Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Backyard Burials

Episode Date: November 20, 2019

Time was that you’d bury a deceased relative in your yard; now it’s just weird. But it’s still legal – and if you want to do it, here’s how! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren in Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host. So a while back, we did a podcast, I'm not even sure which one it was, but you said that

your ultimate wish was to be, was it fired from a cannon? Yeah, yeah. Like so, like yesterday's news, I've changed my mind like five times since then. What's your current plan? I actually am still in the process of figuring that out again. I am trying to figure out just how much or what parts of my body might be donated to science. If any, I've kind of been creeped out by a lot of the stories where it's like, we found

ahead in the woods and it was clearly surgically removed and I guess the people who it was donated to didn't need it anymore, so they just dumped it in the woods kind of stuff. Right. And you don't want to one day become a soccer ball for wildlife. But the weird thing is, is like when I read about stuff like what we're about to talk about, I'm like, well, it doesn't matter if this land gets subdivided a hundred years from now and somebody accidentally digs up the grave, who cares? So it's weird, like part of me is very precious about what happens to me after I die and another

part of me is like, it does not matter. Yeah. I'm still in that camp still. I have an alarming amount of or a lack of reverence for a human corpse after they're gone. I know, I've seen you pee on one before. No, I wouldn't do that. But it just, I don't know, man, I just think that once you're gone, you're gone.

So, you know, burn me up, ash me up, spread me around someplace I liked. Cut you into lines and snort you up. I did bury my cat, Laurent, in the backyard, but all of our other animals have been cremated. And Emily didn't love the idea of burying Laurent, but she was like, he's your cat, you do what you want. And I like him being out there. Yeah, I'm with you. So there's really no beef that you're going to get from anybody for burying Laurent in

the backyard. And by the way, RIP Laurent, he was one of the great ones. But if Laurent had been, say, your father or your brother or something like that. Let's go with my brother. Okay. If Laurent had been your brother, if Laurent was Scott, and you tried to bury Scott in your yard, but you would have probably run into some issues with the authorities. At the very least, your neighbors would have been rather upset with you, and they could

have called the cops on you, and the cops would have been like, dig your brother up. And that'd be that. And I'd dig up Laurent and be like, here he is. Right. Pauli will switch a roux. Yeah. So this is definitely an old prairie kind of thing, the idea of burying relatives on your land.

Yeah. And it is still really very much legal in a lot of states, California won't let you, because I guess their real estate is just super valuable in that they said that there are concerns that in the future, like you were talking about, if they subdivide their land to sell parcels and plots that someone might be disturbed. American state, Indiana, and Washington DC is on record as just being like, there's no room. Sorry.

Right. Bury your dead in Virginia. Probably so. Right. So anywhere else, you can, if you own enough land, bury anybody you want to on your land, especially a family member, I think that probably greases the wheels a little more if you're actually a blood relative or relative by marriage of them. But there are some rules that you have to follow no matter what.

But one of the first questions you want to ask yourself before you actually do this is, do I really want to do this? Yeah. Because if you're not planning on spending your dying days on this piece of property and handing it down to your kid who wants that property, there's a good chance you might want to sell that property in the future. And it may affect the resale of that house and property, knowing that there's a dead body buried in what's now a cemetery on your land.

Yeah. Like I go to give my house one day to my daughter and she's like, gross, Uncle Scott and Lorona back there. Right. Exactly. No thanks. And why did you make them share the same grave? Yeah.

It's under the bird bath. It really is. So if you were going to do this, and we'll get into the nitpicky details after the break, but there are definitely going to be nitpicky details. You can't just say, well, it's illegal in my state. Here we go. Give me a shovel. There are rules and regulations depending on the state and the county or the district

that you're in. They're definitely going to be setbacks. Like you can't bury it right next to your property line or next to a stream because it's pretty. It's going to have to be well away from the water table, any kind of water and any kind of building or adjoining properties. Yeah. Which are, I mean, really good things to keep in mind.

You don't want the cadaver fouling up the local water supply basically. You don't. No. So you want to take a break and then come back and get into the real deets? Yeah, let's do it. Okay. Hey, friends. When you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an

Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lisa in Manitoba, who got the idea to Airbnb the backyard guest house over childhood home. Now the extra income helps pay her mortgage. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the

cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64?

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Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, Chuck, so you've donned your overalls and taken your shoes off, got a little thing of grain in your teeth, and you're saying, I'm ready to bury a loved one, just give me one first. Yeah, which I would not do barefoot, by the way. No, you wouldn't? No, no, no.

