October 29, 2024 • 49 mins
HAPPY HALLOWEEN, MOTHERFUCKERS! This week, we’re diving deep into the Tumblr bone witch saga, the epic 2015 tale of internet-age graverobbing that all but exploded the internet.
In late 2015, a witch named Ender Darling posted that they’d found some human bones in a New Orleans graveyard, and offered to mail them to other witches in a Facebook group called the Queer Witch Collective. What followed was bedlam – a debate on the ethics of private safe spaces, on bone thievery in New Orleans, and a story that led all the way to court. Spoiler alert: grave robbing isn’t as illegal as you think! Tune in, dear listeners, to the scariest episode of Sixteenth Minute of all time.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
All Zone media.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
Happy Halloween, assholes. It's Jamie Loftus, host of sixteenth Minute here,
and this week's episode is about the thieving of human bones.
This is a crime of the past. Right, we're civilized people.
(00:28):
We're less than a week away from another incredible election
with amazing options.
Speaker 3 (00:35):
We're good now, right.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
No, No, dear listener, bone thieves have not disappeared. They've
evolved with the tools made available to them. You may
think of a nineteenth century grave digger when you think
of a stolen bone. But what if I told you
that bone thieves are.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
All around us at your school, in your neighborhood, on
your phone, your first school is a TikToker? Okay, Ian
we can get rid of the haunted house music for now.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
More specifically, we're talking about a TikToker named John's Bones.
Here's his personal lore as he tells it. When he
was just a child, John pichea fairy, received the skeleton
of a mouse from his father as a gift.
Speaker 4 (01:36):
Okay, instead of taking it from a creepy, dark and
spooky way, I looked at it really with a fascination
and awe, John.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
Told ABC News in twenty twenty two, okay, and by
the time he was twenty one years old, John had
built a TikTok following of nearly half a million people
talking about and showing off his gigantic collection.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
Of human bones.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
He got into the hobby in earnest, when he was
in college at the Parsons School of Art and Design
and the Thailand born Indiana Brad John was all in
on bones after seeing a human skull for sale at
Obscura Antiques and Oddities in Manhattan. According to a Curbed
profile of him from twenty twenty three.
Speaker 4 (02:27):
I was like, is this legal? And they were like, yeah,
it's no problem.
Speaker 3 (02:32):
But is it a problem?
Speaker 2 (02:35):
Turns out it depends on if you're talking about the
law or a given person's values, because what constitutes a
legal transaction of human bones versus what I'd be comfortable
with is pretty significant, it turns out, and John's Bones
is very aware of that, because yes, this is our
(02:57):
Halloween episode. We're having fun, but I want to be clear.
Speaker 3 (03:04):
Woo, let me be clear.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
This episode contains a lot of information about the laws
around bones and bones in America specifically, and different religions
and cultures have different views around what should be done.
With bones, and with death rituals, and with human remains generally.
So there's no prescriptive way to handle death or death rituals.
(03:29):
I mean, listen, my dad's ashes are in this very room.
They're about two feet behind me, and I can't deal
with it. So no one is wrong with the way
that they're handling this issue. It's fucked up for everybody,
and everyone's culture and religion is going to vary. No
one is wrong, that is, except the people we're going
(03:52):
to be talking about today. These people are perhaps the
most wrong anyone has ever been. So who is John
and why does he have so many bones? John's Bones
was born in two thousand and became a bone influencer
before he could legally buy Miller Lyte. And when I
(04:13):
first heard about him and the fact that there was
controversy surrounding this creator who made content around death, I wondered,
did this just stem from people in the West's discomfort
around death in general? Because that's absolutely a thing. Some
of my favorite writers and creators working online are making
material about death. Look no further than one of the
(04:36):
greatest to ever do it, Caitlin Doty aka The Good
Death aka ask A mortician on YouTube. Doty is a
licensed and practicing funeral director and has been working in
cremation since the two thousands, and her work is amazing
and has really moved the needle on how I view
American attitudes on death and death rituals. But everyone's reallylationship
(05:00):
to death is different outside of the fact that it
is coming for all of us.
Speaker 3 (05:05):
But Caitlin Dodie makes educational content about death, and while.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
She is a funeral director, there's nothing that she's doing
that is like out of line or illegal for American
funerals for instance, and maybe especially she is not selling bones.
So John's Bones a key term you're going to need
(05:29):
to know for this week's episode is osteology basically skeleton studies,
and the term John's Bones most closely associated with. In
spite of not having any overt credentials that we know
of outside of having worked with bones in college, his
TikTok launched just short of the COVID lockdown, and he
saw a lot of growth in the account alongside the
(05:53):
pandemic era growth of TikTok itself. And make no mistake,
John's Bones had been posting bones to Maine since twenty nineteen.
But as he gets more popular, he starts to do
these fluffy, kind of unsourced TikTok history videos that you've
seen before, but of course there's bones in them. Here's
(06:15):
an early post.
Speaker 5 (06:16):
Just wanted to showcase something that I bet you guys
probably haven't seen before. This is one of the largest
human spine collections out there.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
With deepest regrets, I do need to describe this for you.
John is panning over at least fifty human spines, just
spines on the floor, without context. Where did they come from?
Why does he have them? And look, I'm on board
with all of us being skin bags that need to
accept our own mortality, but this content just feels very
(06:49):
removed from humanity, I guess. But as John's Bones posts
grew in popularity, some viewers became uncomfortable with the casual
of his work, with the unclearness of how he had
acquired these damn bones, particularly when he started selling bones
after graduating college. John says that the bones he sells
(07:14):
on John's Bones is mainly used for medical research, but
that's not necessarily true. He does sell a lot to
medical institutions, by his account, but he also sells to
anyone in states where it's legal. And I'm not kidding
when I say this. On his website right now you
can buy a quote adolescent medical skull with several cuts, unquote.
Speaker 3 (07:39):
For nearly four thousand dollars.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
And I can't help but think, what whose bones are these?
John's bones? Because this is the thing with bones. If
you're looking at bones in a museum, in a medical setting,
whatever it is, chances are you were probably looking at
the bones of a poor person, and very likely a
(08:05):
non white or indigenous person. There's no guarantee that the
family of this skeleton gave their consent for it to
be used in this way, or even knows that ever happened.
For all intents and purposes, people who were disproportionately exploited
in life are often further exploited in death in this way.
(08:27):
And yes, there is a separate conversation about how it's
increasingly popular to donate one's body to science, but as
we'll find out, bodies voluntarily given to science are quite
open to exploitation as well. And prior to it being
more common to donate your body, the best way to
have bodies to study was you guessed it grave robbing,
(08:51):
and whose graves are easiest to rob those who do
not have tombs or coffins, which means we're already playing
a class game. Poor people who can't afford a deep
ground burial or cremation are more likely to have their
bone surfaced or if you're a grave robber, and I
would be fascinated to know if any.
Speaker 3 (09:14):
Of you are grave robbers.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
But the bodies of people who can't afford traditional funeral
routes are much more easily disinterred. So when you're looking
at a publicly displayed skeleton or any human remains, it's
not a question of what is that, it's who is
that and how did.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
They get here.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in particular, there was
a high demand in the skeleton trade as medicine and
science expanded quickly, leaving plenty of bad actors resorting to
grave robbing, swiping unclaimed bodies from local morgues, and even
looking to prisons where people had been recently executed. At present,
(09:58):
the most commonplace for bones to be sourced from is India, which.
Speaker 3 (10:02):
Had a multimillion.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
Dollar trade before the practice of selling bones was banned
in nineteen eighty six and what ended this industry while
fifteen hundred skeletons of children were being illegally traded and sold,
which led to a directive from the Indian Supreme Court
to halt all sales permanently. But skeletons from this gruesome
(10:27):
boom of time are now all but impossible to trace
to specific people, partially because of poor documentation and a
lot because of bone bleaching. Much of these samples identifiable
DNA has been destroyed, and this has been a completely
intentional practice for a very long time. Companies who sold
(10:48):
these skeletons primarily targeted the vulnerable before destroying the skeleton
of any defining features, slapping a label on it, and
selling it as a product. And this is, as with
many seemingly unrelated topics on this show, an extension of
colonialism more than anything else. Scott Carney expands on this
(11:10):
in his book The Red Market, explaining how demand for
studiable bodies in English medicine caused the colonizing country to
start sourcing bodies from the same places they had been
colonizing Since the eighteen fifties. Calcutta, India was the global
center of the bone trade and primarily sold the bones
(11:32):
of their own disenfranchised people to the UK and the US,
quite literally selling the brutal consequences of colonialism back to
the colonizer. According to a twenty twenty two profile of
John's Bones, who sources much of his collection to the
companies that comprised these nineteenth century Western businesses, the nineteen
(11:56):
forty three Bengal famine.
Speaker 3 (11:58):
Was a boone for the bone industry.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
Because it had killed millions of poor Indian people who
could not afford a proper funeral or had lost everyone
in their family and had no one to advocate for them.
