Questionable ethics in and around funeral homes and sacred sites of those buried
The further you go down the rabbit hole (not a Castigation reference, that would have to be “Jakalope warren”), the more nefarious and evil you see we can be in reality. The examples of funeral salesman, post-death profiteers, is disturbingly plentiful. Naively, I believed my writing was a work of fiction. Does art imitate life? Or does life imitate art? Or are we all just gliding through this confusion.
Here are further updates to the fictitious world of “The Lies People Tell” having parallels with the real world, this one.
Beneath the veneer of respectful cremations and solemn burials, a shadow industry thrives worldwide. In Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, police discovered 383 corpses – some three or four years dead – stashed in a single crematorium, revealing that funeral directors were hoarding bodies instead of providing promised services [1]. In Colorado, a funeral home owner pleaded guilty in 2022 to fraud after prosecutors showed she’d dissected at least a dozen bodies — harvesting heads, arms, spines and legs — and sold the parts without permission, while charging grieving families full cremation fees [2] [3]. Modern commerce has created a new era of grave-robbing, body commodification and corpse neglect.
Funeral Homes as Morgues of Profit
In theory, a funeral home should honor the dead. In practice, some have become sales offices. Reuters reported that funeral-director Megan Hess pleaded guilty to defrauding families by “dissecting corpses and selling the body parts without permission” [2]. Hess ran a dual operation: a mortuary and a “human body parts” business next door. Families paid for simple cremations, but instead their loved ones’ heads, torsos, arms and legs were harvested and shipped off to medical schools and training labs for profit [4] [5]. Many mourners received buckets of mixed ashes — or concrete dust — instead of their relatives’ remains [3]. One prosecuting brief noted that a bereaved client “received concrete mix instead of a relative’s ashes” [7].
The underlying problem is stark: federal law bans organ sales for transplant, but not the sale of cadavers or body parts for research [8]. Investigators found that “selling body parts is legal in 42 states” [9]. This means grieving families have almost no recourse when funeral directors commit fraud.
The problem extends beyond the US. In 2023, Mexican officials exhumed 383 rotting bodies from a Juárez crematory — many far older than the contracted cremation date [1]. A Chihuahua prosecutor observed: “storing that number [of corpses] also makes you think they weren’t providing the service” [10]. In South Africa’s Limpopo province, investigators found about 40 paupers’ bodies secretly buried without coffins in mass graves by a contracted funeral company [11]. A parliamentary report warned of over 3,000 unclaimed corpses piling up in South African mortuaries, some over three years old [12].
These scandals reveal a systemic rot: with fat profit margins, lean oversight, and eroded respect for the dead, many operators see corpses as dollar signs. “Poor and vulnerable” families are prime targets, prosecutors note, because such clients consent without scrutiny [13].
A Global Gray Market for Human Remains
The commodification of corpses isn’t confined to small-town mortuaries. An underground body-parts trade spans the globe. In the US, a 2025 court case exposed how Harvard Medical School’s morgue manager allegedly shipped stolen cadaver parts—brains, skin, bones—to anonymous buyers [14]. The real outrage is that no law explicitly prohibits trafficking in human remains [15]. The manager was charged only with stolen goods, because under U.S. law donated body parts for research are treated almost like property [9]. As forensic scholar Sam Redman observes, “you’d be shocked by the array of people participating in these markets” [16].
This “gray market” extends online and abroad. In Britain, scientists report social-media-driven sales of skulls, skeletons and even “masks” made from human skin [17]. The Guardian featured Henry Scragg, proprietor of a macabre “curiosities” shop in rural England, selling monthly subscriptions to receive random human skulls and touting embalmed fetuses as home decor [18] [19]. There are disturbing reports of fresh thefts: “reports of bones being removed from crypts and graveyards” [17]. Dame Sue Black calls any trade in human remains a moral abyss: “If you can make the sale of a bird’s nest illegal, surely you can make the sale of a human body illegal” [19]. Yet in UK law a person’s remains are not considered property; desecrating a grave is criminal, but selling the corpses from it would technically not be [20].
Asia has its own dark markets. In China’s rural heartland, impoverished families and gangs collaborate to sell fresh corpses for “ghost marriages” – a traditional custom of matching dead bachelors with corpse brides. A 2013 court in Shaanxi jailed four men for exhuming ten corpses and selling them as brides for about £25,000 total [22]. Coal-boom money enabled wealthy peasants to afford these grisly arrangements, with some families cutting deals with hospital workers to procure recently dead women [23]. Police in Senegal arrested four people after they exhumed and burned the body of a gay man, violating the deceased’s dignity [26]. Prejudice and superstition corrupt what should be sacred rituals.
