MARIETTA, Ga. — A police report details how officers found 35 boxes of cremated remains at an abandoned funeral home in Marietta this week following a Reddit post by a photographer who had first gone inside and captured the scene.
The user u/places_forgotten made the original post on Tuesday, describing how they found caskets, chemicals and cremated remains around the Norman Medford Peden Funeral Home and Crematory. The funeral home has reportedly been unoccupied since a fire earlier this year.
The post has since been removed, as a Marietta Police Department report details how a woman called and was able to identify the funeral home through documents in the photos. The report identifies those documents as death certificates and other identifying documents attached to boxes containing the cremated remains.
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The report describes how the officers checked inside the building and found "that it still contained a large amount of chemicals along with approximately 35 boxes of human cremains." Those boxes had the identifying documents attached.
"The business is partially boarded up but persons can still access the interior of the building with ease," the report notes, adding that they found a mattress in a back room where someone had set up a living situation.
According to the Associated Press, there is also thousands of dollars in prepaid funerals that have not been recovered by families since the fire.
“We are trying to find out where that money is,” Noula Zaharia with the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office Cemeteries Division, told the news agency.
A new post by u/places_forgotten, without identifying documentation visible, has gone up since the original post was removed. It depicts in at least one photo what appears to be the remains of a fetus that were left behind, and in other photos bags of ashes laying about on shelves, boxes and tables.
The AP reported this week the building is due to be demolished after the fire this year.