12 Ft Skeleton (rewind)

both real and fake, stretching back hundreds of years. I also wanted to advertise a new ongoing series I'm doing over on Patreon and Apple Plus called Discord Dispatches from the field, where I talk at you about whatever I want for however long I want in an unedited, uncensored stream of consciousness. In our new episode called Chelsea's Lifelong Haunting

I tell you as many of my own ghost experiences as I can remember in under an hour. Join at patreon.com/slash American hysteria or subscribe on Apple Plus. If you join us at Patreon, you'll be able to join the conversation. And I think it's an all-around better experience. Just my recommendation. I also want to let you know that tomorrow, Tuesday, October 14th.

You can head over to the podcast You're Wrong About to hear my Halloween presentation on midnight ghost shows, a massively popular theatrical phenomenon. that was paired with horror movies from the nineteen thirties to the nineteen sixties. Imagine a combination of a spiritualist seance and a stationary haunted house A campy four D performance of paranormal parlor tricks and gory skits, beloved by a mostly a stage audience who often became a part of the show themselves.

Found at most every department store, grocery store, drug store, hardware store, and gift shop, making their seasonal aisles into our very own American catacombs. For the last few years, we've scoffed at the anatomically incorrect skeletons of various animals and even insects that make absolutely no biological sense. And yet, in my home, a bones only dog sits beside a half size plastic skeleton all year long.

doctor Skull's jaw wide open as if in gleeful, unnerving awe. But the twelve foot skeleton was something else altogether, and he hit us like a fur. Crush. The obsession with Skelly, as he came to be known, started with the help of influencers like Karen and Georgia of the massively popular podcast. My favorite murderer, who mused about their overwhelming desire to own one themselves.

At Pinar wrote, I don't think my boyfriend, the twelve foot skeleton from Home Depot, would be too pleased to hear about this. At Airbag, wrote, My wife just left me for the twelve foot skeleton. Flushing out the meme into a work of art, Anthony DeMiri posted his short film, My New Boyfriend, to YouTube. Dating in New York was never easy.

The marketing teams at other massive brands quickly noticed Home Depot's viral social media success, and they jumped on the bony bandwagon real quick. Budweiser made a giant beer that fit in the skeleton's hand, one that doubled as a fifty-inch body pillow. Natty Light, Slim Jim, Impossible Foods, 1-800 Contacts, Come and Go Gas Stations, and Life and Time all incorporated Skelly into their own social media ad campaigns. Dunkin' Donuts went a step further.

were up to. What they noticed immediately was that everything seemed to be getting bigger, overwhelmingly so, including their favorite Half a skeleton made to appear as if it were climbing out of the ground. They were awed by the spectacle, but taken aback by the price. Most of the larger props cost thousands of dollars. That's when they started to wonder, could Home Depot make something truly enormous that the macabre of the middle class could reasonably afford?

At first, the team pitched a ten-foot skeleton to the higher-ups. And the idea landed. In their collective excitement, they thought, why not spring for two more feet? Let's go higher, they said, higher than anyone thought. Possible. Then the idea came to add darting digital eyes that would give a spark of spirit. to this undead king, and the 12-foot giant-size skeleton with life eyes, T M L C D eyes, was ready to be designed and then mass-produced.

The jubilance within Home Depot's holiday product team was building as the prototypes were coming together. But then, in March of 2020, just six months before their big release, news of a global pandemic. sent the world into unprecedented turmoil, followed by local, state, and federal stay-at-home orders, social distancing, mask requirements,

I don't need to remind you. The company wondered if Halloween would even be celebrated in such frightening and dire times. The answer was a resounding Fuck yes.

packed Tetris like into thousands of four foot by four foot eighty five pound boxes. Assembly definitely required. Due in large part to the social media hype, the twelve foot skeletons sold out online in a matter of hours when they were launched in September. and soon the scarcity made him all the more attractive, you know, like a crush who won't return your texts.

Home Depot reached the highest quarterly earnings the company had ever seen. And almost immediately, a black market popped up online on Etsy and eBay and Facebook Marketplace. where mint conditioned skellies were selling for up to$1,300. As people were actually getting their mortal hands on the decoration, pictures were shared and reshared on social media, with Skelly guarding houses with his huge arms up.

his skull reaching above the first floor, sometimes standing like a slender man in living rooms with vaulted ceilings. or dressed in creative outfits as part of a larger Halloween yard scene. One viral photo showed a skelly surrounded by a group of human-sized skeletons on their knees, hands raised in worship around this modern savior. Once the decoration sold out, it became a coveted holy relic, something not only to desire, but a kind of pilgrimage site for the secular.

