Eight Bodies, Eight Places: The World's Strangest Missing Persons Discoveries

In July 2021, 35-year-old Texas firefighter Elijah Snow was on a wedding anniversary trip with his wife in Cancun, Mexico. After a night of drinking, he never returned to their hotel room.

The next morning, his body was discovered wedged headfirst in a small bathroom window at a different nearby hotel—not the one he had been staying at. The gap was so narrow that it seemed nearly impossible for a person to enter intentionally, prompting immediate suspicion.

Initially, Mexican authorities ruled the death accidental, claiming Elijah had tried to climb into the window and became trapped. But the details didn’t sit right with his family.

They soon released autopsy photos showing severe bruising on his arms, back, and head, suggesting a possible struggle prior to death. His wife, who had been frantically searching for him, believes he may have been targeted and that local authorities rushed to dismiss the case.

Adding to the mystery: surveillance footage showed Elijah walking alone but did not capture the moment he entered the other hotel or how he ended up at the window. The bizarre positioning of his body and the bruises raise unsettling questions.

Was he trying to escape someone? Was he forced into the space? His family continues to push for an independent investigation, fearing that the truth is far darker than what was officially reported.

Though Mexican authorities initially ruled the death accidental, the contorted position of his body, the unusual location, and signs of a possible struggle left his family convinced there was foul play.

Was it a tragic accident, or something far more sinister?

In May 2008, 18‑year‑old Joshua Vernon Maddux disappeared from his home in Woodland Park, Colorado. Though he walked out saying he was just going for a walk, he never returned, prompting years of searching by a devastated family.

It wasn’t until August 2015, seven years later, during demolition of a long‑abandoned cabin barely a mile from his house, that workers stumbled on his remains wedged inside the cabin’s chimney. His identity was confirmed via dental records and a distinctive finger injury.

Joshua’s death was ruled as “ likely accidental” with the coroner stating that there were “no signs of trauma, no fractures, stab wounds, or bullet holes” with toxicology reports showing  no drugs in his system .

His death was attributed to hypothermia or dehydration, likely after he became stuck while attempting to shimmy down the chimney.

Yet the more bizarre details of the case have haunted those following it:

• Joshua was found wearing only a thin thermal shirt. All his other clothes (pants, shoes, socks) were discovered neatly folded inside the cabin, near the fireplace
   
• His body lay in a fetal position with legs above his head, implying he entered the chimney head‑first
   
• Cabin owner Chuck Murphy insisted the chimney’s top had been fitted with a heavy steel mesh, installed to stop animals from entering. If that mesh was still intact, it would have physically blocked anyone from descending into the chimney
   
• A large wooden breakfast bar had been torn from the cabin wall and dragged across the floor to block the fireplace opening, yet who moved it, and why, remains unexplained

Joshua’s father and sister described him as bright and well-adjusted. His family never fully believed the official version, but they welcomed the closure that identification of his body finally brought .

Those who followed the case  pointed to a mysterious acquaintance named Andrew Richard Newman, who had been seen with Joshua before his disappearance and later arrested in New Mexico for unrelated violent crimes.

Rumors suggested he may have boasted about “putting Josh in a hole,” but no formal charges were ever brought in Joshua’s death.

In March 2017, residents of a remote village in West Sulawesi, Indonesia, faced a nightmare straight out of folklore. Akbar Salubiro, a 25-year-old palm oil harvester, vanished after leaving for work in the fields near his home.

When he didn’t return, villagers launched a search. What they found was beyond comprehension.

Near his plantation, they encountered a massive 23-foot-long reticulated python, unmoving and grotesquely swollen. Sensing something was wrong, the search party killed the snake and cut open its belly.

Inside was Akbar’s fully intact body, still clothed in the same boots and work gear he wore the day he disappeared.

Experts later confirmed that the snake had likely ambushed Akbar, biting and constricting him before slowly swallowing him whole, a process that can take several hours.

While pythons are known to eat large prey, such as wild boar and monkeys, experts say it's one of the few documented cases of a python consuming a fully grown adult human. This instance is extremely rare, making it the first fully documented case of its kind in Indonesia.