So the degree to which the bone trade is connected
to class, to race, and to colonialism really can't be overstated,
(12:22):
and there should absolutely be serious criticism for people unwilling
to acknowledge this kind of historic brutality while actively profiting
from it. And John's Bones doesn't really have a response
to this other than well, it's for education and it's
technically legal. This is a post from early twenty twenty.
Speaker 5 (12:43):
Hi everyone, I'm gonna talk a little bit about what
I do because it always gets asked in the commons,
So here I go. So Hi, my name is John,
John I work with John's Bowen. That's my little business
I started there you go and Chunky Boys a mascot.
But essentially, the US is complete legal and there's no
federal regulation against the ownership, possession, or selling of human
(13:06):
blones and humanosity ology.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
I am so sorry about that fucking vocal filter. It's
just sorry. I hate John's Bones. There I said, it
feels good. But this explanation that these sales are for
education and to possibly give stolen bones a second life
obviously falls apart under scrutiny. It's why Sam Redman, author
(13:29):
of the book Bone Rooms, pulled The Guardian in a
profile of John's Bones.
Speaker 4 (13:33):
That there's no ethical way to buy and sell human
remains because there is a clear link between the legacy
of this and racism, and scientific racism and colonialism.
Speaker 2 (13:46):
John's Bones admitted in twenty twenty one that his collection
was largely sourced from India, Russia and China, which most
likely means that the bones belonged to poor people and prisoners.
And that's not to say that America is any more
advanced when it comes to bone trading. As we'll get
into throughout this episode, laws around human remains are very
(14:09):
state to state and have not really been updated to
reflect inflation or advances in technology. As I'm recording this,
there are forty two states where it's completely legal to
sell human remains at your weird store. Selling human remains
on Etsy was only discontinued in twenty twelve and on
(14:30):
eBay in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 3 (14:32):
When asked the question.
Speaker 6 (14:34):
Where do you source your human remains from and is
it ethical? Do you believe selling human remains for profit
is ethical?
Speaker 3 (14:41):
John replied, well.
Speaker 4 (14:43):
The problem with these bones is that, regardless if you
agree with the means of which they entered the public market,
they exist. It is currently impossible to repatriate them due
to the cleaning processes they underwent when they first were
put on sale, and they can be destroyed because improper
disposal of human remains is a crime that leaves an
(15:05):
impossible object that has no easy solution for being dealt with.
Our solution is to re enter them into the educational field.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
For profit, and not always for education, because while medical
institutions seem to be the primary buyers of John's bones, again,
he will sell to anyone. To quote Scott Karney in
that Guardian piece.
Speaker 4 (15:31):
When we turn a human into a commodity. That's where
you start getting enormous ethical lapses, and John is on
the wrong side of that equation.
Speaker 2 (15:41):
Woo Okay, you're thinking, Jamie, a TikTok bone sale drama
is wild, but surely an anomaly. Right, It's the result
of a misguided young person with too many bones, not
an issue that would eke out into a full on
institutional crisis. Right right, Well, what would you do if
(16:08):
I told you there is a current in litigation bone
drama at Harvard University? Does that sentence sound like a
Lana del Rey album? Sure it does, but it's happening.
Speaker 3 (16:23):
Wait, let's turn on some Laanna del Rey style music.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
What would you do if I told you there is
a current in litigation bone drama at Harvard University. Sorry,
I just had to try it, But it is true
that happened. And unlike John's bones, the sale of human
remains was done extremely under the table here, very illegally,
(16:49):
because there is no world where the Harvard Medical School
is supposed to be doing anything other with their collection
than studying it. And for all of the reasons we
talked about, this does not mean, by a long stretch
that Harvard Medical School has their hands clean just because
they're not selling the human remains in their possession. The
(17:10):
bones on display and in possession of universities and museums
are very often directly tied to colonialism and white supremacy.
But for the sake of this scandal, Cedric Lodge, the
manager of the Harvard Medical School morgue, and six others
were indicted last year after over half a decade of
(17:32):
poaching from the university's vast collection of human remains and
selling them over state lines. Lodge was said to allow
buyers to enter the morgue and tell him what body
parts they were interested in buying, so he could then
privately steal them and sell and mail them from his
house in New Hampshire. And maybe most shockingly of all,
(17:55):
the maximum prison sentence that they face for this is
only fifteen years, in spite of the fact that, unlike
many of John's bones, some of these stolen body parts
from Harvard were very identifiable via donors who had given
their bodies to science just in the last couple of years.
To quote US attorney Gerard Kam.
Speaker 4 (18:17):
It is particularly egregious that so many of the victims
here volunteered to allow their remains to be used to
educate medical professionals and advance the interests of science and healing.
For them and their families to be taken advantage of
in the name of profit is appalling.
Speaker 2 (18:36):
Cedric Lodge netted around forty thousand dollars from the stolen remains,
and if you needed any more proof of how modern
grave robbing is now evidence that proved his guilts included
PayPal transactions with descriptions like head number seven and brains
(18:56):
And fascinatingly, both of these bone dramas drew comparison in
the media to what is considered to be the original
online bone theft drama, one that it appears John Bones
learned a lot from not because he thinks it's unethical
to sell human remains online, nor did Cedric Lodge, but
to do it smarter because the most famous example of
(19:20):
human remains traded online put a witch in jail, the
tumblr Bone Witch and bone Gazi. Your sixteenth minute starts now.
(19:51):
S Welcome to sixteenth Minute, the podcast where we look
(20:37):
at the internet's main characters of the day, look at
how their moment affected them and what their moment meant
for the Internet and US, and today we're headed to
the graveyard for a revisit of the infamous Humbler bone
Witch story. And not to disappoint, but there is not
(21:01):
an interview with the bone witch themselves here, and the
reason that is will become clear. What we do have
are interviews with a practicing non bone stealing which a
graveyard preservationist in New Orleans and the only legal expert
(21:22):
on human remains in the United States. There should be
more than one, in my opinion. Now, as we've established,
grave robbers have been around forever. It's one of the
world's oldest professions and has developed alongside technology. It can
(21:44):
look like a lot of things. John's Bones is skirting
legalities to display disenfranchised people's bodies, as are most museums.
People like Cedric Lodge are thriving by pilfering already ethically
questionable collections. And you have things like the underground organ
trade that's operated on and offline for years. But today's
(22:07):
story is a little bit of old and a little
bit of new, an old school grave robbery whose morality
play acts out entirely online. I am genuinely very excited
to talk about this story. It is a classic of
the Internet, and both stories I told you about, particularly
the John's Bones story, mentions the Tumblr bone witch story
(22:30):
as the seminal social media grave robbing saga.
Speaker 3 (22:35):
What a distinction.
Speaker 2 (22:36):
Back when John's Bones was going through that controversy in
twenty twenty one, a TikTok user named no Me named
Davis posted this.
Speaker 5 (22:45):
I'd enjoy is my human spine collection and in the US,
there's no federal regulation to get the owner.
Speaker 7 (22:50):
They tried to warn us, the Tumbla veterans. They tried
to tell us that TikTok 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?
(23:12):
Why didn't we need?
Speaker 2 (23:15):
The comparisons were being made to the point where John's
Bones himself felt the need to respond, telling ABC News
in twenty twenty one.
Speaker 4 (23:25):
The Tumblr bone thief is an example of what I
abhor and try to combat within the industry. We work
to preserve osteology so that future generations can learn from it.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
Sounds legit to me, John's Bones, but this does speak
to the lasting impact of this incident, which was eventually
referred to by many as Bone Gazie the Place, New Orleans, Louisiana.
The tumblr Bone witch story is a meme unto itself,
(23:57):
but like every story on sixteenth Minute, it very real
people living and dead, and it draws in a lot
of social media patterns that have repeated in the years since.
So come with me if you dare to. December twenty fifteen,
(24:18):
David Bowie makes his final public appearance before his death.
In early twenty sixteen, attending the debut of his musical Lazarus,
Donald Trump declares that if elected president, he will place
a Muslim band across the US and in New Orleans, Louisiana,
a practicing twenty something which named Endre Darling, who uses
(24:42):
they then pronouns. While you'll find that coverage of this
story often gets it wrong, is caught advertising the fact
that they are mailing human remains over state lines without
permission for witchcraft purposes. And let's get this out of
the way. I'm pro witchcraft. I've lived in LA for
(25:02):
almost a decade. Okay, i am pro witch and this
looks really bad for ender Darling. Here's what happened, and
I want to give a huge shout out to Diana
Tourge advice for writing me definitive timeline of this story
all the way back in twenty sixteen. On December eighth,
(25:22):
twenty fifteen, ender who it becomes relevant is white passing
but is not white posted to a Facebook group called
Queer Witch Collective. The description of the two thousand plus
member group was as follows.
Speaker 6 (25:39):
We are a collective of queer witches, diverse in age, nationality, gender, race,
class ability, and more. To strive for a better community
for everyone, we must acknowledge how privileges and oppression intersect
across these labels.
