It was neither zombies, vampires nor a crazy cult performing a ritual. It wasn’t even an opportunistic landlord who tried to raise the rent on the post-mortem tenant. It simply was an unreliable salvage worker for whom 100 bucks wasn’t enough to dispose of an old casket in a respectful way.
The New York Times published an article today solving the mystery of the old casket found on Bushwick’s Pilling St, near Evergreen Cemetery, earlier this month. NYPD’s 83rd Precinct tweeted the picture of the casket and concluded that it was “not cool.”
The casket was covered in dirt and filled with trash and with what was later confirmed to be human skeletal remains. However, Evergreen Cemetery declined that the casket came from their graves.
According to The Times, the casket came from Frederick Douglass Memorial Park on Staten Island. Children of a man buried in 1989 requested the exhumation and that the coffin and the remains were moved 52 miles east, to Pinelawn Memorial Park in Farmingdale, on Long Island. A funeral home from Prospect-Lefferts Gardens in Brooklyn handled the exhumation and moved what they believed were all of the remains to a new coffin.
The funeral home then handed off the old coffin to a salvage operation for disposal, and paid $100 for it. It is believed that the salvage worked dumped the coffin at Bushwick Pilling St for the sake of convenience.
The cops have identified the salvage worker who may be facing illegal dumping charges.
The funeral home representative told The Times that the family of the exhumed man was very upset, and no wonder… Can you imagine the remains of your deceased father lying around in garbage in Bushwick?
Anyhow, this peculiar story of a Bushwick casket made us learn a couple of lessons:
Guys, cremation is the way to go. Seriously…
If you move, don’t move your dead relatives with you, please. Just pray for them and think some good memories, just don’t move them.
Funeral homes are not reliable when it comes to handling one’s exhumed remains, and they may forget something somewhere.
Salvage workers are totally unreliable, and will dump a coffin in your backyard if needed be…
Also, why the hell is Pilling Street used as a junkyard? Can we please stop using this neighborhood as a trash dumping destination?
Everything is, indeed, temporary.
