My hometown is covered in trees. The majority of it is inhabited by people, yes, but there’s still at least one tree per 100 square foot area (generally more). So, in the areas with many trees in one area (forests), there’s a lot of space for weird stuff to go unseen.
Personally, I’ve found a few weird things during my time home. I’ve stumbled upon wars between rivals tribes of ants. I have found a cabin full of tires. I’ve found an area kind of like Stonehenge with a lot of rocks, except more disappointing (or just as disappointing, depending on your opinion of Stonehenge, I guess). I’ve even found a mattress in the woods, just laying out. Which is very suspicious. But nothing has topped what my friend discovered.
My friend is a filmmaker. That’s actually how we met; we were the same school news class. One day, when we were doing things that were in no way productive in our school news class, he suddenly said:
“Oh hey, did I tell you about the mattresses I found?”
And I said:
“No?”
And he said: the following story.
One day, his dad and himself were on a bike ride. Usual parent stuff, I guess. They decided to drive down a path they didn’t usually take, which lead them into a deeper part of the woods than they usually explored. They saw the usual sights, smelled the usual smells, felt the usual feelings (apathy, sadness). But then the encountered something weird.
A lot of mattresses.
I know that’s a very general statement. To be honest, anything more than three mattresses would be a lot to me. But this was a lot of mattresses. Like. Over 100 mattresses. All in groups of 10 or so, in stacks. They were all located in a big clearing in the woods, I’m assuming a hundred feet or so around.
My friend made a specific note that there were far too many of them to have been left there in one sitting. As in, who ever had left them there didn’t just one day make some sort of elaborate mistake and leave a bunch of mattresses in the woods. It was a deliberate action that took place over a long period of time. (Or, possibly a long series of elaborate mistakes. But I don’t know how likely that is.)
It’s illegal the just leave a bunch of litter deep in the woods like that. So, whoever did that committed some first-degree littering. My town doesn’t typically shy away from suspicious underground criminal activity, so this isn’t very surprising. If we can have a heroin den across the street from a church, we can have sketchy mattress dumping.
Aside from clearly upstaging my story about finding one mattress in the woods, I asked him what he planned on doing with this discovery. I mean, it’s a pretty weird thing to find, and also a crime. He was officially a mattress dumping bystander, and that’s a big responsibility. He told me that he was thinking about making a documentary about it, including hard-hitting interviews with local mattress distributors.
I don’t know if he still plans on doing that. There really isn’t a resolution to this story. I just remembered it and thought it was weird. But, hey, here’s a quick playlist of songs about mattresses/beds (it leans a little more towards the beds part. The mattress is not a very popular muse):