Speaker 2 (25:51):
And Darling's post said the following content warning graves, phone
hunting comment if they're added, worn need it. About twenty
minutes from my house in New Orleans is what we
call the poor man's graveyard. Most graveyards around here are
full of above ground graves because we live in a
(26:11):
fish bowl. But there happens to be a graveyard where
it's all in ground graves for those of us who
are too poor to afford above ground burial. When it rains,
of course, bones wash up. The older the grave, the
more you find you can literally walk around and see
Femur's teeth jaws, skull caps, et cetera, et cetera. This
(26:32):
is where I go to find my human bones for
cursework and general spells that require bone. I find human
bones are easier for work with for me than animal bone.
I can relate and work with the energy they carry,
if that makes any sense. Anyways, I wanted to see
if I started selling basically cover shipping to wherever you
happen to be, if people would be interested. I know
(26:54):
human bones aren't easy to come by, and I usually
have leftovers. I only go once a month or when
it rains here. The post is polarizing, but is received
positively in the group.
Speaker 3 (27:07):
At first.
Speaker 2 (27:09):
Some commenters just say yes, I'm interested. Others say this
sounds cool, but be careful of state laws. And Andrew
Darling responds to these concerns pretty quickly, saying I looked
it up and it's all good. I wouldn't even be
offering if there was any chance someone would get in
trouble me.
Speaker 3 (27:27):
Lol. Okay, put a pin in that.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
And others asked if Darling was making offerings to those
they were taking from, which is a common practice among witches,
and they respond that they bring honey and flowers and
that me and my goddess have a pact. She provides
the bones if I only take what the Earth gives
and I leave offerings.
Speaker 3 (27:50):
Okay, put a pin in that.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
But it's not long before they start to get pushed
back from people within the group who insist that the
bones should be left in peace. Er Darling gets defensive
and is supported by the mods of the Queer Witch Collective.
They say, do not shame me for my work. Now.
(28:14):
I was confused at first as to why the moderators
were so supportive of Darling in this case, but it's
connected to a pretty common rule in online communities, that
being don't shame the participants. Darling explicitly mentions that shaming
magical practices is not allowed in this group, and that
(28:36):
was true at the time. It's an extension of creating
safe spaces, and I've seen it as a commonly enacted
rule anywhere from private queer spaces to women's spaces to
in an outlier example, a right wing hate group that's
a part of MENSA. The group was founded by millennials
who per tourges piece were invested in the idea of
(29:00):
decolonizing magic and not forcing a white or western lens
onto a very diverse group's practice, and this is a
good idea. Safe spaces are necessary, but complicated because in
this case, Darling was asking to be kept safe from
(29:20):
criticism of grave wropping, and that did not make other
witches in the group feel particularly safe. So things spiral
out of control pretty quickly from here. Many of Darling's
loudest critics were people of color within the group, pointing
out that the area singled out in the post was
(29:41):
a burial site for primarily poor black residents of New
Orleans spanning hundreds of years, and based on their location,
most people guessed Darling was frequenting a place called Holt Cemetery,
although they initially deny this. One of their critics commented,
you were implementing white supremacist and colonialist tactics to do
(30:03):
your bidding, like y'all are actually stealing bones. But at
this point the controversy is still only within this Facebook group.
But when black witches in particular begin to speak up,
Darling and the moderators seem to realize that they need
to change course, and they attempt to the same moderator
who defended Darling hours before says.
Speaker 6 (30:27):
I support people discussing the use and distribution of racialized
people's bones, especially the bones of black people, which very
well may be in this graveyard being given to non
black or especially white people.
Speaker 2 (30:40):
Darling echoed this feeling, but for many critics they were
done with the Queer Witch Collective at this point, with
the general feeling being some safe space. This fucking was
and these moderators, who were white don't really know how
to handle the situation. A founder of the group, a
(31:00):
non binary trans which said the following about why they
initially defended Darling.
Speaker 6 (31:05):
In the group, there is an immense amount of shaming
directed at African diaspar religions by white witches, whether it
be about animal sacrifice, hexing, cursing, jinxying, etc. All I
saw was a person of color being attacked for their practice,
even if it's something I did not understand or would
never do myself.
Speaker 2 (31:25):
And this is a genuinely, very complicated issue. I won't
pretend it's not. There are spiritual practices and rituals that
involve human remains and might technically violate the law. In
the eight States where things are more restrictive, which includes Louisiana,
It's impossible to give the full scope of these spiritual
(31:48):
practices here, but it is true that different shades of necromancy,
or the practice of communicating with the dead, has included
the use of remains across cultures historically. Few months before
bone Gazi, there was a reckoning among whodoo practitioners, a
spiritual practice brought from enslaved Africans forced to come to America,
(32:09):
and one that remained a predominantly Black practice while mixing
in elements of Christianity as time went on. In the
fall of twenty fifteen, Vice reported on the appropriation of
who do buy white witches? This was an active and
necessary conversation, and Darling invokes these cultures in their next defense,
(32:30):
singling out practices traditionally done by non white witches. However,
as many witches, including Darling's critics and my witchy guest
today can attest to, there isn't really a known practice
that encourages engaging with the human remains of a total stranger,
because the people who Darling was pulling bones from, by
(32:53):
their own admission, were completely anonymous. Nonetheless, it takes over
a week for this drama to leak outside the private
Facebook group to where, well, where else was there going
to be bone drama? In twenty fifteen, it was tumblry.
Speaker 3 (33:28):
For those of you too.
Speaker 2 (33:29):
Old, too young, or too protective of your peace of mind.
Tumblr is a still technically active blog site that peaked
in popularity in the mid twenty tens and was pretty
unique as far as social media sites went. Humbler thrived
on images on tightly knit, niche fan communities, on parasocial
(33:50):
relationships largely done with anonymity, and we could talk about
Tumblr all day. But like any online community dominated by young,
anonymous people, the highs of Tumblr were fun and connective,
and the lows could get dangerous. It was a chaotic
place dominated by millennial women and queer people, making it
(34:14):
a very likely place for the ender darling drama to
end up with. A screenshot posted to user Hastel Pruveer's
tumbler on December seventeenth, the post.
Speaker 6 (34:25):
Reads psa 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.
Speaker 2 (34:38):
The post got immediate traction, around thirty thousand reblogs and
a fair amount of skepticism, with other users asking for
proof that this had actually happened. But in pretty short order,
the original screenshot surfaced, and it's here that Ender Darling
saga hit the internet in earnest. Not only was a confirmed,
(35:01):
Darling's own Tumblr, Little Fuckin' Monster was exposed too, and
the Internet went wild. Bone Gazi had begun.
Speaker 4 (35:16):
Today's big news Twitter, Martin Screli, Facebook, star Wars, Tumblr
calling out a witch for actually stealing human bones from
a cemetery.
Speaker 6 (35:30):
We have reached peak Tumbler. A call out post was
made for someone literally stealing human bones and offering to
sell them, with attached commentary about racism and classism, a
your favor is Problematic esque discussion made in lieu of
contacting the authorities. The post offering the bones had content
warnings at the top. It is the end of twenty
(35:52):
fifteen and Tumblr has become what it was always destined
to be.
Speaker 4 (35:57):
Me on a date, So what do you think about
real and dark witchcraft my date? It's okay, I guess
pretty scary though I like that glittery honey wicca ooh
ooh shit more me shoving my stolen human bones into
my purse. Shit, I gotta go.
Speaker 2 (36:16):
And this is super goofy, although note the early what
is this woke culture bullshit and the shout out to
your favorite problematic Tumbler for an episode in a few
weeks foreshadowing the back half of twenty fifteen was considered
to be pretty dry in terms of big Internet stories
(36:37):
after an influx of viral stories like.
Speaker 3 (36:40):
The dress Ever Heard of It?
Speaker 2 (36:41):
Check out that episode of sixteenth minute took place earlier
that year. The tone of this discussion also said a
lot about how Tumbler was perceived at this time too,
a bunch of young people who were deeply entrenched in
discussions around decolonization and identity politics but were often thought
of as being naive and their approach to these pretty
(37:02):
massive issues and bone Gazi was mocked quite a bit
because to the average Internet user this seemed absurd and
any witchcraft practice, particularly one that violated state law, seemed
deserving of being mocked. But inside the witch in community,
this incident really strained relationships and mutually held values, and
(37:27):
part of that is because Darling themselves continued to double
down on Tumblr once that call up post became popular.
This post is long, So I'm just going to share
some highlights.
