Mail by hearse: Pender County postal carrier explains her morbid ride
ROCKY POINT, NC (WWAY) — On most days, you’ll find Jennifer Chesson cruising Pender County in a 2003 Cadillac hearse.
No, she’s not a funeral director, and she’s not making deliveries to the departed. She’s actually hauling mail.
“I’ll be at mailboxes, and then cars will start going slow past me and then I’ll look over and there’s a phone. Or people come running out of their houses with their phones. I’ve gone through neighborhoods and little kids will do like that little truck horn thing for me to blast my horn as I go past,” Chesson said.
Chesson works for the Rocky Point Post Office, delivering USPS packages five days a week.
But you might be asking, how did she get such a killer ride?
“I had a Jeep Wrangler that I used for the mail route, and someone hit me and they totaled it,” Chesson explained. “So, the next day or two, I said, ‘you know what, I’m going to get a hearse,’ because everything that I could fit in it, and I figured who’s going to hit me in a hearse?”
Certainly a grave departure from the norm; and although some didn’t quite get it, her supervisor actually approved of her hauntingly unique choice.
“He was like, ‘well I think it will be kind of weird but okay.’ So then I went to my Postmaster, who was new to this office, so I wasn’t sure, and I went to her and she was like ‘I think it’s genius,’” Chesson recalled.
Chesson’s ghoulish wheels are a hot topic in the area, and she’s heard all the jokes.
“I get the ‘hey I’m not dead yet!’ I get the ‘do you have a body in there,’” she said.
But for this self-proclaimed “goth kid,” driving a hearse is a dream she’s had since childhood.
“I always wanted a hears, Chesson said. “When I was a kid I was like, ‘I’m going to drive a hearse, that’s the only car I’m ever going to drive.’ Well when I became a grown up, it wasn’t practical. So, time has gone on, I got the Jeep for work, and then it got recked and I was like ‘I can get a hearse.'”
A childhood dream now brought back to life.
