Footsie

7 February 2021 More than a dozen feet in shoes have washed up on B.C. beaches — and 1 case remains unsolved

 

1 March 2021 How 21 feet washing up on Canadian shores may provide clue in Caddick case

 

15 March 2021  How science solved the mystery of feet washing ashore in the Pacific Northwest

3 feet high and rising

We have probably written all there is to write regarding the facts surrounding the be-sneaker'd feet that have been washing up on the shores of Vancouver Island and environs for several years now, so we won't spill any ink on this latest, except to point out that yes, another foot has made an appearance:

https://us.blastingnews.com/news/2018/02/a-detached-foot-belonging-to-a-washington-man-has-washed-ashore-in-canada-002386071.html

Something we didn't know:

Vancouver Island is also well known for its Sasquatch sightings.

For well over a decade, residents on or near Vancouver Island have reported hearing strange howls during the day and night. Some have even claimed to have seen one of the creatures.

The Sasquatch, we should point out, is also known as....Bigfoot.

Diese Stiefel wurden zum Gehen gemacht

A Southern California footwear company has recalled a pair of its boots after a Redditor posted a picture on Imgur of the footprint they leave: a mandorla in glory, with a lucky seven swastikas inside.  A surprise to be sure.

The Redditor writes "There was an angle I didn't get to see when ordering my new work boots...."

Conal International Trading Co., the manufacturer, issued an apology and stated the swastikas are completely unintentional, blaming their Chinese manufacturer for the mistake.

One Redditor countered "The soles don't look that much like swastikas, but the prints are unmistakable and whoever made the soles would have understood that."

That actually might be true.  In many Asian cultures, the swastika still signifies good fortune, which was how it was used in the West for decades until the Third Reich tainted it until now and probably for a long time to come.  Until WW2, it was used on everything from Scout badges to Coca-Cola mementos.  It has been used for centuries as a religious symbol, even on synagogues.

Neo-Nazi site The Daily Stormer called them a "Perfect footwear for Nazis....wanting to leave a good impression."  Hyuk hyuk.  Stern, a German magazine, notes that the boot's name Polar Fox -- Polarfuchs -- was an operation in WW2 in which German and Finnish soldiers captured a town in Finland from the Soviet Union.

If the Chinese maker of these boots did this on purpose or by accident, it wouldn't be the first time something like this has slipped through the cracks.  

Back in 2014 a German discount shop sold Chinese-made coffee mugs that featured flowers and....a portrait of Hitler.  Not to be outdone, Migros, a brand of Swiss coffee creamer, sold little doses of cream with a foil lid featuring the man, based on a cigar band.  The creamer company was mortified and issued an apology, but the third-party designer, Karo Shipping, didn't really understand the fuss.  Miglos severed their relationship.

In India, the use of Hitler is intentional.  Perhaps after a day of shopping for clothes at "Hitler" and Having a meal at "Hitler's Cross", you can have a "Hitler" Ice Cream, then go home for an episode of Hitler Didi or go to the movies and see Hitler Hero in Love.  Expat pedophiles need not worry either, because in Bangkok you can go to "Hitler" for a bucket of chicken.

Sometimes, like with Michael Graves' tea kettle said to look like Hitler, the resemblance is a bit of a stretch, as if people are out there looking to get offended, or just be silly.  But the kettle does, oddly enough, when seen from a certain angle, resemble Hitler. 

Then there those cases somewhere in-between.  When Trump was still but a long-shot waggling his tiny orange hands about, were the SS soldiers on one of his (hashtag) Make America Great Again tweets a gaffe, or was he trying to tell us something?  (and yes, I actually do think it was an error).  I guess we'll see; only 5 short days until the piss hits the fan.  Some people say not to worry, Trump's just playing to the crowd.  But watch out where them Polar Foxes go, and don't you eat that yellow snow....

Hitler and Nazi-related imagery seem to have popped up unexpectedly on products quite a bit recently.  It's as if the universe is telling us to examine what we buy closely.  You buy a coffee mug and you end up staring at Hitler every morning.

