While on a 5 miles walk about I took the opportunity to listen to my favorite podcast: Hidden Brain. Hosted by Skankar Vedantam, the show explores the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior and questions that lie at the heart of our complex and changing world. Today’s episode was “Why We Hold On To Things.” If you would like to listen….

The whole episode was fascinating to me, but the part that you just can’t make up starts at time marker 34:43. It is an account of a bizarre property dispute between John Wood and Shannon A. Whisnant. Mr. Wood was pilot of a small airplane that crashed killing his father, a passenger, and seriously injuring Mr. Wood. The injury required the amputation of his left foot. For reasons his own, Mr. Wood decided he wanted the foot and planned to mummify it …. as a keepsake? Financial troubles lead to his losing his North Carolina home, so he placed the mummified foot in the outdoor barbecue grill (for safe keeping), placed that and his other possessions in the public storage unit – and moved to South Carolina. His financial woes continued and he fell behind on the storage unit payments. Eventually the storage unit operator, as allowed by law, auctioned off the contents of the unit. Mr. Whisnant purchased the grill – and discovered the foot. And that is the beginning of the story. You can’t make this up – and the story has not even entered into the “weird” phase.  Take a moment and enjoy! (…by the way, there was a 2015 documentary, “Finders Keepers”)