Speaker 8 (37:40):
Long story short. A post that was posted in a
queer witch collective where cell is understood to mean cover shipping,
especially when I made that clear and curse is understood
to mean any spell you can cast on another physical
person was screenshot. Just my post, not the massive bread
that fucking followed and removed from the group where it
(38:01):
had contacts and posted. What has followed has been extremely racist,
especially towards those who still practice indigenous craft. Physical harm
has been threatened, including towards my child. Any who I
made a choice in what I thought was a safe
place for POC witch is especially POC which is who
practice indigenous dark or otherwise not wicken fluffy magic to
(38:23):
post something offering the little bits of bone I had
sitting on my altar to other POC, which is who
might use human bones in their practice. Somehow this blew
up into me digging out fucking bones. I'm not, I repeat,
I am not digging up bodies or bones. I've also
been heavily shamed for my indigenous practices. Here's the thing,
(38:45):
a bunch of focks. Magic is dark, magic is bloody.
Magic is scary magic isn't just fucking white light, fairy
dust bowls of honey on your damn altar. You can
all stop touting the threefold rule or wicked read or
karma thing that should apply to only those who believe
in it. Oh fucking stop. I'm not wicking, I'm not fluffy.
(39:07):
I work with death and bones, curses, in hexes, the dark,
and the things not for the feint of heart, and
you ain't about to shame me for it. Fucking y'all
want to pretend that I'm not in New Orleans where
I have watched black voodoo priests break into crips and
steal random full bodies. Y'all want to sit there and
pretend that gravekeepers aren't actually selling bodies or bones to
(39:27):
hospitals and colleges. Yeah, yeah, they have legal ways to
do it. But if you honestly think people aren't being
paid to bury empty coffins, you're way more naive than
I need to point out. Y'all want to be mad
at the kid who saves some phones from being crushed,
because fuck getting the actual story.
Speaker 2 (39:43):
The post continues from here, and it was made the
same day that that call up post got traction and
it's here that we learn a little more about Ender Darling.
They're saying that they have been dockxed and that they
have a child, meaning that the call up post has
put them potentially in harm's way. And again there's a
(40:04):
split in how the Queer Witch Collective and now you know,
all of Tumblr are reacting to this news. Most are
not condoning doxing, and especially not to putting Darling's child
at risk, But some people are baffled that Darling appears
to be further confirming that they did indeed take bones
(40:24):
from a local graveyard, while others still point out that,
as Darling says, they're a person of color practicing indigenous
magic and it's not their place to judge. And so,
while the Queer Witch Collective's mission statement was well intentioned.
Speaker 6 (40:40):
To strive for a better community for everyone, we must
acknowledge how privileges and depression intersect across these labels.
Speaker 2 (40:48):
This became difficult to enforce after the Tumblr post exposed
the name of the group itself after a full week
of Bone discourse had estranged their moderators from Vocal, which
is within the group. When it became clear that Darling's
most vocal critics were queer black witches. Within the Queer
Witch Collective, the whole shield of no shaming suddenly held
(41:12):
significantly less power and started to seem more like suppression.
One commenter said, there is a difference between shaming and
questioning possible ethics and possible oppressive practices. Why are we
silencing a black witch? The white moderators of the group
apologize for mishandling the situation, but the trust within QWC
(41:36):
was far too thoroughly broken by this time. The founder
of the group eventually ended up leaving, but the new
moderator wasn't able to revive it after both suggesting white
Witches stop posting altogether for a period of time to
allow people of color to reclaim the space, and when
that didn't work, purging the group altogether so that people
(41:57):
would have to rejoin if they were interested in starting fresh.
But most were not interested, and a year later the
group had gone from two thousand to only seventy seven members.
According to Weiss, bone Gazi had decimated the community. Things
wouldn't be that simple for Ender Darling. In the aftermath
(42:20):
of the Bone Fevery memes, there was originally some confusion
between Facebook and Tumblr whether anyone had reported Darling to
the authorities in New Orleans, but it became clear eventually
that someone had To this day, it's not known whether
this was initiated by a member of the Queer Witch
Collective or someone who learned through the viral moment, but
(42:42):
Ender Darling wouldn't be around to watch the fallout of
the QWC because they were still in the process of
defending themselves against the accusation that what they'd done was
illegal or unethical. Long after they left the Facebook group,
while the viral moment itself had cooled off by the
end of twenty fifteen into the holidays, Darling's home was,
(43:03):
unbeknownst to them, placed under periodic surveillance for about six days,
and at the end of January the home was raided
by the police, along with a subpoena issued that collected
over twelve thousand pages of their Facebook correspondence, but they're
not arrested at this time. There was a weed charge
to them in their roommates, and there were bones removed
(43:26):
from the home eleven bones plus fourteenth to be exact,
and these were taken to be tested to confirm that
they were in fact human, and for reasons I will
truly never understand. Their next move was to give an
interview to The Advocate in early April of twenty sixteen.
(43:46):
A lot was revealed in this interview. By this time,
Darling had apparently relocated to Florida and was continuing to
defend their actions. They tell reporter Jim Mustian.
Speaker 8 (43:58):
They were coming against seriously expecting to find bodies and
human organs, and having me and my roommates arrested for
black marketing human remains. You should have seen their faces
when they walked into the house and found a bunch
of sleeping hippies. It was just a bunch of little
shards of bones and pieces of teeth I'd picked up
off the ground. I said to the agents, here you go,
there's probably human bones in there, but I know better
(44:18):
than to give you that answer.
Speaker 2 (44:21):
And again their continued doubling down makes no sense to me.
I mean, I don't know, man, my feeling, Jamie's feeling
is never talked to the cops, especially to confirm that
you have human bones in your house like this interview
is baffling to me, and it really does seem to
further sabotage ender Darling's case because, as it was revealed
(44:43):
in September twenty sixteen, just a few weeks shy of
ken bones, Big moment, Everything's connected. Indre Darling was arrested
and was presently in jail in New Orleans.
Speaker 3 (44:56):
By this time.
Speaker 2 (44:57):
The Advocate reported that they had, under their government name
Devin Marie Michuka, fled guilty to simple burglary and marijuana
possession and admitted that, unlike they'd said previously, they had
indeed taken human remains from Holt Cemetery as accused. They'd
been arrested back in July while living in Florida, after
(45:19):
New Orleans detectives spent six months confirming that the bones
taken from Darling's residence in January were in fact human.
Once they were arrested, they were brought back to New
Orleans and spent several weeks in jail before making a
plea bargain, and from what we can tell, walking free.
So just to recap, we started here.
Speaker 8 (45:43):
This is where I go to find my human bones
for cursework and general spells that require bomb and we
ended here are you pleading guilty to burgerlary of Holt
Cemetery because you are in fact guilty of the charge.
Bar Us asked, yes, ma'am, Darling said, but.
Speaker 2 (45:59):
Daring's true legacy is encoded in Louisiana law. This incident
is said to have been influential on a piece of
twenty sixteen legislation called the Louisiana Human Remains Protection and
Control Act, the first update to human remains laws in
the state since nineteen fifty. Included in that legislation.
Speaker 4 (46:21):
The legislature further finds that existing state laws do not
adequately protect against the illicit trade in human remains, and
that such trade needs to be stemmed in order to
minimize looting and desecration of cemeteries.
Speaker 2 (46:37):
I mean, a legacy can look like anything. The Tumblr bone,
which who identified by the Spanish term Bruja by the
time they were in court, hasn't cropped up online since
Ender Darling Devin Matchuka is thoroughly offline now from what
I can tell, I was not able to find them
(46:57):
or speak to them for this episode, and that it
makes sense. If anything, A clear lesson to be learned
from their saga is to perhaps say less and stop posting,
because if you'll excuse the pun. They mistakenly dug themselves
a major hole here, and after going through this story,
(47:17):
I felt pretty stumped because the way I see it,
what Enter Darling did was clearly wrong and something that
doubling and tripling down on made it clear that they
may not have actually been well versed in the practice
of magic and did not have a connection culturally to
this practice, and certainly not to the potter's field bones
(47:39):
they were stealing. But my question really is does that
mean that a twenty somethings single parent should have been
thrown in jail?
Speaker 3 (47:48):
I don't think so.
Speaker 2 (47:50):
And what's fascinating is that this wouldn't have been an
arrestable offense in many states. Darling's biggest mistake legally was
doing this in Louisiana, a state that I learned has
extremely strict laws around human remains. So I wanted to
collect a number of perspectives here, like so many bones
in the rain, And that's what we're gonna do this Thursday,
(48:13):
when I get to the bottom of what bone law is,
what American witchcraft looks like today, and whether it's the
bone witch was innocent after all. And until then, here's
your moment of fun. A question I've been asking for
almost ten years would beetlejuice, come wet or dry scabs?
(48:33):
Now keep in mind the wet scabs would sound like
an old laser jet printer printing out a full page
color photo and calming. Dry scabs would sound something like
a deck of fresh cards being shuffled. Thank you for considering.
Please send me your responses common subscribe.
Speaker 1 (48:56):
We need this. I love you, Goodbye.
Speaker 2 (49:04):
Sixteenth Minute is a production of fool Zone Media and
iHeart Radio.
Speaker 3 (49:08):
It is written, hosted, and.
Speaker 2 (49:10):
Produced by me Jamie Loftus. Our executive producers are Sophie
Lichterman and Robert Evans. The Amazing Ian Johnson is our
supervising producer and our editor.
