Rock Creek Park, Wash. DC. Saw a body in the road that had just completed a 90' swan dive. Actually a car pulled up and stopped as I was running past. There are two bridges a few hundred feet and one is known for suicides(Calvert St) has an 8' railing. The other (Connecticut Ave) has a 5' rail. This fellow went over the low rail.
Another time when finishing a run the DC cops were pulling a body out of the woods 1/4 mile from my friends house. Both instances were between 5 and 6:30 am.
Ha, that's the first thing I thought of! "Wiiiiiiiiiith... a herring!"
Four posts about people who had committed suicide. How freakin' depressing.
midwesta wrote:
Ha, that's the first thing I thought of! "Wiiiiiiiiiith... a herring!"
actually with the subject matter of this thread it should be more of a cry:
"Bring out your dead, Bring out your dead."
We are going for a jog now so :
"Bring out your dead"
I've never found a dead body, but I found a killer one time.
A buddy and I found a guy who had hung himself on a tree. It was early one Sunday morning at the beginning of a long run.
Had a meet cancelled once in HS (or maybe it was MS...can't remember for sure) b/c the course ran through the woods and someone decided to hang themselves in there. Didn't see it, but that's ok.
Lake Chabot, San Leandro/ Castro Valley, CA fall of 1999:
my teammates and i were on a run on a friday afternoon, the day before a race. all but the juniors raced on saturday, so the juniors went farther. they found a woman who had been raped, and she was crying on the trail. one guy stayed with her, another went to get her medicine (she had an asthma inhaler in her car), and another went to call the police. the kid who went to get the police was talking to them and said, "we found a woman who was raped," cop said, "yeah we know." evidently, there were 2 women raped within an hour or so. the cops eventually found the guy and there was a shoot-out. the suspect had been released from jail that morning, for good behavior.
that's the closest i've found to a dead human body. sorry, no newspaper link to the story.
In high school our normal warm-up under a rather lofty bridge was rerouted due to a jumper who had hit the pavement. Next day all that was there was some kitty-litter.
Another time in Spokane out on the Sunday morning long run along Downriver. Instead of running on the trail next to the river we stayed on the road. Two hours later they found a body in the river next to the trail. I had always said that I would find my first dead body running while I lived in Spokane. This is as close as I have come.
I run mostly in a college town and in & about a few big-city parks. I grew up in a fairly mean part of town. But I never see any of this stuff. The most interesting thing I've ever seen is an old ugly lady blowing an equally old and ugly guy, and that's pretty much it.
I feel like the skit from Monty Python's "Matching Tie and Hankerchief" album:
June the 4th, 1973. It was much like any other summer's day in Petersburg, and Ralph Melish, a file clerk at an insurance company, was on his way to work as usual when....(Dramatic music)
nothing happened.
Scarcly able to believe his eyes, Ralph Melish looked down.
But one glance confirmed his suspicions. Behind a bush on the side of the road, there was no severed arm, no dismembered trunk of a man in his late fifties, no head in a bag, nothing...not a sock.
For Ralph Melish, this was not to be the start of any trail of events which would not, in no time at all, involve him in
neither a tangled knot of suspicion nor any web of lies, which would, had he been not uninvolved, surely have led to no other place than the central criminal court of the old baliff.
(Sound of gavel banging)
But it was not to be. Ralph Melish reached his office in Dallezll Street, Petersburg, at 9:05 am. Exactly the same time as he usually got in.
the girls xc team were running once on a back trail in a park and they found a dead body but didnt tell anyone. now the run is called dead man's run
mammatus wrote:
Came upon Lars from Metallica while he was beating off at a rest area men's room off I-5 near Buttonwillow, California.
You came? Where? Hopefully on his face.
One I passed a guy on a trail that I thought was dead.... but then I noticed it was just Ed Whitlock
Having been running 21 years now the dead animals, the copulating and blowing couples, the depressed and weird wandering alone, the car accidents, and the random objects on the road are all kind of old hat.
If you want to see al fresco public sex, run trails within easy walking distance of houses and roads, but just enough foliage to suggest the hint of privacy.
The closest I have come to finding a dead body is that a kid was shot on my favorite stretch of local trail last fall. He wasn't discovered 'til the next afternoon. Had I not been taking the week off after a marathon I might well have found him in the morning.
One day ...
In my mountainous meanderings I have come upon a newly dead body and almost have become one- both at the hand of predators.
The former was a Snowshoe Hare being dismembered by a Goshawk, it's body heat leaving steam trails in the 13 degree air.
The latter was being chased to a standstill by a 150-lb cougar, which I then spent the next ten minutes staring down and shouting at until it backed off and crouched nearby. The impending darkness forced me to back away, slowly at first. I then commenced a series of all-out sprints carrying a baseball-sized rock, interspersed with stops and turning to wait for it's approach (it never did). This was all about 2 miles from the the end of a 22-mile trail run.
No dead bodies. A garbage sack full of dead kittens, I wish I hadn't looked, probably 20+ dead dogs and cats people had thrown out of car windows, wallets, purses, probably 100+ dollars in various denominations of money, small change etc. Untold #'s of f--k mags, videos, condoms, bras, panties, polaroid pics of the x rated variety. I guess most of this stuff was from when someone gets out of their car at night to take a whiz and it falls out of the car.
Of all the pets my wife and I have had in 30+ years of marriage they've all come from critters someone has taken out to the country to get rid of. Some really good pets. All gone now. I need to start running my old course again. Or I should say at least jog it. It was a free pet goldmine.
dank. i have found a shotgun
Now we all know that's just not true.
Nobody passes Whitlock.
We did, just last year. We were warming up for a race in Upper Lower Woodland Park (or Lower Upper Woodland? I can't remember) in Seattle and we saw someone who looked very still and pale, lying on a table with his shirt off, even though it was quite cold. We stopped and looked (at a distance) to see if he was breathing, but I couldn't tell.
One of the women ran and told the race officials and, sure enough, he was dead of exposure. We had to run right by the spot several times during the race.
Go back to your shinebox.