P.S.  Just to clarify what we're on about, here's the stock photo of some re-enactors in WW2 German uniforms that some witless (or very cheeky) graphic designer used in the offending Tweet.  And no, I don't think Trump did it on purpose.  I implied he's crazy like a fox, not stupid.  He could have vetted his propaganda better though  We originally posted on this here.

The Agony of Defeat

The latest foot

We've been following the Canadian foot mystery for some time now.

No idea what I'm talking about?  Wikipedia's opening paragraph on the subject sums up the situation perfectly:

Since August 20, 2007, several detached human feet have been discovered on the coasts of the Salish Sea in British Columbia, Canada, and Washington, USA. The feet belonged to five men, one woman and three other people of unknown sex. Of the 15 feet found, only two have been left feet; both of those were matched with right feet. As of February 2012, only five feet of four people have been identified; it is not known to whom the rest of the feet belong. In addition, several hoax feet have been planted in the area.

Gid has been thoughtfully compiling a few stats along the way, but it's been rather hard to keep track of all the details.

In the most recent turn of events, a foot was found on Feb. 7th washed up on Vancouver Island's Botanical Beach by a pair of unsuspecting walkers.

Five days later, on the 12th, another foot was found close by; these latest make a pair.  The findings were fast and furious around 2011 but have slowed down a bit -- the last was found in 2014.  Makes sense then that when two turn up days apart after a silence of two years, they'd be related.

We've speculated, punned and pondered about the meaning of all this, but to no avail.  At this point, we simply feel duty-bound to keep up with the latest developments.  Coming right on the heels of a post about severed hands, it seems doubly appropriate to keep the tally up to date.

We still welcome idle speculation....

15 feet towards nowhere

A 15th foot has been found floating in the Pacific waters near the Canada/US border.  We include a link cuz we've been following this since the beginning but really, we have nothing to say on the subject we haven't already said, no grisly puns to trot out (hehe).

Article: http://www.seattleweekly.com/home/952427-129/port-of-seattle-finds-severed-human

Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salish_Sea_human_foot_discoveries

Note that the foot was in a jogging shoe.  I think this means that the jogging shoes are more floaty than other types of shoes, hence the reason we're finding them.  Which makes we wonder how many feet have sunk to the bottom in say, a pair of penny loafers?

That or there's a killer on the road, hunting joggers.

Cut!

I haven't updated the blog for a month now because I'm on the road, a traveling man as it were.  Currently I'm in Rio de Janeiro, but before that I was in Argentina and made a brief jaunt to Uruguay.  I've got lots to post about folk saints and Masonic monuments, but that will have to wait until I get home....which will be soon as my flight leaves in about 11 hours.

Just a brief blurb.  My pal Tim turned me on to a film called Severed Footage about the mystery of the feet washing ashore off the coast of British Columbia and Washington.  It's a found footage piece a la The Blair Witch Project, which makes the title a pretty clever pun.  The story is....

In the fall of 2007, a student had been videoing his history project on “Kanaka Pete the Axe Murderer”. In January 2012 that same video was leaked from the local authorities. You decide if this video finally exposes the "Mystery of the Severed Feet".

The Kanaka Pete link is in in the original text.  I was a bit skeptical, thinking maybe it was a clever way to fabricate evidence for the back story, but you can view a PDF version of a short history written in 1972 on the University of Hawaii library's website.

I haven't seen the film, but since we've been keeping abreast of what's afoot in Canada, it seems logical to make a short post about it.  You can see the trailer on YouTube or on the film's website.

BTW, this is the second time we've come across a a history of violence on an island in association with this Canadian mystery.  See Who stole the sole?

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

The foot saga continues.

The Vancouver Sun sheds light on the recent discovery of a lower leg and foot found Friday (October 5th) by two fishermen in a place called....wait for it...False Creek at 3:30 (33?) in the afternoon.  The floating appendage was wearing a men's blue and white B.U.M. Equipment running shoe that appears to match another found back in August 2011.

