A gas man out on a routine delivery discovers a corpse on a rural property in the tiny town of Noble, Georgia.
This podcast contains graphic descriptions of death and decay.
Please listen with care.
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 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 urn.
And of course, that's if everything goes right.
From Waveland and Campside Media, this is Noble.
I'm Sean Ravief.
Episode 1 the Gas Man 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.