Severed foot in the Garden of Earthly Delights - updated many times

It has been almost two years since I've been able to add any material to the 29 posts in TYWKIWDBI's category of severed feet.   So, a tip of my blogging cap to Miss Cellania at Neatorama, who found one in Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights.

A quick search led me to a claim that "the severed foot is one of the most repeated in the Bosch's panel paintings, appearing in several works, as in the Garden of Delights and in the central panel of the Temptation of St Anthony triptych in Lisbon." Although this is offered as support for the premise that Bosch was depicting sequelae of ergot poisoning, the one pictured above appears to me to be traumatically severed, not withered by occlusive vasculitis.

And speaking of severed feet, by an improbable coincidence, the Washington Post is reporting this week that severed feet continue to wash ashore in the Pacific Northwest.  Those were the odd events that prompted me to create this category for TYWKIWDBI back in 2008.

Sixteen of these detached human feet have been found since 2007 in British Columbia, Canada, and Washington state. Most of these have been right feet. All of them have worn running shoes or hiking boots. Among them: three New Balances, two Nikes and an Ozark Trail.

The most recent one turned up earlier this week.

More information and a video at the link, but no explanation for the phenomenon.

Reposted from 2016 to provide some addenda:
I continue to encounter the odd report of severed feet (and longtime readers occasionally send me links of such incidents).  Rather than put new reports on the front page of the blog, I'm going to convert this post into a linkdump.

Via Nothing to do with Arbroath:

"Three severed human feet found in and around a park are likely to have been educational medical exhibits or from a private collection, an investigation has concluded. The first foot was found by dog walkers in Weston Park East Bath, Somerset, in February. A second was discovered in the garden of a property in Weston Park in July and a third in a garden in nearby Cranwells Park a month later. Avon and Somerset Police said they found no evidence of foul play..."

 A website that sells severed animal feet (dried, salted, or preserved in alcohol).

Severed feet as a theme for Cake Wrecks.

At Rio's 2016 summer Olympics: "A beach goer Wednesday discovered human body parts that had washed up on the shore, right in front of the Olympic Beach Volleyball Arena on Rio's famed Copacabana beach. A dismembered foot and another body part still unidentified was found..."

"The freelance journalist told the Bath Chronicle: "It was just like CSI. There were a few of us out walking our dogs and then a lady came running over to find us and said there's a foot in the hedge."

"The Sonoma County coroner's office is investigating a foot in a shoe that washed ashore at Doran Regional Park south of Bodega Bay" (Feb 2017)

"After a shoe with a human foot inside turned up on a dock in Charleston, South Carolina, investigators are trying to figure out whose it was and how it got there." (May 2017)

A severed foot in a tennis shoe was discovered in a county park in St. Louis, Missouri.  The park was adjacent to the Mississippi River, so it could have come from an aquatic incident.

A tip of the blogging cap to long-time readers Phil and Bub, who remembered this series of posts and sent me a link about yet another foot washing ashore in Canada (13 since 2007...).  This one was remarkable for having the tibia and fibula still attached (photo at right).

I was pleased to see in Neatorama today a link to a Wikipedia page that provides comprehensive coverage of this topic (at least as it relates to the Pacific Northwest).

Addendum:

Another update from British Columbia after the discovery of a fourteenth severed foot.

A 2019 report of a fifteenth severed foot from the Pacific Northwest, with a reasonably concise and comprehensive summary of all the available evidence from past reports.

Reposted in 2022 to add a note about the discovery of a severed foot (in a shoe) floating in a hot spring at Yellowstone National Park.

Human foot encased by a boot

No.  Not really.  But not far off.

