This podcast contains graphic descriptions of death and decay.

Please listen with care. Weigh, Land.

Campside Media. It takes 28 gallons of fuel and a spark to burn a human body.

The body lays flat for hours, engulfed in flames, as the crematory furnace reaches

1600 degrees, as hot as molten rock.

Our skin, fat, muscles, and organs vaporize at that temperature, but not our bones.

When the furnace is turned off, only a skeleton remains, laying prone prone like it decided to take a nap.

If you want to fit those bones into an urn, you have to pulverize them in a machine that

looks like a large blender.

Two heavy blades grind them down into pebble-sized pieces of bone.

The ashes are only ashes in name.

They're not soft or powdery to the touch, but coarse like dry sand.

It's an imperfect process, if perfect means every last bit of us ends up in an urn.

Inevitably, some small percentage of our remains falls into literal cracks in the furnace.

The cracks formed over time by the intense heat.

Some of us of our remains

is even mixed with remains of previous cremations.

But when all is said and done,

most of our bones end up in an earn.

And of course, that's if everything goes right. From Wave Land and Campside Media, this is Noble. I'm Sean Raveve.

Episode 1, the Gasman. It's October 2000 and Gerald Cook is driving to a crematory. He's in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, where he grew up, like his parents and their parents.

Like a lot of people from rural Northwest Georgia, his family goes back generations in the area. Gerald knows it as a place where if one person does

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