Woman Thought Her House Was Haunted After Finding A Mysterious Rug Buried In Her Yard — Then The Cadaver Dogs Showed Up
Katie Santry sensed something was off. Now her house is a taped-off crime scene.
sheff | Shutterstock Just in time for "Spooky Season," a content creator named Katie Santry is having an experience that is equal parts paranormal activity and true crime, and it all started with something very simple but extremely unsettling — a rug buried in her backyard.
Now, her entire property is taped off as a crime scene that has sent literal cadaver dogs running wild through her yard — and people all over the internet are losing their minds trying to solve the mystery.
Santry began noticing strange occurrences that made her think her house was haunted.
Actually, it all started before the rug was found, with some very weird, and still unexplained, goings-on in Santry's office. The content creator awoke one recent morning to find the sunroom where her office is in quite a bit of disarray.
Santry says that the night before, as always, she shut the doors to the sunroom to keep her dogs out, so she's certain nobody from her home or family was in the room overnight.
But that morning, she went through the still-closed doors to find several items on her desk in total disarray and, most surprising, her closed laptop screen totally shattered. Her home alarm system never went off, so a break-in was ruled out. And that left only one conclusion.
As she put it, "I think my house is haunted and I'm freaking out." But that was only the first of several bizarre and downright unsettling turns her story would take.
Days later, while doing yard work, Santry discovered something truly ominous — a rug buried in her backyard.
Imagine, if you will, that you're working in your yard digging holes for posts for a new fence when you suddenly strike something your shovel just can't get through — and it turns out to be a rolled-up carpet.
Buried rolled-up carpets tend to contain one thing and one thing only — bodies. We've all seen this movie! So naturally, Santry was a bit unsettled. She quickly realized she was no match for the rug, which was partially buried beneath a tree.
"You need to call the police," one commenter wrote, joining a chorus of Santry's friends, some of whom worked in law enforcement themselves. So she did, figuring that not much would likely come of it.
That is not at all how it ended up going down. "The cops think it's weird," Santry said in a follow-up video that also showed local Columbus, Ohio-area officers investigating the hole Santry had dug that started this whole thing. It only got weirder from there.
Law enforcement ended up calling in cadaver dogs, who immediately signaled they'd found human remains.
Santry's story rapidly took a turn from one of those things where you're sure there's some reasonable, undramatic explanation to one that seems ripe to become fodder for one of those late-night true crime series.
When the cops came, "they were talking about...how they'd have to get excavators out here" to unearth the rug, Santry said. But it ended up going even farther than that.
Columbus police ended up bringing in cadaver dogs to look for human remains. Cadaver dogs are trained to immediately sit down on a spot where they have sniffed out human material, and in a moment that left Santry and gazillions of others on TikTok utterly shocked, the Columbus PD's dogs both immediately ran to the spot where the rug was buried and sat right down.
"I'm still just hoping maybe someone just had a bloody nose on a rug and buried it," Santry wrote in a video caption, and indeed, Columbus PD told The Columbus Dispatch that the dogs could have smelled a variety of things, from something "insignificant" like body oil or sweat to actual human blood.
Santry's home has now become an active crime scene. But the rug seems to have turned up little evidence.
What started as a viral TikTok lark has now turned into police taping off Santry's home as an active crime scene, which has since been encircled by local media trying to hunt down the rest of the story.
Columbus Police did in fact bring in digging equipment to unearth whatever the heck is going on in her yard, and were digging in earnest into the afternoon on Friday, October 4. But sometime around 1:00, Santry reported they abruptly stopped their digging.
Shortly thereafter, Santry reported that Columbus Police had indeed dug up the rug in its entirety, hauled it away, and covered up the hole it came from — and from what they could tell, it contained no human remains of any kind.
Lab testing, of course, may change that. For now, though, this bizarre mystery remains just that. But Columbus police said their investigation is far from over.
"You can't leave any stone unturned in these incidents," an officer told the Dispatch, "so we just want to make sure that we are doing our due diligence."
Santry hopes so too. As she said in her final update as of this writing, many unsolved details remain — not only as to why the cadaver dogs seemed so certain they found human remains, but also the unanswered question that started this entire thing: As Santry put it in her video caption, "I still want to know WHO BROKE MY LAPTOP?!?"
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.