Severed feet at the Battle of Visby

"The 2,000 bloody, mangled, and hacked bodies were immediately buried in a hastily-dug pit on a hot sumer day, July 27, 1361... During the last century these bodies were exhumed and examined.  Most had their left foot (the leading foot exposed under the shield) axed off..."

From page 101 of  The Kensington Rune Stone: Compelling New Evidence, by Richard Nielsen and Scott Wolter, 2006.  While fact-checking the statement above, I found an interesting account of the battle, including the photo above, described as follows:

War hammers were also in evidence where a square section of the hammer head showing in the shape of the section of the skull which had been stove in. See the picture... which points to three bodkin arrow points which had penetrated the skull and two holes where a hammer had been used and the skull split between them...

Which came first is unknown. A number of guesses can be made such as two quick hammer blows to fell the man and the arrows landing after, or a hail of arrows which he had turned his back on and then later two hammer blows to put him out of his misery...

The grouping of the arrow heads is particularly spectacular and it makes one wonder if they used the tactic of a hail of arrows as in the later battle of Crecy where it is said the English Longbow men kept 100,000 arrows in the air at one time.

Another severed foot washes ashore in Washington

The remains of a human foot still encased in a shoe was found washed ashore near Tacoma about a week ago, raising to 10 the tally of feet found on Pacific Northwest beaches since 2007.

On Dec. 5, a man walking along the shore spotted the foot and called police. The foot has not been identified yet, but police believe it belonged to a juvenile or small adult.

"Our best guess someone in their mid-to-late teens," Tacoma Police spokesman Mark Fulghum said. The shoe, a boys' size 6 "Ozark Trail" hiking boot, was sold in Walmart Stores in 2004 and 2005.

Further details at the Vancouver Sun.

Civil War veteran with his prosthetic foot

Via Historical Indulgences.

Severed foot found in the Netherlands

Terschelling - OOSTEREND -  Op het strand van Terschelling is zaterdag een voet gevonden. Dat gebeurde ter hoogte van Oosterend bij paal 16. De politie weet nog niet van wie het lichaamsdeel afkomstig is. Het Korps Landelijke Politiediensten gaat dna-onderzoek doen.De voet werd aangetroffen door een familie die een strandwandeling maakte. Zij zagen een sok liggen en ontdekten de inhoud. Er was weinig meer van over dan wat botten.Bron : Leeuwarder Cournat (source)

A hat-tip to Heumpje for locating this.  He reports that "another foot in a similar sneaker had been found on the beach of Hull, UK, a month earlier.  Turns out the feet belong to a Britton that has been missing since 2008.."

Severed foot regurgitated by shark

I guess if I'm going to maintain a severed feet category, I should include all such events.  This all began with a flurry of feet in running shoes washing ashore in the Pacific Northwest; that seems to have quieted down, but others occasionally pop up.  This week there is a report of a banker who caught a shark, which regurgitated a human foot and was found to have a human body in its stomach.  Warning: graphic photos.

Severed foot found in Tennessee

I've been blogging the "severed feet washing ashore" saga in the Pacific Northwest since its onset, so for completeness I should probably report on other similar incidents.  A hat tip therefore to reader Djinny for notifying me that a a jogger found a boot with a foot and part of a leg floating in the Tennessee River near Chattanooga.  A later report indicated that a body wearing military style clothing, but missing a leg and foot has subsequently been located in the river.

A hat tip to reader Joe for the heads-up.

Another human foot has washed ashore !!

Finally!!  It's been almost a year since the last one...

Those of you who are long-time TYWKIWDBI readers will know that we have been following this series of bizarre events for about two and a half years.  I would venture to say that TYWKIWDBI is the only blog with a subcategory of severed feet.

Here's a synopsis:

A human foot was found washed ashore on Whidbey Island in Washington state on Friday.  The bare foot was found at about 11:15 a.m. by a tourist on the east side of the island, near the town of Greenbank.

It is the ninth severed foot to be found on the B.C.-Washington coast since August 2007, with seven of those in B.C.

