An Essex curiosities shop openly sells human remains and grisly artefacts including skulls, a foetus in a jar, mummified body parts, shrunken heads, and goods made from human leather. The shop offers a monthly human skull subscription and markets human-derived items online. Leading forensic scientists and heritage experts are calling for stricter regulation of the trade in human remains. Current UK law leaves a legal grey area because human remains are not technically property, making ownership and theft difficult to prosecute. Growing online demand is linked to reported removals of bones from crypts and graveyards domestically and abroad.
Speaking from his macabre curiosities shop in Essex in a recent YouTube interview, Scragg wears a shabby bowler hat, has tribal-style face tattoos and a ginger beard that descends into three pendulous dreadlocks. The shop, Curiosities from the 5th Corner, provides a backdrop that could be plucked straight from a Victorian penny dreadful: a foetus of conjoined twins floats in a large medical jar at Scragg's elbow, shelves of human skulls and a hybrid animal skeleton loom behind.
You've got people who are breaking into mausolea and who are taking remains away to sell them for people who think this is gothic, quaint [or] supernatural, said Black, the president of St John's College, Oxford. If you can make the sale of a bird's nest illegal, surely to goodness you can make the sale of a human body illegal. Having a necklace made out of somebody's teeth isn't acceptable to people.
Collection
[
|
...
]