It takes a lot to shock people in Las Vegas, but a shopkeeper is raising eyebrows for selling “corpse water,” after a succession of human remains were discovered as Nevada’s drought-stricken Lake Mead continued to drop.
Charlie Hanks, owner of an occult emporium called Blaspheme Boutique, said he hit on the idea as a joke, and that customers aren’t actually buying water from the lake, but a mixture of witch hazel, glass, rocks, dirt, and green mika.
“As a joke, I said, ‘I should do Lake Mead corpse water, because of the corpses in the lake,’ and then I made it,” he told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “I had it and I posted some pictures of it and then it kind of went viral on Instagram and Facebook and social media.”
“I wouldn’t steal water from our already depleting water source,” he added.
The corpse water may not be real, but the interest in it clearly is. The shopkeeper said he’s sold more than 100 bottles of the stuff, which is priced at $7.77 per bottle, in honour of the 7-7-7 that appears on a slot machine when you hit the jackpot.
Multiple sets of human remains have been discovered at Lake Mead, the largest man-made reservoir in the US, as the water receded about a foot a week thanks to a climate crisis-fueled drought and heavy human demands on the watershed.
One set of remains was found in a barrel with a gunshot wound, leading police to suspect a homicide from the late 1970s or early 1980s.
“The water level has dropped so much over the last 30 to 40 years that, where the person was located, if a person were to drop the barrel in the water and it sinks, you are never going to find it unless the water level drops,” Las Vegas homicide policeman Ray Spencer said earlier this month. “The water level has dropped and made the barrel visible. The barrel did not move….It was not like the barrel washed up.”
Lake Mead, created when the Hoover Dam was built on the Colorado River, is at historic lows, imperiling water access and hydro power for the more than 40 million people who rely on its water in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming, and northern Mexico.
"We’re falling about a foot a week right now because of the agricultural demands downstream," Patti Aaron of the US Bureau of Reclamation told KSNV.