Notably (or not), this one wasn't wearing a tennis shoe.

Something's afoot.

R.C.M.P. stumped by severed feet in B.C.

I should think TYWKIWDBI must be the only blog with a category of posts devoted to severed feet. A couple readers kindly notified me tonight that yet another foot has washed ashore in British Columbia - the seventh one in the past two years.

If the sneaker above (Nike, size 8.5) looks familiar to you - especially if you know that it belongs to a loved one - then the RCMP want to talk to you, because when it was found on the shore there was a (human) foot inside it.

The CBC has also updated its interactive map, on which you can click to view the stories of the other severed feet and see photos of the shoes (the image above is a screencap; the map is here).

A couple of the previous cases have been solved:

A possible connection between the detached feet found in B.C. and the Orcas Island footless body came to him just recently when he was reading a newspaper about the case in his kitchen. “There was a report of shoes with no bodies. And I thought, gee, I have a body with no shoes. I wonder if they could be related,” Mr. Gaylord recounted.

So far there is "no proof of foul play" in the current (or previous) cases, because it appears that the feet have become "detached by a natural process" (death, decay, predation). But why these natural processes seem to be more active in British Columbia remains unexplained.

Hat tip to Andrew in Ottawa for the notification and the ?inadvertent suggestion re the title for the post.

Update: National Geographic Explorer will be airing "Mystery of the Disembodied Feet" on Halloween.

Update #2 November 5 - The RCMP are no longer "stumped." They have identified a deceased 25-yo man from the "lower Mainland" as the owner of the foot. More details and link in the Comments.

Unimaginable courage

Camisea, 11 June, 1981:
"It was already dark when I was called to the medic's station in the big camp. Up on the plateau between the two rivers, woodsmen had been felling trees, barefoot as usual, and one of them had been bitten by a snake. Snakes had never been seen anywhere near chain saws, because the noise and the exhaust fumes drive the snakes deep into the jungle, but this man had suddenly been bitten twice in the foot. He had dropped his chain saw and just caught a glimpse of the snake before it disappeared into the underbrush; it was a chuchupe. Usually this snake's bite causes cardiac arrest and stops breathing in less than a minute, and cases in which a person has survived a bite longer than seven or eight minutes without treatment are almost unknown. Our camp with the doctor and the antivenom serum was twenty minutes away. The man, so I was told by someone who had been working next to him, had stood motionless for a few seconds, thinking hard. Then he had picked up the chain saw, which had stalled when it hit the ground, pulled the cord to start it, the way you pull an outboard motor, and had sawn off his foot above the ankle. I saw the man - his whole body was gray. He was alive, perfetly collected, and very calm. Before they took him to the doctor, the others had tied off his leg in three places with lianas: below his crotch, below his knee, and above the stump, and had twisted the lianas with sticks to make a tight tourniquet. They had stuck a kind of moss on the stump to stop the bleeding. I had a plane readied to fly him out to Lima the next day."

Blogged not because of the violence or the grotesqueness of the event, but because of my jaw-dropping admiration for this woodcutter and the courage it must have taken for him to face his imminent mortality and deal with it in such a dramatic fashion.

From Werner Herzog's Conquest of the Useless - his notebooks about the filming of Fitzcarraldo at the headwaters of the Amazon.

More severed feet - these found in Ireland

The human remains, a foot from a young child and the foot of an adult male with part of the lower leg attached, turned up during renovation work on the house in south Dublin...

The foot of the male adult had part of the lower leg attached although the stretching and tearing of the muscle fibres suggest it had been pulled off a body, said the report.

“It closely resembled a bog body in appearance, as it had the dark brown, almost black colour seen in recent bog bodies such as Oldcroghan Man and Cloneycavan Man...”

The radiocarbon dates found the adult foot dated to AD52-230 and the juvenile foot was dated to 60BC-AD53, indicating there was a real possibility of these being parts of bog bodies...

The latest indications are the house may once have been the residence of a pathologist...

Via Archaeology.

Another severed foot.

