There was a tall (three story) skinny white house across the street from us. Til I was seven Missus Roth lived there all alone. A series of families moved through the house, never staying more than a couple of months. Finally her children (Angie and Leo), decided to put the house up for sale, and came to clean the last of their stuff out of the house.
My mother had grown up with these people, and she went tpo visit while they emptied old closets. Turns out the house had been a real problem with constant complaints from the tenants about bad wiring and poor plumbing; even though the owners swore they had left everything in top shape. They said people complained the house was haunted. Now Missus roth was the most down-to-earth no-nonsense woman in the world, and she would never come back to any place once she had gone. The kids just hoped the word would not get around before the house was sold.
While talking to my mother, Angie started cleaning out the back of the kitchen pantry. She found canning goods her mother had put away during the war. Three very large canning jars were full of something that looked grey with mold. On each jar were three letters and two sets of dates. Leo took one of the jars to the back yard to dump on the refuse pile (people still burned their garbage back then), but all that came out of the jar was a fine powder.
My grandmother came in about that time, and noticed the two remaining jars on the table. She asked what happened to Mr. Roth. No one knew what she was talking about. Turns out the jars were full of the ashes of the kids paternal grandparents and their father's brother. The house had once been theirs. Seems that from early on in their married life; the father's deceased family had resided in fancy brass urns on Missus Roth's mantlepiece. She hated them, and the required weekly cleaning. So when Mr. Roth passed away during the war; the first thing Missus Roth did was to relocate her dead in-laws and donate their urns to the scrap metal drive. But because she was a good woman, she couldn't just toss their remains in the refuse; so she labeled them and shoved them to the back of the cupboard.
Apparently, they were contentto stay there until strangers moved in. Since they had been with the house for almost 100 years, Angie and Leo spread the rest of the ashes around the yard. And no one was ever bothered while living in the house after that.
I know it's a little silly; but since that day, I have not been able to eat anything that came out of a glass canning jar.