The only one I (and my kids) found was relatively fresh and in the middle of a river. We were mildy thrilled when the newpare wrote about us and referred to us as the proverbial “hikers in the woods.”
It turns out the guy was wading across the small river when his feet got stuck in the mud, and he died of exposure. When we found him, he was standing up and bent forward at the waist, so all we could see was the back of his blue shirt. I didn’t know what it was. At first I thought it was one of those blue plastic barrels for floating docks, or a sandbag. So I wanted to toss some rocks at it to see what it sounded like. The only rocks around were larger than my fist, so I lobbed a couple and hit it with a solid “thump.” I thuoght I saw the back of a head on one end, so I thought it was a scarecrow (it was a week or so after Halloween.) Then I tossed a rock that landed in the water right next to the head, and the face bobbed up pretty clearly.
I found a guy floating in the Mississippi that had been in the water for 4 months, but the water had only recently warmed up enough for him to float up to the surface. And was the first one on the scene of a car accident where the woman lost consciousness in my arms, and she died later in the hospital. I’d take the floating body any day over anything like that car accident again.
I’m a member of our local “chevra kadisha,” or Jewish burial group. One of our main tasks is to ritually wash and prepare a body for burial. I’ve worked on some bodies in various “interesting” conditions. This includes one elderly gentleman who wandered away from home and died; his body was found 5 days later after being out in 90+ degree heat.
Some of us worked with tissue stuffed tightly into our nostrils.
It’s a dead guy in the woods. Who do you think would have wrapped him up tastefully? google “mummified remains” as an image search if you need a visual.
The famous ‘Otzi the Iceman’, 5300-year-old mummy, was found by hikers - his head and shoulders were poking out of a glacier in the woods. They thought he was the victim of a modern murderer at first.
I worked in a mortuary once, and when the director brought back a body of someone who’d died under a doctor’s care (without need of a coroner investigation), he sometimes needed help moving the heavier bodies, and they were usually still warm.
I can say that, for me, the “fresh” bodies were much preferable to handle than the cold, stiff, embalmed bodies. Those just seemed so inorganic. Once I was asked to put a wedding ring on a body lying in state, and it was had to get on, because the hands were so inflexibly cupped together. All I could think of was all of those foul-smelling chemicals saturating the person’s flesh. That’s what grossed me out the most.
The water was about waist deep. He was standing up with his feet stuck in the mud, facing away from us, bent forward at the waist. So all we saw at first was his back clad in a blue workshirt. His arms and head were hanging down below the surface of the very muddy water. His head didn’t start bobbing up and down until I started lobbing chunks of concrete at it…
