Sixteenth Minute (of Fame) - the tumblr bone witch, pt. 1

Episode Date: October 29, 2024

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. It's Black Business Month, and Black Tech Green Money is tapping in. I'm Will Lucas spotlighting black founders, investors, and innovators, building the future, one idea at a time. Let's talk legacy, tech, and generational wealth. I had the skill and I had the talent. I didn't have the opportunity. Yeah.

We all know, right? Genius is evenly distributed. Opportunity is not. To hear this and more on the power of Black Innovations. and ownership, listen to Black Tech Green Money from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Hey, I'm Kurt Brown-Oller. And I am Scotty Landis, and we host Bananas, the podcast where we share the weirdest, funniest, real news stories from all around the world. And sometimes from our guest personal lives, too. Like when Whitney Cummings recently revealed

her origin story on the show. There's no way I don't already have rabies. This is probably just why my personality is like this. I've been surviving rabies for the past 20 years. New episodes of bananas drop every Tuesday in the exactly right network. Listen to bananas on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. and this week's episode is about the thieving of human bones

this is a crime of the past, right? We're civilized people. We're less than a week away from another incredible election with amazing options. We're good now, right? No, no, dear listener, bone thieves have not disappeared.

they've evolved with the tools made available to them. You may think of a 19th century gravedigger when you think of a stolen bone, but what if I told you that bone thieves are all around us? At your school, in your neighborhood, on your phone. Your first ghoul is a TikToker. Okay, Ian, we can get rid of the haunted house music for now. 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 Pacheia Ferry received the skeleton of a mouse from his father as a gift. Okay. Instead of taking it from a creepy, dark, and spooky way, I looked at it really with a fascination and awe. John told ABC News in 2022. Okay. And by the time he was 21 years old,

John had built a TikTok following of nearly half a million people talking about and showing off his gigantic collection of human bones. 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-bred John, was all in on bones after seeing a human skull for sale at obscure antiques and oddities in Manhattan. According to a curved profile of him from 2023, I was like, is this legal? And they were like, yeah, it's no problem. But is it a problem?

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 Halloween episode, we're having fun, but I want to be clear. Let me be clear.

Ooh, let me be clear. 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. 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 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 2000 and became a bone influencer before he could legally buy Miller Light. And when I 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 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 2000s. 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 relationship to death is different outside of the fact that it is coming for all of us. But Caitlin Doty makes educational content about death. And while 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 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 pandemic era growth of TikTok itself. And make no mistake, John's Bones had been posting Bones to Maine since 2019,

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 an early post. 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. With deepest regrets, I do need to describe this for you.

John is panning over at least 50 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 removed from humanity, I guess. But as John's bones posts grew in popularity, some viewers became uncomfortable with the casualness 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 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, for nearly $4,000. 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 are probably looking at the bones of a poor person, and very likely a 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 it ever happened. For all intents and purposes, people who were disproportionately exploited in life are often further exploited in death in this way. 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. 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 bones surfaced.

Or if you're a grave robber, and I would be fascinated to know if any of you are grave robbers, 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 they get here? In the 18th and 19th 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, the most commonplace for bones to be sourced from is India, which had a multi-million dollar trade before the practice of selling bones was banned in 1986. And what ended this industry? Well, 1,500 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 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 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 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 1850s. Calcutta, India was the global center of the bone trade and primarily sold the bones of their own disenfranchised, franchise people to the U.K. and the U.S., quite literally selling the brutal consequences

of colonialism back to the colonizer. According to a 2022 profile of John's Bones, who sources much of his collection to the companies that comprise these 19th century Western businesses, the 1943 Bengal famine was a boon for the bone industry, 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. 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 2020. Hi everyone. I'm going to talk a little bit about what I do because it always gets asked in the comment. So here I go. So hi, my name is John John and I work with John's Bones. That's my little business has started. There you go. And Chunky Boy is our mascot. But essentially in the U.S. It is completely legal, and there's no federal regulation against the ownership, possession, or selling of human bones and human osteology. 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 Redmond, author of the book Bone Rooms, told The Guardian in a profile of John's Bones 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. John's Bones admitted in 2021 that his collection was largely sourced from India, Russia, and China, which most likely means that the bones below. 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 state-to-state

