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The original was posted on /r/tifu by /u/effietea on 2025-06-16 04:11:52+00:00.
I bought my house about 4 years ago. It’s in a rural area, almost an acre, has a few trees. I don’t really know anything about the people who lived here before me but I know the woman was a widow and raised a few kids there. Anyways, there’s a dead tree that’s been in the middle of the property since I moved in. Since it wasn’t really bothering anything and here were much more pressing things to take care of, I hadn’t worried about it.
I was out doing yard work today and decided it was finally time to get the tree down. I started clearing the area around it and found a bunch of decent sized rocks–like 30-40lbs each. I was really excited because I needed those size rocks for another project I was doing so I cleared the area and moved each rock across the yard to my other project. Once the nice rocks were moved, there were a bunch of pieces of cement–I moved those too. I went back to clearing around the tree and suddenly the ground started smoking. It looked like a cloud of white smoke appearing every time I raked–then I hit a patch of very fine white dirt. At first I thought it was like, chalk to make the dirt easier to work with but it dawned on me that I’d probably disturbed someone’s ashes. Then I remembered the woman I bought the house from was a widow. I’m guessing the previous family scattered ashes under the tree and then put a bunch of rocks on top to keep the ashes from blowing away. And then the tree died and the idiot new owner dug it all up. So I’m probably cursed now, will keep you all updated.
TL;DR: I dug up rocks in my yard and probably disturbed the former owner’s ashes. Yay me.