The foot was actually originally found by a lady at the beach. She was beach combing for rocks for an art project that she was doing. She’d come across a shoe and thought maybe someone here at the campground had lost it. When she got closer to it, she could see the bone sticking out of it and realized that it looked like a severed foot in a running shoe.

She came up to our office at the campground – we’re right in front of the beach where she found it – and asked me to call the police, which I did. While we were waiting for them to come, we called my husband and asked him to come to the beach with us. We walked over to where the shoe was, and it definitely looked like there was a foot inside that running shoe.

That was the sixth foot to wash up, but now we’ve been told that it’s a hoax. It looked human to us, and even the officers that were here were quoted in the newspaper saying that it looked to be human remains. Yesterday I had a phone call while I was out of the office, and I was told that it was actually the shoe stuffed with seaweed and animal carcass bone.

Of course the first time I saw it, I believed it to be human remains, and I absolutely felt sick inside. The first thing that came to my mind was, ‘Oh no, is this another one?’ because we had just heard a few days before about the fifth foot being found, and that was right out here near where we live.

Campbell River is a very safe place. I was born and raised here, and I actually grew up on this beach. My grandparents house is just down the road from where I work and live here. To have something like that happen – before we knew it was a hoax – was terrible. For someone in this area to be sick enough to do something like that…(pause)...the prank that they pulled off is absolutely disgusting.

The first day it happened, my husband and I just kept thinking all night long, ‘How can this happen, here of all places?’ It raised all kinds of questions, like whether there’s criminal activity in the area – whether there’s some sick person in our community. A lot of people that have checked into our campground in the last few days have a lot of questions as well …

No one has any answers of course. They’re investigating, but nobody knows. That’s the fear of it all. All we know is what we’re hearing from the media. As far as I can tell the investigation is being kept very quiet, and I guess that’s what they have to do to find out what’s going on, but it sure causes a lot of speculation.

All the international attention suddenly on our community has changed my life quite a bit. The phone is ringing all the time, there are people coming and going here all the time. It’s affected a lot of people’s lives. It’s opened up a lot of wounds for families that have lost loved ones, whether in accidents on the water or that type of thing.

I mean, I have children. I have twin daughters that are getting ready to go to prom here tomorrow, and my youngest. It’s just raised a lot of concern for my husband and I. Now we have to tell our kids to watch for anyone around the area that they feel looks suspicious, to get license plates and that type of thing.

I just wish it hadn’t happened, that’s for darn sure.

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Read more about this case in this commentary: The Sixth Severed Foot [1]