and have not really been updated to reflect inflation or advances in technology. As I'm recording this, there are 42 states where it's completely legal to sell human remains at your weird store. selling human remains on Etsy was only discontinued in 2012 and on eBay in 2016. When asked the question, Where do you source your human remains from and is it ethical?

Do you believe selling human remains for profit is ethical? John replied, Well, 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 cannot be destroyed because improper disposal of human remains is a crime. That leaves an impossible object that has no easy solution for being dealt with. Our solution is to re-enter them into the educational field. 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 Carney in that guardian piece. 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. Ooh. 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 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. Wait, let's turn on some Lana Del Rey style music. 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, 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 just 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 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 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. New Hampshire. And maybe most shockingly of all, the maximum prison sentence that they face for

this is only 15 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 U.S. attorney Gerard Karam, 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. Cedric Lodge netted around $40,000 from the stolen remains. And if you needed any more proof of how modern grave robbing is now,

evidence that proved his guilt included PayPal transactions with descriptions like head number seven and brains. 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 human remains traded online

put a witch in jail. The Tumblr Bone Witch and Bone Gazi, your 16th minute, starts now. I'm not so bad when you turn up the lights, boy. I'll get it perfect all in a time. Let's start, let's take it too far, then give me one more more. Let me see you. Sixteen minute of fame.

Sixteen minute of fame. Sixteen minute of face. One more minute of me. We all know. We all know. We all know. We all know, right?

Genius is evenly distributed. Opportunity is not. It's Black Business Month and Black Tech Green Money is tapping in. I'm Will Lucas spotlighting black founders, investors, and innovators, building the future, one idea at a time. Let's talk legacy, tech,

and generational wealth. I don't think any person of any gender, race, ethnicity should alter who they are, especially on an intellectual level or a talent level, to make someone else feel comfortable just because they are the majority in this situation and they need employment. So for me, I'm always going to be honest in saying that we need to be unapologetically ourselves. If that makes me a vocal CEO and people consider that rocking the boat, so be it. To hear this and more on the power of black innovation and ownership, listen to Black Tech Green Money from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the IHart

radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In sitcoms, when someone has a problem, they just blurt it out and move on. Well, I lost my job and my parakeet is missing. How is your day? But the real world is different. Managing life's challenges can be overwhelming. So, what do we do? We get support.

The Huntsman Mental Health Institute and the Ad Council have mental health resources available for you at loveyourmindtay.org. That's loveyourmindtay.org. See how much further you can go when you take care of your mental health. Adventure should never come with a pause button. Remember the MoviePass era where you could watch all the movies you wanted for just $9? It made zero cents and I could not stop thinking about it. I'm Bridget Todd, host of the tech podcast, there are no girls on the internet.

On this new season, I'm talking to the innovators who are left out of the tech headlines. Like the visionary behind a movie pass, Black founder Stacey Spikes, who was pushed out of Movie Pass the company that is, he founded. His story is wild that it's currently the subject of a juicy new HBO documentary. We dive into how culture connects us. When you go to France, or you go to England, or you go to Hong Kong, those kids are wearing Jordans, they're wearing Kobe's shirt, they're watching Black Panther. And the challenges of being a Black founder. Close your eyes and tell me what a tech founder looks like. They're not going to describe someone who looks like me and they're not

going to describe someone who looks like you. I created There Are No Girls on the Internet because the future belongs to all of us. So listen to There Are No Girls on the Internet on the IHurt Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, Puzzlers. Let's start with a quick puzzle. The answer is Ken Jennings' appearance on The Puzzler with A.J. Jacobs. The question is, what is the most entertaining listening experience in podcast land? Jeopardy Truthers, who say that you were given all the answers, believe in...

