Qualla: Salish Sea Human Foot Discoveries

Salish Sea Human Foot Discoveries: Introduction

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dennis Bratland, CC BY-SA 4.0. Most of them have names now. Of the fifteen feet found on British Columbia's shores between 2007 and 2018, thirteen have been matched by DNA to specific people, and behind each match is a family that spent months or years not knowing. The last of those was a left foot found on a rocky West Vancouver beach in September 2018, identified as belonging to a man who had gone missing earlier that year. That is the part of this story that got lost while it was travelling around the world as a curiosity. At least twenty detached human feet, nearly all of them in running shoes, have come ashore on the coasts of the Salish Sea in British Columbia and Washington since August 2007. They are not evidence of a killer. They are what the ocean does with the people it takes.

Image: Dennis Bratland | CC BY-SA 4.0

Salish Sea Human Foot Discoveries: Jedediah Island, and Then the World

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dennis Bratland, CC BY-SA 4.0. The first turned up on 20 August 2007 on Jedediah Island, a small uninhabited island in the Strait of Georgia. Another followed. Then another. When a fifth foot appeared in June 2008, the story escaped the local papers and went global: the Melbourne Herald Sun, The Guardian in Lo...

Image: Dennis Bratland | CC BY-SA 4.0

Salish Sea Human Foot Discoveries: What a Running Shoe Does

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dennis Bratland, CC BY-SA 4.0. The explanation, once forensic scientists laid it out, was disappointingly ordinary and physically precise. A body in cold seawater decomposes slowly, and the ankle is a comparatively weak joint. Simon Fraser University entomologist Gail Anderson has noted that extremities, hands...

Image: Dennis Bratland | CC BY-SA 4.0

Salish Sea Human Foot Discoveries: Foul Play Ruled Out

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dennis Bratland, CC BY-SA 4.0. In December 2017 the British Columbia Coroners Service stated that foul play had been ruled out in every case investigated to that point. The identifications, where they were made, told a consistent and sombre story: people who had drowned, and people who had taken their own live...

Image: Dennis Bratland | CC BY-SA 4.0

Salish Sea Human Foot Discoveries: Leg-In-Boot Square

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dennis Bratland, CC BY-SA 4.0. None of this is new to the coast, only newly frequent. In 1887 a leg inside a boot washed up in Vancouver, and the place where it was found is called Leg-In-Boot Square to this day, which tells you something about Victorian-era attitudes to public commemoration. On 30 July 1914, ...

Image: Dennis Bratland | CC BY-SA 4.0

Salish Sea Human Foot Discoveries: Hoaxes and Afterlives

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dennis Bratland, CC BY-SA 4.0. A foot found on Tyee Spit near Campbell River on 18 June 2008 was not a foot. Someone had put a skeletonized animal paw into a sock and a shoe, packed it with dried seaweed, and left it where it would be found; the RCMP opened an investigation. After the eleventh genuine discover...

Image: Dennis Bratland | CC BY-SA 4.0