File this one under things I didn't know I needed to know.

Oddities and Curiosities

When I was in college there was a show on TV called Oddities. The show followed the folks from Obscura Antiques and Oddities, a store specializing in the strange and unusual in New York.  The show fascinated me, and I loved seeing what weird items people brought in.  This inspired me to finally start my own little oddities collection. While my collection is nothing to write home about, I do have a couple curio cabinets at my house that I've filled with odd little trinkets, old medicine bottles, uranium glass, a coffin nail, you know, normal stuff.

The concept of oddities has also really taken off over the past few years with the Oddities and Curiosities Expo taking place annually around the country.  While I have a couple of pieces of small taxidermy in my collection, that's about as wild as my oddities collection gets.  However, some people like to collect human bones.

Is It Legal to Buy or Sell Human Bones?

Recently, a post was shared to a Facebook group I follow called Weird Secondhand Finds That need to be Shared.  The post was a photo of a display from an antique shop that said "Real Human Bones" and they were for sale.  The person who made the post asked "is this even legal?"  Which had me wondering, is it?

So is it legal to buy or sell human bones in Indiana?  The answer is YES, which I think is wild.

According to Jons Bones, there is no federal law prohibiting the sale of human remains.

Despite there being no major current production of human skeletal remains, there is no federal law preventing ownership, sale, or distribution of the bones in the US today, because this would make criminals out of average folks who have remnants of their education left in their homes. The only restrictions are on a state by state basis. Louisiana, Georgia, and Tennessee are the only states to have restrictions. So yes, it is completely legal to buy human bones in the US as long as you don’t live in those three states!

Now there are laws surrounding the ownership of human remains. For instance, you can't just ask the funeral home for your loved ones' bones to be returned to you.  Legally they have to transport that body to its final resting place, and no, you can't rob the grave, that's also illegal.

You can find a really interesting article about bones and laws, here. Many of the bones for sale today are old medical specimens or from the 1800s and earlier.

I think I'll Stick to the Bone Museum

As fascinating as I think bones are, I don't know that I could mentally get over the fact that there was once a real, living, breathing human attached to that piece of skeleton.  So for that reason, I don't think I'll purchase any bones anytime soon.  However, after falling down a rabbit hole, I did find the cheapest human bone to buy is the patella which will run you about $40 or so, so do with that information what you want.

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For me, I'll stick to scoping out bones at the Bone Museum in New York, this museum has a fascinating collection of human bones, and I definitely want to see that in person!