A Robertsdale woman whose discovery of human cremated remains and a preserved fetus inside a storage unit made headlines earlier this month says she is now being evicted from the very facility where she made the find, with no explanation given for the sudden move.
Rebekah McManus purchased the contents of an abandoned storage unit at an auction in Mobile and later moved the items into a unit she leased at Highway 59 Storage in Robertsdale. While sorting through the boxes, she discovered the cremated remains of 13 people, along with the remains of a fetus preserved in a small jar.
The items had reportedly once belonged to a funeral home in Mobile that is no longer in business. Storage-unit auctions like the one where McManus bought the lot happen routinely across the Gulf Coast, but the contents of this unit — records, equipment and boxes from a defunct funeral operation — turned an ordinary resale purchase into a discovery that no buyer expects to make.
“He wasn’t full term,” McManus said of the fetus. “He fits in the palm of your hand.”
McManus said she immediately began trying to identify the cremated remains and locate surviving family members so the ashes could be properly returned. Her efforts drew local media attention, and law enforcement became involved after the discovery of the fetal remains, which were turned over to authorities as part of an investigation.
Her stated goal from the first has been reunification: matching the 13 sets of cremated remains to the families who paid for funeral services that were never completed, and seeing the remains delivered to the people entitled to them. That work requires tracing the defunct funeral home’s records, identifying whose ashes were held and how, and navigating the legal and practical questions that arise when a business that held the dead goes under without finishing its obligations.
The eviction letter
According to McManus, the timing of what happened next was hard to ignore. One day after a news report aired describing the discovery and the police investigation into the fetus, she received a letter from the storage company’s corporate office in Connecticut informing her that she needed to vacate her unit by the end of the month.
“She told me she didn’t have a reason,” McManus said of the notice. “It’s not fair for her to evict me like that. I’ve never been late for rent, and never had a breach of contract. I feel like it’s unfair.”
A copy of McManus’s lease agreement does not appear to list any cause for the termination, and she has since consulted an attorney about her options. The end-of-month deadline leaves her in the position of moving the very items at the center of the dispute — boxes containing the cremated remains she is trying to reunite with families — while their status with investigators remains open.
Mobile-area attorney John Beck, who has been advising McManus, said the abrupt nature of the eviction raised red flags from the outset. The question he and other observers are asking is a simple one: why would a storage company with a paying tenant in good standing move to remove her within a day of the property drawing news coverage?
The company’s corporate office has not publicly explained the termination. Without a stated reason, McManus and her attorney are left to argue the case on the lease’s own terms — terms that, as written, do not appear to authorize the removal she received.
How storage auctions work — and how this one went wrong
Self-storage facilities in Alabama operate under state law governing abandoned units. When a tenant stops paying, the operator must follow a notice process and may then sell the contents at auction to recover the debt. Buyers at those auctions take the unit’s contents as-is, sight unseen or viewed only from the doorway, and most purchases yield furniture, boxes of household goods or the occasional collectible. Units connected to a business — especially a regulated business like a funeral home — are a different matter entirely.
The contents McManus bought raise questions that stretch beyond the storage company. Funeral homes are regulated operations, and the remains of the people whose services were paid for are, in law and in practice, the property and responsibility of the families — not inventory. A defunct funeral home’s records are the key to resolving the question, and whatever records were in the unit are now central both to McManus’s reunification effort and to the authorities’ investigation into the fetal remains.
Cremated remains themselves occupy an unusual legal space. Families may keep, bury or scatter them under Alabama law, and there is generally no prohibition on holding the ashes of the dead — which is why McManus’s possession of the 13 sets of remains has not been the issue. The preserved fetus is what drew law enforcement, and it was turned over to authorities, leaving the rest of the unit’s contents in McManus’s care.
What a tenant can do
Storage evictions without stated cause sit in a gray area that depends heavily on the lease’s language. Self-storage leases in most states can be terminated with notice, but the notice period, the grounds required and the tenant’s remedies vary, and a company that moves within a day of adverse news coverage invites the suspicion — and potentially the legal claim — that the eviction is retaliation or an attempt to control a property that has become an embarrassment.
Beck’s red-flags observation frames the practical question for any attorney advising McManus: whether the lease permits termination without cause on the timeline the letter demanded, and if not, what damages and remedies a wrongful eviction would carry. Tenants in McManus’s position typically document everything — the letter, the lease, the payment history she says is spotless — while seeking more time to remove the contents in an orderly way.
The contents themselves complicate the move. A unit full of boxes is a weekend errand; a unit containing the cremated remains of 13 people whose families may be waiting is not something to rush, damage or lose. McManus has said her priority is keeping the remains safe and accounted for until they can be matched and returned — a priority that a hurried end-of-month deadline puts at risk.
The wider problem of unclaimed remains
The case has cast light on a problem the funeral industry rarely discusses publicly: what happens to remains and records when a funeral business closes. State regulators keep licensing and records requirements, but closures, ownership changes and simple disorganization can leave unclaimed cremated remains in limbo for years — stored in back rooms, moved between facilities or, as here, sold as the contents of a rented unit when the bills stop being paid.
Advocates for grieving families have pushed for stronger requirements that funeral homes maintain records through closure and that unclaimed remains be transferred rather than abandoned. When the system works, a successor funeral home or the state’s Board of Funeral Service takes custody and completes the search for families. When it fails, the remains end up exactly where McManus found them — and the burden of reuniting them falls on whoever opens the boxes.
For McManus, the weeks ahead involve two clocks: the storage company’s eviction deadline and the slower, human work of finding 13 families. She has said she intends to keep both moving — and, with an attorney now involved, to make the storage company explain why a paying tenant who uncovered its problem became the one shown the door.
Highway 59 Storage sits along the Robertsdale stretch of U.S. 59, the corridor that runs from Interstate 10 through the center of Baldwin County toward the coast. Storage facilities line that highway the way they do most fast-growing Southern corridors — the county’s population growth creates steady demand for units, and auctions of delinquent ones have become a regular secondary market, advertised by signs and online listings and attended by the same community of buyers every month.
The facility is part of a chain operated from out of state, with its corporate office in Connecticut. That structure explains part of the dynamic McManus describes: a local manager taking direction from a distant corporate office, and a decision like a no-cause eviction arriving as a form letter with a deadline rather than a conversation. It also explains why the letter came the day after the news report — a corporate office watching coverage of its own facility, and acting quickly.
McManus’s purchase at the Mobile auction followed the standard path: she bid on an abandoned unit, won it, and arranged to move its contents to a unit she leased in Robertsdale, where she could sort through them at her own pace. It was during that sorting — weeks after the auction itself — that the boxes from the defunct funeral home gave up what they held.
The discovery’s aftermath has moved on two tracks since. The investigative track belongs to authorities, who took custody of the fetal remains and are working to determine their origin and whether any law was broken. The humanitarian track belongs to McManus, whose stated project — returning 13 people’s ashes to their families — continues even as the storage company’s letter tries to put her belongings on the curb.