Giant Head Found Floating in the Hudson River; Recovered by Marist Crew Team

Heads up: A seven-foot-tall Styrofoam head sculpture has locals doing a double take

April 22 began as an ordinary morning for the Marist College crew team as they rowed along the Hudson… until they discovered a head floating in the river alongside their boats. Now don’t panic, it wasn’t a real human head, but a gigantic Styrofoam and fiberglass sculpture shaped like one. And the word “gigantic” is no exaggeration: it’s seven feet tall and weighs in at close to 300 pounds; it took a dozen crew members to haul it out of the water and onto the college’s grounds.

giant headPhotographs by Matt Lavin (above) and Tyler Sawyer (below), courtesy of Marist College

marist crew team

No one claimed the statue, and it remained on campus where people snapped pics with it, including our own Web Editor Jessica Friedlander (check out our photo on our Facebook page here). Where did such an interesting object come from, you ask? No one knows for sure, but there was speculation that it was either a theater prop, part of a Manhattan department store display, or a cast-off from a New Jersey backyard. Strangest of all, it vanished in July as mysteriously as it arrived, after being put back into the river and tied to the bank. Says the college’s Greg Cannon, “[We’re] not sure if a human or Mother Nature set it free.”

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