But that's not the only recent development in the mystery of Canada's floating feet.  Apparently, this year back on August 30th, three children's shoes were found stuffed with bone and a "meat-like substance"...but these turned out to be a hoax.  The police were understandably pissed after closing down the beach and bringing out the dogs, questioning potential witnesses etc.

I imagine they were even more pissed a week later when two more childrens' shoes were found, bringing to total to 5 by Sept. 6th.

All this on a beach near Victoria, smack dab in the region where the other dozen or so have been found.

Befuddled?  So are we.  Follow this post's tags for earlier posts on the story.

Confirmation Bias

In what seems to tragically echo too many other stories from Canada, the news is reporting that "A severed human head and foot have been discovered in a park near Toronto."

We've been reporting on cases of human feet washing ashore in western Canada for sometime now (see our previous posts here).

Now this particular case is, it should be noted, over 2600 miles from the feet that have been washing up on the Canadian shores.

So what's the link?

We have, as I keep saying over and over, given up speculating on source of the feet that keep washing up on Canada. Is it a mass murder? Is it weird drift patterns? Is it an area drawing suicide victims? These are questions others can ponder. We've given up.

But wait--I do have a new theory to consider involving this most recent news.

With highly publicized "events", there's always the possibility of copy-cat crimes. In the case of the Canadian feet, for example, there was at least once case of someone stuffing dead animal feet into a pair of shoes and leaving on the beach. Sick--but that's the kind of stuff that clog up the search for patterns.

What I'd like to ponder here, however, is the possibility that the media are making unrelated events seem related. A sort of selected attention. An unusual pattern starts--severed feet washing up on beaches--and then people start looking for more cases, further confirmation of the pattern. It's in our nature.

I'm perfectly guilty in perpetuating this right now. Surely this case has nothing to do with what's happened 2600+ miles away. But once we start looking for further evidence of the pattern, we start to focus on the similarities and not the differences of new pieces of evidence. Take the case of the severed body parts found in Montreal. That also, almost certainly, had nothing to do with the feet washed ashore. But once you start looking for the pattern, the pattern seems to stretch itself up more and more events...

So what do you think? Confirmation bias -- or a series of grisly connected events?

Sad Feet

We've been tracking the strange saga of shoe-clad feed washing ashore in the Salish Sea (British Columbia) pretty closely.

According the authorities--the mystery's been solved: it's suicides: "Mr Fonseca [an investigator on the case] told the New York Post that most of the victims jumped from a bridge over the Fraser River, which flows into the Pacific Ocean at Vancouver [..] Mr Fonseca said: ‘It’s very explainable. The unusual nature of this is that the feet were found in a very short period of time.’"

I'm not sure exactly which bridge Mr. Fonseca is referring to--perhaps the Skybridge?

Skybridge over the Frazier River in Canada

There do seem to certain structures that are suicide magnets, like the Golden Gate Bridge and Toronto's Prince Edward Viaduct. (Toronto's Prince Edward Viaduct lost its draw after the installation of the Luminous Veil, a barrier stopping would be jumpers.)

It's difficult, quite frankly, for me to write about this because suicide has touched my life too many times. Once I had to wake my aunt up in the middle of the night when the police called us to tell her that her son had killed himself. Over the next several years, both of her other children--my older cousins--killed themselves. That's not the only time I've been with a parent when they heard that their child had committed suicide. And another time I sent a postcard to a friend who was living with his parents, only to find out, minutes after I dropped the postcard in the mailbox, that he had killed himself about a month before.

So I'm keenly aware of the tragedy and horror of these events.

But I do have to say that, to quote Mr. Fonseca, the fact that "the feet were found in a very short period of time" does still seem awfully bizarre to me.

Has anyone explained this element of the mystery?

This boot was made for floating

From CBC News, 3 days ago:

Foot found in B.C. lake identified after 25 years

The coroner says foot bones that washed ashore in a boot found on Sasamat Lake [back in November] in Port Moody, B.C., belonged to a man who vanished while fishing on the lake in January 1987.

Nothing to say that we haven't already said before, except that Sasamat was the name of a village at the mouth of the Seymour River and apparently means "lazy people". Not to imply anything!

