Beth Greene paid for interment rights at Montlawn Memorial Park in Raleigh back in 2013, expecting to one day rest beside her husband. Instead, in 2024, her family discovered that someone else’s cremated remains had already been buried in one of the spaces she had purchased for her daughters more than a decade earlier.
Greene, along with her daughters Sarah and Lydia, had bought interment rights at the South Wilmington Street cemetery in 2013, according to WRAL. When the family later went to confirm the plot locations, they learned a person had been buried in the space set aside for the Greene daughters — and that a different family actually holds the legal burial rights to the ground the Greenes believed was theirs. Montlawn staff acknowledged the mistake, and the station reports the cemetery blamed faulty maps for the error.
Beth Greene told the station she is disappointed and afraid for other widows who might find themselves in a similar situation. Her daughter Lydia Greene said the family wants accountability to prevent similar incidents from happening to other families. The Greenes filed a 170-page consumer complaint over the matter, and the family says it has not heard from Montlawn staff or ownership since 2025 — with Beth Greene saying the family has not heard from a company or cemetery representative since last summer.
A Pattern That Predates the Greene Family’s Case
The Montlawn mix-up is not an isolated incident at the Raleigh property. The same reporting found that Montlawn buried a person in another family’s purchased plot in a separate case: Winfred Barnes, who died of a heart attack at work on Christmas Eve in 2014, was buried in a disputed plot that another customer had started paying for six months before his burial. Barnes’s body was dug up five years after burial, after the cemetery had sold his interred plot to the other customer, and a court ultimately decided the 2019 dispute by court order, per Montlawn’s own statement to the station…