Thread by @DrKillgrove

💀Skeleton story time! 💀

Since I was tweeting earlier about how one should not buy/own/sell human remains, here's the story about the time I did call the police because of random human body parts, and what happened next...

#anthropology #bioarchaeology #osteology #skeleton

This box showed up in my lab classroom one day when I was teaching at UWF. No note. No explanation.

It was lab time, and my #osteology students were in there studying for their exam, with my TA (@Angervana) answering their questions. I asked @Angervana if she knew what it was. She did not.

The box was a lightweight wood of some sort, maybe 6"x6" and 4" tall. Clearly handmade, not very sturdy.

We opened the box cautiously.

Well, @Angervana did because I was terrified a mouse or cockroach or something else shiver-worthy would pop out at me. 😱

She slid the box top open...

There were some leaf bits and dirt, but the contents were clearly:
1) a small container of human teeth, 🦷
2) a small container of shell or bone, and 🐚
3) an old pepper grinder with a piece of what looked like charcoal in it. 🤔

I recognized the little shaker things as travel-sized containers for loose foundation/powder. And had no idea why there was a wire on the other item.

It was getting close to the end of the day at that point, so I took the box on a promenade through the anthropology department. One of our adjunct instructors actually recognized it and said...

"Oh yeah, I've seen that. Last night one of the lab instructors--the black-haired one--came and showed it to me. We concluded there were human teeth."

Me:

I believe my exact response was, "What the everloving FUCK?", and I went back to the lab to see what else I could find out about the mystery BOX OF DEATH.

I opened the little shaker full of teeth. They appeared to be modern. Mostly molars, my guess is they were extractions. It's pretty easy to get or keep extracted teeth from dentists (at least here in the US). 👩🏻‍⚕️👨🏻‍⚕️🦷

I then tried to open the other container, but the top wouldn't come off using my fingernail or a dental pick -- irony alert! After slicing my finger, I gave up.

I went home and emailed the "black haired lab instructor" (another graduate TA) to ask what she knew. She responded that a guy she didn't know came into her classroom before her 6pm lab the previous day and gave her the box. He said he found it just outside the anthro building.

Now, that building was pretty... special. At the head of a nature trail leading to dozens of acres of swamp, it was not actually the first time I'd been alerted to... dead things nearby. (One person, two bags of shark blubber. Yes, really.)

Every time something weird was found -- heck, once it was a circle of stones that someone thought was either satanic or some educational anthropological activity -- the campus police would call us and see if we knew what it was.

Logically, since I was now in the possession of what were CLEARLY human remains that I had NO EARTHLY CLUE where they came from, the appropriate thing to do was to call the campus police.

I called them in the morning after teaching. Explained to the dispatcher that I'd found human remains with no provenance and didn't know what to do with them. The dispatcher told me someone would come by later.

I was eating my lunch when the two campus police officers came in. They were super curious about my story, which I recounted for them. While I told it, one of them looked at me quietly and the other just started grinning.

The quiet one was happy he'd already eaten lunch, he said, while the grinning one joked, "You should keep the box. You know, to show the students what happens if they don't do well in your class!"

Me:

So. I had a box with random human bits in it, and... still no idea what to do with it. I started talking to colleagues in other parts of the building. One remembered seeing the box -- about a month or two prior.

A WEIRD BOX WITH A DOZEN TEETH SAT OUTSIDE MY OFFICE FOR MONTHS!

I did the only thing I knew how to do: blogged about it. I figured worst-case scenario was they were a serial killer's death trophies, and that person would hunt me down. 😱 Best-case scenario, I guess I got some free teeth for use in teaching. 👩🏻‍🏫

I kept the box for about three weeks. Just staring at it every day, wondering what the hell to do with it. And then I got an email... a cadaver dog handler thought he recognized it as a "hot box" for use in training.

Suddenly, the holes in the top of the box and the shakers of remains made a WHOLE lot more sense! The dogs could smell the remains but not get at them.

The man who emailed me very quickly located the box's owner, as there aren't too many people who train cadaver dogs.

I arranged to meet the box owner at my office - in broad daylight! - to find out his story.

Turns out, he & his team were doing a basic demo for the city police in the nature area behind the anthro building. But they got an emergency call and lost the "hot box" in their haste.

The cadaver dog trainer was a lovely man, and he explained what all the things were:
- the teeth were pretty self-explanatory
- the powdery stuff was cremains, which dogs can scent on

But the shaker thing with wire was super creepy...

It was to train dogs on "high finds", he told me. The wire allows them to hang it on the tree.

Yes, but what exactly is IN it, I asked (although I wasn't sure I wanted the answer).

It was tree bark with...corpse juice on it. I'm sure he had another term, but that's what it was.

They use it to train dogs to find bodies in trees. ☹️

The organization he worked for helped find missing and trafficked children, and he was the one who coordinated large-scale field efforts. I didn't probe much into why he focuses on kids because, honestly, I have two kids & the topic was far too depressing & anxiety-inducing.

But it sounds like noble work trying to help people. I was only too happy to return his creepy box of death trophies--er, his "hot box"--to him.

That's the only time I've ever had to call the police about random remains. But NOT the only time I have had to deal with them. You'd be amazed how many people just drop off random skeletons to an anthropology department with a story about how they found them in their backyard...