The 2010s have been a good decade for witchcraft.
The past few years have seen a massive rise in demand for witchy clothes and witchy knick-knacks,
Tumblr and Pinterest are filled with witchy mood boards, Sabrina the Teenage Witch got a dark, edgy reboot,
celebrities are participating in Wiccan rituals, and all of the Internet's WLWs
collectively admitted that the Hex Girls were their sexual awakening.
But this stuff - it's all aesthetic. This is child's play.
What about the real stuff, the actual modern-day witches
performing long-forgotten spells with powerful arcane implements?
The witches harnessing the power of the earth and the spirits for healing and cursing alike?
What about the people for whom being a witch isn't just about buying some shit from Dolls Kill and wearing dark lipstick,
but about learning and preserving an ancient art, the masters of which have been persecuted for centuries?
What about the people who take this seriously?
Well in 2015, one such person would show the world just how far they were willing to go
in order to practice witchcraft the way it's meant to be done.
This is When Posting Goes Wrong.
- Taking human remains from a historic New Orleans Cemetery--
- A 24-year old is accused of plucking human bones from graves and trying to sell them online.
- How a user with the name of Ender Darling--
- I have family members buried in that graveyard too,
so y'all can stop treating me like some tourist that just came out of nowhere.
- There are laws against theft of automobiles and everything else,
and there are laws against removing human remains.
 
On February 23rd, 2015, a private Facebook group by the name of The Queer Witch Collective was created.
The page is pretty much what the name would suggest:
it's a group for witches who identify as queer or trans to post about witchcraft.
At its peak, the group had about 2,000 members.
The collective aimed to be an inclusive space for witches of all backgrounds and advertised itself as such.
A key way in which this translated to discussion of actual witchcraft was in the form of a strict policy
against shaming other witches for their practices.
This rule was in place to protect witches of colour who performed witchcraft rooted in African Diaspora religions,
such as Voodoo and Hoodoo.
According to the group's founder, referred to only as Dakota in her one interview on the subject,
practitioners of these forms of, quote, "black magic",
which the collective considered a racialized term,
are often shamed by white witches who are uncomfortable with things like, quote,
"animal sacrifice, hexing, cursing, jinxing, etc."
In short, what one person might consider unethical might be someone else's culture,
so it's best to just witch and let witch, so to speak.
However, as anyone who has spent time on 4chan or certain comedy subreddits can tell you,
it is a dangerous game to moderate an online community in such a way that not only allows
but encourages the posting of things that make other users uncomfortable.
There will come a point where someone posts something that people may consider a bridge too far
and at that point the moderators must make a decision as to where they want to draw the line
and how they make that decision can decide the fate of their group, then and there.
For the admins of Queer Witch Collective, that day arrived on December 8th, 2015,
less than nine months after the group was created, when a non-binary witch by the name of Ender Darling
made a post that would go down in history as the spark that ignited some of the most profoundly absurd discourse ever seen.
"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, the bones wash up.
The older the grave, the more you find.
You can literally walk around and see femurs, teeth, jaws, skull caps, etc, etc.
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 to work with for me than animal bone.
I can relate and work with the energy they carry, if that makes any sense.)
Anyway, 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."
Within the collective, Ender Darling's post was, at least initially, received relatively well.
The first two comments showed people expressing interest,
though one user pointed out that Darling needed to be careful with state and federal laws.
Keep this in mind for later.
Another user expressed some concern, asking
"Are you making any sort of offering or payment at the graveyard to the dead or the spirits of the land?"
To which Darling responded, "I bring drink and honey and flowers. Me and my goddess have a pact.
She provides the bones if I only take what the earth gives and I leave offerings."
Unsurprisingly, it did not take long for some users to take issue with Darling's behavior
and Darling was quick to go on the defensive.
Quote, "Do. Not. Shame. Me. For. My. Work."
The beginnings of the discourse were starting to emerge.
Now it is at this point that the moderators could have stepped in and raised questions
about the ethics of taking random bones from a cemetery for the impoverished.
It would have been entirely possible for them to confront Darling about their practices
while also respecting the folk religions that their policy of no shaming was meant to protect.
After all, while many forms of witchcraft across different cultures have used
human remains as part of their practices, according to American witch expert Alex Mar, quote,
"There aren't any specific traditions that I know of or that I've heard of
where you're given the right to take the remains of someone you have no family
or magical or religious connection to and use them for your magical practice,"
and that Darling's behavior reflects, quote,
"inexperience and irresponsibility."
