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In 2015 and 2016, a controversy occurred on Facebook and Tumblr concerning Ender Darling (born 1990 or 1991[1]), a neopagan witch who took human bones from a cemetery in New Orleans for use in rituals. Darling posted to the Facebook group Queer Witch Collective in December 2015, saying they[a] had been collecting bones for use in witchcraft from a "poor man's graveyard" where bones often rose to the surface, and offering to sell bones to others for the cost of shipping. Some fellow witches accused Darling of desecrating graves and took issue with the bones' apparent source, Holt Cemetery—a potter's field where most burials are of poor people of color. Screenshots of the argument were posted elsewhere on Facebook, making their way to local news and then to Tumblr, where one user made a call-out post that garnered over 31,000 notes and led to discourse about racism and classism, which was dubbed Boneghazi or bones discourse. Meta-commentary on Tumblr included both humorous memes and criticism of the discourse's focus on identity politics.
Darling defended their actions, saying that they had only taken bones that were already aboveground and that they cared more about Holt Cemetery's dead than most New Orleanians, given the cemetery's disheveled state. Louisiana authorities subpoenaed Darling's Facebook correspondence, surveilled their home, and in January 2016 searched it, seizing 11 bones and 4 teeth. After testing confirmed that the bones were from humans, police arrested Darling in July on charges of burglary and trafficking in human parts. After two months in jail pending trial, Darling pled guilty to simple burglary and marijuana possession and was sentenced to time served. During the investigation, Louisiana enacted the Louisiana Human Remains Protection and Control Act, which increased the penalties for trading human remains and made Louisiana the third state to broadly ban the import and export of human remains. The Queer Witch Collective's founder left and subsequent moderation action took the group's membership from over 2,000 to less than 100.
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