Seven years ago, a box containing 12 human skulls and a hyena skeleton arrived at Henry Scragg’s front door in Essex, England. The 28-year-old gardener, who had been collecting and hoarding other oddities for a number of years, stumbled on the collection a week earlier while browsing on eBay. On a whim, he placed a bid and won.

Having never owned human remains before, Scragg unpacked the delivery with some trepidation. But when he held the skulls in his hands, he was struck by the beauty of the bared teeth and cavernous eyes, devoid of all life. He arranged the craniums, took some photos, and uploaded them on Instagram, adding hashtags: #skull #skeleton #curiosity.

Soon, Scragg was flooded with messages from people offering to buy the grisly remains. “I wasn’t really expecting much,” he says. “But obviously people want what they haven’t got.” Over the next few months, he sold a few of the items, and with the extra cash he bought more skulls and put them up for trade too.

Wired UK This story originally appeared on WIRED UK.

Today, Scragg’s Instagram account has over 33,000 devoted followers and is a central node in a small but active network of buyers and sellers who trade human remains on Instagram. Most buyers and sellers are avid collectors, who see accumulating rare bones as a legitimate, if eccentric, hobby.

But others view the rise of the human remains trade on Instagram as more than a sign of eccentricity, particularly when Instagrammers take real human skulls and give them faux tribal makeovers. Archeologists and historians keeping a close eye on the Instagram skull trade worry that it is an online microcosm of the West's dark colonial past, and at a moment in history when museums are beginning to take decolonization and repatriation of stolen remains seriously, some wonder whether the online trade is reopening barely healed wounds.

Pre-2016, if you were in the market for human remains, eBay was your go-to website. But after the site banned the sale of human body parts (with the exception of scalp hair) in 2016, Instagram has taken over.

Selling remains on the photo-sharing network works much like other informal commerce on the platform. A user will post an image of, say, a skull and offer a price in the comment section below. Interested users will then reach out via direct message, and if a price is agreed upon, payment is made directly, and the goods packaged and shipped.

Archeologists Damien Huffer and Shawn Graham have been surveying the scale of this shadowy market since 2013, searching and analyzing several thousand posts advertising human remains on the platform. Their findings reveal a rapidly growing trade: In 2013, sales totaled only $5,200 (£4,190), but by 2016, that number had risen to $57,000 (£46,000). And Huffer says that the true total is likely to be much higher. Many sellers don’t advertise prices for their wares—preferring to leave the messy business of negotiating to direct messages—but through his own sleuthing, Huffer has found some items selling for upwards of $19,800 (£16,000).