Severed feet keep washing up on beaches in Canada and the US

Sixteen detached human feet have been found since 2007 in British Columbia, Canada, and Washington state in the US. All of them have worn running shoes or hiking boots.

The most recent one turned up this week. Charlotte Stevens of British Columbia was taking a walk with her family on Vancouver Island when her husband spotted a shoe in the sand. She told CBC:

He picked it up and brought it out on to the beach and we had a look at it for about five minutes and we thought, it almost looks like there is an actual foot bone in it.

The Coroners Service confirmed the shoe came with a dismembered foot. But to the disappointment of many a conspiracy theorist, science provided more mundane answers.

Spenser Davis wrote in the Pacific Standard last year that a study on the Puget Sound (an inlet of the Pacific) found that when a body floating in water is "subjected to the push and pull of its environment", the bones of hands and feet often fall off first.

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