I could tell stories, actually

Skulls for sale: Inside Britain’s macabre trade in human remains.

Not actually about this, but bone-related anecdotes from my former working life.

I have recounted the tale of the plague-pit bones received as part of an accession of archives that we finally managed to dispose to a ~~good~~ appropriate home (and nobody came down with plague, I may add, while they were sitting around various offices in the plastic shopping bag in which they were received).

Archives do tend to contain certain bits and bobs of human detritus but this is usually more along the lines of baby's curls lovingly kept after they were finally cut off (though the toenail is still unforgettable).

I was working in some adjacency to a museum which contained remains - which were ethically deaccessioned/transferred at some point.

I am not quite sure - it was in the very early days when things were seriously informal - whether it was just that a certain elderly pathologist had been given space to examine a collection of skulls quite near my office, the effect was definitely Gothick, under some Old Boys' Act.

On the baby-teeth necklace thing mentioned, I can remember a story I read in some book for children - ?on the shelves at my primary school? - in which a brother and sister were trying to collect their teeth as they lost them, they being at the age when second teeth were coming in, in order to make a tasteful piece of jewellery for Mother Dearest. And it was quite devastating when one of them went to the dentist and the dentist just chucked the extracted tooth into the gurgly-fountain-thing WOE. Other times, wot.

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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

lilysea

There was an article recently

a man in Australia found a human skull fragment in a cow paddock in 1974

and just... used it as a pub ashtray.

It turned out to belong to a young woman murdered in 1972.

He's not a suspect for the murder, and his (racist) excuse for the way he treated the skull fragment is that he thought that it was pre-European Invasion Aboriginal Human Remains.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-10-15/marilyn-wallman-skull-used-as-ashtray-at-pub-inquest-hears/107271522

ranunculus

When the Rock and Roll Museum opened in Cleveland I was on the crew who focused the lights on the displays. It was a fun job, the lighting designer and his wife were friends of mine and took me along as crew. He lit the place in real Rock & Roll fashion, with lots of vivid colors, especially on the walkways. One of the exhibits was from the Steel Wheels tour by the Rolling Stones. The costumes were all tastefully displayed on manikins - sort of. When the museum contracted for the display cases they measured an average human for size. No one counted on platform shoes and spiky hair styles or even hats. OOps.
The manikins were all normal human dimensions. Touring musicians in any era like their drugs, and the Rolling Stones used a bunch. They were all impossibly thin, wore skin tight costumes and tottered around on 6+ inch platform shoes. The dressed up manikins (with their back 1/4 cut off so the clothes fit) were too tall for the cases, often by several inches. So what to do? They took the heads off, heads that were very carefully made up to look like individual band members, and placed them, floating in space, down somewhere above those platform shoes....
Perhaps the individuals who made that bizare decision had been partaking of some of those drugs.

Edited Date: 2026-10-20 03:09 am (UTC)

oursin

Feel that this obliges me to invoke Jeremy Bentham's Head, a recurrent motif around here: comment on this post actually mentions that at one point the real (badly mummified) head was kept in a box at the feet of the auto-icon (which has wax head).

starshipfox

My father owns a human skull that was formerly used for anatomy classes in an art school, and was given to him because the art school no longer wanted it. I have felt pretty weird about having it around, but I'm never sure what the correct thing to do with it is.

Historically bones haven't been treated with a lot of respect, and they still turn up in strange places.

In the case of the Plague-Pit Bones in the Archivists' Office, we at least had some degree of provenance as to where they had come from, i.e. the specific Soho plague pit. So we contacted the London Museum, which has form for dealing with the remains of the dead of London, and they said either we had to go through complicated bureaucratic procedures to have them re-interred; or, they offered to take them off our hands to join the other materials from that excavation in their collections. So one of my colleagues had a nice jaunt out of the office conveying the bones there.

But I'm not sure how one would deal with a random skull. Which there must be quite a lot of around for art studies, being Yorick in Hamlet and Vindice's dead girlfriend in The Revenger's Tragedy, etc.

affreca

When I was a child, my grad student parents had cubes in the basement of the college's Anthropology museum. At some point my father took me and my sister up to see the shrunken heads that were upstairs in the attic storage (and not display). The museum has been closed for 20 years, and I'm curious about if they are still in the attic.

It's Always More Complicated

The wandering thoughts of a wandering hedgehog