This one didn't wash up on a riverbank or coastline. It was found at a recycling center.

While investigators sifted through material at the recycling facility in Seneca where the foot was found Monday night, forensics experts examined the foot itself for clues...

A worker discovered the foot when it came across a conveyor belt about 8:50 p.m. Monday. Workers inspect every item that comes through the facility, sifting recyclable material from non-recyclable material, Povero said. The worker alerted the county 911 center after finding the foot.

The foot was a right foot, moderately decomposed, Povero said. He would not speculate on the possible age, sex or race of the person whose foot it was, though he did rule out a young child or an infant. The foot had been severed above the ankle...

No additional body parts were found at Casella on Tuesday, Povero said. The sheriff's office is still awaiting results from the medical examiner.

The foot discovery came on the same day that a suspected finger was found on a deck outside a home in Brielle, N.J.

Fingers don't count. We only blog severed feet.

Addendum: see Ian's update in the comments.

One more case of missing feet...

Less than an hour ago I was bemoaning the absence of any more cases of severed feet. Moments ago at Archaeology.com I found a link to this story...

The bones of a man were found with an arrow embedded in the ribs of the upper chest prompting speculation he had been killed in battle.

However adding to the mystery is the fact that he was found buried along with several ceramic jars and other flint arrow heads suggesting he was given a burial...

Officers from the carabinieri's cultural section spotted the skeleton during a fly over of a beach at Nettuno, south of Rome, an area already well noted for its archaeological discoveries.

During the flight officials noted a hole in the ground which they believed could have been a tomb and they were proved right when colleagues sent to the area found the bones...

"The skeleton is just below 1.7 metres in length and was found intact apart from the feet...

A disappointingly prosaic explanation is offered at the link.

Another severed foot found in Canada - in Quebec

It's been two months since I've added anything to the severed feet category. Finally another case has arisen - this one clear across the continent in Montreal (the others were all in the vicinity of Vancouver).

Robitaille first spotted the shiny, black winter boot earlier this month as he chugged across the 20-hectare farm in his tractor.
Still unsure what the boot contained, he tossed it on the back of the machine and continued working the field for another 15 minutes.
But his growing curiosity pushed him to eventually unzip the unisex boot, so he could pull that blue sock down a little bit further.
"I touched it and pretty much saw that it was a foot," he said of the badly decomposed member.
"It took a real effort to (try and) get it out."

Another severed foot!

I had some doubts when I created the "severed feet" category for TYWKIWDBI as to whether I would continue to find material. But the cases keep trickling in. Or washing ashore, to be more accurate.

The latest one was found on a riverbank in Gloucestershire. Det Insp Steve Bean said:

The foot is within a dark grey sock and a size nine-and-a-half, in a mid grey, blue suede shoe, with a white rubber sole and a bright blue 'V' logo edged in white on the side.

"V" - for Vendetta?? From the comments at the Arbroath post, this apt phrase:

"Hurry, Watson, the game's afoot!"

The Saga of the Severed Feet continues

TYWKIWDBI has been following this story since February, when just three severed feet had been found. The total has risen to seven, although the RMCP is now emphasizing that the feet are not technically "severed" since all indications are that they have been separated from their host bodies by normal decompositional processes rather than by a madman with a chainsaw.

According to a new report out this weekend, DNA evidence shows that two of the feet match and belonged to a woman. This is the second matching pair, because in July two of the feet were found to belong to the same man.

The CBC has kindly created an interactive map for those who want to keep score at home. The image above is a screencap of the map, the original of which is at this link.

The top image shows one of the shoes of the matched pair belonging to the woman (a size 7 New Balance with blue trim). It was released in the hopes that someone will recognize the shoe as having been worn by a loved one. I found it a bit startling, since the shoes match those worn by my wife, whose feet are thankfully intact.

When this saga began in February, I labelled the post "ephemera," assuming the topic would no return. With no end in sight, I've decided to create a new label for these posts, all of which are now accessible by clicking on "severed feet" in the list of labels.

