Someone Sent Cremated Remains to The Walkmen’s Hamilton Leithauser

He detailed the situation in an epic Twitter thread

Hamilton Leithauser
Hamilton Leithauser performs on the Sutro Stage during the 2017 Outside Lands Music And Arts Festival at Golden Gate Park on August 11, 2017 in San Francisco, California.
FilmMagic/FilmMagic

What does a successful working musician tend to get in their mail every week? You might think the answer would be fan letters or new music or something else connected to their professional pursuits. In the case of Hamilton Leithauser — best known for his work in The Walkmen, as well as an acclaimed solo career — the answer is a little different. In his case, the answer to the question, “What’s in your mail?” is, well, the remains of someone who died.

If you think that’s bizarre, don’t worry — so does Leithauser. In a concise but epic Twitter thread, he described the process of receiving a package addressed only to the “current resident” at his address. (Leithauser has lived there for six years.) Inside were the cremains of someone who died in October of 2017. As for whose remains those were….well, that’s still a mystery.

This is genuinely surreal for any number of reasons, not the least of which is that — assumably — somewhere out there is a family wondering just where the cremains of their loved one are. It certainly doesn’t reflect well on the funeral home Leithauser reached out to in the hopes of getting some resolution to the matter and seems wholly disinterested in actually resolving the matter.

Hopefully someone can get to the bottom of this and reunite these cremains with their intended destination. Which is a genuinely bizarre sentence to write, and yet it’s entirely accurate in this situation.

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