CHEROKEE COUNTY, S.C. (WSPA) – Human remains were found Tuesday afternoon in Cherokee County.

According to Cherokee County Coroner Dennis Fowler, a homeowner on Holly Ridge Road reported seeing something which looked like human remains near a wooded area of his property just before noon.

On the scene, Fowler confirmed what the homeowner found was a badly decomposed body of a man. Fowler said the body appeared to have been in the wooded area for more than a month.

It was a typical Tuesday for Ken Evans, he went outside to throw away food scraps and saw the door to his old pick up was open.

So, he walked closer to check it out.

“Make sure everything was alright and nobody had been in it, closed the door and looked down and that’s when I realized somebody had been in it,” said Evans.

He looked down and saw a pair of boots and pants.

“It’s not every day you walk up on something like that, and I’d walked by and noticed a smell, but didn’t think that much about it, but I didn’t notice it when I walked over to the truck,” he said. “After I looked down and seen it, that really hit me hard.” 

Evans ran inside to call 911.

“It was a badly decomposed body that was found there on the property,” said Sheriff Steve Mueller.

Sheriff Steve Mueller said in situations like these, the first thing they do check missing persons reports in their county and surrounding ones.

“At this point and time, I don’t want to release a name, but we do have a missing person that was in the general area where he was located. We’ve reached out to the family of that missing person,” said Mueller.

Mueller said the coroner will request dental records and possibly DNA to help identify the remains.

“It’s kind of eerie to know that, you know, that there’s something in your backyard that close to your house, that long,” said Evans.

Evans said he noticed a bad smell on his property, on and off again.

“We’ve got some old animals that stay in the back of that barn, in and out from under it. That’s what I thought when I walked by, well one, a groundhog or something had died. It was much worse than that,” he said. “I hope it’s the only one I ever find; I don’t want to go through this again.”

Fowler is working to identify the remains through an autopsy and determine a cause of death.