The forces of nature, be they destructive or otherwise, have on occasion forced the
dead from their tombs, exposing to the world of the living
clues of past lives. And the planet's untamed weather, as destructive as it can
be, has been known to help find the missing dead. This is my third and
probably last installment, of When Nature Unearths the Dead.
Sir Ernest Oppenheimer was a german-born industrialist, financier, and pioneer in
the African diamond mining industry. His eventual success in the diamond trade
would see him elected as chairman of De Beers consolidated mines in 1929.
Ten years earlier he founded the Consolidated Diamond Mines of Southwest
Africa Ltd. This early endeavour of Oppenheimer's had a base of Lüderitz on
the west coast of Namibia, and in 1925 hundreds of local men were employed at
the plant. Between March and May of that year a
hundred and sixty-seven of those workers, in an effort to escape their poor
working conditions, made a run for either the desert to the south and east of
Luderitz, or the South Atlantic Ocean to the west. Eighty-eight of those men were
eventually found after miraculously surviving an estimated 400 mile trek.
They were starving, dehydrated and close to death. According to the survivors, fourteen
men died during the journey. They had no other option than to leave the bodies of
their workmates in the desert, and with no way of locating them, it was assumed
that by now they had been buried by the ever moving sands. After their capture
they explained that the other absconding workers had made their way west towards
the South Atlantic, in a bid to swim for either penguin Island or the farthest
western shores of the Namibian mainland. It wasn't until 1930, when a police
sergeant named Easton, was patrolling the vast desert lands 15 miles north of
Orange River, that the fates of the missing men were confirmed. As he rode
through the desert, he found a human skeleton partially covered by sand.
A short distance away, he found seven more complete skeletons huddled together,
along with sections of clothing, pocket knives, money, almost undecipherable
papers, and a single ticket with the number 3,170 still clearly visible.
The identities of the eight dead men were soon confirmed to be among those
who absconded in 1925. After being buried in the sand for five years, a recent sand
storm had significantly shifted the dunes, revealing the skeletons.
The remaining six men who were left in the desert, from what I have found, were never
recovered. And whatever became of the sixty-five mine workers who chose the
South Atlantic as their escape route, remains a mystery.
At around 5:20 on the morning of December 28th 1908, the regions on both
sides of the Strait of Messina, which separates Sicily from the Italian
mainland, were hit with an exceptionally violent earthquake. Coastal towns on both
sides of the Strait were badly affected. The quake's epicenter lay directly
between Reggio Calabria and the busy port city of Messina, which was by far
the worst affected area. The number of people who lost their lives in Messina
and the surrounding suburbs was estimated to be between 75,000 and
80,000. it's said that between 90 and 98 percent of the city's buildings
were either badly damaged or destroyed completely. Reggio Calabria and other
locations in southern Calabria also suffered heavy damage with a further
25,000 deaths. According to the survivors, the quake came in three waves;
the most violent being the second, which caused most of the buildings to collapse.
The quake reached 7.1 on the Richter scale and was the most powerful
earthquake Europe had ever seen. The extremely high death toll was due to the
fact that most of the population was still asleep when the earthquake hit.
Therefore, many didn't even make it out of their beds before being buried in the
rubble of their own homes. Messina was more crowded than usual that morning due
to the number of overnight visitors from other areas, who had come to the city to
see a performance of Giuseppe Verdi's opera or Aida. In the immediate moments
following the disaster, many of the survivors in Messina and the surrounding
areas rushed to the relative safety of the beaches, only to be met with an
equally horrible fate. Around 10 minutes after the initial quake, the sea on both
sides of the Strait suddenly withdrew. Moments later a 39-foot tidal wave
washed ashore, tearing through the harbour and what was left of the coastal
buildings. The wave claimed many more lives, washing
hundreds of souls out to sea.
Almost four years later, as the surviving and new population of Messina were still trying to rebuild, mother nature dealt the
already devastated city a cruel final insult. On Sunday November 24th 1912, a
tremendous storm gathered over the Strait of Messina, bringing with it freak
waves that crashed through the city harbour, washing inland, crashing through
the high wall of the cemetery, and dragging the dead, along with their
caskets, into the sea. The cemetery not only held dozens of cholera victims who
died during an outbreak in the mid 19th century, but also victims of the 1908
earthquake. it's said that as many as two hundred corpses, like the hundreds of the
Messina residents before them, were lost to the sea.