I guess they would be conspiracy theorists. That's right. Are there Jeopardy Truthers? Are there people who say that it was rigged? Yeah, ever since I was first on,

people are like, they gave you the answers, right? And then there's the other ones which are like. They gave you the answers and you still blew it. Don't miss Jeopardy legend Ken Jennings on our special

game show week of the Puzzler podcast. The Puzzler is the best place to get your daily word puzzle fix. Listen on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The U.S. Open is here, and on my podcast, Good Game with Sarah Spain, I'm breaking down the players from rising stars to legends chasing history, the predictions, well, we see a first time winner, and the pressure. Billy Jean King says pressure is a privilege, you know. Plus, the stories and events off the court, and of course the honey deuses, the signature

cocktail of the U.S. Open. The U.S. Open has gotten to be a very fancy, wonderfully experiential sporting event. I mean, listen, the whole aim is to be accessible and inclusive for all tennis fans, whether you play tennis or not. Tennis is full of compelling stories of late. Have you heard about Icon Venus Williams' recent wildcard bids or the young Canadian, Victoria Mboko, making a name for herself? How about Naomi Osaka getting back to form? To hear this and more, listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain. Women's Sports Production in partnership with deep blue sports and entertainment on the IHeart

Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. Welcome to 16th Minute, the podcast where we look 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 Tumblr Bone Witch story.

And not to disappoint, but there is not an interview with the Bone Witch themselves here. And the reason that is we'll become clear. What we do have are interviews with a practicing non-bone-stealing witch, a graveyard preservationist in New Orleans, and the only legal expert 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 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 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 Bone story, mentions the Tumblr Bone Witch story as the seminal social media grave robbing saga. What a distinction. Back when John's Bones was going through that controversy in 2021, a TikTok user named Nomi Name Davis posted this. I'd enjoy is my human spine collection.

And in the U.S. there's no federal regulation against the owner. They tried to warn us, the Tumblr 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 their warning? Why didn't we heed? The comparisons were being made to the point where John's bones himself felt the need to respond. Telling ABC News in 2021, 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. 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 Gazi. The place, New Orleans, Louisiana. The Tumblr Bone Witch story is a meme unto itself, but like every story on 16th minute, it involved 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 2015. David Bowie makes his final public appearance before his death in early 2016, attending the debut of his musical Lazarus.

Donald Trump declares that if elected president, he will place a Muslim ban across the U.S. And in New Orleans, Louisiana, a practicing 20-something witch named Ender Darling, who uses they-them 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 L.A. for 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 Torje at Vice for writing the definitive timeline of this story all the way back in 2016. On December 8, 2015, 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 2000-plus member group was as follows. We are a collective of queer witches, diverse and age, nationality, gender, race, class, ability, and more. To strive for a better community for everyone, we must acknowledge how privileges and depression intersect across these labels. And Darling's Post said the following. Content warning. Graves. Bone hunting. Comment if there are added warnings needed. about 20 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 fishbowl, 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 femurs, teeth, jaws, skull-cap, et cetera, et cetera. This is where I go to find my human bones for curse work 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 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 at first. Some commenters just say, yes, I'm interested.

Others say, this sounds cool, but be careful of state laws. And Ender 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, L.O.L. Okay. put a pin in that, 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. Okay, put a pin in that. But it's not long before they start to get pushback from people within the group, who insist that the bones should be.

