I live in Hudson, Oregon, and sometimes when they cut down a tree in my town, they find a body inside.

I don't mean that they find bodies inside the hollows. I mean that the bodies are found completely

encased within the wood of solid whole trees. According to my grandpa, there were many stories of bodies and trees going around in Hudson since before he could remember.

He thinks they started in the first

first first the first confirmed in the first confirmed instance

didn't occur until the 70s.

According to my dad, when he was about 11, he'd heard rumors that the Benson family had

cut down a tree in their backyard, were chopping it up for firewood and boom.

Bones and clothes in the middle of the logs. Donnie Fillmore told me it was like the

word had grown around the corpse, he remembers.

Dad got unnerved.

Dad told Grandpa, and Grandpa, a scientist enthusiast who didn't even raise his children to believe in Santa Claus, laughed and said those stories had been around forever.

My dad was pretty shook up though, so Grandpa said that, if it would calm him down, he'd take him to the Benson family himself to prove that it was just the newest iteration of an old story.

They went to the Benson's.

It wasn't just the story.

Nobody knew who it was the Benson's found in the tree.

Grandpa says, some wacko in town even tried to persuade people the body had grown inside the tree

but everyone pointed out real soon that didn't explain the clothes

the reporters came to Hudson of course. it from archives I was able to find online. But the news never really made it national.

Grand-Bassiz had got drowned out by Watergate. They buried the remains in an unmarked plot in

the local cemetery and for years people

joked that if someone was running late to a meeting they'd been caught by a tree.

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