Someone’s Selling Human Bones on TikTok?
S1: So what happens in my bedroom, Detective, is none of your business. Don’t ever speak to me like that again.
S2: Hi, my name is Madison Malone Kirchherr.
S3: And I’m Rachel Hampton. And you’re listening to I Fly
S2: By in Case You Missed It, Slate’s podcast
S3: about Internet culture.
S2: We have some unfortunate news. Yik Yak, the anonymous college gossip app. It’s back. It’s Yick back.
S3: Oh, God. You just had that. You just had to say it, didn’t you?
S2: I did. After a week of teasing on Twitter that it might be coming back. It might not be the geo located anonymous gossip app popular on college campuses launched back in, let’s say, 2014, 2013. It’s it’s back in town. And it was, to my recollection, a nightmare. If you were a certain age, say, college slash high school the last time it came around.
S3: It was a nightmare, but it was also a dream in that I love gossip and you get was the best for gossip, objectively bad. But I ate
S2: as two people who feasted through Yik Yak round one. We’ll be keeping an eye on it and we’ll keep you posted.
S3: Speaking of eyes, Rachel, you know I’m not out yet. Like, you know, I’m not actually I’m not going to make that joke. Today’s episode is about bone talk, specifically a TikTok who goes by the name at Jon’s Bones. That’s Jonez, and has an online store of the same name that sells, you guessed it, Bones. And no, that’s not a joke. You can really go to Johns Bone Thoughtcrime right now and buy a femur with a light petina for two hundred and sixty dollars. Except you probably shouldn’t do that for a myriad of reasons that we’re going to get into.
S2: But first, we’re going to briefly revisit Bamma, restack my jewelry normal. We got an email from a listener and Bama graduate who pointed out that the school’s chapter of Gamma Phi Beta actually offered a bid to a black woman, Carla Ferguson, in 2003. In our Saturday episode, we said that Alabama didn’t officially desegregate until 2013. In 2013, that was the year the school finally grappled on the record with the racism of Greek life and the year that more than one sorority offered bids to black women, which this listener actually had some more info about, that we also didn’t get into the episode, namely the function of fraternities in the exclusion of black women from sororities,
S3: the listener wrote when news broke that the girl in 2013 was dropped from all sororities, a lot of alumni and active in the sororities represented blamed fraternities for threatening sororities that they would hold no social functions with houses who gave bids to black women as their excuse. They go on to say that I can confirm that when Carla was initiated in 2003, Gamma Phi was shunned by most fraternities and then became the subject of fat phobic stereotypes. For the next decade, as fraternities would openly say, the decision to not have social functions with the House was a racist one.
S2: Our favorite word around these here icymi parts is nuanced. So there’s some more nuance for you and boo to sexism, racism and xenophobia.
S3: Speaking of, we really have to we have to find another transition than that. I know, but speaking of people e-mailing us, so many of y’all emailed D.M. tweeted, sent carrier pigeons about bone togue, basically asking some form of what the fuck is going on this episode. And my therapy bills are for y’all.
S2: Before we get into Jon’s bones, just a little content warning. We’re obviously going to be talking about dead bodies, bones, corpses, and we are going to get into violence and mistreatment of indigenous people and poor folks. So brace yourself. It’s a dark
S3: ride. So today.
S2: Hmm. OK, so enter Johnstone’s, a very Instagram aesthetic purveyor of, you know, buttons. If you want to drop hundreds or maybe even thousands of dollars, John Petrea Ferry will sell you human remains, skulls and tibias and hands and feet. And can you tell I don’t know the names of that many bones and you know, everything on up to full ass articulated skeletons for the
S3: blissfully unaware, articulated as when bones are connected versus disarticulated, which are just floating metatarsals. Oh, only one I know.
S2: So John of John’s Bones is a man who has a room full of spines hung on his walls. This is a man who is obsessed with bones, who says his obsession is purely from a curiosity and educational standpoint. And the man owns a lot of bones.
S3: When Madison says a room full of spines, she’s not exaggerating. It’s literally think of string lights except spines on the wall.
S2: It looks like if you didn’t know it was real human remains from real people who had real lives and thoughts and feelings, you would think this was some sort of garland of fake bones bought at Etsy to be particularly spooky and spooky. It is per the website. John’s Bones is the leading provider of medical human astrology. We are committed to providing thoughtful selections of human bones for the purpose of educating and understanding, which, OK, that sounds a little weird if bones are not your thing, but it is full of nice buzzwords.
