By Tim Binnall
A grandmother in England is being tormented by troublesome badgers that continually unearth human remains from a graveyard near her home and then dump the bones throughout her yard. The bizarre issue reportedly began last summer when Ann Mathers found an unfortunate individual's skull sitting outside her residence in the town of Dudley. "My mum called me in hysterics," her daughter Lorraine Lloyd recalled, "when I went over there I couldn’t believe my eyes. There were human remains everywhere." Uncertain where the creepy cranium could have come from, Mather promptly phoned the police, who actually first suspected that she had stumbled upon some kind of crime scene
"I don’t know if they thought it could be a possible murder victim," Lloyd explained, "but pretty soon they found lots of holes in the garden where the badgers had been digging through." While the mystery may have been easily solved that day, it was sadly just the start of a year-long ordeal for Mathers, who laments that the mischievous creatures haven't stopped leaving unearthed human remains in her yard. "The badgers are tunneling under the graves," Llyod explained "and when they come across one which has collapsed, they drag the bones out and dump them in mum’s garden." Beyond the nightmarish nature of the 'deposits,' Mathers' daughter mused that "it must be very distressing for people if they found their relatives remains were being dug up."
At her wit's end over the issue, Mathers turned to her local government for help in putting an end to the badgers' unnerving antics. Adam Aston, who serves on the community's council, was equally aghast at the situation. Noting that "I work as a paramedic so I’m not easily shocked," he conceded that the "sight of so many human remains" strewn throughout the area "stopped me in my tracks." However, solving the problem may not be so simple as badgers are actually a protected species in Britain. As such, Aston indicated that the town intends to enlist an ecologist to see how they might manage the creatures, while also strengthening the barriers around the graveyard to possibly prevent them from gaining access to the area.