The white man's name for the area is Indian Arm. An arm, a mouth, a foot. Pretty soon we'll have enough to put a body together....

2 mystery feet identified

Two of the mystery feet that have washed ashore along the coast in the Pacific Northwest, mostly on the Canadian side, have been identified.

The feet belonged to a woman who committed suicide in 2004, though the feet washed up separately in 2008.

There's not much more information than that, but to us it diminishes (but does not entirely negate) the possibility that the feet come from the tsunami, some kind of accident or more fancifully, a serial killer.

An article from the Vancouver Sun.

Just pulling our legs

http://filesofjerryblake.netfirms.com/html/canadian_mounties_vs__atomic_i.html

We've been assiduously following the mystery of the Canadian feet.  The story is weird enough, but along the way there have been at least two hoaxes to muddle the facts.  Now it seems four hoax feet were found last Monday.  From the Times Colonist:

The shoes were stuffed with pork or beef in what police believe was a student prank, part of an annual student ritual called Endurance Night. Police are now looking for the culprits.

With a disturbing bevy of floating feet found in the area, I'm sure the Mounties don't need these hoaxes.  Waste of time, money, energy.  But if the culprits are found, could they be charged with anything other than littering or illegal dumping?  Are hoaxes illegal?  Could they be charged with the Canadian equivalent of obstructing justice?  Or, if police resources are squandered as a result of a hoax, is there a separate charge?  Some sort of financial liability?

Anyway, according to local rag the Oak Bay News, the night otherwise passed quietly:  "Unlike previous years, officers didn’t respond to any rowdy incidents involving youth...."

Oak Bay itself seems to be a rather tony suburb of Victoria, and its coat of arms features a sea-lion (a lion with a fish-tail as opposed to hindquarters), the shield surmounted by one of those crowns in the form of a tower we mentioned in the last post.  The motto:   Sub Quercu Felicitas:  "Under the Oak, Good Fortune"

Which is all rather irrelevant, but interesting nonetheless.

11th Foot

Another foot has washed ashore in British Columbia, the 11th since 2007. It is, I believe, the 6th male, right foot, clad in a running shoe. Here's a pic, minus the foot and protruding bone:



I'm astonished that 9 of the 11 are right feet, and that both of the left feet have a matching right foot.

We've stopped speculating & punning, leaving that to the local mounties, but if you're into rumors, ruminations, bad puns, grisly details, & previous findings, you can get your kicks from our previous posts.

Feet Identified

We've been following the strange story feet washing ashore on the Salish Sea shore (Pacific Northwest).

By our count:

* 10 have washed ashore since 2007
* 2 fakes have been planted
* 1 early foot was found in 1999
* 2 pairs are officially matched

And now one of the two pairs has been identified as belonging to a missing man from Surrey, England, no further details provided.

This is the third identified ... body, for lack of a better word.

Interestingly, as the incidents have become more numerous, the officially released details have been become more vague. Early on, shoe size, left/right, color, make, and gender were identified. The 2 most recent findings seem to have been reported without a left/right designation; 3 of the 5 most recent reports seemed to have failed to commit to a gender designation.

Why the increasing vagueness even as more concrete details (like matches to actual missing people) are apparently being discovered?

Canadian Feet (Would that be Meters?)

A recent episode of the TV show Bones lifted an idea from the headlines. As in real life, pairs of feet wash up on the Canadian shore, prompting an investigation.

Curiously, reports of the episode disagree on the number of severed feet, unconsciously mimicking, perhaps, the confusion surrounding the reports of the non-fictional feet--reports that are tangled up by a couple of fakes (animal paws stuffed in shoes) and a pair of chronological outliers (discovered much earlier than the rest).

TV.com reports on 7 pairs of washed up feet in Bones. "Brennan teams up with a Canadian forensic podiatrist to determine the identity of the real victim after seven pairs of feet are found washed up on the U.S.-Canadian border, but six pairs turn out to belong to research. Elsewhere, Cam crosses a major boundary when she takes away Michelle's right to choose her own college."

