Read: What happens to a dead body no one can name?

The bodies that remain accounted for, meanwhile, float in and out of state custody. No one is quite sure what to do with them. The United States has no uniform system for managing the unclaimed. There is no federal law outlining what steps to take, and many states do not have clear procedures, leaving individual medical examiners to make decisions about how to best deal with the bodies. As a result, examiners without money to simply bury or cremate the remains are resorting to inventive—and strange—solutions.

Among the unclaimed bodies processed in the United States, some are the unidentified remains from missing-persons cases like the ones Krebs works on, but the majority belong to people who were estranged from their family while they were alive, according to Kenna Quinet, an associate professor at Indiana University—Purdue University Indianapolis who co-wrote one of the only academic articles on unclaimed bodies. In most of these cases, the identity of the victim is known, but coroners or funeral directors can’t contact the next of kin, or the next of kin was reached and either doesn’t want the body or can’t afford to bury it. The unclaimed population skews poor and homeless.

Policy makers have rarely backed programs that would set clear terms for the management of the unclaimed, which has left coroners to cycle through a grab bag of disposition methods once a body enters their custody. Coroners often opt to cremate unclaimed remains to save money—burials cost at least twice as much—but some states don’t allow coroners to request a cremation for fear that it could infringe on the deceased’s religious values. In smaller counties that have fewer unclaimed bodies, bodies are kept in coolers; those that are cremated are left in boxes or in a coroner’s closet.

Los Angeles County has one of the more organized systems. There, unclaimed bodies are cremated if no one comes to retrieve them within a month of death, after which the cremains are kept in the county coroner’s office for another three years, according to the Los Angeles Times. If by that point no family has reached out, the cremains are buried alongside more than a thousand others in an annual interfaith funeral.

But because of a lack of funding, counties cannot always afford to pay funeral directors to cremate or bury unclaimed bodies. Only 14 states devote money to funeral costs for unclaimed bodies, and it rarely covers the actual volume of bodies that coroners and funeral directors face. West Virginia, which has the highest rate of opioid deaths in the United States, has run out of funds two years in a row, the state’s Funeral Directors Association told me. And while some counties and towns provide funds in addition to the state’s contribution, many don’t.