Addendum: local Vancouver video here.

Seventh severed foot found

November, 12, 2008 - 08:18 am THE CANADIAN PRESS.

RICHMOND, B.C. - Another foot has washed up on B.C.'s south coast, the seventh to be found from Georgia Strait to the northwestern tip of Washington state since August of 2007…

Diane Johnston says she was walking her dog when she saw the runner sitting on a rock on the banks of the south arm of the Fraser River…

One other New Balance runner - the only one belonging to a woman - has been found since the feet began turning up…

Police have determined that two of the seven feet - one found Feb. 8 on Valdez Island and the other found June 16 off Richmond - are a match.

DNA testing linked one foot to a depressed man who disappeared in 2007 but the other remains have not been identified.

(for newbies to TYWKIWDBI, previous blogposts on this ongoing saga are located here, and here, and here, and at the links at those links... Maybe I should make a "severed foot" category label.)

Please ignore that last severed foot

The one I blogged earlier this week, found in Alabama and apparently the foot of a child, turned out to be a bear's paw. The orthopedic surgeon who examined it and initially declared it human is probably a bit embarassed right now.

The other severed feet in the Pacific Northwest are still valid, and still unexplained.

Bear paw update courtesy of Arbroath.

Another severed foot found

This one in Alabama, and this one belonging to a child.

RUSSELLVILLE, Ala. (AP) — A family dog brought home a child's severed foot, but searchers combing surrounding woods in northwest Alabama found no signs of any other remains and don't know where the child might be.

No children have been reported missing, killed or maimed in or around Russellville. Police Chief Chris Hargett said investigators were studying missing persons reports from nearby areas and sent the severed foot for forensic tests in a bid to narrow the search.

The son of a homeowner spotted the family dog carrying something late Saturday and called his father, who then alerted police. Hargett said an orthopedic surgeon verified that the dog had dragged up a child's bare foot, severed below the ankle.

The foot was found in a subdivision, Hargett said, and authorities on Sunday searched the area with cadaver-sniffing dogs without finding anything.

"A dog could have brought it so far and then another one got it," Hargett said. "It could be miles away."

He added that the foot appeared to have been outdoors only a few days. But he said it's unlikely a young child could have survived such an injury without treatment and added investigators have received no indication that the child is alive.

"We pretty much have to think the worst," Hargett said, noting no accidents have been reported by area hospitals involving the loss of a foot.

TYWKIWDBI has tried to keep abreast of the all the reports of severed feet being found in the Pacific Northwest. But this is starting to get ridiculous.

Addendum: forensic studies have revealed that the "child's foot" was actually a bear's paw.

Sixth human foot washes ashore

It was only two days ago that I blogged about the discovery of the fifth foot. This one reverts to the original pattern of being a right foot, and is a man's foot encased in a size 10 black Adidas running shoe. This one was found several hundred kilometers further north, on Vancouver Island. This Canadian News link is probably the best one for summarizing the data, and indicates that the RCMP has a caseload of 2,300 missing persons to sort through.

I don't plan to post any further items on this subject, even if dozens more feet are discovered. It has already reached the mainstream media and certainly is no longer "TYWKIWDBI" in character.

update June 25: "The sixth "foot", which was discovered June 18, 2008 on Tyee Spit near Campbell River on Vancouver Island, was a hoax. The hoax was a "skeletonized animal paw" was put in a sock and shoe and then stuffed with dried seaweed. The hoax has been called "senseless and thoughtless", "despicable", and "reprehensible". Police have begun an investigation into the hoax, and an arrest could result in charges of public mischief." From the new Wiki entry now devoted to this subject.

Another foot has washed ashore in Canada

Long-time TYWKIWDBI readers will remember the post back in February reporting that human feet were washing ashore in Vancouver - three of them, all right feet. In May I noted that a fourth foot had been found - also a sneaker-wearing right foot.

Today the BBC is reporting that a fifth human foot has washed ashore. For some inexplicable reason I find it comforting to note that this was a left foot - as though some kind of cosmic balance is being restored.