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Posted on 05/18/2026 7:15:12 PM PDT by BenLurkin
A Southern California family rattled after discovering what appears to be the ashes of a stranger in an urn they ordered through Amazon say they are trying to do the right thing, but that the companies involved are not making it easy.
Mark Culberston said the urn was one of a few his family purchased after the death of his grandfather early last year. After enduring months of grief at the loss of her husband, Culbertson’s grandmother was finally ready to place her late husband’s ashes within urns for family members.
Culbertson explained to KTLA’s Shelby Nelson that all of the urns were empty except for one of them.
“This one has an ashy substance in it and we did a little more research. They look like ashes,” he said.
Culbertson contacted Amazon right after the family made the discovery but said the response he got from the giant online retailer was frustrating, saying their response to the matter was super casual.
“It’s like I’m talking to them, like, ‘Hey, I got shoes. They looked like they were scuffed. I need to return these,’” he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at ktla.com ...
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Yikes!
How could they tell who the ashes were?
At least it’s not as bad as what happened to Graham Chapman’s ashes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ox9bcx_LZMs
My aunt was recently cremated. She would have been laughing her ass off...
I guess this is the risk of buying “used but in good condition”
I’ve had problems with just about every damned seller who I’ve purchased from on Amazon going back many years. Never once have I had any of them send out a “new” product to make good on a defective item. I always get the runaround and people emailing me in English that makes no sense. I am just about ready to dump the damned thing off my computer. Now I’m seeing Amazon “fulfillment centers” popping up all over town with reckless delivery drivers in those Mercedes Benz vans Amazon uses parking on the wrong side of the street in our subdivision just to drop off a package of Chinese junk on someone’s front porch. Yet I’m always reading comments where the company is lauded for being sensitive to screw-ups and making them right. Bullshit.
Please bury your dead. They need to be intact to be ready for that great day to come.
Strict return policy.
When I get a customer service rep like that, I don’t put up with the crap very long. I simply say “Escalate” and I get a supervisor who has more authority to make things right.
We do a lot of shopping on Amazon and have from Day One when they only sold books. They always look at our purchase record and say “Thank you for being such a GOOD customer.” That, too, goes a long way to getting the best service from them.
No. They don't.
How your body is treated after death does nothing except, perhaps, reflect poorly on those who job it is to care for your remains.
Some years back, my brother in law died in an accident. He was a big union guy in the movie business, what they call a “Key Grip” I think, and he knew a lot of people.
All those people showed up for his service which they did in a local fancy hotel. In the room where they did the service, the urn with his cremated remains was front and center on a table with a picture of him beside it.
When the service was done, his grieving widow approached me, and privately asked me if I would be kind enough to take the urn with his ashes up to her hotel room, which I readily agreed to. I pocketed her room key, and made my way through the thick crowd to take the urn away. It was a beautiful, very large, and appeared to be porcelain enameled. It seemed unnaturally heavy for its size. He was a very big guy, over 300 lbs. if I recall correctly.
I picked the urn up, and turned around to carry it away, and as I moved through the crowd, well-dressed people parted respectfully to let me through.
I suddenly became very self-aware, and found myself gripping the urn with a death-grip, and feeling that every inch of carpet contained an invisible, protruding fold that was going to trip my suddenly very self-aware feet and cause me to stumble and drop the urn, right in the middle of this parting crowd.
When I had picked it up, I noted how heavy and solid the urn felt, but I was holding it normally. Before I had walked ten feet, I felt like every step was a potential disaster (causing me to stop walking normally and I began nearly sliding my feet) which no doubt increased my chances of a urn-mishap. It was very unnerving.
The whole time in my imagination (and I have a very vivid imagination) in super-slow-motion at high resolution, in my mind, I could feel my toe stub the carpet, me beginning to fall, the urn somehow escaping from my steely grip, and as it flew through the air I envisioned the cap coming off that the gray ashes issuing forth in a plume, and everything, me, the urn, the cap, and all that gray ash coming to rest on the hotel carpet, with a forest of legs around me watching in horror.
All this before I had even taken five steps!
Finally, I got to the elevator, and was able to poke the button with my elbow and get on. But I was still holding that urn with the tenacity of a moray eel that wasn’t going to let go.
When I found his wife’s hotel room, I suddenly realized the room key was in my pocket.