People who have snagged Askelly have become de facto neighborhood celebrities. With passerbys stopping for photos daily and sharing them online, as the owners themselves share heartwarming comments and letters that they've received from neighbors. About the happiness that the spectacle has brought to their children and to themselves. One review on Home Depot's page for the 12-foot giant-size skeleton with life-eyes TM L C D eyes.

says, best thing I've ever purchased. This skeleton is the only thing that has cured my depression. I've never been so happy and gotten so many compliments. Now many of the skeletons, which proved to be difficult to take down, disassemble, and store.

Most tens of thousands of members often post letters that owners have received from neighbors and representatives of the homeowners association, who take umbrage with their gruesome displays.

Towering Phantom, and the 12-foot hovering witch, along with a 9.5 foot immortal werewolf, all priced from about$300 to$400. But none of these decorations reach The same level of obsession as Skelly. Why? What was it about the year 2020 specifically that could have ever spawned a desperation for a funny and frivolous novelty? That's also a stark, enormous, yet ultimately harmless reminder of our own mortality. Hmm, I wonder.

So now, let us explore the centuries-long oddball lineage that our 12-foot skeleton is a part of. In order to figure out what it is about him that made us fall madly in love, and how we developed the dark humor that brought him to life. or I guess, more accurately, brought him to death. Five, six, seven, eight. In 2004, a small town high school cheerleading squad in Missouri had finally found the perfect new practice space.

When the coaches for the Show Me Spirit All Stars entered the 100 year old building, they noticed that something was a little off. As they were tidying up, they found objects left by the eccentric former inhabitants who appeared to be the diametric opposite of the peppy teenage girls. First, they found a very old book labeled IOOF Ritual. Then they found dusty black robes and red cloaks, old handwritten ledgers, and even a series of secret door buzzers and peepholes.

But far more disturbing than these occultic oddities were the three very old black wooden coffins that they discovered hidden away in the back of the Lodge Theatre. Breaking open the first two, they found cracking plaster skeletons inside, obviously fake. But when they opened the third coffin, the bones inside looked totally different. Either these were some fantastic antique practical effects, the coaches thought, or this skeleton is fucking real as shit.

Soon, whispers burned through the teenage squad until the coaches finally allowed them what they were begging for, to gaze upon the bones. When a parent of one of the girls called the police, it was determined through forensics that, yes, this was a real skeleton, most likely placed there a century before. Without any signs of foul play, police declined to investigate further. Their explanation?

The new practice space for the Show Me Spirit All-Stars was originally built for a fraternal secret society called the Independent Order of the Oddfellows. and finding real skeletons in their closets was nothing remarkable. In 2001, an electrician in Warrington, Virginia was checking the wiring of a former Oddfellow's lodge when he came across something large and black wedged into the wall.

When he pulled at the objects, he saw a white shroud, and then white candles, and then a full skeleton. He put it like this.

Within the walls of their evil lairs? Probably not. You may have also heard the tales of the real skeletons draped throughout the Pirates of the Caribbean ride in Disneyland.

Probably not. You see, before the nineteen eighties, accurate replicas of skeletons were just really expensive.

Toward the middle of the nineteen hundreds, medical schools across the West were in need of real articulated skeletons to use as part of each student's training, and in a quickly expanding industry, that was a whole lot of skeletons. But as you might imagine, these institutions often found it difficult to obtain something like that. And so a London-based medical supply company started outsourcing to a country that Britain had long ago colonised.

Around a dozen Indian families out of Calcutta ran a multi-million dollar business by acquiring human bodies. processing them until they were just bleached white bones, and then using wires to create the fully articulated skeletons that buyers were asking for in Europe and America. By the 1970s, many, if not most, of the skeletons seen in any classroom, college, high school, or even elementary school, were real and had been imported from India.

The practice understandably upset Indian citizens, as well as the Indian government. and by the nineteen eighties rumors spread about this gruesome industry. Rumors of the company stealing bodies from funeral pyres offering small amounts of money to those still living in exchange for their future dead bodies, and even murdering people to sell their skeletons, though it's difficult to know what was true and what wasn't.

The final straw came when the media reported that a bone trader had been caught exporting fifteen hundred children's skeletons, and mobs of Indian citizens started scouring nearby cities for any of these alleged kidnappers involved in what was being called a network and a conspiracy.