The eastern Mediterranean island of Cyprus has been subject to a dispute
between Greek and Turkish Cypriots for many years. In 1974 Turkish troops
invaded the island and claimed a third of its territory. The conflict saw the
deaths of as many as 200,000 people. Many of the bodies, as is inevitable with war,
were never recovered. A further 2000 people were displaced, leaving
their families wondering if they were alive or dead. Since 1981, the Committee
on Missing Persons in Cyprus has been searching for people who disappeared on
the island between 1963 and 1974. The committee, with the support of the United
Nations, prepared a list of more than 2000 missing people with the objective
of discovering what had happened to them. Many of these people were known to have
been lost during the 1974 conflict. So this is where our next case unfolds.
A popular version of this story originally featured in a 2018 edition of Turkish
newspaper Hurriyet. It was then adopted by various British
and US newspapers and websites, but the true details of what transpired are very
different to what was reported in 2018. In an attempt to bring some clarity to
the story I'll begin with the version of events presented to us in 2018. For years
the family of a man named Ahmet Hergune, who had been missing since the conflict of
'74, had searched for him, finding no closure for almost four
decades. Then, in 2011, in a mountainous area of Cyprus, a single fig tree was
found standing inside a cave by a curious researcher for the Committee on
Missing Persons. The presence of a tree not typically found in the area captured
the researchers imagination, and he wondered how it had come to grow in that
particular spot. As he dug around the base of the tree, he
was shocked to find that it had apparently grown out of a human skeleton.
He raised the alarm, and when police arrived at the scene and began digging
further, they found two more skeletons nearby. Ahmet Hergune was one of the names
on the Committee on Missing Persons list, so when his sister came forward with the
suggestion that it might be her brother, a DNA test was made and it was
confirmed that the remains beneath the tree were that of Ahmet. The theory was that
the tree had grown from a small fig stone in the man's stomach. As detectives
investigated the death of Ahmet and the two men who lay beside him, they
discovered that all three had been taken to the cave and killed following a
dynamite explosion. The blast had caused the walls of the cave to fall in, but
left a hole in the rubble big enough for light to stream in, and for the tree to
grow from the decomposing body. Ahmet's sister, who was 87 years old in 2011, said:
After reading a 2018 article from the
Cypress Mail, it was clear that the tale as fascinating as it is, was more than
just a little inaccurate. So we need to go back a further 12 years to fully
understand it. In 2006, the Committee on Missing Persons received information
regarding a cave on a beach in the southern city of Limassol. Out of that
cave grew a fig tree that eventually caused the caves roof to fall in. During
an excavation of the now collapsed cave, three skeletons, all believed to be
victims of the 1974 Turkish invasion, were found several metres away from the
tree. Turkish Cypriot journalist, Sevgul Uludag, recounted the tale in 2008
just before the funerals of the three men. According to her account, back in
1974 a man named Ahmet Camal was taken by Greek Cypriots from a coffee shop in
the village of Episkopi, brought to the beach cave which was approximately nine
miles east, and was killed along with two other men. There was no entrance to the
cave from the land, so the men must have been brought there by boat.
On investigation it was realised that the tree growing from the cave was not
typically found in the Limassol region, and only a few were known to grow in
Episkopi, where Ahmet Camal was from. It transpired that Camal once grew this
type of fig tree in his garden. If the tree did indeed grow from his stomach,
it's possible that he had eaten the figs either from his garden or at the coffee
shop where he was captured. But as mentioned, all three bodies were found
well clear of the root of the tree, so the theory that it had grown from
Camal's body is in serious doubt. A more likely theory is that an animal had
eaten the fruit, made its way to the sea cave, and either excreted the fig stones
or died there. The tree then growing from its carcass.
