Basement Caskets & Golden Rings | 4M #185

Welcome to the hundred-and-eighty-ninth edition of Morticians’ Monday Morning Mashup, 4M #189, where we’ll serve up bite-sized, easily-digestible nuggets of the deathcare news you need to crush conversations in the week ahead. Bon appetit!

Parlor picking

A recent episode of American Pickers featured a few interesting finds in a couple’s basement that might be of interest to deathcare collectors: an old embalming fluid crate and a child’s coffin. The couple inherited these and other funeral-related items from the wife’s father, who salvaged them from a state hospital. Here’s the link to the YouTube clip of basement pick. Spoiler alert — the pickers snagged the embalming fluid crate for just $45.

Yes, it’s trespassing

Remember last November, when a so-called urban explorer made the “shocking” discovery of unclaimed cremated remains in an abandoned, burned-out funeral home in Georgia? Our take on this was that, one, a storage room full of unclaimed cremains is, unfortunately, the norm for most funeral homes, so this shouldn’t be “horrific” headline news; two, there should be laws, or at least guidelines, for their handling when a facility goes out of business; and three, the guy who trespassed into the building and shared these photos should be penalized. Well, last week, the Marietta (GA) Police Department charged the photographer with criminal trespassing for entering the property without permission and not reporting his findings to the authorities. The building has since been secured, and several of the cremains have been claimed.

Confession rings true

Authorities doing routine patrols near an Indiana cemetery last week caught a grave robber in the act of digging up a recently-buried urn. The culprit turned out to be a man who worked at the cemetery and had been told that a gold ring was in the urn along with the deceased’s cremated remains. He told police he “couldn’t stop thinking about the ring,” so he dug it up with the intention of pawning it. Police recovered the ring, arrested the man, and notified the family.