This, however, is not the approach that the mods decided to take, as one admin replied, quote,
"I am really sad that someone is acting like this is grave desecration when it's literally
taking what the earth washes up so they don't go into waste treatment???"
The admins would soon regret their decision to hold fast to this policy.
See, Ender admitted in their original post that the graveyard they were visiting to get these bones was for those too poor to afford
above-ground burial, which other New Orleans residents identified as a potter's field called Holt Cemetery.
This meant that the bones they were, uh, "collecting"
were likely those have disenfranchised, marginalized people,
and considering that this was in New Orleans, a city with a long and storied history of racism,
it did not take long for other users to come to the conclusion that, quote,
"Ender is implementing white supremacist and Colonialist tactics to do their bidding.
Like, y'all are actually stealing bones."
"I joined this group about three weeks ago," another user replied,
"and about ten seconds into that tenure I see a post about someone
collecting potentially black human remains."
Now accused of abetting racism in a group that prided itself on inclusivity, the admins change their tune,
encouraging a dialogue about the ethics of the situation.
Unfortunately by this point the cat was out of the bag.
The admins had already gone to great lengths to defend Darling
and anything they did now is essentially an admission of guilt.
Their policy against shaming other witches, which was meant to protect witches of colour,
had backfired stupendously. Those who actually practiced African Diaspora religions
knew that what Darling had done not only went against tradition, but quite frankly against human decency,
and they were not going to sit by idly and watch the mods defend it.
Within only a few hours of Ender Darling's post, the collective was in full-on revolt.
Users were leaving the group, saying they were going off to start their own collectives
where this sort of behavior would not be tolerated.
One user screenshotted Ender Darling's original post, and on December 12th, shared it on Facebook outside the group
in order to warn other New Orleans residents to keep their eye out for Darling so they can, quote,
"Tell them to stay the fuck out of Holt Cemetery or THEIR bones might get broken."
This post received over 300 shares, prompting the interest of several local news outlets.
Five days later, on December 17th, Tumblr user pastel-prouvaire
located Darling's Tumblr account and decided to warn fellow users about their
bone stealing habit. In a post that would go on to become even more infamous than the original from Facebook.
pastel-prouvaire wrote, "PSA: Tumblr user littlefuckinmonster is stealing human bones
from cemeteries in Louisiana. Please don't let them get away with this and spread the word / signal boost!"
Another user asked for verification, to which a third user responded with the screenshot of Darling's
Facebook post and links to the aforementioned news articles. The PSA blew up, garnering over 43,000 notes.
A common theme in user reactions to the post seemed to be the inherent absurdity
of using a Tumblr call-out post, the sort of thing normally reserved for digging up a user's racist or sexist comments,
to draw attention to someone stealing human remains for use in witchcraft.
This, combined with the fact that the latter half of 2015
experienced a drought of new memes on Tumblr, was all the excuse other blogs needed to meme the shit out of the
Ender Darling call-out post. Let us take a moment to laugh at some of these.
"You: doing taxes, folding the laundry 
Me: calling someone the fuck out for grave robbery on Tumblr dot com"
"PSA: Geneva resident Victor Frankenstein is stealing human remains from German cemeteries.
Please don't let them get away with this"
"I wanted to say I want to die because of this bones stealing thing,
but littlefuckinmonster would probably steal MY bones then so I can't do that."
"Why is someone out there stealing bones when they can take all of mine right now for free?"
"You wouldn't steal a cemetery."
"20 minutes into stealing literal human remains
for the purposes of dark magic and chill
and he gives you this look."
"Alas, poor Yorick, littlefuckinmonster stole ye well."
Shortly after the post blew up, Darling deleted their blog littlefuckinmonster due to repeated harassment
but would create a second account, fuckinheathen, on which they posted a lengthy defense of their actions.
The main points of this post were that, one, Darling was not selling bones,
simply offering to send them to people in exchange for the recipient of the bones paying for shipping.
Two, Darling was not digging up graves. They were, in fact, rescuing bones that
a supposed, quote, "old man digging with a shovel and a backhoe had unearthed,"
presumably for his own Wiccan rituals, and were thus preventing the bones from being,
quote, "crushed or swept away."
Three, Darling's practices are rooted in indigenous traditions and they are being shamed
by people who prefer, quote, "fluffy magic,"
that's just, quote, "just fucking white light fairy dust bowls of honey on your damn altar."
