It was a hair-raising adventure.
A California man was given the fright of his life after allegedly stumbling upon a century-old grave with human hair sticking out of it. A TikTok video of his macabre discovery currently boasts 1.5 million views and 290,000 likes, according to Jam Press.
“When I first saw it, I was shocked – I wasn’t exactly sure what I was seeing was real,” Joel Morrison told Jam Press of the freaky, “really f–king gross” find, which he happened upon while visiting the Saint Joseph Catholic Cemetery in Sacramento.
“But upon closer inspection, I realized that it was definitely human hair coming out of the grave,” the stunned 37-year-old handyman added.
The POV TikTok video shows the allegedly 100-year-old tombstone with a tuft of thick locks protruding out of a crack in the stone like a Halloween prop.
“There is the person’s hair coming out of the crack,” exclaims an aghast Morrison, before unleashing a stream of expletives.
After an initial wave of disgust, the janitor said he “started to feel bad for the deceased family members and worried about the upkeep of the cemetery, feeling kind of like maybe they were being disrespected or desecrated in some way.” Indeed, he reported seeing other gravesites getting destroyed by squirrels and other animals, with overgrown trees also damaging the tombs, reported Jam Press.
His ghoulish clip sent spines tingling across TikTok.
“This is craaaazzzy freaky!” said one creeped-out commenter, according to Jam Press, while another called the mangy grave “the scariest thing I’ve ever seen.”
One morbid user joked that Morrison should “pull on the hair and if it screams – run.”
However, other viewers had a more rational explanation for the “Night of the Living Dead”-evoking phenomenon, with one suggesting that a natural disaster had caused the corpse to literally roll over in their grave.
“Y’all: this definitely can occur, especially after heavy floods and rain,” said one of the groundbreaking discovery. “This can, unfortunately, bring up the bodies.”
“Seems like they’re buried near a tree,” wrote another. “A funeral director once suggested to not be buried near trees as something like this might happen.”
Someone else surmised that an animal “probably found the hole and tried to bring it out to make a bed in its nest.”
According to Jam Press, Morrison has settled on his own theory that partly mirrors that.
“What looks like happened to me was there was a large tree very close to the tomb/grave and the roots from the tree had grown up into the grave, disrupting the concrete barrier and brick mortar, possibly pushing up the remains,” he said.
“Then once the grave was opened squirrels, rodents and whatever other animals were free to go in and out,” he added. “It looks like maybe they were trying to nest in the human hair.”
Unfortunately, the cemetery explorer didn’t get a chance to probe deeper into the mystery. He explained that when he returned the next day, he discovered that the hair seemingly had been pushed back into the hole, which he suggested could be the handiwork of the groundskeeper. (Hair today, gone tomorrow?)
Morrison plans to provide a lock of the hair to the coroner’s office to determine whether or not it’s actually from a human.
