Eerie reason why shoes were found in pairs at Titanic wreckage
There's a horrifying reason that shoes were found scattered in pairs throughout the wreckage
Kit Roberts
More than a century on and the tragedy of the Titanic continues to capture the public imagination.
While we have succeeded in reaching the wreck at the bottom of the Atlantic, there's one thing which many have noticed about the site.
The wreck is a unique site as it effectively contains a snapshot of how life was in 1912, with many objects surviving at the bottom of the ocean.
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Some were recovered from the wreckage, including musical instruments, clothes, and all manner of random fragments of everyday life.
As for the wreck itself, one kind of object has been noted as extremely prevalent among the haunting remains of the ill-fated vessel.
Nestled among the rusting hull and the disintegrating rooms many expeditions have noticed a lot of shoes.
But perhaps more intriguingly, the shoes were always found in a pair, hardly ever just one shoe.
By itself one or two pairs wouldn't seem that big a deal, but this is a lot of pairs of shoes, and there's a very sad reason that they're found in pairs.
The shoes were mostly leather and contained a lot of tannic acid, which had preserved them at the bottom of the ocean.
But why were they always in pairs?
Another thing that many have remarked about the wreckage is the complete absence of any human remains.
Hundreds of people are known to have died in the tragedy, so where are all the bodies in wreckage? They must be there, right?
Well, in a way they are.
That's because the shoes are all that's left of the bodies of the people who went down with the ship.
Animals living at the bottom of the ocean, combined with the water itself, would have made short work of the remains.
One study found that placing a pig carcass roughly the same size as a human on the seabed resulted in it being reduced to bones in just four days, with bones gone after around six months.
So after more than 100 years it's no surprise there is nothing left.
The shoes themselves survived as the tannins in the leather made them unappealing to the marine life at the bottom of the ocean.
Hardy leather also meant the shoes were better able to resist the ravages of time long after the person that occupied them was completely gone.
So the pairs of shoes found around the Titanic are in fact the last vestiges of the people who lost their lives in the disaster.