The human remains trade is thriving on Facebook and Instagram
Human skulls are pierced with coffin nails and human bones are turned into Ouija board pieces; almost nothing is off-limits in the U.K.’s thriving online human remains trade, a Live Science investigation has found.
One Instagram seller posted a picture of a human skull with the words “kill me” carved into the side of it. The skull also had coffin nails in it and had been turned into a lamp. The user, named Joseph Plaskitt according to his Instagram profile, posted a picture of the altered skull on Oct. 17, 2021. He told Live Science the skull was a “teaching piece” from Europe and had been carved by “a fellow collector.
Most of the human skulls and bones that Live Science documented in this investigation appeared to be medical or anatomical specimens that could be decades or centuries old. A 2019 editorial published in the BMJ estimated that there are likely thousands of human skeletons from medical education sources in private possession in the U.K., with medical students encouraged to buy bones for their studies in the 20th century.
One popular seller offered black-stained human skulls with iron nails for teeth, human bone wind chimes and Ouija board planchettes , and wallets crafted from human and pig skin. The seller, named Henry Scragg online, promotes his merchandise on Facebook and Instagram with an online store and a physical shop/museum called “Curiosities from the 5th Corner” in Essex, England.
A third skull—shared in a July 11, 2020, post—had injuries that were compatible with blunt force to the head around the time of death. Marquez-Grant noted that blunt-force injury can result from being hit by a blunt weapon, such as a baseball bat, or from slamming against a wide and large surface—for example, by falling from a height and hitting the ground, or when experiencing a vehicle accident. The blunt force, in this case, appears to have been against a large surface.
“If you take human remains and you apply work or skill, or some sort of technical process, to them to create something novel or different, you create an item of property,” Heather Conway, a professor of property law and death studies at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland, told Live Science.
To put that into context, the desecration of a statue or memorial can land a person in prison for up to 10 years under the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, according to the Home Office, another U.K. government department. Live Science found several of what sellers claim are preserved human fetuses for sale online and saw them in pictures of private collections, along with the skeletons of babies and the skeletons of children. These human remains weren’t modified like some adult skulls and bones were, but the 1989 case highlights a legal precedent for modified human remains outraging public decency.
“They weren’t ethically sourced in the first place,” Trish Biers, an osteologist and paleopathologist at the University of Cambridge in England, told Live Science. Biers coordinates a task force at the British Association for Biological Anthropology and Osteoarchaeology that investigates the sale and trade of human remains and the objectification and commodification of the dead and does public outreach.
In 1984, at the peak of the medical supply trade in human remains, India exported about 60,000 skeletons and skulls to Britain and other European countries, America, and Australia for medical students, the Chicago Tribune reported in 1985. The Indian government banned skeleton exports in 1985 after a bone trader was arrested for exporting 1,500 skeletons belonging to children. This sparked fears that children were kidnapped and killed for their bones, investigative reporter Scott Carney reported for WIRED in 2007.
In private ownership, there are no such regulations. Furthermore, the HTA doesn’t inspect shops selling human remains; a statement from the HTA is provided at the bottom of this story. “These were people that were exploited for the medical industry and once we were finished with them, drawing all over them, writing on the bones, cutting them up, treating them like an object, they’ve just been discarded,” Ball said.
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