A man in California appears to have found a big clump of human hair jutting out of a 100-year-old grave.
37-year-old Joel Morrison found the grave of John Drissand at the Catholic cemetery in St. Joseph in Sacramento, California News Times reports. Uploading the discovery to his sister's TikTok channel, he can be heard saying:
"So we're here walking around a cemetery and I've seen something really f---ing gross. There's a tombstone, and there is the person's hair coming out of the crack in the tombstone.
"I mean that is f-----g hair. What the f--k."
He returned a few days later, and found that "they still haven't fixed it". Though on first glance the hair was gone, when Morrison bent down and looked underneath the stone, someone had merely pushed the hair back into the grave.
So, what could cause a body to appear to be making an attempt to escape, mullet first? Well, Occam's razor says it's likely a result of flooding, which is grim, or animals tugging at the corpse's hair, perhaps to make a nest, which is so much worse.
Flooding is a fairly common cause of bodies rising to the surface. Holt Cemetery in New Orleans, though famously also overfilled through the years, is notorious for bones rising to the surface whenever there is too much rainfall. The rain disturbs the soil, and the bones rise up through the mud. The less said about the appetites of animals for human flesh, the better (trust us).
In this case, the roots of a nearby tree may have caused the crack in the grave, which would allow for rainwater to get in.
However, there is still a bit of a mystery here, in that hair would normally have decomposed by this point in a grave in a state of disrepair. In soil, for instance, hair would break down in a few years. Given that the grave states the occupant's death was in 1906, you might expect his bones and hair to have broken down by now.
This varies by conditions, though, so it could be that the body was well preserved within the stone before a very recent crack, after which the hair emerged to spook TikTok. Or, you know, vampires. Either/or.