So it's unlikely that the tree had grown from the stomach of a corpse as reported,
but its presence certainly did lead to the discovery of three victims of the
1974 conflict. As far as the 2011 story goes, it's generally accepted that the
family of Ahmet Hergune wanted to believe that it may have happened to him,
so adopted the story from 2006 to make his passing and subsequent discovery
more symbolic, to help them find closure.
The town of Whitby, in the English county of Yorkshire, was a great inspiration to
author Bram Stoker. After spending some time there in 1880, he chose it as a
setting for the first appearance of Dracula in England in his famed 1897
book. One of the book's locations, the cemetery of St. Mary's Church, lies to
the north of the town and overlooks the mouth of the River Esk. In 2013 the
cemetery, with its well-known literary link to horror, revealed its long dead
inhabitants after heavy rainfall spanning a number of days caused a large
portion of the cliff, on which the cemetery lies, to come crashing down onto
the grounds of the houses and businesses on Henrietta Street. It brought with it
hundreds of pieces of human skeletal remains dating back well into the 19th
century. The landslide was made worse by a broken drainage pipe which had been
leaking into the cliffside. With its initial structure being built in 1110,
the church, although altered over time, is the oldest building in the town, and
according to Reverend Cannon David Smith, who was the pastor in 2013, the loss of
the Grade 1 listed building, declared a World Heritage Site in 1954, would be a
huge blow to the local community if the erosion were to move further inland.
But according to local surveyor Steve Smith, the church is in no danger of collapse
because it was built on a solid rock structure. Reverend Smith said that there
was no way of determining who the remains belong to, so they were collected
and re-entered in the cemetery further back from the cliff edge at a more
secure location. Whitby resident Barry Brown, who runs the
Fortune Kipper smokehouse, which stands directly below the cemetery, spoke of his
findings after the cliff gave way:
The church's cemetery was closed in 1865 and
no one, apart from the reinterred remains of 2013, has been buried there since.
In March of 2020, Putnam County in Middle Tennessee, was hit by a series of
tornadoes that tore through a number of communities. One of the worst affected
was the city of Cookeville. At approximately 2:00 a.m. on March 3rd,
while the vast majority of the inhabitants were still in their beds, the
175 mile-an-hour tornado winds ripped through Cookeville, leveling vast areas
of the city. As a surviving community emerged from what was left of their
homes, recovery and search efforts were already underway. But while the people
and Police Department of Putnam County were clearing their way through the
debris, detectives from the local Police Department responded to a call made by a
search team scouring a wooded area close to Miller Road, which lies to the
northwest of Cookeville. What they found amidst the trees was an abandoned, collapsed tent.
It was around 12:00 noon when the detectives entered the tent to find the
skeletal remains of a person. The Cookeville Police Department, amidst the
already traumatic tornado recovery efforts, were now presented with the job
of solving a mysterious death, completely unrelated to the emergency at hand.
County Sheriff Eddie Farris spoke of the discovery during the press conference on
Wednesday March 4th: As Mayor Porter stated, he did find a body today as we
were searching for the tornado victims. The body had been there for quite some
time. It is being worked as death investigation by Cookeville Police
Department, and it's an ongoing investigation. And there's not a whole
lot else to report on that.
in fact the deceased was later reported to have died at least one year ago.
The remains were sent to the Davidson County Medical Examiner's Office where an autopsy will be performed to help determine
the cause of death and the identification of the person. When the story was shared to the
Cookeville Police Department Facebook page on March 5th, someone suggested that it
may be the remnants of a homeless person, as she knew that they lived out in the
woods close to Miller Road. Another person even suggested a name.
But as this is such a recent discovery, no official identification has been made,
and the investigation is still under way. At the the time of writing, twenty-five people had lost
their lives due to the tornado storm which swept through Middle Tennessee.
Eighteen of those were from Putnam County.
2020 has been a difficult year so far. I know like me, many of you would have come into the New Year with a great sense of
optimism. It may not be the year we were hoping for, and now as we collectively
face a continuing global pandemic, I'd like to wish you all the best for a
brighter future. I'm trying to make the most of my isolation by uploading more
frequently. I hope that these videos offer some kind of respite and help
pass the time. Stay safe, look after yourselves and your families, stay in
touch, and as always, thank you for watching.