A gravedigger’s job is not as simple as preparing a six-foot hole in the ground. In a congested cemetery, the task becomes challenging and sometimes horrific.
At the Baylous Cemetery in Salt Rock, West Virginia, Matthew Fortner, 49, was digging a new grave on 27 March when he unearthed a casket that he tossed down a hill, sending the skeletal remains inside flying through the air after the lid opened, according to a report by WOWKTV.
A couple decorating a gravestone nearby witnessed the desecration and reported it to the police.
Fortner was arrested and “charged with disinterment or displacement of a dead body or part thereof, damage to a cemetery or graveyard, and violating the protection of human skeletal remains,” New York Post (NYP) reports.
Meanwhile, what a one-year-old boy from Lincolnshire, United Kingdom did was more mortifying.
The boy’s mom, Natasha Emeny, left him downstairs momentarily to put away some laundry upstairs in their home. When she returned her son, Koah, was “strolling around the sofa with his clothes and face smeared with ashes like a volcano eruption survivor,” NYP reported.
Emeny then saw an opened decorative vase with its powdery contents spilled all around it, which shocked her.
She recorded the scene with her phone camera, the video panning from the spilled ashes of her father and then to Koah.
“My son has eaten my dad’s ashes,” wailed Emeny in the clip that she shared with NYP.
The mother asked doctors for advice about the ashes Koah ingested and was simply told to give her son “water, and he’ll be fine,” according to NYP.