I recently completed the Mages Guild quest "A Mages Staff". After I completed the quest I went back through the caves to the island as I had a feeling that I might have missed something there (loot or dropped weapons or alchemical ingredients). When I exited the tunnel onto the island I was shocked to find that all the bodies of the necromancers I had killed there were standing upright with their arms out in a crucifixion type pose. Their eyes were open and they just stood there in approximately the same positions where they died. This freaked me out a little so I quickly searched the island. I noticed an article of clothing on the ground near one of the "bodies" and as I picked it up all the "bodies" fell to the ground. I have never left anywhere so quickly !!!

Is this something anybody else has noticed??

I havent seen this. It sounds weird.. maybe part of a mod you have installed?

Aye, I've experienced this before, though not in quite some time and never in that particular location. I researched it back in ye olden days but can no longer recall either cause or cure (if there is one).

-Decrepit-

@ blahs44 - it was weird, walking around with these bodies almost hanging there, gave me the shudders. I have revisited locations numerous times to collect loot I left behind but never encountered anything lie this. When they all dropped as I picked up the clothing I nearly hit the ceiling.
I play on the Xbox so no mods for me.

@ Decrepit - Not sure I feel the need for a cure - In game it is easily explained away - I just creamed a few necromancers, something strange happening to their bodies 12 hours later, it almost seems like I should expect it.

Lol, I've seen that before on 360. I think that there is a default way of how they are listed in the behind-the-scenes area, something us on console can only speculate about, while those on PC can probably see.
For the record: I envision that this area where npcs are listed looks like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZR64EF3OpA place.

I've seen that where I have battled necromancers or conjurers underground. Never above. I've revisited the place, in my case, it's usually because I have a (imaginary) lockpick case that can only hold ten lockpicks, as I usually open all locks by spell only, except the very hard one, which I have not yet acquired that spell..... sooooooo I'm returning for another go at a chest usually. It certainly freaked the living poo poo out of me the first time I saw it. It was like the Exorcist or something. I got them to come down with an AOE fireball.

I've seen this on my PS3 a lot and on my PC too. It also happens with creatures... a dead Minotaur standing in the road. I've also seen a dead ghoul standing up in Fallout New Vegas. It's just something in the AI. We never know what we'll see, do we? I love that about these games but I'm sure they'd rather not have that. I didn't see it in Skyrim while playing for hundreds of hours so maybe they got it?

If you look at body/clothing in Nifscope, that's the position you see. I believe the glitch happens when for some reason the game has lost track of the position the body is supposed to be in, so it gets drawn in that default position.

I wonder what my default position is

Is that measured in "sheets to the wind," perhaps?

Or looked at another way, Face Down might be "Default of Datbottle"!

I had something similar happen on the PC a couple of months ago. I was going down the road from Chorrol’s north gate and there was this body suspended in the air just as you said. I had killed and looted a bandit there the day before. I’ve seen a lot of strange bugs in Oblivion, but that one was weird. I retreated back inside Chorrol’s walls, made a save, closed and reopened the game, then went somewhere else. Next time I went through the same area, everything was back to normal.

The first time I saw this was in Hackdirt. I thought it was part of the Hackdirt weirdness. It was a long time before I went back through there!

In Skyrim, near the Blue Palace, I saw a head on the ground. Then I realized it was a woman NPC talking to another one haha. It was more funny than weird though in that game they cut heads easily..

It's a known glitch. You can take Streamline mod and toggle 'Kill corpses' on unless you're on X-box or PS or whatever.

That is the default position without physics applied.

It sometimes happens, though it has never happened to me.

It does seem really creepy. I actually think Bethesda should purposely do something like that in an Elder Scrolls (or Fallout, etc) game. Like in a particular creepy or haunted dungeon, after having killed the inhabitants of some part of the dungeon, when you return they are posed, kind of lifelike but not really. That plus a few sound effects would add some scary-ness that Elder Scrolls tends to lack.

Yeah, it's a bug that occurs all the damn time if you're not using a mod to prevent it. If you play on console unfortunately there's nothing you can do.

It can be frustrating because while the dead humanoids affected by the bug will stand in that eerie crucified pose, animals and basically anything that's not bipedal will often just be standing there looking perfectly ordinary. If you play a stealth archer (which is probably the most popular build in this game), it's all too easy to come across a spider or bear or whatever that looks alive from a distance, and wind up wasting arrows into it before you realize it's already dead. That used to aggravate the hell out of me when I played on my PS3, especially when I'd have a really good poison on my bow and then waste the shot on something already freakin' dead.

My character uses the Staff of Worms occasionally to reactivate Vampires so she can collect more Vampire Dust for her poisons. Talk about creepy, they just float up in the air with physics applied, all rag doll like, then finally assume a more normal pose, at which point we kill them again.