This is a sagittal section of an elephant's foot.  For those with at least a passing familiarity with human anatomy, the parallels are quite striking: tibia, heel, metatarsals, etc.  The difference is in the pad under the heel.  I found more information at the Journal of Anatomy:

The uniquely designed limbs of the African elephant, Loxodonta africana, support the weight of the largest terrestrial animal. Besides other morphological peculiarities, the feet are equipped with large subcutaneous cushions which play an important role in distributing forces during weight bearing and in storing or absorbing mechanical forces... the cushion also presumably helps to distribute the animal's weight over the entire sole... deformable foot cushions serve to absorb mechanical shock, store and return elastic strain energy, protect against local stress and keep pressures low...

In addition to the obvious mechanical functions, the cushions are important sensory structures. The high concentration of sensory receptors such as Vater–Pacinian corpuscles within the cushion and Meissner corpuscles in dermal papillae of the adjacent skin might rank an elephant's foot among the most sensitive parts of its body.

This comment sums up some of the mechanical aspects:

The heels of elephants compress as they walk along, a bit like suspension, so they can walk without their centre of mass moving up and down but maintaining it at a constant height. This means they are doing less work since they’re not having to raise and lower their mass, which because they are so large would be a huge waste of excess energy, even though it’s negligible for animals like us.

And IIRC, elephants are capable of detecting infrasound, which I presume is related to that final comment about the sensory function of the feet.

"When culling was being done in some of the parks, the elephants could clearly detect andidentify the thump-thump-thump sound of the helicopter blades from 80 to90 miles (130 to 140 kilometers) away, identify it as danger, and take off in the opposite direction." 

This is way more interesting than I initially thought.  You learn something every day.

De-feeted shoe

Long-time readers of TYWKIWDBI know that this blog has a separate category for severed feet posts.  This was stimulated by an "epidemic" of severed feet washing ashore in the Washington/Puget Sound area about five years ago.  Now another foot has appeared in the same area:

The discovery of a human foot in a running shoe on the Seattle waterfront this week is at least the 15th such appendage found along the Pacific Northwest coastline since 2007.

The human foot in a white New Balance tennis shoe was found Tuesday morning on the shore at Centennial Park, just north of downtown, by volunteers cleaning the park, Port of Seattle spokesman Peter McGraw told NBC News. The foot was turned over to the King County Medical Examiner’s Office for further investigation. 

The King County Medical Examiner’s Office on Wednesday released a photo of the shoe – a New Balance athletic sneaker, men’s size 10-1/2, white with blue trim – in hopes the public could help identify its wearer. It said the foot also was clad in a black, cotton Hanes brand sock. 

More details at the link.  If the embedded photo looks like your shoe, check your feet.  If one of them is missing, please contact Seattle authorities.

Something's afoot on a Florida beach

As reported by Reuters:

Investigators in south Florida are trying to identify a human foot inside a tube sock and midsize white New Balance athletic shoe found by a beach walker on New Year's Day...

The foot was discovered shortly after noon on Wednesday under sea grass at Peck Lake Beach at the north end of Jupiter Island, north of Palm Beach. After a ground and helicopter search over several miles, investigators found a matching shoe but no other human remains.

The shoes were all white except for the New Balance logo, estimated to be size 7-9 and described by Snyder as a running or cross-trainer style.

Posted because when I started TYWKIWDBI, I created a severed foot category, which now has accumulated 28 entries.  I really should stop, but attentive readers keep sending me more reports (hat tip to Keith this time).

Links for you to explore

Because I just don't have time to present them as individual posts.

A "former FBI Special Agent and head of the Los Angeles Joint Terrorism Task Force Al Qaeda squad" says the TSA is useless.  Not annoying - useless.  A summary at BoingBoing, with links to the source material.

An explanation of how restaurant menus are designed to incorporate a variety of marketing tricks.  "A box draws attention and, usually, orders..."  The $115 platter is there to make everything else look cheaper.

"A proposed new time-keeping system tied to the orbiting of a neutron around an atomic nucleus could have such unprecedented accuracy that it neither gains nor loses 1/20th of a second in 14 billion years."  "So we'll have a leap-neutron-second every 280 billion years? How am I supposed to write that into my software?"

