Shoes With Human Feet Inside Keep Washing Ashore in British Columbia

On Sunday, a man came upon a New Balance sneaker on the shores of Vancouver Island — with the left foot still inside.

It was a macabre discovery, but not altogether unusual in British Columbia, where 13 feet have washed ashore since 2007.

Back then, a string of discoveries over a ten-month period along Canada's west coast sparked wild theories about the stories behind the severed limbs — everything from a crime writer speculating it could be the work of a serial killer, to people considering if a morgue worker with a twisted sense of humor was to blame. Others wondered if the feet could be linked to the victims of a nearby place crash in 2005, but a DNA match was not made at the time.

The latest discovery happened on Sunday, when a hiker came across a running shoe, with a foot in a sock, in Botanical Beach, near Port Renfrew.

He "was up on the driftwood and he happened to find this shoe," Charlotte Stephens said of her husband. "He just picked it up and brought it out onto the beach and we kind of had a look at it for about five minutes," she told CHEK News. "We thought it almost looks like there is an actual foot bone in it."

Police on Tuesday said it appeared the shoe had washed ashore. The British Columbia Coroners Service has since confirmed that the foot is indeed human.

BC Coroners Service spokeswoman Barb McLintock says an investigation is underway to determine whose foot it is and the cause of death, the Canadian Press reported. She said so far there is no suspicion of foul play.

McLintock says of the 12 previous instances, coroners have been able to identify 10 of the feet, belonging to seven people.

The first foot, found on August 20, 2007 on Jedediah Island, near Nanaimo, BC, was found in a shoe commonly sold in India. It was later linked to a depressed man who had gone missing earlier that year, the Victoria Times Colonist reported. In June, 2008, a left male foot, found at the mouth of the Fraser River, near Kirkland Island, would later be matched to a right foot found on Valdes Island, in a blue and white Nike shoe. The man's identity was never known, though.

One foot reportedly belonged to a man who had gone missing 25 years earlier, when his boat capsized. Female feet have also been found and in 2010, a right foot that might have belonged to a woman or a child was found in Puget Sound. Once, in 2008, someone stuffed the bones of animal's foot in a sock and shoe, and in September of that same year, someone placed a plastic foot in a shoe on a Vancouver beach.

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