Investigators estimate the remains found near the Village of Peninsula had been in the Cuyahoga River for at least two to five years. Here is what forensic experts and rangers know so far.
Six views of the skull found at Cuyahoga Valley National Historic Site (Photo: Photo courtesy of Summit County Medical Examiner)
Published September 4, 2026 09:52AM
Kayakers paddling along Ohio’s Cuyahoga River made a grisly discovery on June 19 when they came across a partial human skull.
Authorities told Outside that the kayakers found the bones near a popular beach and picnic area in Cuyahoga Valley National Historic Park, a 33,000-acre National Park Service (NPS) site located between the cities of Cleveland and Akron.
“We are attempting to get a DNA profile at this time,” Gary Guenther, chief investigator for the Summit County Medical Examiner’s Office (SCME), said in a statement sent to Outside.
Park rangers went back to the area where the skull was located and performed additional searches, Guenther said, but didn’t find any other human remains.
Based on the skull’s shape and size, anthropologists at Mercyhurst University in Pennsylvania determined that it belonged to an adult and had been in the water for at least two years—likely more than five—Guenther said in his email. The person’s sex, age, weight, height, hair, and eye color remain unknown.
Greta Johnson, a spokesperson for SCME, declined to comment further, citing an open investigation.
Kayakers found the skull near the Ohio and Erie Canal Towpath Trail, a 90-mile hiking and biking trail following a historic mule route in the area. Cuyahoga is an outdoor hub for more than 2 million Ohio residents nearby. The once-heavily polluted river made national headlines in 1969 for literally catching on fire, and has since made a comeback among anglers, hikers, and kayakers.
Officials have not said whether they have determined a cause of death, nor have they speculated on whether it could be tied to a crime in the area. But it’s not the first time national park goers have found human remains on public lands.
In 2025, more than 300 piles of human cremated remains were discovered in the Mojave Desert outside of Las Vegas.
A family exploring Yosemite National Park in 1983 discovered a severed hand and forearm. Authorities did not find any other body parts at the time. Nearly three decades later in 2022, the NPS used DNA analysis to determine that the remains belonged to Patricia Hicks, a woman linked to a California cult leader.
Since 2007, multiple severed human feet still wearing shoes have washed ashore along the Pacific Northwest’s Salish Sea, with the most recent recovery of a foot clad in a gray Nike running shoe being in 2018.
Nearly every time the water level drops at Lake Mead in Nevada, authorities find human remains. In August 2026, a Las Vegas man was shifting through the shoreline at Boulder Beach when he picked up a human jawbone with teeth still attached. Additional bones were spotted nearby along the shoreline.