And four, other people in New Orleans have stolen far more human remains than Darling in far less ethical ways.
Darling did not provide citations for these last claims.
Now at this point you might be wondering what many Tumblr users were wondering
when they first encountered a call-out post about someone stealing human bones:
"Hey, this sounds illegal. Shouldn't someone call the cops about this?"
Well...
At the height of the bones meme, or Boneghazi, as it came to be known,
as many jokes were being made mocking the idea of writing a Tumblr call-out post
for someone committing grave robbery as there were jokes at the expense of Darling themself.
Another user by the name of nopathfollowed came to the defense of the callout post,
pointing out that Tumblr has a large community of witches and bone collectors
who would be interested in ethical, reputable sources for purchasing human remains online,
something that...apparently exists?
and it would be helpful for them to know that littlefuckinmonster was offering stolen goods.
Additionally, nopathfollowed pointed out that it wasn't like pastel-prouvaire made a call-out post instead of
calling the police, because the woman who initially shared Darling's post on her personal Facebook account
had already contacted the authorities.
And despite the absurdity of the situation, the police took this tip seriously.
On January 28th, 2016, after a period of, quote,
"periodic surveillances and investigation into Darling's activity on Facebook,"
law enforcement raided Darling's home in mid-city New Orleans and recovered
at least eleven bones, four teeth, and some weed.
In an interview with the New Orleans Advocate, Darling described the raid, saying, quote,
"I had them on an altar. It was just a bunch of little shards of bone and pieces of teeth 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.' "
Court documents claimed that Darling had been stealing bones from a nearby cemetery
since around November and that they had primarily acted alone
but occasionally with the help of a roommate. Darling's roommates denied all such accusations.
Asked for comment on Darling and their bone theft,
one of the roommates replied, paraphrased to correct the pronouns,
"I think [they] thought [they] had way more power than [they] actually had."
Following the raid, Darling moved to Tampa, allegedly to protect their daughter from angry citizens.
After running some tests to confirm the items found in Darling's home were in fact actual human bones,
police arrested them on July 15th. Speaking to law enforcement,
Darling admitted to having collected bones from Holt Cemetery that had washed up after a rainstorm,
but clarified that they had not taken bones from any other cemeteries in Louisiana.
Darling did however imply that they had taken bones from, quote, "one or more cemeteries in other states,"
specifically identifying Maryland, a lead that was tragically never followed up on,
leaving the thrilling saga of Boneghazi with a frustrating loose end.
After being extradited back to Louisiana and held in jail awaiting trial for a little over a month,
on September 9th, Darling struck a plea deal in Orleans Parish criminal court.
They pled guilty to simple burglary and marijuana possession and were sentenced
to a five-year suspended sentence, plus time served, allowing them to walk free that day.
While the stolen bones meme came and went on Tumblr as so many other memes do,
the effects of Ender Darling's actions were far more long-lasting elsewhere.
The main casualty of Boneghazi, aside from the stolen remains of unknown poor people from New Orleans,
was the Facebook group where this all started: The Queer Witch Collective.
Darling left the group voluntarily shortly after the controversy started,
but despite apologizing for the incident, Dakota, the founding admin, was subject to months of harsh criticism
over how her and the other mods initially handled the situation.
As one user put it, quote,
"I don't think white witches are inherently bad.
I do however think Dakota is irredeemable based on the fact that their aura is rotten AF."
Dakota would later leave the group but the new management
still couldn't bring the community back together and eventually resorted to drastic measures.
In the fall of 2016, around the time when Ender Darling was being sentenced,
the admins of the collective removed all other members and asked that everyone reapply.
There seems to have been little interest in rebuilding Queer Witch Collective.
Of the once 2000 members, only 77 rejoined after the purge.
As of the making of this video, that number has dropped to 64.
Surprisingly, Boneghazi also made its way to the halls of government.
After hearing about the story from the local media, in April of 2016,
the Louisiana State Legislature passed a law that more clearly outlined the penalties for stealing human bones,
which, while not referred to as littlefuckinmonster's Law, absolutely should be.
As for what happened to Ender Darling, local media stopped reporting on the story after the sentencing
so the paper trail more or less ends there.
It's unclear how much if any of that five year suspended sentence
they ended up serving, and if they have returned to social media in the ensuing years
they've been smart to avoid any mention of stolen human remains.
In short, we will probably never get a "where are they now" on the Tumblr witch
who was caught stealing human bones, which is probably for the best.
For their sake as well as ours.
[music]
