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Kalamazoo man finds urn that doesn't belong to him in back seat of his car

Jordan Harris was checking out his car after not driving it for several days. He couldn't believe the unexpected passenger he found: An urn.

KALAMAZOO, Mich. — A Kalamazoo man made an unusual discovery in the back of his car this week, leaving him confused and concerned.

Jordan Harris's car sat in front of his home last Thursday after coming home from the mechanic. He didn't get back into it until Sunday.

"My car is clean all the time, right?" says Harris. "And so I get in the back seat, and I'm just kind of doing a once over."

When he looked below the seat, he couldn't believe the unexpected passenger he found: An urn.

"It was weird," says Harris. "I didn't really know how to react to it." 

Harris called the police and then the mechanic. They had no answers for him.

"I just didn't know where to begin figuring out where it came from," he says.

A trip to a funeral home traced the urn back to a crematorium more than an hour away in Rockford.

"That raises a whole other world of questions, like how did this get all the way here?" wonders Harris.

Wednesday morning, he got his answer when the police called him back. They found the owner.

"He said she's staying in a hotel locally because her house just had a house fire in Kalamazoo," says Harris. "That's when the pieces start to come together."

It immediately clicked with Harris. Two weeks prior, during an ice storm, his neighbor had a fire.

"There was a house fire across the street, powerline came down and started the roof on fire," remembers Harris.

The urn came from across the street, owned by a neighbor he had never met.

"She said, you found my husband's ashes," says Harris, after talking to her on the phone. "I said, well, your husband's ashes actually found me because I don't know how they got in there."

Harris believes the urn may have ended up in his car during a garage sale, lost in the confusion of cars lined up and down the street. In the end, he's just glad it made it home.

"This is just still a mystery, but I don't know," says Harris. "I don't know that we'll ever get to the bottom of it, really."

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