S3: John’s Bones has about forty nine followers on Instagram and he is very active on TikTok, where he has twenty one point three million likes on his profile and just under half a million followers. TikTok is a. So where he’s essentially been telling himself and blowing up his business into this week’s viral Internet nightmare,
S2: he’s based out of New York, a relatively young guy who says he studied at Parsons School of Design and is a product manager by trade. He is passionate about bones. Sure. That that seems. Obvious in some sense, but that’s that’s not a substitute for any sort of credentialing, which I’m going to go and assume he has none of, because if he did, they should probably be on the website. He’s not a doctor. He’s not a lawyer, an audiologist, an archaeologist, a cultural anthropologist. He’s just a guy who, according to the About US story, has been obsessed with bone since childhood and is on a mission to destigmatize. That’s a word that gets thrown around a lot. He wants to destigmatize the bone trade,
S3: perhaps the bone trade to stay stigmatised.
S2: I thought so. John Kerry says there are three types of skulls, but that they only work with, quote unquote, medical skulls. That’s the ones they exclusively sell. The other two kinds are tribal skulls, which are of religious or spiritual origins, and then archaeological skulls, which are found skulls.
S4: So the problem with tribal skulls is a lot of these skulls originated outside of America but now reside in the U.S. And these have been exclusively asked to be returned to their original country of origin with ossuary and archaeological skulls. We don’t know what the individual wanted done with the remains. We don’t know if they wanted to be cremated, buried or what the situation is relating to the remains. And this is why we don’t work with those. And lastly, our medical skull. So these are individuals that donated their bodies to medical science and they were made to be displayed, studied and learned from. So this is why personally, we work with those types of skulls. I hope this answers a lot of your questions. And if you have any more, feel free to ask
S3: on the website. John says that they do their best to send them back to the medical community, which is odd, one might say, because I could buy one right now, no questions asked,
S2: but
S3: I feel like the maintaining strict rules about selling only to medical and academic situations probably wouldn’t be good for business, but maybe is good for legal liability. That’s just a guess, though.
S2: So when when John talks about the quote unquote, medical market and medical bones, those are bones that were prepared and treated in such a way that they were meant to be used by hospitals, by medical schools, by doctors specifically. And they’ll have markers from specific companies indicating that’s how and why they were preserved. But what John’s bones is sort of skimming over here, it mentions occasionally, but not with enough detail, is that it doesn’t necessarily mean the person who’s bones, those are gave them truly and freely with the intention of them ending up where they have. And what we’re talking about is the very nefarious business that is and has been the bone trade, a system historically rooted in in classism, in exploiting poverty. In one TikTok, John talks about the places where a lot of the bones they deal come from. And he specifically points out India, noting that a lot of the bones that ended up in the quote unquote, medical market came from people who would be at the bottom of India’s caste system and historically would sell or would have their bodies sold by their families into the so-called medical bone trade for money.
S3: I mean, you mentioned classism, but specifically Western imperialism. A lot of these bones and skeletons that would make their way from India were sold specifically to the UK, to the United States for the purpose of medical education. But it’s an inherently unequal and imperialist structure. There’s actually a really interesting YouTube video by this doctor named Rohan Francis, also known as a mid-life crisis with a great name. Now he has a really interesting video giving a really phenomenal overview of the history of medical skeletons in the West.
S5: In India, processing and disposal of dead bodies was regarded as a low cost job left to some of the poorest members of the community. The promise of some extra cash was a no brainer, quite literally, if a skull had been requested. And soon India, where dead bodies were no short supply, was the source of most of the specimens coming to the UK, America and Europe. This roaring trade continued at a pace. In 1984, India exported 60000 skulls to America alone. How could bone factories revenue exceeded a million US dollars. The ravenous hunger for bones meant that simply scouring city mortuaries for unclaimed bodies would not meet the demand. The bone merchants of Calcutta headed to the cemeteries and funeral pyres ready to pounce as soon as the grieving family had departed.
S3: We’ll link the rest of the video on the show notes. But later in the video, Dr. Francis actually goes to Calcutta and attempts to buy and pretty much succeeds to buy a human skeleton in 2020, signaling that though this kind of trade and export of human bodies is technically illegal, it’s very much still accessible.
