Someone bought human ashes on Facebook Marketplace for $30. The seller said it was their dead mom.

• A creator discovered that someone was selling portions of their mom's ashes on Facebook Marketplace.
• They bought some for $30, and sent it to another creator known as Lauren the Mortician.

Two creators tracked down and bought an urn of human ashes after finding out it was for sale on Facebook Marketplace.

The creators — a man called Mark and a woman called Lauren Eliza — bought a $30 vial of human remains and discussed it in their posts.

Mark, who runs the TikTok account Marketplace Finds, saw the listing offering selling the remains in portions — "2 oz of ash and bone per vial."

The listing said the ashes belonged to the seller's mom, and offered the "backstory" to the listing for $5, saying "I'm not reliving the trauma for free."

Mark, whose account is dedicated to strange things he find on Facebook Marketplace, at first seemed uneasy with the idea, saying: "If I sold my mom's ashes, she'd come back from the dead and smack me upside the head."

Lauren Eliza, better known as Lauren the Mortician on TikTok where she makes content about the unusual ways people can die, saw the video and responded.

"Where's the listing, send me the listing," she said in a TikTok which amassed over 500,000 views. "I want to buy, and I want to pay the extra $5 for the back drama story too. Who sells their momma's ashes on Facebook Marketplace?"

She added that she was "pretty sure" it was legal to sell someone's ashes because "when the crematory shuts off, that's considered final form of disposition."

Eliza appears to be right — in the US there is no federal law against selling human remains, according to Law.com.

"Everything harmful has been burned away anyways," she said. "But it's not every day you see somebody trying to sell their mama in glass vials on Facebook Marketplace."

She concluded: "I'm buying grandma."

Mark and Lauren spoke offline and Mark managed to find the live listing. Mark then bought a portion of the ashes for Lauren and sent it to her.

It arrived on October 5. Lauren posted a TikTok of her opening the package. It arrived in a glass vial, which was stored in a hollowed-out book decorated with skulls and flowers. There was also a letter attached.

As with everything posted on the internet, the original listing, and resulting package of ashes, could be fake. But Lauren seemed convinced, using her expertise as a former mortician.

"It's real," she said in response to someone who inquired about the legitimacy of the ashes, describing the bone "fragments" she could see inside.

Lauren didn't share the backstory, but Mark posted an interview with the seller — a man named Chris Brown.

Brown explained that he didn't have a very good relationship with his mom, and her presence made him "uneasy."

He said he had been thinking about what to do with her remains — "do I just throw her in the trash? Do I just flush her? I don't know, none of those brought me peace."

"I just kind of made a post on Facebook to see how it would go, and it just blew up," he said.

Mark said he had read the backstory, and the short version was that Brown's mom was an "amazing" woman, but ended up being abusive to Brown.

"There was a lot of mental abuse," Brown said, and a lot of "manipulation," and some "physical abuse."

Anyone who wanted to hear more, Mark said, would have to contact Brown directly.

But Brown said he felt a sense of freedom by selling his mom's ashes.

"Everybody always says that you should just forgive the dead because they're dead," he said. "And I very much felt, why does she get a free pass? She never tried to fix things when she was here."