The Trees in My Town Have Bodies in Them.

I live in Hudson, Oregon - and sometimes, when they cut down a tree in my town, they find a body inside.
I don?t mean that they find bodies inside the hollows - I mean that the bodies are found completely encased within the wood of solid, whole trees. According to my grandpa, there were stories of bodies in trees going around Hudson since before he could remember; he thinks they started in the 1800s as old pioneer and settler stories. But they were just that - stories.
No, the first confirmed instance didn?t occur until the seventies.
According to my dad, when he was about eleven he?d heard rumors that the Benson family had cut down a tree in their backyard, were chopping it up for fire firewood, and boom - bones and clothes in the middle of the logs. ?Donny Filmore told me it was like the wood had grown around the corpse,? he remembers. Dad got unnerved, Dad told Grandpa - and Grandpa, a science enthusiast who didn?t even raise his children to believe in Santa Claus, laughed and said those stories had been around forever. My dad was pretty shook up, though, so Grandpa said that, if it would calm him down, he?d take him to the Bensons himself to prove that it was just the newest iteration of an old story. They went to the Bensons. It wasn?t just a story.
Nobody knew who it was the Bensons found in the tree. Grandpa says some whacko in town even tried to persuade people the body had grown inside the tree, but everyone pointed out real soon that didn?t explain the clothes. The reporters came to Hudson, of course; dad says he even remembers a news truck. There are some old newspaper articles about it from archives I was able to find online, but the news never really made it national - Grandpa says it got drowned out by Watergate. They buried the remains in an unmarked plot in the local cemetery, and for years people joked that if someone was running late to a meeting, they?d been caught by a tree.
The second body they found is much better documented - in fact, you may have heard about it yourself. In 1987, a landscaping company hired by Westford Construction was clearing out some forest land for homes; the landscaping company (whose name I haven?t been able to find, it may have been off-the-books illegal immigrant labor) decided to mitigate cost of labor by selling felled trees to Gerstein Lumber, a local timber processing plant. Guess what they found in one of the trees.
?BODY FOUND WITHIN TREE? - Sandra Tyson, Portland Times [defunct], March 29, 1987
?Hudson, OR - A lumber processing plant was shocked on Monday to discover the remains of a missing woman encased within the wood of one of the trees it was processing.
?Hector Torres, a supervisor at the Gerstein Lumber processing plant, informed authorities that workers had found clothes and human bones within some timber that the plant was in the process of preparing for sale.
Local authorities have identified the body as Helen Fields, a Hudson woman who was reported missing in 1974. Robert and Cassandra Fields, the parents of the missing woman, say that while they are at peace now that their daughter has been found, they want to know what happened to her and how her body came to be encased within a tree. Fields?s remains will be laid to rest with a memorial service at the Hudson City Cemetery on Saturday.?
You can still find some other articles about the incident online from newspaper archives, though it?s most frequently talked about in publications about mysteries and urban legends. Of course the article doesn?t tell you that they?d already cut up the tree when they found the body. I?ve called Mr. Torres myself, who told me they didn?t notice anything strange until the machinery started making funny noises during the cutting - and that they had to hand over four different slabs of wood to the police. Also, the article seems to imply that either the body was intact enough to identify (it wasn?t) or that they did some sort of DNA testing (I don?t think they did). From what a retired cop told me, they were only able to ID the body because they found a Sears name-tag encased in the wood with the name ?Helen? on it (they had to sand it down to make the name visible), and Helen Fields had been working for the local Sears at the time of her disappearance. Also, again from what I can tell, the news never really reached a national scale. Dad says it got drowned out by the Iran-Contra scandal.
From what I?ve been able to find, there weren?t any incidents after 1987 - at least, none that were reported. During the 80s, Hudson had been touted as ?the next Portland;? the city was planning to expand as much as it could, cutting into the forest land to build homes in stores. But while the rest of America?s economy boomed, for some reason Hudson?s failed, and the plans for expansion were scrapped. In fact, I haven?t been able to find evidence that any more forest land in Hudson has been cleared since 1987.
As you could have probably guessed, I?ve done my research about this Hudson phenomenon. I?d heard the stories a time or two growing up - they weren?t any sort of hushed town secret, nor were they any sort of oft-told, important part of the town?s heritage; more than anything, they were just things that had happened, and everyone in town, busy with their own lives, had simply moved on. They were the kinds of stories that you forgot for years at a time, and when you were at a party or a hangout and one of your friends mentioned them, you?d feel a light turn on in your head and you?d remember them, and you might even have a spooky conversation for half an hour or so before the topic changed again and you?d talk about something else. Heck, the stories might even linger in your mind for a couple of days, but work and relationships and bills and new gossip push them to the back of your mind for another several years until someone else at another party mentions them again.
So let me tell you when the stories became more than just stories to me.
