What appears to be a human heart was found inside a pink box in New York City’s Lower East Side on Wednesday, police said.

A 67-year-old man found the box in the Riis Houses on Wednesday at around 11am. According to a New York police department spokesperson, the man called police and someone from the medical examiner’s office went to the scene to remove the remains.

The contents of the box are currently undergoing testing to determine whether it was indeed a human heart. It could have belonged to an animal, the spokesperson said. It is uncertain when the test will be completed.

According to the New York Daily News, the man who found the heart was rummaging through the garbage when he found it at the bottom of a container holding a potted plant. Police were searching for the plant’s origin.

The finding of the heart, while grotesque, is not the first time such a situation has occurred.

In August, a heart was found in a plastic bag in the middle of a field near a gas station in Norwalk, Ohio. The EMS crew that found it called the police and at first threw it in a dumpster, BuzzFeed News reported. They retrieved it after the dispatcher said it might be human.

That heart did not appear to be related to a crime, according to CBS.



Late last month, body parts, including a severed arm, were found in a commercial yard in Phoenix, Arizona, and a man’s head was found in a Chicago lagoon.



A brain found under a porch in Pennsylvania in June was reportedly stolen and used to get high, local station FOX43 reported. The brain appeared to be a teaching specimen contained in formaldehyde. Joshua Long, 26, the man who possessed it, allegedly soaked marijuana in the fluid.

Long was already incarcerated in Cumberland County prison on burglary charges when his aunt found the brain and called police. He had named the brain Freddy.