Cross Words & Go-Go Gadgets | 4M #160

Welcome to the hundred-and-sixtieth edition of Morticians’ Monday Morning Mashup, 4M #160, 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!

Go-go to the cemetery

A Brooklyn entrepreneur has launched a fundraising campaign on Indie-Go-Go to bring her invention — and the dearly departed — to life. So far, Caylin Sanders has raised just over $3,000 of her $30,000 goal to launch the Gravesider mobile app, which will use augmented reality to share videos of historic figures during cemetery tours. You can check it out here.

The perfect tribute

As Hurricane Milton trudged across the Gulf of Mexico toward Florida as a category five last week, technicians from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) took the opportunity to provide the most appropriate disposition for a late colleague. The hurricane hunting plane “Miss Piggy” did double duty as it passed over Milton; in addition to mapping the storm, the team dispersed the cremated remains of radar scientist and researcher Peter Dodge, who died last year after 40 years as a federal employee. A reporter shared this beautiful gesture on his X account, as seen below.

You forgot something …

There’s a reason that abandoned funeral homes are prime properties for urban explorers (those folks who trespass into private property to explore interesting, empty spaces). Unfortunately, they love to trespass old mortuaries because so many previous owners tend to leave items behind that fascinate or freak out the general public. In addition to embalming tools and empty caskets, sometimes that includes human remains — in cremated form, that is. So it probably wouldn’t be surprising to learn that last week, the new owner of a former funeral home in Greenville, North Carolina found human remains on the property. The problem, though, is that these remains were not ashes; they were skeletal, and there were four sets. Seems there’s much more to this story, and authorities are investigating.

Cheez-y tombstones

A New Jersey outlet recently interviewed the owner of Koch Monuments, the oldest monument company in the state, to talk about the business and the significance of tombstones. The owner, Michael DiPiazza, shared some of the most interesting and humorous creations he’s done or seen, including:

• A stone featuring a box of Cheez-It crackers (the deceased loved them),
• One that reads “I’m Dead — Now What?,”
• A life-size granite Mercedes 240 D that took 13 months to carve,
• Bingo cards and crosswords (with the phrase “never a cross word” included),
• Clocks indicating the person’s time of death, and
• A stone including a photo of the deceased shooting a bird (they’re still working to get permission from the cemetery to complete that one).