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WANNA BUY A SLIGHTLY USED SKELETON?
Cases where your body, post-mortem, can become a tradeable commodity

The market for human remains
In case you've missed it, there are websites where real skulls and skeletons available for purchase by anyone interested. These are expensive, to say the least, and unless you buy the REALLY expensive ones, they don't appear to be better (visually) than the imitation ones. I look at them merely as "wishful thinking" items, or merely with morbid curiosity about the fact that some folks would love to get ahold of them. The truth of the matter is that real skeletons are fragile as hell, and nice ones are VERY expensive, assuming that they're gotten from a respected supplier. It's cheaper to get a nice fake one, and the semi-expensive ones hold all the details that a real one does.

It IS possible to get cheaper ones. Disreputable folks go to 3rd world countries and hand a kid $15, (approximately equal to a week's wages in these countries), he'll go to the local cemetery (possibly the one that he and his family LIVE in) and dig out a raw corpse and give it to them. The company then "cleans" them, ships them to the US, and sells them for around $1000. Additionally, these skeletons have no LEGAL documentation, which can get the unsuspecting buyer in trouble if a background check is ever made in a state that requires such certification. While I think it's great that the kid made some much-needed money, he should be making considerably more for what he's doing, and because of the profit margin involved. Not to mention the fact that the loved ones of the deceased had apparently decided to bury the individual, and paid quite a bit to have that done. If the deceased's loved ones were making even $300 and foregoing the funeral costs, it would be considerably more to my liking. After all, if I was extremely poor, and thought my family could earn 20 times their weekly wage just by letting weird folks have my body, I would certainly prefer to do THAT, rather than have them lose money burying me. As noted in previous Dementias, when I die, I'm done with my body, and ya'll can do what you want with it.

The reputable dealer holds only skeletons and skulls from folks that have donated their bodies to science, and/or been executed in prison. Sometimes, the "science folks" finish with a cadaver, but the parts left over are useless to them. Depending upon the institution, they either send the bodies to a crematorium, or they have a deal set up with medical supply companies where the skeletal remains are sold. In fact, in some cases, the reselling of the skeleton is written into the purchase of the original cadaver. I'm guessing it works sort of like a really morbid "return for deposit" kinda' deal. What's really kinda' gross though is that you can buy a "fully intact" head, with flesh and everything, for less than a skull costs, due to the amount of work involved with stripping down to the skull. When I say "you" I DO mean you.. In other words, some of the medical specimen supply companies will sell entire cadavers to non-medical folks if asked. It's worrisome to me that there's even a market for that. Maybe I'm being morally selective, but it seems as though you could use the invoices from these purchases to find all kinds of serial killers. Anyone wanting to get a frozen cadaver in the mail is definitely not someone that should be allowed to wander freely in society. However, the instances of this happening have been reduced dramatically over the past few years; many businesses that offered that kind of stuff to folks have been closed down. Some are still out there though, and you have to go to THEM, which is risky for the business.

I'll never forget being in 6th grade biology class, and the teacher giving me a catalog (at my request for plastic skulls) and turning to a page that offered a human head in what was essentially an ice bucket for $250, with some kind of deposit on the container! I was amazed, and checked to see if it was one of the items tagged for wholesale purchase only, but it wasn't.. If I had the money, I could have bought it. I actually toyed with the idea of buying it and having it drop-shipped to my math teacher's house, to freak her out, but of course, $250 was more than my allowance was going to withstand, and a HEAD was probably more than her HEART would withstand, so it was just as well I didn't. heh heh.. yeah, gee, I'm really impressed by the whole "frog-in-your-desk" prank, it's a good thing I was essentially a penniless kid.

Morally, I'm on-the-fence when it comes to real bones. Is it "right" to own a piece of a person, and essentially display them without their knowledge? That's a question that's plagued me ever since I was very young, and I've never satisfactorily answered it. I have no problem owning and displaying castings from real skulls, but for some reason, it just seems wrong to do that to the genuine article. It would certainly be a "crown" to my collection, but I guess that aside from money issues, I'd be too concerned about where the skull came from.

