Claim: Bodies still strapped into their airplane seats are discovered in an apartment near the World Trade Center.
Status: False.
Example: [Collected on the Internet, 2001]
It seems that my friend's mother in law has a friend with an apartment in Battery Park City. The friend was just allowed into her apartment the other day for the first time since those who don't know lower Manhattan, Battery Park City is basically across the street from the World Trade Center. This lady walks into her apartment and sees that her living room window is completely shattered. And there, sitting in her living room, are two airplane seats, with two (dead and decomposing) people still strapped to them....I told my friend that those people are among the lucky ones - they can at least be identified and given a proper burial. My friends wife is a flight attendant for american, a flight attendant friend of hers based out of NY told her that she was just allowed back to her apt. about two weeks ago, located a few blocks from WTC. She was |
Origins: The aftermath of the
New York. A policeman dead of a self-inflicted bullet wound, his legs crushed in the rubble. (He'd chosen to die quickly rather than slowly.) A baby's broken body trampled on the street outside the World Trade Center. (The mother had earlier been seen fleeing the building with the babe in her arms, but the jostling of the panicked crowd caused the woman to drop the child, and it met its death underfoot.) A pair of clasped hands, severed at the wrists, one black and one white. Five emaciated bodies dug out of the debris sometime in November. (These folks had died of starvation.)
The horror we felt (and still feel) found an outlet in those tales, so we passed them along. Each gruesome piece of scuttlebutt was an attempt to put into words our gropings towards a better understanding of the butchery that had taken place. Sixty-five dead on
The "strapped in" canard was yet another of these forays. We knew 65 passengers and crew perished aboard United
Had such finds been made? No mention of them surfaced in any news accounts, and we have to believe such gruesome discoveries would not have gone unreported. In a world where the find of a
cat and her kittens in the rubble of the World Trade Center sparks a frenzy of reportage, it's not reasonable to conclude that the discovery in a distant apartment of two of the murdered would have stayed out of the news. We do know this story was being circulated at an American Red Cross Service Center
more.
Curiously, in the days immediately following the
It's possible airplane seats and the remains of those who died on the two planes the WTC will eventually be recovered from Ground Zero. From that, it's logical to assume at least one of those seats will contain the full or partial body of a passenger, either one that was strapped in or one that fell in the same vicinity of that piece of wreckage that by happenstance came to reside in the seat. But that's a far cry from intact bodies being found in airplane seats blocks from the scene, as it is from those finds being made by luckless apartment dwellers weeks after the event. One would think the appearance of an entry hole
blown into the side of a building (the corpses wouldn't have just materialized in someone's living room)
would have alerted those working the area to the need to investigate, but then rumor only rarely troubles itself with plausibility.
Barbara "the hole: nine yards" Mikkelson
Last updated: 21 April 2008
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