be left in peace. And her darling gets defensive and is supported by the mods of the queer witch collective. They say, do not shame me for my work. Now, 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 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 Torje's piece, were invested in the idea. of 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 criticism of grave-wrapping. 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 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 are implementing white supremacist and colonialist tactics to do 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, 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. 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 non-binary trans witch, said the following about why they initially defended darling in the group. There is an immense amount of shaming directed at African diaspora religions by white witches, whether it be about animal sacrifice, hexing, cursing, jinksing, 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. 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 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. Just a few months before Bonesa, there was a reckoning among Houdou practitioners,

a spiritual practice brought from enslaved Africans forced to come to America, and one that remained a predominantly black practice while mixing in elements of Christianity as time went on. In the fall of 2015, VICE reported on the appropriation of Houdou by white witches. this was an active and necessary conversation. And Darling invokes these cultures in their next defense, 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 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 2015? It was Tumblr. we all know right genius is evenly distributed opportunity is not it's black business month and black tech green money is tapping in i'm will lucas spotlighting black founders investors and innovators building the future one idea at a time let's talk legacy tech and generational wealth

i don't think any person of any gender race ethnicity should alter who they are especially on an intellectual level or a talent level to make someone else feel comfortable just because they are the majority in this situation and they need employment. So for me, I'm always going to be honest in saying that we need to be unapologetically ourselves. If that makes me a vocal CEO and people consider that rocking the boat, so be it.

To hear this and more on the power of black innovation and ownership, listen to Black Tech Green Money from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If a baby is giggling in the backseat, they're probably happy. If a baby is crying in the back seat,

They're probably hungry, but if a baby is sleeping in the backseat, will you remember they're even there? When you're distracted, stressed, or not usually the one who drives them, the chances of forgetting them in the back seat are much higher. It can happen to anyone. Parked cars get hot fast and can be deadly. So get in the habit of checking the back seat when you leave. A message from NHTSA and the ad council. Hello, puzzlers. Let's start with a quick puzzle.

The answer is Ken Jennings' appearance on The Puzzler with A.J. Jacobs. The question is, what is the most entertaining listening experience in podcast land? Jeopardy-truthers who say that you were given all the answers believe in... I guess they would be conspiracy theorists. That's right. Are there jeopardy truthers? Are there people who say that it was rigged? Yeah, ever since I was first on, people are like.

They gave you the answers, right? And then there's the other ones which are like. They gave you the answers and you still blew it. Don't miss Jeopardy legend Ken Jennings on our special game show week of The Puzzler podcast. The Puzzler is the best place to get your daily word puzzle fix. Listen on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Adventure should never come with a pause button. Remember the Movie Pass era, where you could watch all the movies you wanted for just $9?

It made zero cents and I could not stop thinking about it. I'm Bridget Todd, host of the tech podcast, there are no girls on the internet. On this new season, I'm talking to the innovators who are left out of the tech headlines. Like the visionary behind a movie pass, Black founder Stacey Spikes, who was pushed out of movie pass, the company that he founded. His story is wild and it's currently the subject of a juicy new HBO documentary. We dive into how culture connects us. When you go to France, or you go to England, or you go to Hong Kong, those kids are wearing Jordans, they're wearing Kobe's shirt, they're watching Black Panther.

And the challenges of being a Black founder. Close your eyes and tell me what a tech founder looks like. They're not going to describe someone who looks like me and they're not going to describe someone who looks like you. I created There Are No Girls on the Internet because the future belongs to all of us. So listen to There are No Girls on the Internet on the IHurt Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The U.S. Open is here. And on my podcast, Good Game with Sarah Spain, I'm breaking down the players from rising stars to legends chasing history. The predictions will we see a first time winner and the pressure.

Billy Jean King says pressure is a privilege, you know. Plus, the stories and events off the court and, of course, the honey deuses, the signature cocktail of the U.S. Open. The U.S. Open has gotten to be a very fancy, once. Wonderfully experiential sporting event. I mean, listen, the whole aim is to be accessible and inclusive for all tennis fans, whether you play tennis or not. Tennis is full of compelling stories of late. Have you heard about Icon Venus Williams' recent wildcard bids?