In response to this massive public outcry, The Indian government fully banned the export of human remains in nineteen eighty five, and the Western Medical Establishment began scrambling to find some kind of skeletal specimens for study. It was beginning to look like they were going to have to rely on the far more expensive replica skeletons, which meant that there was a new demand for cheaper models that came as close as possible to

As he put it in an interview with Gizmodo, they were literally like an auto parts shop, only with real skeletons. You could buy ear bones, you could buy human teeth. But just a few years after he started his business, the 1985 Indian laws prevented him from selling his most profitable product, human skeletons.

But the orders kept flooding in from medical facilities all over the country, so he partnered with a German company that had been producing some of the highest quality, most accurate sets of plastic replica bones. The first reproduction put out by the Anatomical Chart Company was a life-sized articulated skeleton that Marshall called budget bucky. Then came a miniature version, the sixteen inch Tiny Tim, and then a medium three foot skeleton called mister Thrifty.

All of a sudden, Marshall was moving a lot of fake skeletons, and when some of them inevitably broke, he kept the individual bones in a box. The mid-80s were a time when the consumer aspect of Halloween really started to take off. and the American public began treating the holiday in a similar way to Christmas, the department stores dedicating whole aisles to masks and make up and decorations.

Just for the hell of it, Marshall took out a booth at a Halloween trade show, much like the one that the Home Depot holiday team would eventually find their inspiration. He simply dumped a box of his unusable bones on a folding table with a sign that said two dollars a pound. People who ran haunted houses were impressed by the realism these anatomical skeleton parts provided, and they wanted more. In fact,

They wanted it all. By nineteen ninety, Marshall was selling his bones out of a cart in the Chicago Place Mall. After discovering that regular people wanted these skeletons too, he and his wife opened a store called Bare Bones. in the Woodfield Mall outside of Chicago, and then one in the Gurney Mills Mall in Gurney, Illinois. Bare Bones then became one of three hundred and thirty businesses in the Mall of America when it opened in nineteen ninety-two.

and one of the more memorable, as they had, according to Marshall, skeletons embedded in the exterior of the store. If you shop

Bare Bones also sold their models to Propmasters. You can actually see one of theirs in that famous scene from Patch Adams, joking around with Robin Williams. And inside the Treasure Island Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas dressed as pirates. One of the store's biggest fans was a young Seattle musician named Kurt Cobain of the grunge band Nirvana, who was tipped off to the beauty of bare bones.

by drummer Lori Barbero of the band Babes in Toyland, and he would even use some of their merchandise for his album art for In Utero. Here he is on the Canadian TV station Much Music in nineteen ninety three.

But, adorably, his son would become the president of his dad's former company in 2005, when they were still selling their skeletons to places like Six Flags and continuing their quieter projects. Of supplying articulated skeletons to medical schools all over the country.

Way back before India became the de facto source of real skeletons used in medical schools and classrooms, students as well as administrators of the eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds. had to figure out where to get not only the bones of the formerly living, but also their cadavers for use in teaching dissection. Without any laws in place for acquiring specimens through ethical means, medical schools hired people to dig up freshly buried.

Corpses, and sometimes med students themselves would complete the task in a kind of weird, fratty rite of passage. Most of the time, they stole the bodies of black or indigenous People, those who would be less likely to cause an outcry, as the public was known to riot when they discovered that white bodies had been exhumed. With the accessibility of photography coming in the second half of the eighteen hundreds, medical colleges marked dissection as another rite of passage.

Taking class pictures gathered around these cadavers and skeletons. By the turn of the century, a major craze swept through universities in America, as well as many countries in Europe. With students starting to take funny photographs, goofing off in creative ways with these human remains of dubious origin. Let me set the scenes for you. A group of skeletons are sitting around a table with playing cards fanned out in their bony hands, cigarettes jammed in their jaws, lit and actually smoking.

A skeleton appears to be pouring wine for a group of students playing cards. Two skeletons dressed as sailors also play cards and smoke, others doing the same while wearing jaunty newsboy caps. One shows a student with his arm around a skeleton who's wearing a Sherlock Holmes hat smoking a pipe and holding a liquor bottle. In fact, a lot of skeletons have their arms around a lot of medical students. In large group photos,

skeletons often appear riding on the shoulders of one of these students, with its arm slung over two others. Just one of the boys, just one of the privileged scamps. Another common trope in these pictures was the staging of a dissection, in which the skeletons or cadavers were the dissectors, and the student, laid out on a table, became the dissected, with the image usually titled A Student's Dream. Women training to be nurses were not immune to this.