Desecration of Sacred Sites
Even supposed sanctuaries of the dead are no longer safe. Crime and neglect have turned cemeteries into crime scenes. São Paulo’s cemeteries provide a grim tableau: one family reported wading through a 200-meter wall of garbage just to light a candle at a relative’s grave – piles of broken tombstones, underwear, bottles and even a discarded toilet lay strewn across pathways [27]. Open, unguarded graves emit decay; flies swarm neglected plots [28]. At Araçá cemetery, robbers ransack mausoleums at dawn, ripping off bronze plates and statues. One mourner lamented: “Once you step inside, there’s no security… the most remote parts are completely abandoned” [29].
In South Africa, authorities exhumed roughly 40 paupers’ bodies buried without coffins in mass graves at Mookgophong cemetery [11] — not by secret cults but by a state-contracted funeral parlour “under pressure” to free up morgue space [30]. In Mexico’s narco-lands, even drug lords’ tombs face desecration. In early 2025 gunmen torched the elaborate mausoleum of a cartel boss’s grandson as a message to rival gangs [31] [32].
The dead are voiceless, and the living do what they will. As a Kaurna elder observed during the first mass reburial of Aboriginal remains in Adelaide, seeing ancestors “locked away in rooms and shut in boxes… little skulls, little people that have never seen life” is a profound violation [33].
Colonial Skeletons in the Closet
Western museums and universities for centuries expropriated human remains from colonized and indigenous peoples, treating ancestors as archaeological specimens. In 2023, Australia finally reclaimed six Aboriginal ancestors sent to Vienna in 1905 by an ethnologist who “acted without any ethical standards” [34] [35] — almost 120 years to do right by six ancestors. The South Australian Museum apologized for holding 4,600 Aboriginal remains over 165 years [36]. As the museum’s historian admitted, “the history of museums has been about taking and distributing Aboriginal ancestors,” not honoring them [37].
One notorious example was Catalina Island’s “Indian Museum”, established in the 1940s by collector Ralph Glidden — a nightmarish cabinet with skulls on shelves and limbs in exhibits, walls inset with toe and finger bones [38]. Glidden even sold bones to tourists. Only after tribal descendants asserted their rights under repatriation laws did California universities rebury some 2,200 stolen remains [39].
The demand for repatriation has become a global human-rights movement. Aboriginal elders perform smoking ceremonies as ancestral remains are flown home, reiterating that no grave should be treated as a specimen drawer [34] [36]. Native American tribes have used repatriation laws to force institutions to relinquish bones and burial objects for proper reinterment [38].
Systemic Failures: Law, Culture and Commerce
At the root lies weak regulation, market incentives, and secular abandonment of ritual. In the US, the Anatomical Gift Act effectively shields universities if they “acted in good faith” on donated bodies, even if staff steal parts after donation [41]. Federal courts concluded there is no federal statute governing corpses, leaving “gray area” policies to each state [15]. Harvard’s defenders argued the school bore no liability because the morgue manager’s thefts were outside his job description — a rationale the Massachusetts high court found baffling [42]. Britain’s Burial Act makes grave-robbing criminal, but legally a corpse is not property, so trafficking its bones can slip through [20].
Cultural attitudes compound this. As societies become more secular and mobile, ritual ties to ancestors fray. For the well-off, death is outsourced to professionals; for the poor, it’s often a state-administered pauper’s grave. eBay and Etsy have only partially cracked down on remains sales, with illicit vendors using coded emojis to evade filters [43].
The economics are perverse. Medical schools and research labs pay hundreds or thousands per cadaver. Funeral operators hit higher margins by skipping cremation entirely. In China, coal-boom fortunes enabled villagers to pay astronomical sums for ghost brides [44]. When the dead can be sliced, shipped and sold like raw material, commerce knows no bounds.
Dignity for the Dead or Profits for the Living?
Our “civilized” systems of death care have lapses that invite exploitation. Each scandal involves real families and real ancestors: mothers searching for their son’s proper cremains, tribes mourning missing elders, communities watching graveyards become dumping grounds. Journalists and whistleblowers have exposed these abuses [1] [3] [17], but reform lags. Medical ethicists urge an “ethic of care” model for corpses, treating even donated bodies as trust to be honored, not inventory to be sold.
Legislation alone won’t suffice if culture doesn’t change. Funeral directors must reclaim their role as guardians of last rites, not merchants of mortality. Families and communities must demand transparency. Society must recognize that how we treat the dead reflects our collective humanity.
As one Oxford professor of forensic science put it, “you don’t expect your body to be dug up and sold” [19]. Yet today it is. The question is stark: will we continue shrugging at headlines of desecration, or will we finally enforce that dignity extends beyond the living?
This is an expansion of the surreality understood from “The Lies People Tell” film.
