Your Privacy Choices
In 2011 we reported on a company called Holy Smoke, LLC that offers a service wherein a family could have their ashes spread via reloaded ammunition. The company takes in your deceased loved ones ashes, and loads them into approximately 250 shotgun shells, 100 rifle rounds, or 250 handgun rounds. Although this news report did not go through that company, the report is about a family who recently had their loved one loaded into 50 shotshells, and fired off the shells at the trap and skeet range that the loved one favorited.
How a family got the number of 250 shotshells down to 50 must be due to the measurements they used in mixing the gunpowder and ashes. Maybe the rest were cast out in another fashion? I would be concerned about there not being enough powder to propel the shot if there is more ash than powder. Because I’m pretty sure ashes don’t turn into the right amount of gas necessary to propel any sort of shot fired out of a 12 gauge shell. Either way, the deceased was a Veteran of the Vietnam War, and apparently really liked his shotguns. He certainly went out in style that way. I’m sure he had some measure of decision making when it came to his own cremation.
A Vietnam War veteran literally went out with a bang on Saturday, the St. George Spectrum newspaper reports.
The son of Walter “Jim” Hosey of LaVerkin, Utah, loaded a total of 50 shotgun shells with his father’s ashes and fired them off at the Southern Utah Shooting Sports Park in Hurricane with the help of relatives and friends
His son, Clint Hosey, says: “I think he got a kick out of that.”
The newspaper reports that Walter Hosey, who often visited the sports park, died on Jan. 2.
Spilsbury funeral director Mark Heiner called the firing of the shells “a fitting tribute to the way he lived.”
Heiner told the Spectrum that he has read about funeral ashes being loaded into shells for memorial shooting, but it’s the first instance he knows of in Utah.
