Use of a floating wooden plate to find a corpse, in Taamei Haminhagim

I meant to post this here a day or two ago, when I put it on parshablog, but here it is:

As a followup to my previous post about "A Miracle Worthy of Elisha," it seems that there is a similar segulah mentioned in Taamei Haminhagim, by Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak Sperling (1851-1921) and accessible at HebrewBooks.org on this page here (page 582 in the pdf pager, or 569 if you have the physical book). The image to the right is the relevant selection.

In this accounting of the segulah, it seems that they do not use a flat bread with a lit candle on it. Rather, "if they throw a wooden plate upon the face of the waters and leave it, it floats of its own accord to the place where it stops of its own accord. Then, in that place, that is where he drowned." He cited Yosef Ometz, page 205, though I cannot at the moment track the specific sefer and the specific page.

But written there is: "I have heard that via this segulah they found a certain man whose name was Meir, the father-in-law of Tevlin {?} David, who is near Pidkap {?}. And if the matter is true, it is a segulah and a wondrous matter to permit the wife of the one drowned, such that she does not need to dwell as an agunah."

Thus, they came up with the same idea I did -- why not use this in general to be mattir agunot, whether in a body of water that has an end, or does not have an end? I am not sure if he meant this specifically where they find the body in this location, or if one is so confident in the efficacy of the segulah that one could use this. If the latter, it would be an interesting intersection between miracles and halacha, something discussed here earlier.

There is a difference here in what they did, from the practice mentioned in Taamei HaMinhagim. All sorts of additions to the practice as mentioned in taamei haminhagim. Here, they baked a bread with the meis in mind, and put a candle on it. And after they found the "spot," they dropped a stone with writing attached to it, to get the body to come up. And they had a bunch of rabbis saying tehillim and tefillot. This frums it up a bit, but at the same time makes it into greater sorcery. And I still do not think that it works, or worked.