JACKSON, Wyo.—An aversion to a fancy final resting place landed a couple’s cremated remains at a Jackson Hole thrift store, where the shop owners’ search for relatives led to a mystery spanning from Arizona to New York.
The ashes were discovered last week in a cardboard box at the Forget-Me-Not thrift shop. One of the directors of the shop, Patty Caldwell, thought they were oyster shells.
Upon further inspection, she and her sister, Millie Parks, found a label on the box’s bottom: “This package contains the cremated human remains of: George Edward Challenger, cremated June 5, 1991,” and “Eleanor Margaret Challenger, Aug. 12, 1995.”
It was inside another box, which was underneath a skirted table, Parks said, and could have been there up to two years.
“I’m not sure exactly when they came in,” Parks said. “It’s probably the strangest donation we’ve ever had.”
The box had a clue: “El Encanto Memorial Crematory Inc., Tucson, Ariz.”
John Chapman, the general manager of the crematorium who has worked there for 43 years, said it’s not the first time ashes have turned up in strange places, but “it’s never happened in a thrift store.”
Chapman found a son’s name in his files but wasn’t able to reach him by telephone. He sent a certified letter.
When the Jackson Hole News & Guide () reached the couple’s eldest son, James R. “Jim” Challenger in Garrison, N.Y., on Friday, he pieced together the mystery: “My dad never wanted a fancy urn.”
Upon George Challenger’s death in 1991, Eleanor “picked out a gift box from a closet and kept the ashes there,” he said. When Eleanor died in 1995, “I decided, ‘Why don’t we do the same for her?'” he said.
The two were reunited in the round cardboard box. Jim Challenger left the box with his brother, David, charging him with spreading the ashes near Nambe, N.M., where the couple had spent time.
David Challenger didn’t get around to spreading his parents’ ashes. He and his daughter, Tamara, traveled around the West, running out of gas in Jackson Hole, Jim Challenger said. To scrounge some travel cash, they both got jobs in the valley. Within a year, in about 1999, David returned to New Mexico, but Tamara stayed in Wyoming.
“When they were dividing their possessions, somehow she ended up with the hat box,” Jim Challenger said. “As best as we can tell, during spring cleaning this year, she took a bunch of stuff to the thrift store.”
Jim Challenger called the Forget-Me-Not sisters, who pledged to mail George and Eleanor Challenger back to him in New York. He plans to spread their ashes in the foothills there, near the Hudson River.
George Challenger was a Harvard-educated chemist who worked in the 1950s for the Atomic Energy Commission in Los Alamos, N.M., Jim Challenger said. Eleanor was a secretary there when she met him.
They married in 1951 and had four sons. After George Challenger’s stint working on top-secret atomic bomb projects, he bought a music store in Santa Fe, N.M., and ran it for 20 years. Upon retiring, the couple divided their time between Tucson and Cathedral, Colo., Jim Challenger said.
Both George and Eleanor Challenger enjoyed a good joke, he said. They wouldn’t have minded hanging out in the thrift shop among the clothes, shoes and housewares.
“They would have thought this was funny as all heck,” he said. “They’re laughing in their hat box at this moment. … It’s going to make great dinner table conversation for the next few months.”
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Information from: Jackson Hole News And Guide,