Speaker 3 (49:20):
Our theme song is by Sad thirteen. Voice acting is
from Grant, Creator and Pet.
Speaker 2 (49:26):
Shoutouts to our dog producer Anderson my Kat's Flee and
Casper and by pet Rockbert who will outlive us all Bye.
All Zone media.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
Happy Halloween, assholes. It's Jamie Loftus, host of sixteenth Minute here,
and this week's episode is about the thieving of human bones.
This is a crime of the past. Right, we're civilized people.
(00:28):
We're less than a week away from another incredible election
with amazing options.
Speaker 3 (00:35):
We're good now, right.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
No, No, dear listener, bone thieves have not disappeared. They've
evolved with the tools made available to them. You may
think of a nineteenth century grave digger when you think
of a stolen bone. But what if I told you
that bone thieves are.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
All around us at your school, in your neighborhood, on
your phone, your first school is a TikToker? Okay, Ian
we can get rid of the haunted house music for now.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
More specifically, we're talking about a TikToker named John's Bones.
Here's his personal lore as he tells it. When he
was just a child, John pichea fairy, received the skeleton
of a mouse from his father as a gift.
Speaker 4 (01:36):
Okay, instead of taking it from a creepy, dark and
spooky way, I looked at it really with a fascination
and awe, John.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
Told ABC News in twenty twenty two, okay, and by
the time he was twenty one years old, John had
built a TikTok following of nearly half a million people
talking about and showing off his gigantic collection.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
Of human bones.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
He got into the hobby in earnest, when he was
in college at the Parsons School of Art and Design
and the Thailand born Indiana Brad John was all in
on bones after seeing a human skull for sale at
Obscura Antiques and Oddities in Manhattan. According to a Curbed
profile of him from twenty twenty three.
Speaker 4 (02:27):
I was like, is this legal? And they were like, yeah,
it's no problem.
Speaker 3 (02:32):
But is it a problem?
Speaker 2 (02:35):
Turns out it depends on if you're talking about the
law or a given person's values, because what constitutes a
legal transaction of human bones versus what I'd be comfortable
with is pretty significant, it turns out, and John's Bones
is very aware of that, because yes, this is our
(02:57):
Halloween episode. We're having fun, but I want to be clear.
Speaker 3 (03:04):
Woo, let me be clear.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
This episode contains a lot of information about the laws
around bones and bones in America specifically, and different religions
and cultures have different views around what should be done.
With bones, and with death rituals, and with human remains generally.
So there's no prescriptive way to handle death or death rituals.
(03:29):
I mean, listen, my dad's ashes are in this very room.
They're about two feet behind me, and I can't deal
with it. So no one is wrong with the way
that they're handling this issue. It's fucked up for everybody,
and everyone's culture and religion is going to vary. No
one is wrong, that is, except the people we're going
(03:52):
to be talking about today. These people are perhaps the
most wrong anyone has ever been. So who is John
and why does he have so many bones? John's Bones
was born in two thousand and became a bone influencer
before he could legally buy Miller Lyte. And when I
(04:13):
first heard about him and the fact that there was
controversy surrounding this creator who made content around death, I wondered,
did this just stem from people in the West's discomfort
around death in general? Because that's absolutely a thing. Some
of my favorite writers and creators working online are making
material about death. Look no further than one of the
(04:36):
greatest to ever do it, Caitlin Doty aka The Good
Death aka ask A mortician on YouTube. Doty is a
licensed and practicing funeral director and has been working in
cremation since the two thousands, and her work is amazing
and has really moved the needle on how I view
American attitudes on death and death rituals. But everyone's reallylationship
(05:00):
to death is different outside of the fact that it
is coming for all of us.
Speaker 3 (05:05):
But Caitlin Dodie makes educational content about death, and while.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
She is a funeral director, there's nothing that she's doing
that is like out of line or illegal for American
funerals for instance, and maybe especially she is not selling bones.
So John's Bones a key term you're going to need
(05:29):
to know for this week's episode is osteology basically skeleton studies,
and the term John's Bones most closely associated with. In
spite of not having any overt credentials that we know
of outside of having worked with bones in college, his
TikTok launched just short of the COVID lockdown, and he
saw a lot of growth in the account alongside the
(05:53):
pandemic era growth of TikTok itself. And make no mistake,
John's Bones had been posting bones to Maine since twenty nineteen.
But as he gets more popular, he starts to do
these fluffy, kind of unsourced TikTok history videos that you've
seen before, but of course there's bones in them. Here's
(06:15):
an early post.
Speaker 5 (06:16):
Just wanted to showcase something that I bet you guys
probably haven't seen before. This is one of the largest
human spine collections out there.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
With deepest regrets, I do need to describe this for you.
John is panning over at least fifty human spines, just
spines on the floor, without context. Where did they come from?
Why does he have them? And look, I'm on board
with all of us being skin bags that need to
accept our own mortality, but this content just feels very
(06:49):
removed from humanity, I guess. But as John's Bones posts
grew in popularity, some viewers became uncomfortable with the casual
of his work, with the unclearness of how he had
acquired these damn bones, particularly when he started selling bones
after graduating college. John says that the bones he sells
(07:14):
on John's Bones is mainly used for medical research, but
that's not necessarily true. He does sell a lot to
medical institutions, by his account, but he also sells to
anyone in states where it's legal. And I'm not kidding
when I say this. On his website right now you
can buy a quote adolescent medical skull with several cuts, unquote.
Speaker 3 (07:39):
For nearly four thousand dollars.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
And I can't help but think, what whose bones are these?
John's bones? Because this is the thing with bones. If
you're looking at bones in a museum, in a medical setting,
whatever it is, chances are you were probably looking at
the bones of a poor person, and very likely a
(08:05):
non white or indigenous person. There's no guarantee that the
family of this skeleton gave their consent for it to
be used in this way, or even knows that ever happened.
For all intents and purposes, people who were disproportionately exploited
in life are often further exploited in death in this way.
(08:27):
And yes, there is a separate conversation about how it's
increasingly popular to donate one's body to science, but as
we'll find out, bodies voluntarily given to science are quite
open to exploitation as well. And prior to it being
more common to donate your body, the best way to
have bodies to study was you guessed it grave robbing,
(08:51):
and whose graves are easiest to rob those who do
not have tombs or coffins, which means we're already playing
a class game. Poor people who can't afford a deep
ground burial or cremation are more likely to have their
bone surfaced or if you're a grave robber, and I
would be fascinated to know if any.
Speaker 3 (09:14):
Of you are grave robbers.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
But the bodies of people who can't afford traditional funeral
routes are much more easily disinterred. So when you're looking
at a publicly displayed skeleton or any human remains, it's
not a question of what is that, it's who is
that and how did.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
They get here.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in particular, there was
a high demand in the skeleton trade as medicine and
science expanded quickly, leaving plenty of bad actors resorting to
grave robbing, swiping unclaimed bodies from local morgues, and even
looking to prisons where people had been recently executed. At present,
(09:58):
the most commonplace for bones to be sourced from is India, which.
Speaker 3 (10:02):
Had a multimillion.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
Dollar trade before the practice of selling bones was banned
in nineteen eighty six and what ended this industry while
fifteen hundred skeletons of children were being illegally traded and sold,
which led to a directive from the Indian Supreme Court
to halt all sales permanently. But skeletons from this gruesome
(10:27):
boom of time are now all but impossible to trace
to specific people, partially because of poor documentation and a
lot because of bone bleaching. Much of these samples identifiable
DNA has been destroyed, and this has been a completely
intentional practice for a very long time. Companies who sold
(10:48):
these skeletons primarily targeted the vulnerable before destroying the skeleton
of any defining features, slapping a label on it, and
selling it as a product. And this is, as with
many seemingly unrelated topics on this show, an extension of
colonialism more than anything else. Scott Carney expands on this
(11:10):
in his book The Red Market, explaining how demand for
studiable bodies in English medicine caused the colonizing country to
start sourcing bodies from the same places they had been
colonizing Since the eighteen fifties. Calcutta, India was the global
center of the bone trade and primarily sold the bones
(11:32):
of their own disenfranchised people to the UK and the US,
quite literally selling the brutal consequences of colonialism back to
the colonizer. According to a twenty twenty two profile of
John's Bones, who sources much of his collection to the
companies that comprised these nineteenth century Western businesses, the nineteen
(11:56):
forty three Bengal famine.
Speaker 3 (11:58):
Was a boone for the bone industry.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
Because it had killed millions of poor Indian people who
could not afford a proper funeral or had lost everyone
in their family and had no one to advocate for them.
So the degree to which the bone trade is connected
to class, to race, and to colonialism really can't be overstated,
(12:22):
and there should absolutely be serious criticism for people unwilling
to acknowledge this kind of historic brutality while actively profiting
from it. And John's Bones doesn't really have a response
to this other than well, it's for education and it's
technically legal. This is a post from early twenty twenty.
