An American tourist trekking through the mountains of Italy discovers a dead body in the wilderness. That may sound like the logline for a mediocre Netflix thriller (The Girl in the Woods, starring Halle Berry, only 52% on Rotten Tomatoes), but this sinister synopsis is something that actually happened to one vacationing TikToker. Well, except for one teeny, insignificant detail. The dead body she found… wasn’t a dead body.
Zai Alyenora went for a nature walk with her family during a trip to Italy when what was otherwise an enjoyable day turned sour after she made a chilling discovery. Phone in hand, Zai told her kid to stay back and investigated an extremely suspicious human-shaped lump laying in the middle of a field, wrapped in a tarpaulin sheet. Audibly freaking out, Zai gingerly approached the macabre mass, only to discover an abandoned bottle of lighter fluid by the side. Exactly the kind of thing you’d need if you were trying to burn the evidence of a murder!
“Please god don’t be what I think it is,” Zai pleads to herself as she investigates the “body.” Eventually, she gets the courage to do what you maybe shouldn’t do if you suspect you’ve found a corpse — give it a good kick. Finding the thing under the cover to be rigid and unmoving, Zai believes her suspicions are proven and she runs the hell out of there. “That’s a f***ing body!” she yells. “That’s rigor mortis body, don’t ask me how I know but it is.”
Narrator: it was not a “rigor mortis body.”
In a hilarious sudden cut from the footage from her hike to Zai giving a dead-eyed stare at the camera, Zai fills us in on what her not-so-gruesome discovery actually turned out to be. “It was lawn equipment,” she deadpans. Yup, Zai has clearly just watched too many of those aforementioned Netflix thrillers. As she joked in her caption, “You can take me out of the ‘Merica, but cant take the ‘Merica out of me.”
Now that we know Zai didn’t stumble her way into a future true crime documentary, TikTok can’t help but laugh at her handling of the situation. “The ‘helloooo’ as if a dead body would answer you,” one comment mocked. Others are questioning why Zai’s first instinct upon discovering a suspected murder victim was to make a TikTok and not, you know, phone the police.
To be fair to Zai, she explains the full context of the incident in the replies. She and her family were staying in a remote Italian town called Monte Bruno at the time, which she estimates has a population of just 200 and so the nearest law enforcement was at least an hour away.
Luckily, Zai only encountered a lawn mower, but for those who are morbidly curious, what should you do if you genuinely happen to discover a dead body? According to Aftermath, a trauma cleaning company, there are five steps you should take. 1) Don’t touch anything (that includes giving it a good kick). 2) Call 911. 3) Ensure your own safety (if they were killed, the killer could still be in the vicinity). 4) fully cooperate with medical professionals and the police. And 5) if you have to clean up after this body, seek professional help (no ulterior motive in that recommendation, huh, Aftermath?). Basically, look at what Zai did, and do the exact opposite.
