38 years a firefighter...Back in 1980 got a call to assist police...Heating contractor had pierced an old chimney to route a new exhaust duct for a water boiler, and a shoe had rolled out of the new opening...
Inside the shoe were bones, so the contractor called the cops...Cops wanted FFs to slowly disassemble the chimney wall so they could document the scene step by step...
Opening up revealed the complete fully-clothed skeleton of what was later determined to have been a 17 yo male who had “disappeared” over a weekend in 1947...Nobody ever knew what had happened to him, and it was presumed he’d just run away...
The building was a Mom n Pop grocery in 47, and Lil Johnny apparently had tried to burgle the joint by shimmying down the chimney...Store was closed, and bottom of the chimney had been bricked up years before...Lil Johnny didn’t know...Chimney converged in diameter towards the bottom and he got wedged stuck...
As he sank lower and lower and exhausted himself struggling, nobody could hear his cries for help...Medical Examiner said he probably suffocated the way his rib cage was lodged in the passage...
His parents were long deceased and he’d been an only child...No next of kin to inform...I still have a photo of my gloved hands holding that skull for the cops...
People do wierd stuff without a thought as to what could go wrong...
Gruesome.
That is creepy.
Has anybody ever ( even in a TV sitcom ) succeeded in entering a house by the chimney ?
Horrible story. If the building was a grocery store why didn’t anyone notice the smell of the dead body? Even if the bottom of the chimney was bricked up the smell would have been all around the building it seems to me.
It is pretty much a right of passage, Most of us survive this period of our lives by the grace of God.
Nearly all of us at that age are blissfully unaware of our mortality. This fact is often utilized by generals and despots to send teenagers to war.