What began as a series of fun TikTok posts for the spooky season this October escalated to a full-scale search with cadaver dogs and heavy machinery in the backyard of a woman’s Columbus, OH, home. The outcome of the search is now known, and many on TikTok are questioning: Was it ever real?
A few days before the search, Columbus resident Katie Santry shared on TikTok that her house seemed haunted. Things inside her home were out of place, she said. And, among other examples, her laptop screen was mysteriously broken. In an unrelated project, Santry later said she was digging holes in her backyard to build a fence when she found a rolled-up rug buried in the ground.
Santry shared the news about the rug on TikTok and wondered if there was a dead body wrapped up inside. “Is there a dead body in that rug? Or is it the ghost of the rug’s past? My next-door neighbor also died in her house the day we bought this house last October,” Santry said. Santry also added her late neighbor’s home was boarded up the same day she found the rug. “So it was just a series of weird, coincidental events that, with a creative mind, could be construed as ghostly,” Santry told her followers.
The first attempted dig
Santry’s first post went viral, and in subsequent posts, she tried, with the help of some friends, to dig up the rug, but it was too large. Santry’s followers urged her to contact the police, which she did. Columbus police looked at the exposed part of the rug and said it could be worth digging up with an excavator, but with no clear sign of a crime, Santry would have to do that herself. The police said to let them know if she did and what, if anything, she found.
Enter the cadaver dogs
Santry planned to dig in a TikTok livestream when Columbus police called her back and said they would send cadaver dogs and detectives to investigate. It’s unclear what caused Columbus law enforcement to change their mind. Two cadaver dogs sat down near the area where the rug was buried, meaning they sensed something, a possible sign of a body. But Santry was warned the dogs’ reactions could mean anything, from someone bleeding in an accident near there in the past to blood on the rug for some other reason, or maybe just a false alarm.
Nonetheless, based on how the dogs reacted, police taped off Santry’s home and brought in an excavator while Santry followed along in posts and live streams. With police officially involved, the Santry situation also caught the attention of mainstream media. “Nothing has gripped the entire nation like this since Tiger King. I am locked in,” one comment said in a Santry livestream while police excavated her property.
No sign of a dead body
On Oct. 4, however, Columbus police said they found no human remains inside the rug, or the reason why the rug was buried where it was found, according to The Columbus Dispatch. The police did keep the rug as evidence. The Dispatch contacted the elderly former owners of the home, and they said the police had contacted them, too, but they could not explain the rug. “I just hope that if there’s treasure there … I hope they get lucky,” the home’s former owner said.
A comment on a recent Santry post updating her followers on what was found said, “Theory — the rug is evidence, and the body is somewhere else.” But even though there’s no sign of murder so far, one mystery remains, according to Santry’s post: “Who broke my laptop?” she said.
Santry said she was hacked
Viewers engaged in stories like these are put in uncomfortable situations: Based on publicly available information, there were no human remains or other signs of a crime in Santry’s backyard. On the one hand, that’s disappointing, on the other, no one died, and there was no crime to conceal, so that’s a good thing. And with the news that the search in Santry’s backyard turned up nothing, it seemed like her 15 minutes of fame might be up. But then, Santry posted again, claiming her account was hacked and all the money she made on TikTok live streams was stolen. With that, the whole saga began its third act.
Also worth noting: Santry is accustomed to viral fame, as one commenter noticed. In a coincidence, she formerly cohosted Katie & Karleigh, a popular YouTube channel from the 2010s. Meanwhile, the hacking and robbery claim doesn’t make sense based on TikTok content creator payment policy. Those facts, combined with unconfirmed reports she joined TikTok just a short time before the reported haunting and rug discovery and Reddit accusations she was selling backyard-rug merch the entire time, have changed the conversation: Did Santry make it up to go viral and cash in quickly?
The Santry response
As TikTokers scoured what some viewed as inconsistent details of Santry’s story, suspecting a hoax, Santry addressed the was-it-ever-real controversy in a post, as theories still spun out of control as to why the police kept the rug if there was nothing to investigate (whether or not they kept the rug is disputed), or why human remains could still be buried further down.
We may never know what truly went on in that Columbus backyard in the end. Or as TikTok creator mrwilliamsprek and others pointed out: What was in the rug were the friendships we made along the way. If Santry did game the TikTok system to go viral, only to get the police involved, that could open up a whole new chapter of the story. What seems certain is that we haven’t heard the end from Katie Santry, who proved, like when digging a hole, when posting on TikTok, you never know what you might find.