History Professor Shawn Graham was recently quoted in a Live Science article regarding the market for human remains. A short excerpt is included below with the full article by Patrick Pester “Desecrated human skulls are being sold on social media in UK’s unregulated bone trade” available online.
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.
Buying and selling human remains isn’t illegal in the U.K., provided that the body parts sold aren’t used for transplants, and Facebook and Instagram are hubs for dealing in the dead. The remains of adults, children, babies and fetuses are all on the market.
Live Science documented 50 sellers across England and Wales that used Facebook and Instagram to offer human remains for sale between 2020 and 2022. While some sellers were offering a skull or bone only in private Facebook groups, many of the sellers offered multiple human remains through public Facebook and Instagram pages associated with antiques, oddities and taxidermy businesses, including physical shops.
Sellers and collectors typically posted pictures of unaltered human remains, unless the bones had been cleaned and prepared for learning or study in the past. However, Live Science also found remains that had been disfigured.
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.”
Live Science found more human skull lamps shared by other sellers. There were also steampunk-inspired skulls filled with cogs, gears and other mechanical parts, as well as skulls that had been made to look like vampires.
***NOTE: The original story was published in Live Science. This news post has been updated to include the correct link to the article. We apologize for any confusion this may have caused.***