Speaker 5 (12:43):
Hi everyone, I'm gonna talk a little bit about what
I do because it always gets asked in the commons,
So here I go. So Hi, my name is John,
John I work with John's Bowen. That's my little business
I started there you go and Chunky Boys a mascot.
But essentially, the US is complete legal and there's no
federal regulation against the ownership, possession, or selling of human
(13:06):
blones and humanosity ology.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
I am so sorry about that fucking vocal filter. It's
just sorry. I hate John's Bones. There I said, it
feels good. But this explanation that these sales are for
education and to possibly give stolen bones a second life
obviously falls apart under scrutiny. It's why Sam Redman, author
(13:29):
of the book Bone Rooms, pulled The Guardian in a
profile of John's Bones.
Speaker 4 (13:33):
That there's no ethical way to buy and sell human
remains because there is a clear link between the legacy
of this and racism, and scientific racism and colonialism.
Speaker 2 (13:46):
John's Bones admitted in twenty twenty one that his collection
was largely sourced from India, Russia and China, which most
likely means that the bones belonged to poor people and prisoners.
And that's not to say that America is any more
advanced when it comes to bone trading. As we'll get
into throughout this episode, laws around human remains are very
(14:09):
state to state and have not really been updated to
reflect inflation or advances in technology. As I'm recording this,
there are forty two states where it's completely legal to
sell human remains at your weird store. Selling human remains
on Etsy was only discontinued in twenty twelve and on
(14:30):
eBay in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 3 (14:32):
When asked the question.
Speaker 6 (14:34):
Where do you source your human remains from and is
it ethical? Do you believe selling human remains for profit
is ethical?
Speaker 3 (14:41):
John replied, well.
Speaker 4 (14:43):
The problem with these bones is that, regardless if you
agree with the means of which they entered the public market,
they exist. It is currently impossible to repatriate them due
to the cleaning processes they underwent when they first were
put on sale, and they can be destroyed because improper
disposal of human remains is a crime that leaves an
(15:05):
impossible object that has no easy solution for being dealt with.
Our solution is to re enter them into the educational field.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
For profit, and not always for education, because while medical
institutions seem to be the primary buyers of John's bones, again,
he will sell to anyone. To quote Scott Karney in
that Guardian piece.
Speaker 4 (15:31):
When we turn a human into a commodity. That's where
you start getting enormous ethical lapses, and John is on
the wrong side of that equation.
Speaker 2 (15:41):
Woo Okay, you're thinking, Jamie, a TikTok bone sale drama
is wild, but surely an anomaly. Right, It's the result
of a misguided young person with too many bones, not
an issue that would eke out into a full on
institutional crisis. Right right, Well, what would you do if
(16:08):
I told you there is a current in litigation bone
drama at Harvard University? Does that sentence sound like a
Lana del Rey album? Sure it does, but it's happening.
Speaker 3 (16:23):
Wait, let's turn on some Laanna del Rey style music.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
What would you do if I told you there is
a current in litigation bone drama at Harvard University. Sorry,
I just had to try it, But it is true
that happened. And unlike John's bones, the sale of human
remains was done extremely under the table here, very illegally,
(16:49):
because there is no world where the Harvard Medical School
is supposed to be doing anything other with their collection
than studying it. And for all of the reasons we
talked about, this does not mean, by a long stretch
that Harvard Medical School has their hands clean just because
they're not selling the human remains in their possession. The
(17:10):
bones on display and in possession of universities and museums
are very often directly tied to colonialism and white supremacy.
But for the sake of this scandal, Cedric Lodge, the
manager of the Harvard Medical School morgue, and six others
were indicted last year after over half a decade of
(17:32):
poaching from the university's vast collection of human remains and
selling them over state lines. Lodge was said to allow
buyers to enter the morgue and tell him what body
parts they were interested in buying, so he could then
privately steal them and sell and mail them from his
house in New Hampshire. And maybe most shockingly of all,
(17:55):
the maximum prison sentence that they face for this is
only fifteen years, in spite of the fact that, unlike
many of John's bones, some of these stolen body parts
from Harvard were very identifiable via donors who had given
their bodies to science just in the last couple of years.
To quote US attorney Gerard Kam.
Speaker 4 (18:17):
It is particularly egregious that so many of the victims
here volunteered to allow their remains to be used to
educate medical professionals and advance the interests of science and healing.
For them and their families to be taken advantage of
in the name of profit is appalling.
Speaker 2 (18:36):
Cedric Lodge netted around forty thousand dollars from the stolen remains,
and if you needed any more proof of how modern
grave robbing is now evidence that proved his guilts included
PayPal transactions with descriptions like head number seven and brains
(18:56):
And fascinatingly, both of these bone dramas drew comparison in
the media to what is considered to be the original
online bone theft drama, one that it appears John Bones
learned a lot from not because he thinks it's unethical
to sell human remains online, nor did Cedric Lodge, but
to do it smarter because the most famous example of
(19:20):
human remains traded online put a witch in jail, the
tumblr Bone Witch and bone Gazi. Your sixteenth minute starts now.
(19:51):
S Welcome to sixteenth Minute, the podcast where we look
(20:37):
at the internet's main characters of the day, look at
how their moment affected them and what their moment meant
for the Internet and US, and today we're headed to
the graveyard for a revisit of the infamous Humbler bone
Witch story. And not to disappoint, but there is not
(21:01):
an interview with the bone witch themselves here, and the
reason that is will become clear. What we do have
are interviews with a practicing non bone stealing which a
graveyard preservationist in New Orleans and the only legal expert
(21:22):
on human remains in the United States. There should be
more than one, in my opinion. Now, as we've established,
grave robbers have been around forever. It's one of the
world's oldest professions and has developed alongside technology. It can
(21:44):
look like a lot of things. John's Bones is skirting
legalities to display disenfranchised people's bodies, as are most museums.
People like Cedric Lodge are thriving by pilfering already ethically
questionable collections. And you have things like the underground organ
trade that's operated on and offline for years. But today's
(22:07):
story is a little bit of old and a little
bit of new, an old school grave robbery whose morality
play acts out entirely online. I am genuinely very excited
to talk about this story. It is a classic of
the Internet, and both stories I told you about, particularly
the John's Bones story, mentions the Tumblr bone witch story
(22:30):
as the seminal social media grave robbing saga.
Speaker 3 (22:35):
What a distinction.
Speaker 2 (22:36):
Back when John's Bones was going through that controversy in
twenty twenty one, a TikTok user named no Me named
Davis posted this.
Speaker 5 (22:45):
I'd enjoy is my human spine collection and in the US,
there's no federal regulation to get the owner.
Speaker 7 (22:50):
They tried to warn us, the Tumbla veterans. They tried
to tell us that TikTok 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?
(23:12):
Why didn't we need?
Speaker 2 (23:15):
The comparisons were being made to the point where John's
Bones himself felt the need to respond, telling ABC News
in twenty twenty one.
Speaker 4 (23:25):
The Tumblr bone thief is an example of what I
abhor and try to combat within the industry. We work
to preserve osteology so that future generations can learn from it.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
Sounds legit to me, John's Bones, but this does speak
to the lasting impact of this incident, which was eventually
referred to by many as Bone Gazie the Place, New Orleans, Louisiana.
The tumblr Bone witch story is a meme unto itself,
(23:57):
but like every story on sixteenth Minute, it very real
people living and dead, and it draws in a lot
of social media patterns that have repeated in the years since.
So come with me if you dare to. December twenty fifteen,
(24:18):
David Bowie makes his final public appearance before his death.
In early twenty sixteen, attending the debut of his musical Lazarus,
Donald Trump declares that if elected president, he will place
a Muslim band across the US and in New Orleans, Louisiana,
a practicing twenty something which named Endre Darling, who uses
(24:42):
they then pronouns. While you'll find that coverage of this
story often gets it wrong, is caught advertising the fact
that they are mailing human remains over state lines without
permission for witchcraft purposes. And let's get this out of
the way. I'm pro witchcraft. I've lived in LA for
(25:02):
almost a decade. Okay, i am pro witch and this
looks really bad for ender Darling. Here's what happened, and
I want to give a huge shout out to Diana
Tourge advice for writing me definitive timeline of this story
all the way back in twenty sixteen. On December eighth,
(25:22):
twenty fifteen, ender who it becomes relevant is white passing
but is not white posted to a Facebook group called
Queer Witch Collective. The description of the two thousand plus
member group was as follows.
Speaker 6 (25:39):
We are a collective of queer witches, diverse in age, nationality, gender, race,
class ability, and more. To strive for a better community
for everyone, we must acknowledge how privileges and oppression intersect
across these labels.