BSC.com, however, issued a report of 8 pairs of feet! "Weather patterns plotted by Angela indicated that seven sets of feet belonged to cadavers from the body farm at the University of Hogansburg. The farm had recently been flooded, and the waters helped to naturally separate most of the feet from the bodies. The eighth set of feet showed signs of being cut by power tools, indicating murder."

An interesting piece of the show is the idea of tracing back to the feets' point of origin, an idea that popped up in discussions during our previous severed-feet post on LoS.

Currents and weather are complex, however, and the difficultly of such an endeavor is highlighted by a case where one man's feet drifted apart and washed up on opposite ends of the North Sea!

Consider, too, a recent report that "the body of a man washed out to sea last month when the tsunami from Japan hit the Northern California coast has been found more than 300 miles north in Oregon near the mouth of the Columbia River."

300 miles! An entire body!

I'm tempted to inappropriately joke that buoyant shoes must drift more than a few feet.

Seriously, though, check out No Agenda Foot's cool, interactive map that displays the world-wide phenomena of severed feet findings. You can see that feet are washing up all over the place, but there appear to be clusters, the biggest being in the Pacific North West--but smaller pockets seem to appear else: several feet in San Francisco Bay, several more in the North Sea, and a couple in the Bermuda triangle.

Most of these clusters are probably easy enough to explain away. Bear in mind that as a body rots in the ocean, its buoyant shoes tug upwards, sometimes strongly enough to eventually disarticulate the ankle--hence, floating feet. Compound that with lots of suicides off the Golden Gate bridge, and it's no surprise that there must be lots of feet in San Francisco Bay. The North Sea "cluster" is about two-thirds one man, so it's hardly a trend. The Bermuda triangle is probably too big to declare two feet a "cluster", and one of those two only floated after a shark coughed it up.

But the Pacific North West? Now that's a mystery for the information age.

As the number of severed feet in Bones....

Second Shod & Severed Animal Foot's Ashore in Salish Sea

A severed animal foot in a shoe was found floating in Powell River (Vancouver, British Columbia) on Saturday, March 5.

It is the second severed and shod animal foot found in the area: A previous one was found in Campbell River, Vancouver Island, on June 18, 2008.

Both are presumably hoaxes inspired by the macabre events involving human feet in the area: Since 2007, 10 human feet have washed ashore on the Salish Sea (the coastal waterways of the Pacific Northwest). (See previous posts.)

Various patterns have emerged and vanished. It started with large right male feet. Then the fourth foot was female and average sized--but still right. But then foot five was left, breaking the string of rights.

All were found in running shoes, until feet 9 and 10. All feet were unmatched, until 5 matched 3, and then 7 matched 4, and, presumably, 10 matched 9. None have been identified--except for one. All but two of the feet were found in British Columbia. All were human, before the June 18 hoax. Wikipedia ignored the news, until it started following it.

In fact, there is only one similarity beyond geotemporal proximity: Each was removed without tools (presumably disarticulated as the body rotted and the shoe floated, tugging upward against the body until the ankle separated).

We stopped speculizing long ago.

The foot mystery continues

A 10th foot has washed ashore off the West Coast, this time near Tacoma, Washington.  Don't know if we can speculate any further on this as the police haven't turned up evidence of foul play in any of the cases....

Any theories?  See our tags (Canada and feet) for the posts we've already made on the subject.

Recent news articles via Google.

Who stole the sole?

Another human foot has washed up on shore on the Washington/Canada border, adding fuel to the speculative fire as to exactly what the hell is going on up there.

It's a right foot, either a woman or juvenile and, unlike other feet, was not found floating in a shoe. This is the eighth foot since 2007 and officials estimate that it had been in the water less than 2 months. This kills the theory that all these feet are coming from the same accident, but it doesn't preclude that these are all unrelated incidents....Officials are in the process of gathering forensic info from neighboring jurisdictions.