S2: Johnson’s websites really oversells, in my opinion, that this is about access and education and destigmatizing bones because, you know, selling USCA. For three thousand dollars does not scream accessibility to me. We were really and truly trying to make bones, human people’s bones, human beings with lives and families and parents accessible. That wouldn’t cost three grand.
S3: Yeah, perhaps we should make them accessible, but also three grand, but also if they were cheaper, I would be like, what the fuck? There are some maybe just don’t put a price on human bones. That’s my you know,
S2: that’s a good take away. Sort of makes your head spin. Also making my head spin. And I can’t believe I’m about to willingly invoke the Tumblr word on this show. Rachel, this is all happened before, right?
S3: It as soon as this came up, as soon as I saw the words bone talk, I was like, no way. Not again, not again.
S2: This is not a high speed download, but it does need to be fast paced.
S3: I’m going explanation. OK, if you were on somewhere 2015, you probably witnessed the great bone debate, which was actually set up by a Facebook post shout out to insert platform discourse. I believe someone was selling bones. They had their heavy air quotes here found at a Louisiana cemetery, and someone then traced the creator, the Facebook post to their Tumblr account, which Lovatt Internet sluff. The Tumblr account is little fucking monster. And the person who traced these two accounts together wrote one of the most iconic blog posts ever exist in Tumblr history. It goes passé. Tumblr user, little fucking monster is stealing human bones from cemeteries in Louisiana. Please don’t let them get away with this and spread the word slash signal boost. Can you imagine being. In high school and looking at this post and thinking, what the fuck, because that’s what was happening with me, I was like, what the fuck? This, of course, then prompted both discourse and confusion. I mostly saw the confusion from people who didn’t even know there was a bone Tumblr, but from which we can pick and Tumblr. Their argument was there are ethically sourced bones for witchcraft. And the color post was just so people knew. Little fucking monster wasn’t an ethical source not to shame people for buying bones. Meanwhile, everyone else was like that guy from Brooklyn, nine nine screaming bones.
S2: And that’s exactly where we all are again today.
S3: There was actually a really funny to talk about this specifically Tumblr. That is basically my entire internal dialogue
S4: I’d enjoy is my human spine collection. And in the U.S., there’s no federal regulation against the owner.
S1: They tried to warn us that some of the veterans, they try to tell us the tick tock is exactly like Tumblr. And now here we are, the great bone debate yet again. Yet again. Are we here? Why didn’t we heed the warning? Why didn’t we warn of history to repeat itself? Why do we forget the of history?
S2: I do think that’s what the voice in your head sounds like now.
S3: 100 percent. 100 percent. It’s perfect. Why? History repeats itself.
S2: OK, so that’s a lot of talk about ownership, bitch. We’ve talked a lot about, quote unquote, owning bones and we’ve talked about how there are people like John Faery saying, but it’s technically legal. We actually reached out to John and he rebuked any comparison to the Tumblr era Bones Thief incident. He said that he finds that person to be abhorrent and an example of all that John’s Bones is trying to combat in the industry. John also expressed, much like in the TikTok we played earlier, that his business is totally legal and handled with care and expertise. We, however, are not experts
S3: who would be an expert in this, like a lawyer, a scientist.
S2: And, oh,
S3: I believe the
S2: official term is additional, specifically, Emily. I think she was one of bones, right?
S3: Yes, she is. My mom loves bones. Unfortunately, we cannot get Emily Nacionale for this show, and she probably wouldn’t have been that helpful. But you know who was Tanya Marshall, a professor at the Wake Forest University of Law who specializes in funeral and cemetery law. And she’ll be with us after the break.
S2: OK, so we are back and like we mentioned, we we found a friend we called an expert. So today we’re talking with Tanya Marsh, a professor of law at Wake Forest University who specializes in funeral and cemetery law professor Marsh Tanya. Welcome.
S6: Thank you so much for having me.
S2: So the first question is a very obvious one. Is it actually legal to straight up own human remains, to own human bones?