Interestingly enough, I once got a skull from a garage sale that was cast perfectly from a real skull. The guy who did it wasn't real knowledgable about casting stuff, but he knew he needed to fill in some of the holes in the skull in order to get a decent casting of it. It appears that he used clay to fill in the holes (like to fill in the holes at the base of the skull, and repair damage on the rear side of the skull where the person had apparently been bludgeoned!) and in the resulting casting, you can still see his fingerprint indentations on the putty! The casting was absolutely perfect, it fooled everyone who saw it, and eventually, it even fooled me. I started to wonder if the guy had actually just coated the original skull with paint (is was a godawful white and black paintjob that I eventually redid) and only used casting material in the plugs he'd made to encase the skull. I chipped off part of the flat bottom (he'd incorporated a stand into the design) and noted the material, then I chipped a little bit under the jawline, and found a different material that reminded me of bone immediately. I thought about it for awhile, and then I went ahead and explored part of the back of the skull, to check the material. Fortunately, it wasn't bone, because otherwise I'd have been explaining it to a homicide detective down at the station house IMMEDIATELY. I did find out what happened though, and it was weird to hear about the person whose skull that was. Apparently, this guy I bought it from had been in the Vietnam war and brought home the skull of a Vietnamese soldier he'd killed over there. Although quite a few soldiers did that, though this is the only case I've ever heard of. Evidently, the guy's wife accidentally knocked it off the shelf it was on, and the original skull broke (hence the bludgeon-type damage I'd noted), so he made a casting of it, but was disgusted at his lousy excuse for a paint job, and decided to get rid of it for the $5 I paid for it.

To me, I guess it equates with having pictures of celebrities without their consent, or more impoprtantly, their knowledge. It suggests that the person was never given the opportunity to "pose" or otherwise prepare for the photograph, and are therefore not necceesarily appearing in the best possible light.

Contrary to popular belief, some skulls are more "attractive" than others. This attractiveness takes many forms, and is officially graded on a scale when determining a price, or value, or just a generalized description of it. I also equate it to the fact that many folks hide things like being toothless, or being bald, or whatever, and it seems as though the skull is a removal of the last vestiges of privacy, and just seems invasive for some reason.

Although the skulls are obviously from folks who could apparently care less about appearance at this point in their.. uhh.. existance (I almost said "life"!), there is still the issue of ownership. When all else is long gone, your skull, and bones, are your final possessions on this planet, and should be treated with the respect that they deserve, since it is essentially your property. If I were to one day own a real human skull, you can bet that it won't ever have fake eyes in it, or a wig placed on it, or hats, or whatever-the-hell added to it unless someone left instructions to do that kind of stuff to their own skull. It's certainly nothing that would be added to a haunted house, unless it appears by itself, and without a disrespectful representation.

I personally don't own any real skulls or bones, because of a few contributing factors. Primarily though, the reason is that my interest in these typs of items stem from the make-believe aspects and the way a chunk of plastic can actually fool, and unnerve folks rather than the real thing. Unless my purpose was to take castings of the item, I'm simply not interested enough to warrant putting so much money into it.

An obvious comparison would be that although I love slasher movies about serial killers, I would DEFINITELY not want the opportunity to observe the real thing in person. It's simply not the same thing. However, I MIGHT watch a documentary, and often DO observe photographs of various dead folks, merely to see how this can be imitated to make realistic special effects, and to study the results of various misfortunes to write believable fiction that incorporates similar material.

That being said, I do have an old friend of mine that officially made out a will to include that his body would be donated to science, his head would be stripped using money from his estate, and his skull would be given to me. It's weird, yes, and possibly demented, but the reality is, he knows I'd respect it, appreciate it, and that it would hold a position of "crown" to my collection of fake skulls (with an excellent story attached, no less). At that time, we were long-haired metal heads, and one of his requests was that I get a wig for his skull. I teased him and told him that I'd either do THAT, or just use a handfull of straw. His reaction was incredible.. I hadn't realized that the longer he thought about giving me his skull, the more it represented a quasi-immortality for him, the straw joke was just too much for him. Although we quickly patched that up between us, we're no longer friends now for other reasons, but I can't help but wonder if a grossed-out lawyer is going to show up at my doorstep one day with his skull in-hand.

If anyone reading this decides to will me their skull, I'd be pretty surprised, but I'd certainly accept it. Hell, I'd even encourage it, just lemme' know if you'd want a wig or not, I won't even charge you storage fees.

Yes, I'm a sick puppy by today's standards, but I'm no sadist, or at least not to the point where I revel in the cruelty of man against innocent folks. I claim the prizes in life that other folks don't even see the value of. I ensure that I don't do things at the expense of others, unless those others are agreeable to it first.

Heh heh, kinda' makes you wonder about the phrase "do unto others as you would have them do unto you", doesn't it?