(gentle upbeat music) (gentle eerie music) - People have pondered life after death for millennia, but one phenomenon is much more tangible, death after death.

That is the amazing variety of conditions that can occur to the human body after death.

A trio of such cases in the Pacific Northwest are notable examples that have challenged medical and forensic experts, law enforcement, even grave diggers.

Let's take a look.

(gentle eerie music continues) (eerie upbeat music) (lightning crashing) The Case of the Petrified Madam.

Our first strange case involves one of Seattle's first real characters, Mary Ann Conklin, better known to early settlers and travelers as Mother or Madam Damnable.

Conklin was said to have washed up on Seattle shores in the 1850s.

She had married a sea captain who abandoned her in Port Townsend.

In Seattle, she took over running the city's first hotel, the Felker House, a two story prefab affair, shipped around the horn from back east.

It seemed to offer a touch of civilization.

It would rent rooms for guests, but also for temporary courtrooms and meetings.

It was also said to be Seattle's first bordello.

In the mid 1850s, an uprising of indigenous people threatened the settlement, the so-called Battle of Seattle.

At this time, the hotel appeared on the first map of the city as Madam Damnables.

In addition to what was said to go on inside its walls, Conklin herself was apparently something of a terror.

When the US Navy was in town to offer protection from attack, they sought to improve a road near the house.

The navigator of the sloop-of-war, Decatur, recorded an encounter.

"The moment our men appeared upon the scene, with three dogs at her heels and an apron filled with rocks, this termagant would come tearing from the house.

And the way stones, oats and curses flew was something fearful to contemplate.

And charging like a fury, with the dogs wild to flesh their teeth in the detested invaders, the division invariably gave way before the storm, fleeing officers and all, as if old Satan himself was after them."

(dogs barking) "She was", he wrote "a demon in petticoats".

(upbeat country music) Conklin died in 1873.

(eerie music) In 1886, the body's inner cemetery were exhumed to turn the burial grounds into Denny Park.

When they dug up Conklin, the head of the re burial project told the Seattle Post Intelligencer, quote, "On removing the lid of the coffin, we found she had turned to stone.

Her form was full size and perfect.

She seemed intact, but she was white as marble and hard as stone."

He estimated the coffin weighed 400 pounds.

She now rests in a cemetery on Capitol Hill.

But what caused the supposed petrification of this demon in petticoats is unknown.

A very hard life, perhaps.

(eerie music) The Lady of the Lake.

In 1940, fishermen at Lake Crescent on the Olympic Peninsula spotted a body floating.

(ominous music) Wrapped in blankets and hemp rope, it turned out to be a female murder victim who had been sunk deep in the frigid waters of the dark, deep lake.

(ominous music continues) While there, something remarkable had happened.

Saponification, that's a chemical process that turned her body into soap.

The main questions were, who was she and how long ago had she been murdered?

She no longer had fingerprints or identifiable facial features.

After some months, a dental bridge in her mouth was identified and she got a name, Hallie Illingworth.

It turns out she vanished in 1937 from her waitress job at a lakeside tavern.

And her husband, Monty, a beer truck driver, had left town for California around the same time.

Friends assumed Hallie had departed for Bremerton, but no one had heard from her since.

It turned out, Monty had a history of physically abusing her.

He was tracked down, and in 1942, he was convicted of Hallie's murder.

A key piece of evidence, a witness remembered lending Monty a long piece of hemp rope, exactly like the rope that bound the body.

Monty never returned it.

The Lady of the Lake was a cold case, if there ever was one.

(ominous music) The Tennis Shoe Triangle.

In August, 2007, a 12-year-old girl from Washington found a tennis shoe on a British Columbia beach.

Inside was a human foot.

(eerie music) What was a bad day at the beach soon got weirder.

Less than a week later, another shoe with a foot in it washed up on another BC beach.

It also had a right foot in it.

A local spokesman for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police told the Vancouver Sun, "Finding one foot is like a million to one odds, but finding two is crazy."

If that was crazy, what ensued was even crazier.

Since then, at least 24 single feet have washed up on Salish Sea beaches in British Columbia and Washington, triggering much speculation.

Was there a serial killer with a foot fetish at large?

Right feet, left feet, big, small, men's, women's, what was going on here?

Were we the Bermuda Triangle of footloose feet?

(footsteps popping) It turned out there was a rational, if macabre, explanation.

For one thing, the vast majority of single feet were encased in running or sports shoes, Reeboks, Adidas, Nike.

And unlike shoes of old, they tend to float, because they're light and often contain air pockets.

Some of the feet were determined to have belonged to missing persons or presumed drowning victims.

Bodies in the sea can be reduced to skeletons quickly by undersea critters, and corpses often disarticulate at joints, like the ankle.

Currents within the Salish Sea and the outflow of the Fraser River can keep such things bobbing around.

Voila!

Foot flotsam.

(eerie music) People may talk about ghosts, ghouls, and scary spirits, but often physical changes after death offer examples that are weirder than phantasms and that make even stranger true stories.

(playful eerie music)