S6: OK, so your question includes several questions or several points. So let me start with this stuff. Things we can touch, right, are divided into two categories, legal categories in the United States, property and people. Property is, you know, there’s intellectual property and things you can’t necessarily touch, but anything tangible, that’s all property. But human remains and human organs fall into this weird gray area in between property and people. They have no legal status. So that’s important to note because I can only own property. But then I think the second question is, OK, are there laws that either expressly permit us to possess these human skeletal remains? Right. Or are there laws that expressly prohibit it? And there are a lot of laws that prohibit much of the activity surrounding the possession of skeletal remains.
S2: I feel like I should be taking copious notes right now.
S6: Well, there will be a quiz.
S2: Oh, God. Oh, boy.
S3: OK, going from kind of the abstract of what the law says to the specific of Jon’s bones. Dotcom, when you saw this thing situation that we sent you, what was your immediate thought? And this is obviously a big question, but is this legal?
S6: Is this legal? So I think he makes a statement that there’s no criminal there’s no federal law that prohibits what he’s doing. That’s that’s true. That misses the super important point that federal law has pretty much nothing to say about human remains. It’s state law. And there are a number of states where it is expressly illegal to possess human remains. But but the bigger issue is that it’s illegal to get them in the first place. Right. Where did they come from? Grave robbery is illegal in every state. Abuse of corpse reducing a body down to skeletal remains is illegal in every state. So where did where did these remains come from? Right. The thing is, this is not the only person who’s engaged in this activity. This is commercial activity. These human skeletal remains are in the market. They’ve been in the market for a long time until just a couple of years ago. You could buy them on Etsy, you could buy them on eBay and some of those larger kind of marketplace sites. But now the activity has largely been pushed to Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.
S2: OK, so you mentioned the the the real question is, how does one get these bones in the first place in the United States? And what Jon’s Bones says that it does is that it is locating skeletal remains that were articulated for medical purposes and then, as you said, transacting, as they would say, selling them back into the market.
S6: Yeah, but I mean, those were once living people, right. So what I’m saying is there has never been in the United States a legal process to take a deceased human being and turn them into skeletal remains. So so now we kind of move from the area of legality to the area of ethics.
S3: John’s bones seems to be using the kind of idea of the medical market as a way to get around the morality and ethical quandary of it all. But as you’re saying, medicine has historically been fine with the humanizing people and using their remains in the service of teaching. But that doesn’t erase the question of where the origins of these bones are, right?
S6: I mean, I would be amazed if anyone who’s actually engaged in medical study today outside of the motor museum in Philadelphia, where this is really their niche. Right. But it used to be you had doctors in small towns that had an articulated skeleton in the corner. Well, guess what? They also didn’t have the Internet, right? So they couldn’t, like, look up which bones were located where on a person if they needed that information. So that skeleton is actually of some use to them. We’re a little past that now. So the idea that people that a lot of medical professionals are using these for legitimate reasons I think is a little naive. I mean, these are these are things that some people like to collect. Right. And display. I mean, and I would also say that people who are really flagrantly advertising that they have these collections of bones in their houses, et cetera, are running a risk. There are a lot of criminal laws that a county prosecutor, if they got a hold of some of this stuff and realized that that person was in their jurisdiction. You know, I would advise a client that’s a pretty risky thing to do. The dead in the United States have a right. The dead. Once you are dead, you have a right to be buried and for perpetual undisturbed repose. Right. You can’t go into a cemetery and dig up a grave. And so why should these anonymous bodies that have been reduced to skeletons be afforded so little respect when the main line view of the law is to afford bodies? Great respect. That’s the disconnect that I think the law probably hasn’t grappled with enough. But I think there’s enough there that a county prosecutor could make somebody’s life really difficult if they wanted to.
S3: So from a layman’s perspective, any fully articulated skeleton you see is not really supposed to exist.
S6: There is no legal way for it to exist in the United States. There is no legal way for it to have been created in the United States.
S2: OK, this is just been a fascinating conversation and explaining why half of the terms used on this TikTok from selling to medical market are all lies. They’re fake. They’re not real in the eyes of the law in this country where they’re doing business.
S6: Well, a lot of people do a lot of things.
S2: It’s also funny to me that you brought up this idea that Jon’s Bones is effectively telling on himself on the Internet by making all of this content, because that’s that’s how we and the many people who also tagged us being like, please talk about this. That’s how they found him, because there were two specific instances. One is that he appeared to be selling the skull that Jon’s Bones was claiming was of an indigenous person from Scandinavia. And the second was that he gave this like very chipper history lesson about, well, many of the bones of the medical market came from low caste people in India, as though that made it ethical, as though those people had any sort of real choice in the matter and he didn’t have to do either of those things.