A new LED light puts out more power than is put into it.  Literally.  It "produces 69 picowatts of light using 30 picowatts of power, giving it an efficiency of 230 percent."  The reason it isn't breaking the first law of thermodynamics is explained at Wired.  

Another e-voting system goes down in flames.  "Within 48 hours of the system going live, we had gained near complete control of the election server."

The best behind-the-back basketball pass I've seen all year.

Three hundred years ago, Sweden had a February 30th.  The reason is explained at Widow's Weeds.

A man in Milwaukee tried to rob a bank.  He was unsuccessful.  "Found in the suspect's possession: "How to Be A Successful Criminal."

Some women report reaching orgasm or achieving sexual pleasure while working out at the gym.  Details re the favorite type of equipment at Discover magazine.

A compilation of "All the nipples on view in the permanent collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art."  Safe for work, I guess.

An Easter egg hunt was cancelled because of "the behavior of aggressive parents who swarmed into the tiny park."

"The 56-year-old man held his left leg against an electric saw in his home workshop and severed his foot just above the ankle."  He also threw it in the oven so it couldn't be reattached.

A "bone luge" is a way to drink liquor out of a bone in a restaurant.   In case you need a new way to drink liquor.

Drivers were once taught to hold a car's steering wheel in way to maximize control of the vehicle.  Now the importance of where to place your hands is determined by the possibility that the airbag may inflate.  Among the injuries the NHTSA reports from improper placement of the hands when an airbag deploys are amputations of fingers or entire hands, traumatic fractures and a particularly stomach-churning injury called "degloving." Got your hands in the right spot?

Lewis Lapham has written an insightful appraisal of the American health-care system in the latest edition of his Lapham's Quarterly.  I can't do it justice with brief excerpts; those interested should read the five pages at the link.

Also at Lapham's Quarterly, a scary story about how force-feeding was used against suffragettes in 1910.

For every fan of American football.  Video of Detroit Lions quarterback Matthew Stafford during a game in which he was "miked up" for sound.  Cleveland takes a 24-3 lead.  Stafford gets crushed with an injury to his shoulder.  And then...

"A 93-year-old Florida grandmother has parked her car for good after driving 576,000 miles (927,000km) over 48 years at the wheel of one trusty vehicle."

A collection of photos of swallowtail butterflies of the world.   Beautiful creatures.

Snow globes on a windowsill set fire to a man's couch.

Fourteen photos of gynandromorphs, mostly butterflies, but also birds.  One half of the body is female, one half is male.

A video explains how to peel a head of garlic in ten seconds.

At the GOP convention in Florida, water guns will be banned.  But real guns will be permitted.

A 125-year-old sturgeon was caught in Wisconsin.  It was "bigger than a linebacker."  And it was released after being tagged.

If you want to look up famous people who share your birthday, you know you can do so on Wikipedia.  But for the birthdays of fictional characters there is an infographic at Flavorwire, via Neatorama.

According to Sentence First, the phrase "who to follow" is grammatically permissible.

Here is the archive of every Jeopardy question ever asked.  Over 222,000 entries.

Marilyn Monroe and Ella Fitzgerald helped one another's careers.  "Ella Fitzgerald was not allowed to play at Mocambo (a Hollywood nightclub) because of her race."  Marilyn made a call, and Ella said it changed her career.

Should obituaries of pets be in the newspaper? "Because they openly announce that a pet was part of a family, and bring legitimacy to mourning the pet as a family member, obituaries for animals push up against the definition of "family" in ways that may be quite upsetting for some people."

When the Pioneer spacecraft left the solar system, they began slowing down.  No one has ever been able to explain why - until now.

Surveillance Self-Defense is a website that specializes in explaining how you can prevent yourself from being subject to surveillance.