This odd rite of passage, seen in one photo to be potentially giving a manicure and pedicure to a skeleton who's sitting between them in a blanket covered rocking chair. Another features a woman being embraced by the skeleton, sitting on a bed, as if she's being comforted, not unlike the boyfriend, I would say, that many have made of our modern twelve foot skeleton. In fact, many of these photos look like Halloween fake.

Skeleton scenes that you'd find set up on a dedicated neighborhood lawn, posted by passers-by on social media, who pose beside them in similar jocular fun. Some of these photos were even made into carts de visite, pictures that were collected in ornate photo albums at the turn of the century, meant to sit in parlors and be thumbed through by visitors. very much like a profile on social media.

Real human skeleton photos could be found next to family members posing with dogs or cats, riding bicycles, or gathered together for a typical family portrait. These images were even turned into postcards that were especially popular around Easter due to the resurrection theme. Long before the scientific breakthroughs that marked the modern era of medicine when our boys were monkeying around with corpses at elite universities.

Death was a much bigger mystery, and keeping it at bay was far more difficult and a far more symbolic task.

creating an entirely new genre that used a kind of dark humor to vent their anxiety by attempting to have some fun with this ever-present specter of death. becoming all the rage across Europe by the fourteen hundreds, this genre, known as dance macabre, or the dance of death, showed up in paintings and drawings and woodcuts and sculptures and poems and plays and music. Images show skeletons dancing in wild circles together while playing instruments. I mean, really busting it out.

or they show happy skeletons holding hands with mortals, dancing them to their graves. This art was also a kind of political commentary, showing skeletons leading every part of the hierarchy, peasants, merchants, popes, And kings to their final end, a message to those with power as well as those without that all will become equal eventually in the great eye sockets of death.

In the sixteen hundreds, another horrific wave of the plague would kill off People by the tens of thousands, eventually taking out almost a quarter of the entire population of London.

Britain this time, there was still a sense of impending doom, and new versions of Daunt's macabre art accompanied the anxiety. Creative impressarios. started to design mechanical marvels that toured through Europe throughout the seventeen hundreds. and a spin off of the Daunts Macabre came in the form of the great great great great great grandfather of the twelve foot skeleton.

Appearing in London in seventeen sixteen, he was known as the Moving Skeleton, and his presence was announced in the London Daily Current. Aside a woodblock print illustration of this mechanical marvel, an advertisement described the show like this.

He then opens his mouth and groans three times like a dying person. Most surprising. He then again, with his jaw, strikes the hour past on a He lets down his hand with the hourglass. He lets down his hand with the dart. Of tobacco being put in his mouth, he lights it himself.

He blows the candle out and smokes his pipe as naturally as any living person can do, till being gently moved with a stick, upon which he immediately opens his jaw for the pipe to be taken from him. The curtain then falls down in its place, and all is over.

All your fraternal necessities, whether you're a Freemason, a shriner, an elk, or an eagle. We're talking about a gorgeous selection of robes and boxes, daggers, and prank items for every occasion, like their mechanical goats, their canned snakes, their fake branding irons, their collapsing chairs. Along with one section that included real Genuine deodorized skeletons for the low, low price of$100. Perhaps the most important Oddfellow ritual involved. Coming face to face with a skeleton.

It went something like this. First, the initiate was covered in heavy chains and taken into a hidden room, wearing a hoodwink, which were basically goggles that had little built-in curtains that acted as a blindfold. Used in many fraternal lodge initiations, all the way back to the Freemasons, what was sometimes called the Chamber of Reflection was decorated with rows of burning candles.

When the blindfold was removed, the initiates found themselves face to bony face with a skeleton, which would be made to say something ominous or emit a kind of death rattle. This process was meant to force the prospective member to confront his own mortality, to let him know that no matter what he did in his life, no matter who he was, he could not. not escape inevitable death. But oftentimes, they would instead use another of Skelly's early relatives to get their symbolic points across.

You see, the odd fellows, rather than serious shrouded figures, cutting their fingers on daggers and somberly bleeding onto unfamiliar symbols to conjure otherworldly power, We're just merry pranksters with a hope of some kind of simple spiritual transcendence. Sometimes, at the end of the series of other rituals, the hopeful member would kneel at an altar in a kind of last reflection, waiting to be given a speech about death and morality. And to finally be accepted into the order.

But instead, the Oddfellows would employ another product from the DeMolan Brothers Co. catalog on a page titled Things Are Not What They Seem. The description, alongside an image of a fake plaster skeleton rising from a tall wooden box, went like this.

Could he laugh with death while still taking it seriously enough?