Last year, I was at my friend Eddie?s apartment. His full name was Edgar, a secret few knew and fewer could tell without him knocking their teeth out. It had been a rough day for Eddie - his girlfriend of four years had packed up her things in the apartment and left without even a note, even changing her cell number (as I?d later find out on Facebook, she?d moved back in with her parents.). Eddie had had a few beers, and I was trying to talk him through things. He wasn?t listening too much - he just sort of sat there with his eyes unfocused, and, in spite of the beers, was more fidgety than ever. I remember Judge Judy was on the TV in the background. We?d been there for about half an hour when, suddenly, Eddie got up.
?Just a sec,? he said, heading to his bedroom - and emerging about a minute later with an axe.
?Dude,? I said cautiously.
?You can keep talking,? he said - and, resolutely, he marched straight out the front door.
I followed him. I asked him what he was doing, but he didn?t answer - he didn?t even act like I was there. It was getting dark; we walked out of the neighborhood and into the nearby grove of trees (it?s about two miles wide.) I had my phone in my pocket, ready to call somebody - even the police - in case my friend was about to do something he?d regret.
Finally, when we were far enough into the grove that we couldn't hear the rush of cars from the freeway, Eddie stopped at a tree; he looked at it, sizing it up for a moment - and quicker than I thought him capable, he swung the axe into the tree with a resounding THWACK.
?Dude,? I said again.
?I?m still listening,? he said. I hadn?t said anything in ten minutes.
?What are you doing?? I asked.
?Clearing my mind,? he said. After a moment he stopped, looked around, and pointed a bit farther into the grove - and there, about fifty yards out, I saw a felled tree lying on the ground. This was evidently not the first tree that Eddie had taken his anger out on; he?d always been a wall-puncher in high school, and I guessed his coping mechanisms had evolved into more aggressive vandalism that, if you were careful, you didn?t have to pay for damaging.
I should have told him to stop, but he was whacking away at the tree like it had killed his sister. His teeth were gritted - I don?t think he was drunk enough to hurt anyone, but he might have been tipsy enough to hurt himself. He thwacked and thwacked again, a few chips flying from the tree here and there - then, he let out a guttural yell as he dealt the tree a particularly vicious blow. The axe got stuck in the tree with a sickening thud - and with some effort, Eddie pulled it out again.
?Stop!? I yelled - and, surprisingly, Eddie actually stopped.
?What?? he said impatiently.
?Look,? I said, pointing at the blade of the axe.
The blade was spattered with dark, red liquid. I hadn?t seen a whole lot of blood in greater quantities than when you cut yourself shaving - for a second, my brain didn?t even register that the liquid might have been blood.
We looked at the tree - and from the most recent blow, dark ichor was now oozing down the bark.
The stories all came rushing back to the forefront of my mind.
We both looked at each other; for a moment, we didn?t say anything - Eddie looked absolutely stunned. Then, Eddie swung the axe into the tree again, but this time it was not a passionate blow - it was calculated, or at least as calculated as a semi-inebriated Eddie could manage. I remember his face - no longer contorted in anger, it was the face of morbid curiosity. Eddie swung again, but swore after announcing that he?d missed his mark; he tried again and swore again, and I, seized myself by the same morbid curiosity, convinced Eddie to let me try.
I chipped away lightly at the wood around the bleeding cut. The axe proved too clumsy an instrument for the work, so Eddie went back to his apartment and fetched a hatchet and a pocket knife, and I got to work. I carved and pulled away wood, all the time wondering if I was really going to find a body - and soon, after peeling away a chunk of wood, I saw it.
A strip of blood-soaked denim.
We had reached a leg.
We kept at it. We should have called the cops right then, but we didn?t - the thought didn?t even cross my mind, and I doubt it would have ever crossed Eddie?s. Over the course of an hour we carved out the left side of the body, whittling and pulling away strips of wood as we made our way up the leg, hip, and all the way up to the abdomen, where we hit the blue, shredded fabric of a dress shirt. I was expecting the body to be far more decomposed, but no - as long as I was careful, I didn?t pierce any of the pale, bloated flesh, though the jeans, which were stained with blood in places Eddie definitely hadn?t hit with the axe, kept getting caught in the blade. Though I was fine working away the wood, I couldn?t bring myself to touch the body itself anywhere. The smell was horrible - I can?t even begin to describe it, as I?d never smelled anything like it before and have not smelled anything like it again. As I worked, Eddie remained silent, only handing me the tools I asked for. It got darker and darker, and Eddie had to use the light of his cellphone so I could see what I was doing. I didn?t carve away too much, so that most of the body remained upright within the tree, though when I had started out I was dumb enough to carve the leg out so much that it dangled and, were it more decomposed, might have threatened to fall out while leaving the rest of the body in tree. We carved our way up the body until the form of the chest, shoulders, and neck were all visible.
Then we got to the face.