There are lots of fossilized dinosaur footprints in Maryland.  A man has made a hobby of collecting them.  20-pic photoessay at the link.

Retreaded tires can be dangerous.  If that's not inherently apparent, read the link.

A BBC video shows poisonous sea snakes (kraits) hunting in packs.  I would embed the impressive video if I could, but you can view it at the BBC, via Neatorama.

Bee colony collapse disorder linked to pesticides.

A cheerful story of a puppy rescued from a cholla cactus.  With video.

Chess enthusiasts may be interested in 17th-century examples of the knight's tour.

CARCA is the acronym for the Canadian Avalanche Rescue Cat Association. "Our goals are to train and maintain a network of highly efficient avalanche search and rescue cat teams across Canada."  My ailurophile wife suspects it's a spoof.

A story in Spiegel Online reports on new investigations about the art work and personal life of Albrecht Dürer.  "In 1517, he ventured a detailed depiction of a scrotum -- a pioneering act in the West. Some of Dürer's drawings are so suggestive that researchers kept them secret for years and locked them away in the closet. One example is the drawing "Youth with Executioner." It shows an executioner, armed with a sword, who is stroking a half-naked young man, who voluptuously acquiesces. Other sketches also show naked men's bodies."

The etymology and history of first names.

Cigarette cards were erotic photographs inserted in cigarette packs.  A gallery of them is posted at Marinni's Livejournal blog (in Russian).  Probably not safe for work, depending on where you work.  And for those of you who used to buy Playboy for the articles, here is the English translation of the site's content.

The Great Pyramid's secret doors are still being investigated.

Otters Who Look Like Benedict Cumberbatch.  Self-explanatory.

A Slate column details the history of buttermilk.  It's not the same product your grandparents enjoyed.

Canada has an alternate currency ("Canadian Tire money") that you should know about if you're planning to visit Canada, in case you encounter some.

A delightful story: "Gac Filipaj, an immigrant from the former Yugoslavia, completed his Classics degree with honors after balancing classes with a fulltime custodial job for the past 12 years."  He has now graduated from Columbia University while working there full time.

A man in Kentucky was arrested for leaving his son in the car while he went into a bar to drink.  His son is seventeen years old.

A woman's pants caught on fire after she picked up some rocks and put them in her pocket.  It sounds totally implausible until you read the explanation offered by "jl" in the comments.

Enough.  Got to get outside.

"The agony of the feet"

In early November, another incident in the severed feet saga occurred in western Canada, as noted by the National Post:

The B.C. Coroners Service is investigating the discovery of another foot over the weekend.... Eight feet belonging to six different people were discovered along the B.C. coast between August 2007 and August 2011. Six of the feet have since been identified as belonging to four people. The remaining two appear to belong to two men whose identities are yet to be determined.

The CBC adds these details:

Officials said that on Friday a youth attending a camp at the Sasamat Outdoor Centre spotted the boot, which was floating in a few metres of water off the northwest shore. When the boot washed up Saturday morning and a sock and bones were found inside, authorities were called in...

The coroners service said the autopsy did not show any tool marks or impressions on the bones to indicate the foot had been mechanically separated from the body... The metal eyelets are significantly rusted, which suggests that it could have been in the water for some time.

Although it is the ninth foot to wash up in southwestern B.C. in the past four years, the coroners service said there are "some significant differences between this and the other eight cases."

For one, this is the first foot to be found in fresh water, not saltwater. It is also the first to be found in a hiking boot rather than a running shoe...

For new readers, I should repeat my previous clarification about severed feet that "It's not a fetish for me, and I don't monitor the web for additional incidents or set any Google alerts, but having posted so many stories in the past, I now have a set of readers alert to new developments."  This time I'll add a hat tip to Elizabeth, who notified me about an ABC news report in October that provided a mundane explanation for several of the feet, 
and to Andre, who noted that BoingBoing is also devoting valuable column inches to the severed feet stories.