In horror producer William Castle's nineteen fifty nine film House on Haunted Hill, He used perhaps the first official 12-foot skeleton when he created one of his most famous movie theater gimmicks. In his film, A Skeleton, reportedly a real one from India, backs a screaming woman into a pool of acid. right at the climax of the scene, a blow up twelve foot skeleton would fly out from above the screen and soar over the audience below.

causing fits of frightened laughter, with unruly kids and teens throwing their popcorn at it, even trying to shoot it down with BB guns. The campiness of the whole experience disarmed the audience. and coming face to face with the most potent symbol of death, became a rip roarin' good old time, just plain nido. Less than thirty years later, the commercial Halloween boom of the nineteen eighties, in which Marshall Cordell helped spark a mass-produced skeletal revolution.

The discovery of the HIV virus had caused a massive panic, and the specter of nuclear war yet again shrouded the American consciousness.

Our unique position, as perhaps the only animal on earth who can contemplate our own mortality, as the only species with an underlying current of anxiety. flowing through our subconscious at any given time, means that we have to figure out ways to deal with this terrifying knowledge, ways to keep thoughts of it at bay so we can function in the ways we need to. There have been many studies that point toward dark humor as a balm in dire circumstances.

we are able to transform the fears we have into something we can more easily handle, to process them through a more pleasurable lens. Our laughter is a way to vent our anxiety physically, to literally release endorphins, providing a way to self medicate against our terror. There is plenty of evidence that what we find funny also connects us, strengthens our social bonds. something we desperately need in a time of mystifying disconnection and division.

And something we've obviously found in the millions of meme interactions on social media and the neighborhood connections that have formed around the towering ridiculous beast. That is Home Depot's 12-foot skeleton. But at the same time, distancing oneself too far from death's seriousness can make for truly ugly outcomes. We can look back to the colonized nation of India that provided skeletons for Western consumption, usually bodies of the impoverished.

we can look back to the grave robbers who took bodies of black and indigenous people with impunity to use for their dissection training. The medical students, who were using gallows humor, dark humor, to deal with death as well, appear hauntingly callous when one looks beyond the gags of their little skeleton scenes. So the question becomes how do we treat death with the respect and dignity that it deserves?

while also finding a way to deal with it, because one way or another, it will eventually come to deal with us. Perhaps in something like a giant plastic lawn skeleton, we can find an innocuous homage to the grand spectacle of ever present death. opinions of the HOA and pearl clutching citizens aside. When you think about it, the shape of any skeleton's face is already permanently smiling, creak open its jaw, and it looks like it's cackling at a cosmic joke.

imperceptible to ridiculous mortals like us. And in this way, it feels like there's something irreverent about our very bones, A joke already inside us that we're trying to catch up with, trying to learn the right way to tell. Many Americans lack a sense of how to deal with death in a culture that tries to repress this fear as much as possible.

Death used to be close to us. We used to take care of our loved ones at home during and after their passing, without the distance that hospitals and the funeral industry now provide. Not only that, but many of us lack the connection of shared rituals around death that help us process our fear and grief. and whether we're conscious of it or not, we are as desperate for sacred rites and symbolic art as we always have been.

Centuries of skeletal dealings transforming into the plastic catacombs we now walk through in the millions of seasonal aisles of America. I think a visit to any 12-foot plastic skeleton is a pilgrimage, a secular rite of passage, a ultimately harmless way to face the towering reality of death. during a Halloween celebration, when we make all we fear into all we love. Or maybe it's just a fucking awesome prop, and, as is often the case, I'm just a ridiculous mortal.

Grasping at meaning among the ever present chaos of the unknowable universe.

Perhaps this can explain the proliferation of memes about the hotness of our 12-foot bone daddy. Only this time, laughing with death wasn't quite enough. So we started objectifying him too, daydreaming about holding his enormous hand. About gazing into his life eyes TM L C D eyes, desiring to feel alive beside the manic pixie dream boy that he's always been. As Matthew Leeb said in his essay Funny Bones, if we must suffer death, we've decided that until that time, death must suffer us as well.

If we can't get a hold of our own 12 foot skeleton from Home Depot, if he won't text us back, I guess we'll go stand outside of his house, begging our tall, dark, and handsome dead man to make us laugh, to take us out dancing, and to let us make it official. In a ritual of modern American love, so we can finally call him our boyfriend.

Bigfoot, maybe. If you go to AmericanHysteria.com, you can pick up some of our merch. All of the profits go to the Samir Project, a Palestinian-led mutual aid group that are on the ground in Gaza providing food.

Rod Rodriguez, and our voice actor is Will Rogers. Thanks as always for listening and come back next time for our Halloween special. Have a great day.