People are stacking up thousands of followers with quaint images of shrunken heads, skulls, and babies in jars.
IG’ers like Skullessence, whose thousands of followers principally see photos of skulls described as belonging to headhunters or cannibals, appear to be in it strictly for the goth esthetic.
Others, like a “collector and admirer of the weird and wonderful” with 10,000+ followers called Skullhunter1979, both show & sell. Generally, Skullhunter1979’s descriptives include the geographic origin of the skull’s former owner, several details about their life (if any are available), and prices ranging from a couple of hundred bucks to over $1,000.
Then you have SkulltureFactory, which periodically sells bones, but mainly shares pics of human remains that have feral abnormalities or have been varied by burial rituals.
DeathIsntTheEnd sells skulls and anything from a gator skin bag to a mummified shark’s head.
Josh Balz, who runs The Strange and Unusual Oddities Parlor page, has one of the biggest followings of Instagram’s oddity traders.
“I started buying while I was on tour,” Balz spoke in an email. “I just got bored of going to Walmarts and malls every day, so I’d venture out and stumble upon these items that were one-of-a-kind. I instantly felt my calling, which my band members hated, maybe because I’d fill the bus with a bunch of dead sh*t that was probably haunted. But hey, we were a goth rock band, so it made sense to me!”
“The majority of mine come from from retired dentists,” Dalton German, who has 15,000+ followers on his account OddArticulations, stated via email.
He’s bought 26 skulls thus far, along with 2 skeletons: one disassembled, and one fully articulated, pieced together with metal wire.
“It used to be mandatory to have a real human skull in dental school. You could buy one just as you buy textbooks today. These dentists are now retiring, and looking to get rid of the skulls, so I buy and resell them.”
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