What makes this incident even more haunting is its eerie calmness. Villagers reported no struggle or screams, and Akbar’s disappearance might have remained an unsolved mystery, if not for the python’s bloated body, lying silently in the undergrowth.

In 2005, British sisters Mildred Bowman, 62, and Alice Wardle, 68, took what was meant to be a relaxing holiday to Benidorm, a bustling seaside resort on Spain’s Costa Blanca. They never returned home.

The sisters were staying at the Levante Club Apartments, a popular tourist accommodation. When friends they were vacationing with noticed the women hadn't been seen in over a day, they alerted the hotel staff. 

Hotel employees forced entry into their locked room and found both women dead, trapped inside a foldaway Murphy bed. The bed had somehow swung shut into the wall while they were sleeping, trapping and ultimately suffocating them.

Spanish police described the deaths as a “freak accident.” It’s believed the internal mechanism of the bed either malfunctioned or was triggered unintentionally, closing the frame while the sisters were inside.

What makes the case so eerie is how rare, and violent, the accident was. The women, who were reportedly in good health, had no way of escaping once the bed had sealed shut.

There were no cries for help, no broken furniture, just silence until staff made the horrifying discovery.

The story shocked both Spain and the UK, with investigators struggling to comprehend how a simple piece of furniture could become a death trap. And to this day, the case is referenced in safety manuals and hotel engineering circles as a worst-case scenario for mechanical bed design.

It's the kind of tragedy that makes you question just how safe the most mundane parts of everyday life really are.

Larry Ely Murillo-Moncada, 25, stormed out of his family home during an argument in 2009 and was never seen again.

For years, his case went cold until 2019, when contractors dismantling a former No Frills Supermarket in Council Bluffs, Iowa, made a disturbing find: a human body wedged between a 12-foot-tall freezer and the wall, in a space only 18 inches wide.

The body was so badly decomposed it was initially unidentifiable but DNA confirmed it was Larry.

It’s not just where Larry was found that’s disturbing, it’s how long he went unnoticed. For nearly ten years, his body sat just feet away from shoppers, workers, and security systems, hidden behind humming machinery.

No strange smell? No complaints? It speaks to just how easy it is for people to vanish in plain sight. His story is a chilling commentary on modern isolation and overlooked tragedies.

Investigators believe he climbed onto the freezer (possibly while hallucinating, as he’d been acting erratically before vanishing) and accidentally fell into the gap, where he was trapped and ultimately died a horrifyingly claustrophobic end.

Elmer McCurdy was a minor outlaw who met an unceremonious end in 1911 after a failed train robbery in Oklahoma. Shot dead by a posse, his unclaimed body was taken to a local undertaker who preserved it with arsenic, then displayed it in his funeral home as a sideshow curiosity.

McCurdy became known as "The Bandit Who Wouldn’t Give Up", with visitors paying a nickel to see his embalmed corpse.

Years later, two carnival promoters posing as his brothers claimed the body, and so began McCurdy’s second, much stranger life. Over the next six decades, his mummified remains were passed from sideshow to sideshow, traveling with carnivals, appearing in wax museums, and even featuring in low-budget crime exhibits.

Slowly decaying, the corpse lost fingers, ears, and hair, but remained disturbingly lifelike.

By the 1970s, no one seemed to remember (or care) that the figure was once a real person. Painted in glow-in-the-dark paint and hanging from a noose, McCurdy was being used as a prop in the “Laff in the Dark” ride at The Pike amusement zone in Long Beach, California.

That changed in 1976, during the filming of an episode of The Six Million Dollar Man. A crew member tried to move what he thought was a wax dummy, only for its arm to snap off, revealing real human bone and tissue. The funhouse was shut down, and authorities launched an investigation.

Forensic experts eventually identified the body as Elmer McCurdy using a combination of dental records, historical photos, and odd items found inside the corpse, including a 1924 penny and old museum tickets.

