The Mummified Raccoon Hunting Dog

This post is recycled from June 2005.

Back in January I recounted the story of my dog, Mountain, climbing up inside a standing hollow tree (picture above) chasing after the scent of a raccoon.

Now comes the story of another dog that did the same thing -- and did not live to hunt again (though it did achieve a bizarre kind of immortality).

This story begins along the Cleburne-Haralson County line between Georgia and Alabama sometime in the 1960s. It seems a raccoon-hunting dog, accompanying its owner on a hunt, ran off and followed the critter up into a hollow chestnut oak tree.

The hound got stuck inside the tree and died. Rather than decaying as it would if buried underground, the dog simply dried out inside its natural wood "chimney". The rotting scent of the dead dog went up the "flue" of the trunk, and so predators and insects never got wind of the dog. Nor did the corpse get rained on.

Excellent ventillation inside the trunk eventually left the dog desicated (perhaps "freeze dried" during the winter) and mummified.





Sometime in the 1980s, loggers cut down the tree with the dog still inside it. The tree was actually loaded on to the logging truck before the loggers looked up into the hollow and saw the mummified dog inside.

Rather than send the tree and mummified dog off to the sawmill, the loggers donated the dog and its tree coffin to the Southern Forest World Museum in Waycross, Georgia, where it can be seen to this day.

The dog has been x-rayed and is believed to have been about four years old when it died.

The Southern Forest World Museum is located at 1440 N. Augusta Ave. in Waycross, Georgia, and is open from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. The "mummy dog" is their chief attraction, from what I gather.

The dog, by the way, has been named "Stuckie" by its fans.

Only in America.