Writing posts on this subject typically presents two challenges - coming up with a catchy title, and searching the 'net for an illustration without wading into the world of fetishism. The title this time is a parody of ABC's "Wide World of Sports" motto (via the National Post).  The image shows "Zombie stocking Christmas 'gornaments'" available from the Neatoshop.

The "severed feet" saga continues...

Almost four years ago when a flurry of severed feet started washing ashore in the U.S. Pacific Northwest, I created a severed feet category for this blog, never imagining that I would be writing additional posts on the subject this many years later. 

It's not a fetish for me, and I don't monitor the web for additional incidents or set any Google alerts, but having posted so many stories in the past, I now have a set of readers alert to new developments.  Thus it was that when I took a few days off to attend to family matters, Mike and a couple anons posted comments, and Phil sent me an email - all alerting me to another one of these bizarre incidents.

The severed foot, with a "leg bone" protruding from its running shoe, was discovered on August 30; depending on how the feet are enumerated, this can be considered the 11th incident.  AOL has covered the story (briefly), with a link to a report on the incidents by Rachel Maddow (from August 2010, after the ninth foot was found).  ABC News has a report (via Neatorama). The Vancouver Sun also has a brief article about this most recent incident, and there was some detailed coverage in an apparently undated report in Outside magazine online.  None of these sources have any significant details about the most recent event, which obviously is still under investigation.

My understanding re the huge Japanese tsunami is that it is too early for debris from that incident to start washing ashore in North America (due to arrive in the spring of 2013).

Addendum:  A hat tip to Nathanial Hoodrich for finding a recent article on this subject in the National Post, which included this better map (click for bigger):

Lawsuits over severed feet

Excerpts from a post at Lowering the Bar (a blog of "legal humor"):

The defendant in this case said she did not intend to cause the plaintiff any pain by stealing his foot, and that seems plausible since it wasn't attached at the time. The plaintiff was quite seriously injured in a 2008 crash on I-95 in Florida, and had to be airlifted to a hospital. About an hour later, the defendant, a firefighter/paramedic who had been called to the scene, found the foot in the wreckage [and took it home with her]. She had a perfectly good explanation for why she did that, though, saying that her dog was, or she was training it to be, a "body-recovery dog" that could assist when responding to disasters.

Here's the second case:

... a 2007 incident in which John Wood was trying to get his leg back from Shannon Whisnant. Whisnant found the leg inside a barbecue smoker he bought at an auction, and quickly realized he had a publicity gold mine on his hands. Wood got upset when he learned Whisnant was charging people to look at his former part (this happened in rural North Carolina, where they may be a little short on entertainment), and a custody battle followed.

A hat tip to Mark Whybird for emailing me the link.

Yet another severed human foot

We are pleased today to be able to add yet another incident to our unique-in-the-blogosphere-compilation of accounts of severed human feet, this latest report coming from Vancouver this week:

Another possible human foot has washed up on B.C.'s coast, this time in Powell River, which would bring to eight the number of feet found on beaches in B.C.

"[Saturday] afternoon a local resident of Powell River located a running shoe with what appeared to be remains inside it, on the beach just south of Powell River," B.C.  RCMP spokeswoman Cpl. Annie Linteau confirmed Sunday.

"We attended the area and have since turned over the footwear and the remains to the BC Coroners Service."

Linteau said the coroner will conduct a forensic analysis to determine whether the remains inside are human. If confirmed, the Powell River foot would be the eighth human foot discovered along B.C.'s coast since 2007.

And it would add to the continuing mystery about what is causing lone human feet to wash up on the province's shores.

I agree that this is interesting:

"All of the feet discovered so far have been in running shoes."

The scientist in me says that this reflects the buoyancy of running shoes. But a little voice keeps whispering "maybe they were running from something..."

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.

Update #3 - More identifications made on additional feet, via DNA testing. Nothing suspicious here folks; move right along...

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.