Or the young Canadian, Victoria Mboko, making a name for herself. How about Naomi Osaka getting back to form? To hear this and more, listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain, an IHeart Women's Sports Production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. Tumblr is a still technically active blog site that peaked in popularity in the mid-2010s. was pretty unique as far as social media sites went. Tumblr thrived on images, on tightly knit

niche fan communities, on parisocial 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 a very likely place for the Ender Darling drama to end up, with a screenshot posted to user Pastel Prouvares Tumblr on December 17th. The post 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.

The post got immediate traction, around 30,000 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's saga hit the internet in earnest. Not only was it confirmed, Darling's own Tumblr, Little Fucking Monster, was exposed to, and the internet went wild. Bone Gazi had begun. Today's big news, Twitter, Martin Scraly, Facebook, Star Wars, Tumblr, calling out a witch for actually stealing human bones from a cemetery.

We have reached Peak Tumblr. A callout post was made for someone literally stealing human bones. An offering to sell them with attached commentary about racism and classism. A your-fave 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 2015, and Tumblr has become what it was always destined to be. Me on a date. So, what do you think about real and dark witchcraft?

My date. It's okay, I guess. Pretty scary, though. that glittery honey wika woo-woo shit more. Me, shoving my stolen human bones into my purse. Shit, I gotta go. And this is super goofy, although note the early what is this woke culture bullshit

and the shout-out to the your-favis problematic Tumblr for an episode in a few weeks, foreshadowing. The back half of 2015 was considered to be pretty dry in terms of big internet stories. after an influx of viral stories like The Dress, ever heard of it, check out that episode of 16th Minute, took place earlier that year.

The tone of this discussion also said a lot about how Tumblr 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 in their approach to these pretty massive issues. And Bon 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 witchin community, this incident really strained relationships and mutually held values. And part of that is because Darling themselves continued to double down on Tumblr once that call-out post became popular. This post is long, so I'm just going to share some highlights. Long story short, a post that was posted in a queer witch collective where sell 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 threat that fucking followed, and removed from the group where had context 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. Anywho, I made a choice in what I thought was a safe place for POC witches,

especially POC, which is who practiced indigenous, dark, or otherwise not wickened fluffy magic to post something offering the little bits of bone I had sitting on my altar to other POC witches 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, you bunch of fucks. Magic is dark. Magic is bloody. Magic is scary. Magic isn't just

fucking white, light, fairy dust, bulls of honey on your damn altar. You can all stop touting the three-fold rule or wicket read or karma thing. That should apply us to only those who believe in it. Oh, fucking stop. I'm not Wiccan. I'm not fluffy. I work with death and bones, curses and hexes, the dark and the things not for the faint 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. You don't want to sit there and pretend that gravekeepers aren't actually selling bodies or bones to hospitals and colleges? Yeah, 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. You don't want to be mad at the kid who saves some phones from being crushed because fuck getting the actual story. The post continues from here, and it was made the same day that that call-out post got traction. And it's here that we learn a little more about Ender Darling. They're saying that they have been doxed and that they have a child, meaning that the call-out post has put them potentially in harm's way. And again, there's a 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 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, to strive for a better community for everyone, we must acknowledge how privileges and depression intersect across these labels. 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 witches 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 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 apologized for mishandling the situation, but the trust within QWC

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 stopped 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 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 2,000 to only 77 members, according to Vise. Bone Gazi had decimated the community. Things wouldn't be that simple for Ender Darling in the aftermath 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 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 2015 into the holidays, Darling's home was, unbeknownst to them, placed under periodic surveillance for about six days. And at the end of January, the home was, was raided by the police, along with a subpoena issued that collected over 12,000 pages of their Facebook correspondence. But they're not arrested at this time. There was a weed charge to them and their roommates, and there were bones removed from the home. 11 bones, plus four teeth, 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 2016. 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 Moostian, They were coming in 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 that 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 than to give you that answer. 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 talk 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 satisfy. sabotage Ender Darling's case. Because, as it was revealed in September 2016, just a few weeks shy of Ken Bone's big moment, everything's connected, Ender Darling was arrested and was presently in jail in New Orleans by this time. The advocate reported that they had, under their government name Devin Marie Machuca, pled 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 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. This is where I go to find my human bones for curse work and general spells that require bone. And we ended here. Are you pleading guilty to burglary of Holtz Cemetery because you are in fact guilty of the charge?

