The Law of Halloween Nightmares: Damages for Caskets Bouncing Down the Highway, Burial Blunders, and More Funeral Frights

• Pages: 12-16
• Date: 01 May 2022
• Author: William A. Drennan
• Subject Matter: Derecho Público y Administrativo

May/June 2022

12

Published in Probate & Property, Volume 36, No 3 © 2022 by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved. This information or any portion thereof may not be

copied or disseminated in any form or by any means or stored in an electronic database or retrieval system without the express written consent of the American Bar Association.

The Law of

Halloween

Nightmares

Damages for Caskets

Bouncing Down the

Highway, Burial Blunders,

and More Funeral Frights

By William A. Drennan

Halloween lore abounds with tales of the disrespected

dead seeking retribution. Debate on the existence of

wrathful wraiths is spirited. But surviving family mem-

bers frequently recover money damages in court for their own

mental and emotional distress arising from the indignities vis-

ited upon the dead because of funeral or burial blunders and

bloopers.

A decedent was not only late for his own funeral, but

completely missed it, because of a botched embalming job. Sev-

enty-f‌ive to 100 friends gathered inside for the funeral, but the

decedent was le outside because of the foul stench. The jury

presumably pondered the family’s ignominy from their ances-

tor’s malodorous end.

In 2012, a Michigan family received $80,000 in settlement

aer the casket fell from the hearse and grandma rolled out

onto the road in front of the mourners on the way from the

funeral home to the church. Members of another decedent’s

family nearly fainted when their ancestor’s casket was opened,

revealing that only the top half was embalmed. Elsewhere, a

hearse collided with a railway train, scattering the decedent’s

remains, and nobody from the funeral home bothered to “pick

up the pieces.”

In a rather dramatic protest of low wages, the driver and

William A. Drennan is a professor at Southern Illinois University

Law School and a former editor for the Books & Media Committee

of the Real Property, Probate and Trust Law Section of the ABA.

Getty Images

By William A. Drennan