The trade of human remains is thriving online in the United Kingdom, an investigation carried out by Live Science has found. Buying and selling human remains is not uncommon in the UK. It isn’t illegal unless the sold body parts aren’t used for transplants. Facebook and Instagram have become prime platforms for the online trade of skulls and other remains of babies, adults, children, and fetuses.
About 50 sellers were documented across England and Wales that used Instagram and Facebook to sell human remains between 2020 and 2022. From private Facebook groups to public pages, sellers were spread across social media platforms. Pages related to antiques, taxidermy business and oddities, including physical shops have seen sellers publishing ads for bones and skulls.
Live Science reported that they found pictures of both untouched remains and disfigured bones and skulls online. One Instagram seller even posted a picture of a human skull with the words “kill me” engraved into the side of it.
The skull also had coffin nails in it and was being used as a lamp. The user, named Joseph Plaskitt posted the picture of the skull last year (2021) on October 17. He captioned the photograph, “Just a little project I’ve been doing this past week, a crown made from coffin nails and carved the skull cap turned it into a light.”
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While talking to Live Science, Joseph revealed that the skull was a “teaching piece” from Europe and had been carved by a fellow “collector”. The scientific news outlet found more such lamps made from human skulls shared by other sellers. There were steampunk-inspired skulls filled with cogs, gears, and other mechanical parts along with some that had been made to look like vampires.
Although Meta’s policies do not allow users to post or sell body parts and bodily fluids on their social media platforms, the sellers seem to be thriving on Facebook and Instagram.
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