So there are some states where you can just basically do that. You can show up at the hospital or the hospice or wherever your deceased loved one is and say, hey, I'm a blood relative, here's proof, give me the body. Put the body in your station wagon and take it to your house and bury it, depending on the time frame of when all this happens and, again, where you live. Yeah, I mean, I looked up Georgia just out of curiosity and I found a few little interesting tidbits. One of them is that, and imagine it's like this in a lot of states, embalming is not

a state law. Funeral directors do that because they have the body for a period of time, sometimes before the actual burial or ceremony or whatever you're going to do. So they embalm for that reason, but you're not required by law to embalm a body. And if refrigeration is okay, but even if it's within a really short time span, you may not even have to refrigerate a body. Right, typically in states that allow you to take possession of the body yourself and handle the burial yourself as a family, they usually say about 24 hours.

And actually, I shouldn't even say about, within 24 hours. Yeah. If you bury the body within 24 hours, you don't have to embalm it, you don't have to refrigerate it. You can just, again, go to the hospital, put it in your station wagon, bring it home and bury it. Probably just to be smart, you should dig the hole first, dig the grave first, have it ready.

It's not very cinematic, but sure. No. No. No, it really is another thing about it. Usually dig the hole with the body right there, you know. Right, exactly. And also, if you're going to do this, just a little tip from us, like make sure that somebody can see you and that they see you like nervously looking over your shoulder

a lot. And maybe let's do this at like dusk or nighttime, okay? Right, exactly. And here's the thing, you're also going to have to be, you're also going to have to create an easement for your property and that doesn't mean you have to pave like a concrete path that leads to the grave, but you do have to provide for some sort of future public access to that grave site. Right, exactly.

Like, it has to be on the deed that that is a possibility. That's right. There are some states who say, no, no, no, the funeral directing lobby is far too powerful in our state. You have to hire a funeral director. It varies on a spectrum of just how involved the funeral director has to be. In some states, the funeral director would have to take possession of the body or would at least have to file the death certificate.

In other states, it's like a total free-for-all, like you can handle all that, but you do have to file a death certificate, which from what this article says, I think Dave Ruse actually wrote this on how stuff works. He says that there are no funeral police, but they typically want you to file it within, I think, five days of death, but you just have to file it's one of those things that has to get done. So there's a lot of stuff, a lot of responsibility you take on when a loved one dies and you say, I'm just going to bury them in the backyard.

Yeah, and this was another little thing that I would never have thought about or considered. This is like a county clerk, so they have regular business hours. So if this happens at 5.01 on a Friday, you're not going to be able to file that certificate until Monday, but if you're a funeral director, you can party 24-7 and just file it electronically, which I would guess would be the big advantage of working with a funeral director. Sure. And the best way to do this also, if you're going to handle it yourself, is to be waiting outside of the county clerk's office when they show up the next morning and be covered

in gore and grave dirt waiting to file this death certificate. And they're like, I got to get my coffee first. Have a seat, Monday's. So burying a body, you always hear about, you know, six feet under, that's the sort of rule of thumb. That's actually not the law in most places. Only New Mexico, as far as the United States, where it's legal to bury a body in your backyard, requires six feet.

New Jersey is four. It's astounding to me, but most states are between 18 and 30 inches. But see, that to me makes the most sense, like six feet, you're removing the body from a lot of the aerobic processes that happen in soil, right? True. So all you're doing is prolonging this decomposition, where I guess if you're trying to decompose the body, shallow or grave is a better bet, but you're walking a balancing act here. Like you want it to be shallow enough so that the soil, it's like part of the soil, but

not so shallow that say like coyotes going to come along and be like, oh, yes, and dig it up because it can smell it. Yeah, which we have in our neighborhood. There are coyotes all over Atlanta. They're everywhere. I have buried Loran, I feel like a couple of feet, because I wanted to make sure that he, like the whole idea was that he became part of the land. And quite frankly, I didn't want to dig any further than that, I'm being honest.

That's when I hit that really hard clay pan. But you don't want a smell and apparently 18 to 30 inches will take care of that. That's enough. Yeah. That's what my dad always said. That's right. And then so one of the other things, one of the last things is when you do this, you are by definition, your land becomes a cemetery.

That's pretty cool. Like you don't go in and say, I need to file this little plot of land as a cemetery, just the act of burying somebody legally on your land. That portion of your land becomes a cemetery. So it's protected by all sorts of laws and anti-desecration laws and cemetery laws. And actually these laws go back to Roman times from what I saw. But to do that, you need to file it with your, there's usually like a cemetery or some sort of commission that keeps track of all the graves in a town and has some giant book.

Yeah. That's kind of the coolest thing. It's a giant book, a black book covered in dust with gold leafing all around it. And when you open it, it makes a giant echo-y thud. When you open it, it does. Wow. Yeah. And when you open it in the, you know, like down the middle, let's say.

I got you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then a creaky old finger with a yellow fingernail runs down until it finds the spot where they're going to enter your name in blood. And says, excellent. Well, that's it, huh? Yeah. That's all I got.

It's a, it's an interesting option. That's all I'm going to say. Yeah. Maybe if you're thinking of doing this, look into all the laws first. Agreed. Well, thank you very much for joining us on short stuff. This is the end of this short stuff. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works.

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