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Stumbling Across 'New' Severed-Foot Mystery

VIDEO: This happened before, pre-YouTube.

Aaron Chapman 22 Jul 2008TheTyee.ca

Aaron Chapman is a musician and writer.

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Vancouver: a foot fetishist's worst nightmare.

The mystery of how five severed human feet could have washed up on our local shores is unfolding like a lost X-Files script.

Followers are speculating about local hacked-up gangland crime victims, small passenger plane accident victims, animal attack victims and migration from shores as far as 1,600 kilometres away: Super Natural B.C. indeed.

"This sort of thing doesn't happen here" has been the public reaction, but I'm surprised that nobody has put this in historical context yet. Vancouver has had a long tradition of feet washing up on our shores going back over a hundred years.

We have Leg-in-Boot square down in False Creek, one of the city's more curious addresses found near the, er, foot of Heather street, west of the Cambie Street Bridge.

There's even the ominous sounding address of 666 Leg-in-Boot Square.

The incident that gave birth to the street's name occurred in the late 1800s when a human leg, boot and all, washed up on what was then Vancouver's industrial shoreline. Police posted the leg up in a public place for a week or so in hopes that someone would come forward and identify it. (Or maybe claim it?) But no one ever did.

Over a hundred years later, police seem equally baffled with today's foot mystery. The RCMP just announced that two of the feet belong to the same man, but speculation about the other feet continues.

Perhaps if the RCMP had the technology to post viral videos a hundred years ago, they could have displayed the legs for all to see?

Our local mystery feet story is running (sorry) in newspapers from Brisbane to Taipei. And police media conferences, showing the evidence, are on YouTube.

Maybe someone out there has the answer, but for now, it's just lots of grim reading for even the most ardent foot fetishists to stumble across.

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