Speaker 2 (25:51):
And Darling's post said the following content warning graves, phone
hunting comment if they're added, worn need it. About twenty
minutes from my house in New Orleans is what we
call the poor man's graveyard. Most graveyards around here are
full of above ground graves because we live in a
(26:11):
fish bowl. But there happens to be a graveyard where
it's all in ground graves for those of us who
are too poor to afford above ground burial. When it rains,
of course, bones wash up. The older the grave, the
more you find you can literally walk around and see
Femur's teeth jaws, skull caps, et cetera, et cetera. This
(26:32):
is where I go to find my human bones for
cursework and general spells that require bone. I find human
bones are easier for work with for me than animal bone.
I can relate and work with the energy they carry,
if that makes any sense. Anyways, I wanted to see
if I started selling basically cover shipping to wherever you
happen to be, if people would be interested. I know
(26:54):
human bones aren't easy to come by, and I usually
have leftovers. I only go once a month or when
it rains here. The post is polarizing, but is received
positively in the group.
Speaker 3 (27:07):
At first.
Speaker 2 (27:09):
Some commenters just say yes, I'm interested. Others say this
sounds cool, but be careful of state laws. And Andrew
Darling responds to these concerns pretty quickly, saying I looked
it up and it's all good. I wouldn't even be
offering if there was any chance someone would get in
trouble me.
Speaker 3 (27:27):
Lol. Okay, put a pin in that.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
And others asked if Darling was making offerings to those
they were taking from, which is a common practice among witches,
and they respond that they bring honey and flowers and
that me and my goddess have a pact. She provides
the bones if I only take what the Earth gives
and I leave offerings.
Speaker 3 (27:50):
Okay, put a pin in that.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
But it's not long before they start to get pushed
back from people within the group who insist that the
bones should be left in peace. Er Darling gets defensive
and is supported by the mods of the Queer Witch Collective.
They say, do not shame me for my work. Now.
(28:14):
I was confused at first as to why the moderators
were so supportive of Darling in this case, but it's
connected to a pretty common rule in online communities, that
being don't shame the participants. Darling explicitly mentions that shaming
magical practices is not allowed in this group, and that
(28:36):
was true at the time. It's an extension of creating
safe spaces, and I've seen it as a commonly enacted
rule anywhere from private queer spaces to women's spaces to
in an outlier example, a right wing hate group that's
a part of MENSA. The group was founded by millennials
who per tourges piece were invested in the idea of
(29:00):
decolonizing magic and not forcing a white or western lens
onto a very diverse group's practice, and this is a
good idea. Safe spaces are necessary, but complicated because in
this case, Darling was asking to be kept safe from
(29:20):
criticism of grave wropping, and that did not make other
witches in the group feel particularly safe. So things spiral
out of control pretty quickly from here. Many of Darling's
loudest critics were people of color within the group, pointing
out that the area singled out in the post was
(29:41):
a burial site for primarily poor black residents of New
Orleans spanning hundreds of years, and based on their location,
most people guessed Darling was frequenting a place called Holt Cemetery,
although they initially deny this. One of their critics commented,
you were implementing white supremacist and colonialist tactics to do
(30:03):
your bidding, like y'all are actually stealing bones. But at
this point the controversy is still only within this Facebook group.
But when black witches in particular begin to speak up,
Darling and the moderators seem to realize that they need
to change course, and they attempt to the same moderator
who defended Darling hours before says.
Speaker 6 (30:27):
I support people discussing the use and distribution of racialized
people's bones, especially the bones of black people, which very
well may be in this graveyard being given to non
black or especially white people.
Speaker 2 (30:40):
Darling echoed this feeling, but for many critics they were
done with the Queer Witch Collective at this point, with
the general feeling being some safe space. This fucking was
and these moderators, who were white don't really know how
to handle the situation. A founder of the group, a
(31:00):
non binary trans which said the following about why they
initially defended Darling.
Speaker 6 (31:05):
In the group, there is an immense amount of shaming
directed at African diaspar religions by white witches, whether it
be about animal sacrifice, hexing, cursing, jinxying, etc. All I
saw was a person of color being attacked for their practice,
even if it's something I did not understand or would
never do myself.
Speaker 2 (31:25):
And this is a genuinely, very complicated issue. I won't
pretend it's not. There are spiritual practices and rituals that
involve human remains and might technically violate the law. In
the eight States where things are more restrictive, which includes Louisiana,
It's impossible to give the full scope of these spiritual
(31:48):
practices here, but it is true that different shades of necromancy,
or the practice of communicating with the dead, has included
the use of remains across cultures historically. Few months before
bone Gazi, there was a reckoning among whodoo practitioners, a
spiritual practice brought from enslaved Africans forced to come to America,
(32:09):
and one that remained a predominantly Black practice while mixing
in elements of Christianity as time went on. In the
fall of twenty fifteen, Vice reported on the appropriation of
who do buy white witches? This was an active and
necessary conversation, and Darling invokes these cultures in their next defense,
(32:30):
singling out practices traditionally done by non white witches. However,
as many witches, including Darling's critics and my witchy guest
today can attest to, there isn't really a known practice
that encourages engaging with the human remains of a total stranger,
because the people who Darling was pulling bones from, by
(32:53):
their own admission, were completely anonymous. Nonetheless, it takes over
a week for this drama to leak outside the private
Facebook group to where, well, where else was there going
to be bone drama? In twenty fifteen, it was tumblry.
Speaker 3 (33:28):
For those of you too.
Speaker 2 (33:29):
Old, too young, or too protective of your peace of mind.
Tumblr is a still technically active blog site that peaked
in popularity in the mid twenty tens and was pretty
unique as far as social media sites went. Humbler thrived
on images on tightly knit, niche fan communities, on parasocial
(33:50):
relationships largely done with anonymity, and we could talk about
Tumblr all day. But like any online community dominated by young,
anonymous people, the highs of Tumblr were fun and connective,
and the lows could get dangerous. It was a chaotic
place dominated by millennial women and queer people, making it
(34:14):
a very likely place for the ender darling drama to
end up with. A screenshot posted to user Hastel Pruveer's
tumbler on December seventeenth, the post.
Speaker 6 (34:25):
Reads psa 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.
Speaker 2 (34:38):
The post got immediate traction, around thirty thousand reblogs and
a fair amount of skepticism, with other users asking for
proof that this had actually happened. But in pretty short order,
the original screenshot surfaced, and it's here that Ender Darling
saga hit the internet in earnest. Not only was a confirmed,
(35:01):
Darling's own Tumblr, Little Fuckin' Monster was exposed too, and
the Internet went wild. Bone Gazi had begun.
Speaker 4 (35:16):
Today's big news Twitter, Martin Screli, Facebook, star Wars, Tumblr
calling out a witch for actually stealing human bones from
a cemetery.
Speaker 6 (35:30):
We have reached peak Tumbler. A call out post was
made for someone literally stealing human bones and offering to
sell them, with attached commentary about racism and classism, a
your favor is Problematic esque discussion made in lieu of
contacting the authorities. The post offering the bones had content
warnings at the top. It is the end of twenty
(35:52):
fifteen and Tumblr has become what it was always destined
to be.
Speaker 4 (35:57):
Me on a date, So what do you think about
real and dark witchcraft my date? It's okay, I guess
pretty scary though I like that glittery honey wicca ooh
ooh shit more me shoving my stolen human bones into
my purse. Shit, I gotta go.
Speaker 2 (36:16):
And this is super goofy, although note the early what
is this woke culture bullshit and the shout out to
your favorite problematic Tumbler for an episode in a few
weeks foreshadowing the back half of twenty fifteen was considered
to be pretty dry in terms of big Internet stories
(36:37):
after an influx of viral stories like.
Speaker 3 (36:40):
The dress Ever Heard of It?
Speaker 2 (36:41):
Check out that episode of sixteenth minute took place earlier
that year. The tone of this discussion also said a
lot about how Tumbler was perceived at this time too,
a bunch of young people who were deeply entrenched in
discussions around decolonization and identity politics but were often thought
of as being naive and their approach to these pretty
(37:02):
massive issues and bone Gazi was mocked quite a bit
because to the average Internet user this seemed absurd and
any witchcraft practice, particularly one that violated state law, seemed
deserving of being mocked. But inside the witch in community,
this incident really strained relationships and mutually held values, and
(37:27):
part of that is because Darling themselves continued to double
down on Tumblr once that call up post became popular.
This post is long, So I'm just going to share
some highlights.
Speaker 8 (37:40):
Long story short. A post that was posted in a
queer witch collective where cell is understood to mean cover shipping,
especially when I made that clear and curse is understood
to mean any spell you can cast on another physical
person was screenshot. Just my post, not the massive bread
that fucking followed and removed from the group where it
(38:01):
had contacts and posted. What has followed has been extremely racist,
especially towards those who still practice indigenous craft. Physical harm
has been threatened, including towards my child. Any who I
made a choice in what I thought was a safe
place for POC witch is especially POC which is who
practice indigenous dark or otherwise not wicken fluffy magic to
(38:23):
post something offering the little bits of bone I had
sitting on my altar to other POC, which is who
might use human bones in their practice. Somehow this blew
up into me digging out fucking bones. I'm not, I repeat,
I am not digging up bodies or bones. I've also
been heavily shamed for my indigenous practices. Here's the thing,
(38:45):
a bunch of focks. Magic is dark, magic is bloody.