S6: My 15 year old who came in here to tell me about this account a couple of hours before we started, he said there’s an episode in which he says he got a bunch of bones from Iran. I have not seen that one, but I’m like, let’s occupant’s from Iran. And why would you be telling people you got bones from Iran? I don’t know. I mean, like I said, there’s a bunch of people who are in this business. I have not run into a single person in this business who is not completely convinced that everything that they’re doing is legal and ethical. Right. We’re the ones who have weird hang ups that we don’t think it’s cool for everybody to have their shelves lined with skulls or whatever. So but there’s a lot of people convinced that they’re not doing anything wrong. And they are.
S2: This is a strange question, but one I keep thinking about looking at this website is how does one even price a human right? This is not a question I expect you to know the answer to, but just the thought of sitting down and saying, OK, this skull from the quote unquote medical market. Twenty nine hundred dollars.
S6: Yeah, I, I don’t know. Before eBay banned the sale of human skeletal remains, I remember I was sitting in my living room on eBay trying to get the prices so I could tell my funeral and cemetery law class and our cousins were in town and I found a set of human ribs, disconnected unarticulated human ribs at the buy it now price of fourteen fifty. And I almost bought them just so I could go dig a hole in the backyard and bury them. But my cousins were so horrified by the concept of me buying. But I mean just the idea of a set of ribs disconnected from a person at a buy it now price. Right. I mean there’s just something so unbelievably crass about that.
S3: It’s just I mean, it’s just so dehumanizing. It does not acknowledge that these bones were somebody that at some point and that this person had a life and people who loved them. And now you are treating their remains of the core in your home or a hobby.
S6: And did they consent? I mean, is that what they wanted to have done with their bones to be on display? I just maybe and I’m all for people getting to treat their body before and after death. However they want to. If you want to be stuffed and displayed in a museum and the museum wants you have at it. Right. But that’s. About what the person wanted, it’s it’s the lack of consent that is really galling to me technically, if I go into the mat and see a mummy that’s a dead body in New York and I’m supposed to call the coroner, you know, there’s no there’s no law that says you can have a mummy in a museum. So we do a lot of things that the law doesn’t expressly tell us we can do. And the law doesn’t expressly tell us we can’t do right. But there has to be a difference between a mummy and a museum and a guy making TikTok about bones that he keeps in his house.
S2: OK, so Rachel, myself and Professor Marsh will be taking a field trip to the Met, heading over to there. And you take seriously the women calling about the mummified bodies.
S6: I’m on board and meet you there.
S3: All right. Thank you so much for joining us. We’re going to end this interview before the pop quiz actually happens.
S6: Oh, man, I’ve been making questions up. Well, thank you so much for having me. It was a lot of fun talking to you.
S2: Thank you so much. I’m going to hide before you pull out the scantron. That was really fascinating. What a great conversation,
S3: I felt like I should have been taking notes the entire time, had some really good,
S2: nice, nice bone videos you got here. Nice bones would be a real shame if something were to happen to the energy that I respected.
S3: Absolutely, when she said a county prosecutor could have a time with this, I was like they could.
S2: And on that note, if you do for some reason on human skeletal remains,
S3: don’t put it on the Internet. All right, that is the show you’ll be back in your feet on Saturday, so definitely subscribe. It’s free and the best way to never miss an episode or one of Madison’s terrible puns. Please leave a rating and review an Apple podcast. Tell your friends about us. Talk about us at any given opportunity. Send a carrier pigeon to us. In the meantime, while you’re finding a carrier pigeon, you can follow us on Twitter at Icymi. Why am I underscore pod, which is also where you can post your questions like bones and you can also always drop us a note that just says phones to Icymi at Slate Dotcom. Who knows? We might have you on the show.
S2: Icymi is produced by Daniel Schroeder, our supervising producer is Derek John Forrest Wickman and Alegra Frank are our editors, and Gabe Roth is editorial director of Audio Seyou Online
S3: or maybe at the county prosecutor’s office. I haven’t called you, bitch. Oh, I
S2: found this book, and you think
S3: that was an involuntary reaction?
