The head in the well

Halloween is approaching, so here is an absolutely weird tale from my policing days. Nothing is ever what it appears to be!

The phone call at my home came from one of my police officers that they had a human head floating in an old well. The homeowner had noticed a strange taste and smell to his drinking water, and upon inspection, had found a human head floating on top of the water in his well.

I responded to the scene - shone a spotlight down into the well - and there it was. It was looking up at all of us - flesh-colored face, eyes, nose, forehead, Yup! A human head, but where was the rest of the body?

A bucket was lowered into the water and the hideous finding was brought to dry land. The smell was overpowering, but the previously-floating "thing" was nothing other than a dead gray squirrel that had fallen into the well - died there - with decomposition gases ripping the creature open, exposing its flesh-colored inner skin - with various bones, tendons and ligaments mimicking what we saw as eyes, nose and forehead.

There was not one of us at the scene that did not feel certain that the "thing" floating in the well was a human head. The lesson being that one can never trust his or her senses with total surety. Nothing is ever what it appears to be.

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