Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

This creepy--and sad--story appeared in the “Tucson Citizen,” on March 1, 1985:

The urn sits in the Tucson Police property room. It looks somewhat like a steel ice bucket. Inside are the ashes of a 7-month-old boy who died in June 1982. 

The boy died in Long Island NY. The urn traveled here with the boy’s mother, a woman in her 30s. 

But the mother moved on, leaving the ashes here with people who said they heard humming noises coming from the urn. That’s why the police have it now. 

Sgt. Kirk Simmons and officer Jon M. Heiden said they were flagged down Wednesday in the University area by a man who told them he had an urn with remains in it and he wanted to turn it over to the police. 

He couldn’t take the eerie humming any longer, Heiden said. 

Heiden said the child’s mother used to room with the 22-year-old man on East Adams Street but moved out about two years ago.

She left an old wooden box behind. In it, Heiden said, was the urn, a birth certificate, a newspaper clipping on the boy’s death, and a cremation certificate from a New York mortuary. 

The former roommate said that at first he kept the box with the urn in his child’s room, but the child complained of humming coming from the room. The man’s present girlfriend told Heiden she could hear it too through the walls of the house. 

So Heiden said the man told him he moved the wooden box and urn to a broken-down van in his yard. 

But the humming didn’t stop. 

The man, Heiden said, told him that when he worked on the van the urn hummed. 

“That’s why he wanted to get rid of it.  When it started to hum it bothered him,” Heiden said.

Simmons said the paperwork with the urn showed the remains to be those of Harold Matthew Montgomery. The sergeant said the boy died of natural causes. 

“That’s something that shouldn’t lay around TPD property (and evidence room) forever,” Simmons said, adding he would like to get the remains back to the child’s mother. 

As for the humming, Heiden said that when he drove the urn back to the police station “it was quiet.”

Five days after this story was published, the “Citizen” reported that the urn had been claimed by the baby’s grandfather.