Whidbey Island, where the foot was found, does have an interesting story to tell about dismemebered bodies:

"In 1850, Colonel Isaac N. Ebey became the first permanent settler on Whidbey Island, claiming a square mile (2.6 km²) of prairie with a southern shoreline on Admiralty Inlet. Even though he was farming potatoes and wheat on his land, he was also the postmaster for Port Townsend, Washington and rowed a boat daily across the inlet in order to work at the post office there. On August 11, 1857, Colonel Ebey was murdered and beheaded by Haida Indians who traveled from the Queen Charlotte Islands. Ebey was 39 years old. Ebey was slain in retaliation for the killing of a Haida chief at Port Gamble."

The fort named in his memory was installed just north of a place called "Coupeville". "Coupe" meaning "Cut" in French. (Named after Captain Thomas Coupe). Or it may be a variant of Coop:

1. English: metonymic occupational name for a cooper, from Middle English coupe ‘tub’, ‘container’ (see Cooper). In some cases the surname may have been derived from a pub or house sign.

2. Dutch: from koop ‘purchase’, ‘bargain’, hence a nickname for a haggler or a metonymic occupational name for a merchant.

Not that any of these things has to do with another. But the question remains. What's with all the feet? Why here and not elsewhere?

Foot ho!

For several months the sole "Google alert" LoS has subscribed to is for the keywords "Canadian feet." Every week or so the alert faithfully arrives and we open it with a yawn to scan the news about hockey and Canadian sprinters.

Then a few days ago a familiar story showed up: A seventh detached foot has washed up on the shores around Vancouver. The human remains were in a white size 8 ½ running shoe. There's a joke about Fellini in there somewhere but we can't find it....

This article provides some grisly humor: "....the eighth foot in two years, stumping authorities in both Canada and the...."

UK newspaper the Metro gives us the deets we were looking for: it's a right foot and the shoe was a Nike. (Classical goddess Nike was a daughter of the goddess Styx, or daughter of Oceanus and Tethys, both aquatic deities).

Strange thing is that a quick look at our post Sixth Foot Ashore from Nov. 13, 2008, when the sixth foot was found (a seventh turned out to be a hoax!), we can clearly see the foot doesn't match any of the existing finds. Seeing as two of the feet were a pair from a male the family preferred not to identify, this leaves us with at least six footless bodies out there under the waves. Which isn't so many for such a large area, really.

But it still begs the question, why don't feet bob about in other parts of the world? With the exception of one case in Sweden, we haven't heard of this same phenomenon elsewhere. Which doesn't necessarily mean foul play, but it's certainly weird....

Oh, btw, the human foot has 33 bones. This is obviously a Masonic vengeance affair!

Sixth Foot Ashore

Only 3 days after discovering "meatometers", LoS has learned of a sixth human foot apparently washed ashore in British Columbia.

A brief timeline of the BC6:

1. 8/20/07 – male right foot; size 12 Campus near Jedidiah Island
2. 8/26/07 – male right foot; size 12 Reebok on Gabriola Island
3. 2/2/08 – male right foot; size 11 Nike on Valdez Island
4. 5/22/08 – female right foot; size 7 New Balance on Kirkland Island
5. 6/16/08 – male left foot; size 11 Nike on Westham Island
6. 11/11/08 – female left foot; New Balance on the Fraser River

DNA match feet # 3 and 5.

Curiously, all six feet were found in running shoes. The confirmed five were disarticulated (not cut) and clad in shoes made between 2003 & 2004, with the exception of the 1999 shoe on foot # 4. CNN suggests this is evidence that the feet belong to victims of a plane crash, but local news reports that this theory has been discounted by the RCMP.

One more grisly clue: a lustrative, footless body (male 5'10'') washed ashore on the Orcas Islands approximately 4 months before the first foot was found. As far as LoS can tell, the body has not been definitively linked to any of the feet.

We are still waiting confirmation that foot # 6 is not a hoax. On June 18, 2008, police were japed by an animal paw stuffed in an Adidas human shoe on the Campbell River.

CNN has a nice interactive map.

_____________
Previously on LoS:

• Fish Eats Man
• Not Exactly What We’re Looking For
• Swedish Police
• Another Foot Washes Ashore
• Strange Things Are Afoot
• My Left Foot
• Smiley Face Killers