I shifted the urn, and began to fiddle about, holding the urn in the crook of my arm, and was inexplicably fishing around in my pocket for the room key, when I could suddenly envision myself clearly again externally-shifting the urn about to get a better purchase on the key, extract it, and put it in the door lock and everything going South all at once, dropping the key AND the urn and again, in super-slow-motion, me...bug-eyed and sounding like one of those slowed down recordings with “OHHHHHHHHHHHNOOOOOOOOOOO” issuing gutturally from my wide open mouth, as the tumbling urn again had the cap come off and the gray ashes all heading towards a carpet-ly oblivion.
I saw all this like a movie, playing in my mind.
Fortunately, it was all in my mind. I froze in place, dropped the key deliberately to the floor, got a good purchase with both hands on the urn, placed it squarely on the carpet (in a place I couldn’t clumsily, as is my wont, kick it over by accident) and picked up the key. I opened the door, picked up the urn and went inside.
Oddly, when I thought of that sequence in front of the hotel door, it reminded me of my wedding day. I was at my brother’s house (who would be my best man) changing into my tuxedo as he changed into his, but my trousers had a problem. They had this adjustable metal clip so you could tighten the belt-line without needing to wear a belt, and it was broken.
I examined it, and realized it could be fixed, if the tip of a pointy object like a kitchen knife could be poked into the clip as you held it upside down in your hand, and lever the little adjustable arm back into place.
So, here I am, with no pants on, holding this clip in my bare hand, while my brother is pushing the tip of a ridiculously large and exquisitely sharp butcher knife downwards into this little chrome buckle which I held firmly,
In a flash, I suddenly visualized my brother pushing down on that knife with enough force to move that clip into place, when I saw the buckle slip in my hand, the huge butcher knife came down, the point slicing my hands and fingers open, bright red blood going everywhere, a ride to the Emergency Room, and me, walking in late to my own wedding with my wife waiting at the altar with my hand encased in a gigantic white bandage that seemed to be bigger than a football.
I blinked, and that vision had been a flash in my mind! I looked up, my eyes met my brother’s eyes, and I could see it in his eyes too-he had the exact same visualization at the same time that I did!
He slowly withdrew the knife, we fixed it adequately in some fashion, I put my pants on, and were were late getting to the church, but not so late that my bride had already gone up the aisle. She had not arrived yet, and someone came up exclaiming “You’re late!” and I went inside to the front of the church to wait for her.
It was that same weird prescient mental visualization of something going completely awry withe enough warning to step back before the damage was done that I had while I fumbled clumsily for a hotel room key while holding an urn full of human ashes in the crook of my other elbow!
They needed multiple urns for grandpa’s ashes?
Wow He must have been a really big fellow.
Hahahahaha...the first time I watched that movie, I didn’t really get it.
But I did the second time I watched, and that is a great scene!
Thanks, RL. Great short story for the evening! Yes, the more you concentrate on NOT make a colossal screw-up, the bigger are your chances that what you envisioned WILL happen.
In the first scenario about the ashes, I was certain you were going to lift the porcelain cap of that vase, look down and see a gun, a severed, now fossilized hand, or a pair of dilated blue eyes staring back up at you from inside the urn.
In the second scenario, I hope your wife was patient with the unexpected disruption of cherry-red venous blood mysteriously spotting your pants leg. Maybe she didn’t know until the ceremony was over.
**Both scenes remind me of the theory of “Awake Dreaming” I read about long ago from the ‘Carlos Casteneda’ books.
We went to spread my aunt’s ashes in Yosemite from San Fran (totally illegal but ffs what are a few ashes). And about an hour in to the drive my cousin asked “where is mom?”
The entire family was half way there so I had to turn around and drive back to San Fran to get the urn which was sitting exactly where they left it....
I know she was laughing about that one....
Her mortal ashes are in the Merced river now...
Always reminds me of the “Bog Lebowski” scene....
https://youtu.be/xmy1AsWgOXY
We went to spread my aunt’s ashes in Yosemite from San Fran (totally illegal but ffs what are a few ashes). And about an hour in to the drive my cousin asked “where is mom?”
The entire family was half way there so I had to turn around and drive back to San Fran to get the urn which was sitting exactly where they left it....
I know she was laughing about that one....
Her mortal ashes are in the Merced river now...
Always reminds me of the “Bog Lebowski” scene....
https://youtu.be/xmy1AsWgOXY
HORRORS!
I want a new cat box, now I’ll worry it will arrive with some other cat’s droppings.
What’s Bezoz’s home ddress? Daisywill send it personally.
Good one. 👍
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