Magic is scary magic isn't just fucking white light, fairy
dust bowls of honey on your damn altar. You can
all stop touting the threefold rule or wicked read or
karma thing that should apply to only those who believe
in it. Oh fucking stop. I'm not wicking, I'm not fluffy.
(39:07):
I work with death and bones, curses, in hexes, the dark,
and the things not for the feint of heart, and
you ain't about to shame me for it. Fucking y'all
want to pretend that I'm not in New Orleans where
I have watched black voodoo priests break into crips and
steal random full bodies. Y'all want to sit there and
pretend that gravekeepers aren't actually selling bodies or bones to
(39:27):
hospitals and colleges. Yeah, yeah, they have legal ways to
do it. But if you honestly think people aren't being
paid to bury empty coffins, you're way more naive than
I need to point out. Y'all want to be mad
at the kid who saves some phones from being crushed,
because fuck getting the actual story.
Speaker 2 (39:43):
The post continues from here, and it was made the
same day that that call up post got traction and
it's here that we learn a little more about Ender Darling.
They're saying that they have been dockxed and that they
have a child, meaning that the call up post has
put them potentially in harm's way. And again there's a
(40:04):
split in how the Queer Witch Collective and now you know,
all of Tumblr are reacting to this news. Most are
not condoning doxing, and especially not to putting Darling's child
at risk, But some people are baffled that Darling appears
to be further confirming that they did indeed take bones
(40:24):
from a local graveyard, while others still point out that,
as Darling says, they're a person of color practicing indigenous
magic and it's not their place to judge. And so,
while the Queer Witch Collective's mission statement was well intentioned.
Speaker 6 (40:40):
To strive for a better community for everyone, we must
acknowledge how privileges and depression intersect across these labels.
Speaker 2 (40:48):
This became difficult to enforce after the Tumblr post exposed
the name of the group itself after a full week
of Bone discourse had estranged their moderators from Vocal, which
is within the group. When it became clear that Darling's
most vocal critics were queer black witches. Within the Queer
Witch Collective, the whole shield of no shaming suddenly held
(41:12):
significantly less power and started to seem more like suppression.
One commenter said, there is a difference between shaming and
questioning possible ethics and possible oppressive practices. Why are we
silencing a black witch? The white moderators of the group
apologize for mishandling the situation, but the trust within QWC
(41:36):
was far too thoroughly broken by this time. The founder
of the group eventually ended up leaving, but the new
moderator wasn't able to revive it after both suggesting white
Witches stop posting altogether for a period of time to
allow people of color to reclaim the space, and when
that didn't work, purging the group altogether so that people
(41:57):
would have to rejoin if they were interested in starting fresh.
But most were not interested, and a year later the
group had gone from two thousand to only seventy seven members.
According to Weiss, bone Gazi had decimated the community. Things
wouldn't be that simple for Ender Darling. In the aftermath
(42:20):
of the Bone Fevery memes, there was originally some confusion
between Facebook and Tumblr whether anyone had reported Darling to
the authorities in New Orleans, but it became clear eventually
that someone had To this day, it's not known whether
this was initiated by a member of the Queer Witch
Collective or someone who learned through the viral moment, but
(42:42):
Ender Darling wouldn't be around to watch the fallout of
the QWC because they were still in the process of
defending themselves against the accusation that what they'd done was
illegal or unethical. Long after they left the Facebook group,
while the viral moment itself had cooled off by the
end of twenty fifteen into the holidays, Darling's home was,
(43:03):
unbeknownst to them, placed under periodic surveillance for about six days,
and at the end of January the home was raided
by the police, along with a subpoena issued that collected
over twelve thousand pages of their Facebook correspondence, but they're
not arrested at this time. There was a weed charge
to them in their roommates, and there were bones removed
(43:26):
from the home eleven bones plus fourteenth to be exact,
and these were taken to be tested to confirm that
they were in fact human, and for reasons I will
truly never understand. Their next move was to give an
interview to The Advocate in early April of twenty sixteen.
(43:46):
A lot was revealed in this interview. By this time,
Darling had apparently relocated to Florida and was continuing to
defend their actions. They tell reporter Jim Mustian.
Speaker 8 (43:58):
They were coming against seriously expecting to find bodies and
human organs, and having me and my roommates arrested for
black marketing human remains. You should have seen their faces
when they walked into the house and found a bunch
of sleeping hippies. It was just a bunch of little
shards of bones and pieces of teeth I'd picked up
off the ground. I said to the agents, here you go,
there's probably human bones in there, but I know better
(44:18):
than to give you that answer.
Speaker 2 (44:21):
And again their continued doubling down makes no sense to me.
I mean, I don't know, man, my feeling, Jamie's feeling
is never talked to the cops, especially to confirm that
you have human bones in your house like this interview
is baffling to me, and it really does seem to
further sabotage ender Darling's case because, as it was revealed
(44:43):
in September twenty sixteen, just a few weeks shy of
ken bones, Big moment, Everything's connected. Indre Darling was arrested
and was presently in jail in New Orleans.
Speaker 3 (44:56):
By this time.
Speaker 2 (44:57):
The Advocate reported that they had, under their government name
Devin Marie Michuka, fled guilty to simple burglary and marijuana
possession and admitted that, unlike they'd said previously, they had
indeed taken human remains from Holt Cemetery as accused. They'd
been arrested back in July while living in Florida, after
(45:19):
New Orleans detectives spent six months confirming that the bones
taken from Darling's residence in January were in fact human.
Once they were arrested, they were brought back to New
Orleans and spent several weeks in jail before making a
plea bargain, and from what we can tell, walking free.
So just to recap, we started here.
Speaker 8 (45:43):
This is where I go to find my human bones
for cursework and general spells that require bomb and we
ended here are you pleading guilty to burgerlary of Holt
Cemetery because you are in fact guilty of the charge.
Bar Us asked, yes, ma'am, Darling said, but.
Speaker 2 (45:59):
Daring's true legacy is encoded in Louisiana law. This incident
is said to have been influential on a piece of
twenty sixteen legislation called the Louisiana Human Remains Protection and
Control Act, the first update to human remains laws in
the state since nineteen fifty. Included in that legislation.
Speaker 4 (46:21):
The legislature further finds that existing state laws do not
adequately protect against the illicit trade in human remains, and
that such trade needs to be stemmed in order to
minimize looting and desecration of cemeteries.
Speaker 2 (46:37):
I mean, a legacy can look like anything. The Tumblr bone,
which who identified by the Spanish term Bruja by the
time they were in court, hasn't cropped up online since
Ender Darling Devin Matchuka is thoroughly offline now from what
I can tell, I was not able to find them
(46:57):
or speak to them for this episode, and that it
makes sense. If anything, A clear lesson to be learned
from their saga is to perhaps say less and stop posting,
because if you'll excuse the pun. They mistakenly dug themselves
a major hole here, and after going through this story,
(47:17):
I felt pretty stumped because the way I see it,
what Enter Darling did was clearly wrong and something that
doubling and tripling down on made it clear that they
may not have actually been well versed in the practice
of magic and did not have a connection culturally to
this practice, and certainly not to the potter's field bones
(47:39):
they were stealing. But my question really is does that
mean that a twenty somethings single parent should have been
thrown in jail?
Speaker 3 (47:48):
I don't think so.
Speaker 2 (47:50):
And what's fascinating is that this wouldn't have been an
arrestable offense in many states. Darling's biggest mistake legally was
doing this in Louisiana, a state that I learned has
extremely strict laws around human remains. So I wanted to
collect a number of perspectives here, like so many bones
in the rain, And that's what we're gonna do this Thursday,
(48:13):
when I get to the bottom of what bone law is,
what American witchcraft looks like today, and whether it's the
bone witch was innocent after all. And until then, here's
your moment of fun. A question I've been asking for
almost ten years would beetlejuice, come wet or dry scabs?
(48:33):
Now keep in mind the wet scabs would sound like
an old laser jet printer printing out a full page
color photo and calming. Dry scabs would sound something like
a deck of fresh cards being shuffled. Thank you for considering.
Please send me your responses common subscribe.
Speaker 1 (48:56):
We need this. I love you, Goodbye.
Speaker 2 (49:04):
Sixteenth Minute is a production of fool Zone Media and
iHeart Radio.
Speaker 3 (49:08):
It is written, hosted, and.
Speaker 2 (49:10):
Produced by me Jamie Loftus. Our executive producers are Sophie
Lichterman and Robert Evans. The Amazing Ian Johnson is our
supervising producer and our editor.
Speaker 3 (49:20):
Our theme song is by Sad thirteen. Voice acting is
from Grant, Creator and Pet.
Speaker 2 (49:26):
Shoutouts to our dog producer Anderson my Kat's Flee and
Casper and by pet Rockbert who will outlive us all Bye.
Host
Jamie Loftus
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