After the cremation of a deceased relative, it’s not uncommon for the bereaved to keep their ashes in an urn at home. Many people take comfort from the idea that their loved one is still somehow close by.
And when Dorothy Kuspis died last month at the ripe old age of 98, her granddaughter Ashleigh Wegner decided to do just that. Ashleigh said her mother and uncles chose an urn for “Nanny”, as she called her, and ordered a heart-shaped keepsake urn sold through Amazon.
“It came within a couple days,” Ashleigh told AZ Family, adding that it had clearly been in storage for a while. “When I opened it, it was just a little dusty.”
But then, she added, she found something a little more upsetting than a little house dust.
“I unscrewed the back and that’s when I noticed it still had remains inside of it,” she said. “And that was like… ‘Who are you and what are you?’”
While the heart-shaped urn had been sold as new, it appeared to have been used at least once before.
“I was shocked. I was kind of grossed out. I was uncomfortable,” Ashleigh said.
View 4 ImagesThe item arrived promptly – but it didn’t seem new(Image: AZFamily)
She immediately got in touch with Amazon, as well as the third-party vendor that had actually sold the urn.
Ashleigh stressed that she didn’t simply want to return the item.
“I didn’t want it to end up on the warehouse shelf again and have somebody else make a purchase and have it accidentally get shipped to someone else in a moment like this,” she explained.
She quickly received a reply from Amazon, telling her to expect a refund. While Ashleigh hasn’t heard back from the third-party seller yet, she has received a replacement urn.
“Just as I expected,” she said.
View 4 ImagesAshleigh decided not to send back the mystery ashes(Image: AZ Family)
The remains of Ashleigh’s grandmother are now safely in the replacement urn, apart from a small portion of cremated remains set aside for close relatives.
“She lived a good life,” Ashleigh said. “So it wasn’t a surprise, but it was kind of a — with anything, any loss — kind of a shock when it happened.”
Bizarrely, though, this is not Ashleigh’s first encounter with unexpected ashes.
“We’ve had a similar situation in the past,” she revealed. “A few years back, me and my husband came across a box of ashes in an alleyway where we lived.”
View 4 ImagesAshleigh was stunned when she opened the urn for the first time(Image: AZ Family)
After making her shocking discovery, Ashleigh got in touch with local police, who managed to trace the people who had dumped the ashes. Unfortunately, they didn’t want them back.
“They said they weren’t interested or, for whatever reason, they just didn’t want the remains,” Ashleigh recalled.
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So Ashleigh and her husband decided to scatter those ashes in the Arizona mountains near where she lives. They plan to do something similar with the mystery ashes that were inside the keepsake urn because she does not want them to land on someone else’s doorstep.
“I didn’t want it to end up on the warehouse shelf again and have somebody else make a purchase and have it accidentally get shipped to someone else in a moment like this,” she said.
Amazon was contacted in connection with this story, but the company has not yet responded.