What happens to bodies in abandoned cemeteries?

Once the lease is up, the usual practice is to cremate any remains once the occupant has been evicted from their grave. Workers exhume the remains before reburying them at a greater depth in the same burial plot. This leaves room for another person to be buried above them.

What do they do with unclaimed dead bodies?

Unclaimed bodies are mostly cremated in the United States. Cremation lowers the cost to the government, and is more efficient for storage. The ashes are often buried in a large collective grave, or in a columbarium (above ground mausoleum for urns).

What happens in the cemetery on Day of the Dead?

Often candles, flowers and the favorite foods of the deceased are placed on the grave and the family visits, eats, sings and tells favorite stories about those who have passed. Altars are usually decorated with flowers, candles, pan de muerto, ceramic skulls, and most importantly pictures of loved ones.

How are bodies buried in a cemetery?

Burial, also known as interment or inhumation, is a method of final disposition whereby a dead body is placed into the ground, sometimes with objects. This is usually accomplished by excavating a pit or trench, placing the deceased and objects in it, and covering it over.

Do bones decompose in a casket?

By 50 years in, your tissues will have liquefied and disappeared, leaving behind mummified skin and tendons. Eventually these too will disintegrate, and after 80 years in that coffin, your bones will crack as the soft collagen inside them deteriorates, leaving nothing but the brittle mineral frame behind.

What happens to a family burial ground when it is abandoned?

However, where the family has ceased to visit the cemetery and they have so long neglected to care for it that the ground is no longer recognizable as a cemetery, the family burial ground has been abandoned. Merely because further interments in a cemetery become impossible, it does not lose its character [vii].

Is it legal to abandon a cemetery?

Such abandonment is a question of fact or a mixed question of law and fact[ii]. However, a cemetery is not abandoned as long as it is kept and preserved as a resting place for the dead with anything to indicate the existence of graves, or as long as it is known and recognized by the public as a graveyard[iii].

What are the laws for discontinuance of cemeteries?

Whenever it becomes necessary, the legislature may by statute direct the discontinuance of a cemetery and the removal of the bodies. It may delegate its power to a municipality, which may enact an ordinance to effect the same result [xiii].

What happens to remains after cremation?

After cremation, every city has different rules for how it handles remains. Los Angeles County stores them for three years and buries them in a mass grave if they go unclaimed. Finding people in potter’s fields can get tricky. Cities don’t usually pay for markers, so potter’s fields are mostly filled with unmarked graves.