Another fox "haunting" a cemetery. (Photo: Dan Davison/CC BY-2.0)
It’s Saturday evening. You’ve stopped by the local cemetery to pay your respects to your dearly departed grandmother. Only a few other mourners drift through the grounds, and the air is cool and still. Suddenly, you hear a knocking sound.
There’s no one nearby.
The sound seems to be coming….from a grave?
This eerie scenario played out at the Salisbury Crematorium in Wiltshire, England recently. But don’t worry the Salisbury Crematorium isn’t facing a poltergeist haunting or armies of the risen dead; just an adorable baby fox with a dangerous enthusiasm for peanut butter.
Fortunately for the fox, the visitor who noticed the sound didn’t call the Ghostbusters, instead reaching out to area animal rescue Creatures in Crisis. When the rescue team arrived, they discovered the kit, who had trapped her head inside a plastic peanut butter jar and was attempting to lick out the remaining peanut butter inside. Sanctuary founder Kevin Drew was able to free the vixen with assistance from his son, Callum, and brought her to the sanctuary to recover.
“The jar was stuck fast on its head. If we had been there any later it very well may have died,” Drew explained to SomersetLive. The jar was stuck so tight on the animal that Drew and his son couldn’t fit their fingers between the jar and the fox’s neck. Luckily, they were able to cut the jar off of the fox using wirecutters, and although the fox was “subdued” and in poor health upon being freed, she was uninjured.
The kit, appropriately nicknamed “Peanut,” is now recovering with another rescued fox kit; Drew estimates that she will be ready for release in about three months.
To prevent further graveyard hauntings and ensure other animals don’t trap themselves in search of food scraps, Drew urges people to fully wash out plastic and glass jars before disposing of them.