A group of teens found a suitcase stuffed with human
remains on a Washington state beach earlier this week, reports Inside Edition. The minors stumbled on
their macabre discovery while following the directions of the recently popular
app, Randonautica, a software that leads its users to random geographic
destinations.
If you've ever read or seen the popular film adaptation of
Stephen King's Stand By Me, this
story closely resembles that one. It's not so much stranger than fiction as an
equal amount of strange. A group of brooding teens goes on a coming-of-age
adventure to unearth a dead body only to discover something about themselves.
Because these kids belong to Generation Z, they were, naturally,
livestreaming themselves the entire time on TikTok, the globally trendy online
platform for sharing miscellaneous short video content.
In their livestream, the teens can be seen exhibiting
excitement upon finding the suitcase on the beach. That's before they caught a
whiff of the stink emanating from its gruesome contents.
They then called the police, who confirmed the biology of
the remains as human. Officers also discovered remains floating in the water
inside of an additional bag. The police are still working to confirm the
identity of the deceased.
The app the teens were using, Randonautica, apparently gained
popularity during the coronavirus quarantine. A service whose sole claim to
fame is providing a random set of coordinates to its user might seem like one
of those inscrutable youth fads that mystify older people as a matter of
course—akin to Pokémon Go or TikTok itself.
Despite this unexpected dark chapter, Randonautica's particular
moment in the sun seems wholesome in a way. It gained a following as a way for
people to alleviate the tedium of life at home, a means for people to spend
time together during a time of overwhelming solitude.
