Cemetery Flippers & Taxi Caskets | 4M #149

Welcome to the hundred-and-forty-ninth edition of Morticians’ Monday Morning Mashup, 4M #149, 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!

Oops …

How does a city “accidentally” sell a historic African-American cemetery? You’ll have to ask the city of Tampa, Florida, because that’s exactly what they did in 2023 when they sold Memorial Park Cemetery to a property flipper at auction for $18,000. After they realized their mistake, they bought back the property — for $100,000 (much to the flipper’s delight, we’re sure). Just last week they commemorated the cemetery, which was established in 1919 as a burial site for African-American World War I veterans, with a proper historical marker.

At least they’re not crashers

You’ve probably recognized that today’s funerals and life celebrations have more and more things in common with weddings. Well, here’s one more similarity to add to the list: funeral singers. Just like wedding singers, the Singapore Funeral Live Band will “take up gigs at funerals and often receive requests from the family to perform songs that the deceased person had loved.” Lead singer Kit Teh says family members often join her at the microphone to sing along.

Postal woes

A New York man vividly revived the horrific term “going postal” last week when he learned that cremated remains he was expecting to be delivered from Florida were not going to arrive “on time.” The man took out his frustration on employees of his local post office, verbally spewing a string of brutal threats that he would not only kill them and the postal worker who would eventually deliver the cremains, but also burn down the post office itself. Thankfully, the man was taken into custody and is facing up to 10 years in prison if convicted. 

Defending the hearse

A fifth-generation funeral home in Scotland recently worked with engineers to create a one-of-a-kind Land Rover Defender hearse. When introducing the vehicle last week, William Purves Funeral Directors said, “Funerals reflect a life lived, so whether that’s asking guests to wear a particular colour, share a dram of whisky at a graveside, or travel in the Defender Hearse, we support families to create bespoke celebrations for their final farewells.”

Let’s hope this is a deep/cheap fake

We can’t vouch for the authenticity of this item, but thought we’d share — just in case. Supposedly, the family of a deceased Ghana taxi driver allowed him to leave this world in the manner he lived it — driving a taxi. Several photos (and a video) published in The Sun show the deceased propped up in an open casket that is personalized to look like a taxi, complete with the Ghana flag and license plate. And if that’s not enough, the casket is sitting on a stand that rotates — and a woman is dancing next to the spinning casket. The article said that a local man commented, “Even in the next world he will still drive a taxi. I pity him.”