Beres asked. Yes, ma'am, Darling said. But Darling's true legacy is encoded in Louisiana law. This incident is said to have been influential on a piece of 2016 legislation called the Louisiana Human Remains Protection and Control Act, the first update to Human Remains laws in the state since 1950, included in that legislation. 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. I mean... A legacy can look like anything. The Tumblr Bone Witch, who identified by the Spanish term Bruja by the time they were in court, hasn't cropped up online since. Ender darling, Devin Machuca, is thoroughly offline now, from what I can tell.

I was not able to find them or speak to them for this episode. And that 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, I felt pretty stumped. Because the way I see it,

what Ender 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 Pottersfield bones they were stealing. But my question really is, does that mean that a 20-something single parent should have been thrown in jail? I don't think so, 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 going to do this Thursday, when I get to the bottom of what bone law is, what American witchcraft looks like today, and whether the bone witch was innocent after all. And until then, here's your moment of fun, a question I've been asking for almost 10 years. Would Beetlejuice come? Wet or dry scabs? 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. Comment, subscribe.

We need this. I love you. Goodbye. 16th minute is production of Cool Zone Media and I Heart Radio. It is written, hosted, and produced by me, Jamie Loftus. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichten and Robert Evans. The Amazing Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor. Our theme song is by Sad 13. Voice acting is from Grant Crater. And pet shoutouts to our dog producer Anderson, My Cats Flea, and Casper, and by Pet Rockbird, who will outlive us all. Bye.

It's Black Business Month and Black Tech Green Money is tapping in. I'm Will Lucas spotlighting Black founders, investors, and innovators, building the future, one idea at a time. Let's talk legacy, tech, and generational wealth. I had the skill and I had the talent. I didn't have the opportunity. Yeah. We all know, right?

Genius is evenly distributed. Opportunity is not. To hear this and more on the power of black innovation and ownership, listen to Black Tech Green Money from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In sitcoms, when someone has a problem, they just blurt it out and move on.

Well, I lost my job and my parakeet is missing. How is your day? But the real world is different. Managing life's challenges can be overwhelming. So what do we do? We get support. The Huntsman Mental Health Institute and the Ad Council have mental health resources available for you at loveyourmindtay.org.

That's loveyourmindtay.org. See how much further you can go when you take care of your mental health. Tune in to All the Smoke Podcast, where Matt and Stacks sit down with you. with former first lady Michelle Obama. Folks find it hard to hate up close. And when you get to know people and you're sitting in their kitchen tables

and they're talking like we're talking. You know, you hear our story, how we grew up, how Barack grew up. And you get a chance for people to unpack and get beyond race. All the Smoke featuring Michelle Obama. To hear this podcast and more, open your free IHeart Radio app.

Search All the Smoke and listen now. The U.S. Open is here. And on my podcast, Good Game with Sarah Spain. I'm breaking down the players. The predictions, the pressure, and of course, the honey deuses, the signature cocktail of the U.S. Open. The U.S. Open has gotten to be a very wonderfully experiential sporting event. To hear this and more, listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain, an Iheart women's sports production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment

on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by Novartis, founding partner of IHart Women's Sports Network. Hey, I'm Kurt Brown-Oller. And I am Scotty Landis, and we host Baner. The podcast where we share the weirdest, funniest, real news stories from all around the world. And sometimes from our guest's personal lives, too. Like when Whitney Cummings recently revealed her origin story on the show. There's no way I don't already have rabies.

This is probably just why my personality is like this. I've been surviving rabies for the past 20 years. New episodes of bananas drop every Tuesday in the exactly right network. Listen to bananas on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an I-Heart podcast.