Featured Image Credit: TikTok/@katiesantry
Topics: TikTok, Viral, True crime
Yasmeen Hamadeh
It's not everyday that you serendipitously find yourself in a potential homicide investigation, but what started out as an innocent day task for Katie Santry became something bigger than anyone could have ever imagined.
A resident in Columbus, Ohio, Santry and her boyfriend were casually digging up their lawn to build a fence — however — they soon stumbled upon a rolled up rug buried deep into the ground while digging.
Initially not thinking much of it, it wasn't until a few days later when Santry walked into her at-home office space completely wrecked that she began to wonder if something weirder was up.
Documenting the whole ordeal on her TikTok page, Santry shared that her computer screen was shattered and her desk was a mess, but her boyfriend and children claimed that no one entered the room and that the doors were closed.
This prompted her to think that something paranormal was going on after finding the mysterious rug. "Is there a dead body in that rug? Or is it the ghost of the rug's past?," Santry questioned in one of her TikTok videos. "What on earth happened? Is there a ghost breaking my stuff?"
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"My next-door neighbor also died in her house the day we bought this house last October," she added. "That house started getting boarded up the same day this happened. So it was just a series of weird, coincidental events that, with a creative mind, could be constructed as ghostly."
Naturally, Santry's interest in the rug re-peaked and she tried to dig it up along with her family's help. But, the ground was rock hard due to a lack of rain, proving the task to be far more difficult than they anticipated.
"I give up. I can't dig any further," Santry said in another TikTok. At this point, her videos were starting to gain major traction online and a pool of viewers began offering their insight on what Santry should do — call the police.
So two days after her first video on the rug ordeal went viral, Santry called the police and two officers arrived within 15 minutes.
Although they admitted the situation was strange, they informed Santry that it would take more time and effort than they were willing to invest to dig up the rug and what could potentially be in it.
Now this is where things get really weird and take a pretty drastic turn. Santry received a call from the homicide department shortly after her initial round with the police, and they informed her that they wanted to send over detectives and cadaver dogs to inspect the area.
So, authorities showed up with the cadaver dogs, and each dog separately sat on the area with the rug — a sign of possible human remnants.
Santry explained in one of her TikTok videos that remnants can be as little as blood from a bloody nose or a scraped knee, but the dogs' signal prompted authorities to tape off Santry's backyard and begin digging.
Averaging around 7 million plays per video, the internet eagerly waited to hear the verdict on what police were going to find in the rug, with theories blowing up everywhere.
You see, Santry's house was built in 1967 and only one family had lived there before her and that family told Santry they had no idea why the rug was buried, which unfortunately was more than enough for TikTok's true crime aficionados to run absolutely wild with the what if's.
But alas, after hours of digging, the police revealed on Friday (October 4) afternoon that no remains were found and they were ending the dig.
The news bizarrely came as a disappointment to many, with the majority of Santry's TikTok audience insisting that something strange happened on that rug.
"They buried the body deeper underground and the rug was meant to be a red herring. That's where my brain went right away," one user commented on Santry's TikTok video announcing that the police had found nothing.
"Someone got murdered on the rug. Decayed on there. They got rid of the body somewhere else and the killer buried the evidence (the rug). That's my theory," another added.
"This saga isn't over. Something happened on that rug," said another.
The rug has been taken by the police as evidence Santry noted, so maybe there is still a possibility that a forensic team might find something unusual.
In any case, you'll likely see the next big update on the internet's favorite story of the week on Santry's TikTok page.