Rotting Foot Falls Onto Coffin During Cemetery Burial, Mortifies Loved Ones

The family and friends of an 85-year-old man were at his graveside service when suddenly a rotting foot rolled out of the dirt and onto the top of the man’s coffin. The family and friends of Cleveland Butler were gathered at the Mount Holiness Memorial Park in Butler, New Jersey, to say their final goodbyes when the unthinkable happened.

The people attending this funeral were mortified and what happened next was even more perplexing and disturbing. It was like nothing ever happened. The rotting and moldy foot of another deceased person was laying on top of Butler’s coffin and the people at the cemetery just covered it up with dirt.

The foot didn’t belong to the man the Butler family was there to bury; it was a foot that apparently belonged to someone who died a while ago, which was evident from the shape it was in. The workers quickly filled in the grave so the foot or the coffin was no longer exposed to the outside world.

The deceased man’s daughter, Sandra Butler, spoke with a reporter, calling the incident “traumatizing.” According to Fox News, she said, “It was too much and no one said anything to us…. They just dumped the dirt in the plot like it was normal like it’s nothing to them.”

When caretaker Bill Plog was interviewed, he said he was surprised that something like this doesn’t happen more often. He said that the coffins are made of wood and they are going to deteriorate over time, which is what happened to the plot next to where Mr. Butler was being laid to rest.

Plog said the casket in the plot next to the Butler plot has been in the ground since 1969. After being buried in the ground for that length of time, the wooden coffin might have all but disappeared. The foot rolled out of the dirt from the grave next to the Butler grave.

When the dirt was removed to dig the hole for the Butler casket, the dirt loosened up. So at one point during the service the dirt let go, causing the decomposed foot to roll out of the ground and land on the Butler casket below in the hole. This was a very disturbing sight for the people attending the funeral.

The work crew scrambled to cover up the decayed foot with dirt where it had landed in the Butler grave. This act was equally disturbing to the family. Plog thought this was the most appropriate thing to do. He also said that it was “unfortunate” that this did happen, but “after all, this is a graveyard.”

His decision to fill up the grave with the rotting foot still where it landed when it rolled out of the dirt was “common sense,” he conveyed. He said that he “didn’t want to incite an argument with grieving family and friends.” He thought the best way to go about this was to just to quickly bury the foot where it was.

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