After more than 60 years on the road, Elmer’s body was finally laid to rest in Guthrie, Oklahoma. To ensure he would never be exploited again, officials buried him under two feet of concrete.

McCurdy’s story is one of the most bizarre post-mortem journeys in American history, a grim reminder of how easily death and spectacle can blur.

The fact that his corpse was mistaken for a prop in a haunted attraction makes his case one of the strangest, and most unsettling examples of a person being quite literally lost in plain sight.

In March 2010, the disappearance of 4-year-old Paulette Gebara Farah, a developmentally disabled child in Huixquilucan, Mexico, sparked a frantic nine-day, nationwide search that gripped the country’s attention.

Friends, family, volunteers, even cadaver dogs, scoured her apartment, unaware the truth was hiding right under their noses.

On March 31, her body was discovered wedged between the mattress and the footboard of her bed, wrapped in sheets and showing no signs of movement since she’d gone missing, Official investigators ruled it an accidental death by asphyxia, as though Paulette had rolled into the gap during sleep and suffocated unexpectedly.

What fueled controversy wasn't just the strange location, it was how no one noticed. Household members and experts slept in that room in the interim, yet Paulette went undetected for over a week.

The case ignited fierce debate about whether it was a tragic accident or something more sinister. The mother and father were briefly considered suspects, and the investigation was mishandled so severely that the State Attorney General resigned .

To this day, Paulette’s story remains one of Mexico’s most haunting unexplained child fatalities; a bizarre tragedy that literally lay embedded in plain sight.

In April 1943, four boys were exploring Hagley Wood, near Worcestershire, England, when they stumbled upon something chilling: a human skull lodged inside the hollow trunk of a wych elm tree.

Authorities soon recovered the rest of the skeleton, belonging to a woman whose body had been forcibly stuffed headfirst into the tree. Her right hand was missing, later found buried nearby.

The woman’s remains suggested she’d been killed and hidden roughly 18 months prior, placing her death sometime in late 1941, at the height of World War II. She was around 35 years old, with irregular teeth and fragments of clothing that hinted at a lower economic class.

There was no ID, no matching missing person reports, and no obvious cause of death—only a piece of taffeta stuffed in her mouth, suggesting she may have been gagged.

Then the story got stranger.

Soon after the body was discovered, graffiti began appearing across Birmingham and the surrounding area. In large, scrawled letters on walls and monuments, someone had written:

“Who put Bella in the Wych Elm?”

The message became a kind of urban echo, reappearing again and again for decades, as if someone out there still wanted answers.

Theories soon followed. Some believed Bella was a victim of an occult ritual, citing the symbolism of the wych elm and the severed hand, possibly linked to the “Hand of Glory”, a tool in old European witchcraft. Others suggested she was a German spy, executed during the war.

One informant claimed she was a Dutch cabaret singer turned agent, killed by a Nazi operative. But none of the stories could be confirmed.

Despite public fascination, no suspect was ever identified, and Bella’s true identity has never been verified. Her skull reportedly disappeared from police custody in the 1950s, further muddying the case.

The graffiti, however, persisted, most recently appearing again in 1999 on a 200-year-old obelisk near the original site.

To this day, “Bella in the Wych Elm” remains one of the UK’s most enduring unsolved mysteries, a wartime ghost story grounded in real bone and soil. Her name was likely never Bella, but the forest remembers her, and so, it seems, does someone else.

Each of these cases reminds us that the world holds secrets in its strangest corners, from the mechanical jaws of furniture to the belly of a serpent. The question isn’t just where these people were found, but why they ended up there.

And sometimes, that’s the scariest part of all.

Sources:

https://weirddarkness.com/unlikely-tombs-bizarre-places-bodies-have-been-found/

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/647607/bodies-found-weird-places

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9840469/Elijah-Snows-family-share-autopsy-photos-revealing-heavy-bruising-firefighters-body.html

https://medium.com/true-crime-by-cat-leigh/teens-body-found-in-chimney-93104ecc932

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-39427458

https://biographics.org/elmer-mccurdy-the-wild-west-outlaw-who-became-a-mummy/

Featured photo: Wikipedia