A Colorado funeral home is under investigation for potentially falsifying death certificates and giving fake cremated ashes to its bereaved customers after nearly 200 decaying corpses were found on its grounds.

Return to Nature Funeral Home in Penrose, Colorado has been accused by at least four families of giving them fake human remains after a bad smell at the funeral home led to the police discovery of 189 rotting human bodies, almost all of which have yet to be identified according to an article by the Associated Press.

Return to Nature reportedly listed third-party crematoriums on death certificates given back to bereaved family members after paying for funeral services. An Associated Press investigation culminated with the owners of said funeral homes vehemently denying having done any recent business with Return to Nature. The AP said they reviewed four death certificates provided to them by families who had used Return To Nature’s cremation services and found that none of the cremations appear to have actually happened, or at the very least did not happen at the locations provided by Return to Nature. 

“My mom’s last wish was for her remains to be scattered in a place she loved, not rotting away in a building,” said Tanya Wilson, who told the Associated Press that she believes the ashes she spread in Hawaii in August were fake. “Any peace that we had, thinking that we honored her wishes, you know, was just completely ripped away from us.”

According to the AP, all the death certificates they reviewed listed a crematorium owed by Wilbert Funeral Services. An attorney for Wilbert Funeral Services, Lisa Epps, said they stopped doing cremations for Return to Nature several months before the deaths listed on the provided death certificates. Epps told the AP that no less than 10 families have contacted them regarding cremations they did not perform. The owner of a second crematorium, Roselawn Funeral Home, also said they were recently contacted by a family regarding a 2021 cremation Roselawn did not perform. 

Wilbert Funeral Services reportedly stopped doing business with Return to Nature because of purported financial woes. According to the AP, public records showed Return to Nature was recently the subject of an eviction notice and had records of unpaid taxes. They also recently had to pay a $21,000 settlement to Wilbert Funeral Services because they allegedly did not pay for what Epps described as “a couple hundred cremations.”

The owners of Return to Nature, Jon and Carrie Hallford, have not yet been arrested but have not responded to any of the AP’s requests for comment. A member of one of the four families AP interviewed, all of whom suspect they were given dry concrete instead of human remains, said he confronted Carie Hallford about his concerns when he was originally handed the urn containing what she thought were the ashes of his mother

Jesse Elliott, brother of Tanya Wilson, told the AP that when Carie Hallford handed him particularly heavy ashes, he asked her about it and Hallford said “Jesse, of course this is your mother.” Elliott and Wilson reportedly took the ashes to another funeral home director who told them the ashes looked very strange.

“I’ve never seen anything that looks like that in the range of what cremated remains would typically expect to look like,” said Amber Flickinger from Platt’s Funeral Home to the AP.

Another potential victim of the alleged falsifying of ashes, Michelle Johnston, told the AP she became suspicious after the news broke about all the bodies found at Return to Nature. She closely inspected her husband’s ashes and found, after applying a bit of water to them, that they turned into what she thought was concrete. Properly cremated remains do not behave this way and will remain in a brittle state, according to Faith Haug, chair of the mortuary science program at Colorado’s Arapahoe Community College.

“I was kind of getting to a place where I wasn’t losing it every day,” Johnston said to the AP. “I don’t know where my husband is.”

Charges against the Hallford’s and Return to Nature Funeral Home had not yet been filed at the time of publication but staggering criminal fines and a maximum two-year prison sentence are on the table, according to the AP. Colorado is known for having particularly lax laws regarding funeral services and cremations, and this is actually not the first time that concrete has potentially been substituted for human remains in Colorado. Another Colorado funeral home director was found guilty of selling body parts and fake ashes and received a 20-year prison sentence for mail fraud in January. 

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A recently published article by The Cool Down (“America’s mainstream climate brand”) detailed how hemp can be “transformed into a material called hempcrete.”

“Hempcrete is a carbon-negative building material made out of hemp, which is increasingly being used in place of concrete. The biocomposite material is created from hemp shiv — the woody core of hemp stalks — and mixed with a binder, such as lime powder, and water,” according to the article. “The result is a tough, adaptable material that can be mixed with varying proportions of hemp and lime depending on its intended purpose.”

The New York Times highlighted that trend in a story published earlier this year, reporting in February that interest in hemp “as a viable substitute for construction material is growing as developers seek greener building options.”

“Hemp can be used in block form, as it was in the building of the sports center, or poured like traditional concrete using hempcrete, a combination of lime, hemp fibers and a chemical binder. Hemp panels can also be used…Hemp is already used in a variety of industrial products, including rope, textiles and biofuel. But hemp construction is hampered by high costs and a supply chain that is not fully formed. And proponents must overcome resistance to a product that is often mistakenly tied to recreational drug use. Advocates say hemp offers many environmental benefits that builders and policymakers seek when creating a carbon-neutral product that is also resistant to fire, mold and weather,” the Times reported.

The write-up by The Cool Down noted that hempcrete offers “multiple benefits for buildings,” particularly as “the building industry hunts for less carbon-intensive materials.”

“For one thing, hemp makes an extraordinary carbon sink when it is growing — research suggests that the crop can capture twice the amount of carbon dioxide that trees can. That carbon dioxide is then locked away in the walls of your hempcrete home for as long as it stays standing,” the article said. “Hemp’s strength at sequestering carbon could be crucial for a building industry that is currently responsible for 39% of global energy-related carbon emissions. Making cement, a key ingredient in concrete, produces vast amounts of air pollution. Manufacturers use fossil fuels to heat limestone and clay in a kiln, releasing an estimated 600 kilograms of CO2 into the atmosphere for every ton of cement made.”

It is just one of a variety of uses for hemp, a hearty and versatile crop that has appeared in manifold consumer products in the United States ever since Congress legalized it for industrial use in 2018. 

A recently published study suggested that hemp-derived topical solutions could trigger hair growth in patients with alopecia. 

The researchers examined a group of about 30 people, evenly divided between men and women, who “used a once-daily topical hemp extract formulation, averaging about 33 mg/day for 6 months.” They said that the “results revealed that all subjects had some regrowth.”

“A hair count of the greatest area of alopecia was carried out before treatment was started and again after 6 months of treatment. To facilitate consistent hair count analysis, a permanent tattoo was placed at the point for maximum hair loss on the scalp,” the researchers explained in detailing their methodology,” the authors of the study said. “The subjects were also asked to qualitatively rate their psychosocial perception of ‘scalp coverage’ improvement after the study was completed. The qualitative scale included ‘very unhappy,’ ‘unhappy,’ ‘neutral,’ ‘happy,’ and ‘very happy.’ The subjects were photographed in a standard manner before and after the study. The photographs were compared for improvements in ‘scalp coverage’ by an independent physician. The qualitative scale included ‘none,’ ‘mild,’ ‘moderate,’ and ‘extensive’ improvement of scalp coverage.”

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