I worked the wood away - and as I uncovered the face, a man?s face was slowly revealed, though several strips of skin were pulled off with the wood. The eyes were closed; the nose looked like it had been crushed; and as I worked my way downward I realized that the mouth was open - I had to use my pocket knife to pry the wood out of the body?s open mouth. It took several minutes and lots of wiggling, but I finally managed to yank it out, though several of his teeth came with it. For the first time, I stood back to look at my grim handiwork.
There, in front of me, was the body of a fellow human being, his face frozen eternally in a scream. I don?t know whether the adrenalin had worn off, or if I just hadn?t taken the time to actually think, but the actual horror of the situation finally hit me - my knees felt weak, and I had to lean against the tree. Eddie just stood there, silent. As I looked over the body, I noticed that we hadn?t uncovered an arm - and as I scanned the shape of the shoulder, I realized that the arm must still be in the tree, stretching upward to where we hadn?t carved yet - whoever this man was, he had died with his arm reaching upward.
That?s when we called the cops. They showed up after about twenty minutes and roped off the area, though who would be coming into the middle of the forest was beyond me. We told them our story, and I know they smelled the booze on Eddie?s breath, so I did most of the talking. As they took photographs of the tree and started prying out the rest of the body, one of the younger cops went on a power trip, saying we should have called them immediately after finding the body and shouldn?t have interfered so much with it. In fact, he might even charge us with vandalism of public property. We were let off the hook, however, after one of the older cops subtly told him to relax. They made some half-hearted attempts to tell us to go home, but we stuck around long enough to watch them finishing pulling the rest of the remains out of the tree. They had to do it in pieces.
I kept calling the cops over the next few days, asking for updates - during that time, I researched bodies in trees online, talked to my family, and made phone calls around town, which is how I found all the information I?ve already shared.
When I called the cops about a week later, they finally told me that they had ID?d the body as Jim Peters, a 43 year old real estate agent who had gone missing a month before. Just one month? I pointed out that even if the tree could have grown around the corpse, it would have taken years for it to grow around the body as much as it had. The cops didn?t have anything to say about that. The mystery didn?t end there, though - Jim Peters was not from Hudson. He had gone missing from Phoenix, Arizona. But it was definitely Jim Peters - they did DNA testing and everything. Nobody had any answers as to how a guy from Arizona had ended up dead inside a tree in Hudson, Oregon.
A few days later Eddie knocked on my door. He looked a little rough around the edges - dirty jeans and flannel shirt, bags under his eyes, unshaven - but he was sober. He smelled like a campfire.
?Where have you been?? I asked.
?Around,? he said vaguely. We sat on the step outside my apartment and talked while Eddie lit a cigarette.
?Crazy we just happened to hit the tree with a person in it,? I eventually said.
Eddie scoffed.
?Wasn?t luck,? he said, taking a deep drag.
?So what,? I said, ?it was fate??
?No,? he said. ?It was just pretty much guaranteed to happen.?
?What do you mean??
?I mean that of course we were going to knock one down with a body in it,? he said. ?Don?t you get it??
?No,? I had to admit.
?We knocked down a tree with a body in it,? he said, ?because they all have bodies inside them.?
I was stunned.
?How do you know??
?Well, maybe not all of them,? he allowed. ?But lots of them.?
?Eddie,? I said slowly, ?how do you know that??
For a long time, he didn?t say anything - just smoked. I knew better than to prod, so I let him sit in silence until he was ready to talk. Eventually, I checked my phone - he?d been silent for eight minutes straight. He even put out his cigarette on the cement and lit another one.
?I gotta go,? he finally said, getting up. I almost tried to stop him, but it was Eddie. That would have been pointless.
About two weeks later, Eddie?s parents called me - he hadn?t answered his phone in six days.
?Last time we talked with him,? they said, ?he said he was on his way to see you.?
?I?ll try and get a hold of him,? I said. ?But it?s probably just Eddie being Eddie.?
I tried calling Eddie. He didn?t answer. I drove down to his apartment and knocked on the door. Nobody answered. So, I grabbed the key I knew he kept under the mat, unlocked the door, and walked in. All of his stuff was there, but Eddie was nowhere to be seen.
I called the cops and reported him missing before calling his parents. After I was finished, I drove back to my apartment, parked my car - and for the first time in years, I cried. I sat there and cried.
After about half an hour, I finally wiped my eyes and got out of my car. I locked the doors, got out, made my way onto the sidewalk, began crossing the apartment courtyard - and almost fell down.
There, in the middle of the courtyard?s grass, and where there definitely hadn?t been one before, was a fully grown elm tree.
I?m currently in the process of moving to Indiana. I?m leaving Hudson in a few days, and twice, in the middle of the night, I?ve gone down to the elm tree, carrying my own axe - but I just don?t have it in me to confirm for myself that Eddie is in there.
r/awsmith


Source.