Strange fruits hanging from the maple trees
Six-month-old male deer, 70 pounds, hanging in a 12-foot-high crotch of a maple tree
in Delaware county, New York, near the Pennsylvania border, 2002.
Hunter Gerald Inman, a stockbroker from West Nyack, NY, was at first disoriented by the sight of a deer hanging in the middle of all the white trees in front of him. Upon closer inspection, Mr. Inman estimated the deer was hanging between two branches about twelve feet or more off the ground. (…) The animal was killed by an arrow, which did go through the heart and lungs. So, it was a very good shot, whoever shot the animal made a really good shot, so that deer was dead very quickly. (…) So, there isn’t any mystery about how the deer died. It died from an arrow wound. How it got up in the tree is another story and I think Ward Stone and myself believe that somebody put it, some human, put it up there. We’re reasonably sure of that. (…) The only thing I can think of is a hoax, to play a trick. But you’d think that if someone was going to play a trick, they would have done this near a road or hunting cabin or some place where they knew it was going to be seen. But this was a place in the middle of nowhere.
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In 2003, Baltimore Gas & Electric (Canada) received a call from a customer saying: “My power is out. When you come to fix it be sure to bring a truck with a tall enough bucket to remove the deer”.
The customer service rep prudently trying to gather helpful information to help diagnose the problem asked, “What deer”? The customer replied ” There is a deer on top of one of the electric poles on Wilkes Rd about 1/2 mile west of Perimeter Rd”.
The customer service rep tried desperately to pull herself together and not laugh in front of the customer and replied, “We will dispatch someone right away to investigate the power outage. Thank you for the call”.
Upon completion of the call, the customer service rep proceeded to share the funny story with her coworkers in the office and they all had a good laugh. Until the serviceman who repaired the problem stopped by the customer service office the following day with the pictures [right]. Sure enough, the poor deer had been hit by a train and landed on top of distribution feeder pole. (…)
The issue of whether the deer was really launched atop the pole when it was struck by a train is less certain. The Canadian National Railways (CNR) maintained they received no report from any of their engineers about a train’s hitting a deer in the Headingley area, and whether a deer’s torso could have been struck with enough force to launch it 25 feet up in the air yet remain mostly undamaged (save for missing portions of its back legs) has been the subject of much debate. The general consensus was that the feat was rather improbable but technically possible, but some people speculated that the deer was indeed hit and killed by a passing train, but it was then somehow deliberately set atop the pole by local pranksters.
