Tumblr Devolves into Literal Witchhunt Over Alleged Bone Thief

Tumblr's latest meme involves witchcraft and self-professed thief of human bones.

User pastel-prouvaire alleges that another blogger, named littlefuckinmonster, has been stealing bones from cemeteries to practice witchcraft and sell to others. Instead of, you know, alerting the authorities, the user called her out in a post and asked people to reblog it.

Pastel-prouvaire included a screenshot of a Facebook post by someone named Ender Darling, who has the same profile photo as the one featured in the bio for littlefuckinmonster, which also says her name is Ender.

Darling apparently wrote in a private Facebook group for people who practice witchcraft asking if anyone would be interested in buying bones she took from a "poor man's graveyard" when they washed up after a storm in New Orleans. Two different people expressed interest in purchasing the bones, the sale of which is a misdemeanor in Louisiana punishable by jail time of up to five years.

The original post calling out Darling has more than 30,000 notes on Tumblr at the time this story was published. A local news station took note of the Tumblr story and connected the allegations to Holt Cemetery, a burial ground originally for poor community members. However, in a followup post, a user named fuckinheathen, who claimed to be Darling, denied going to Holt Cemetery, but admitted to taking bones from another cemetery and attempted to justify the act, calling critics of the practice "extremely racist."

"I was walking into the grave yard like I usually do once a week, because its fucking in disrepair and I try to do what I can with weeding and offerings, and I witnessed an old man digging with a shovel and a backhoe tearing into old plots," she wrote [sic'd throughout]. "You fucks wanna threaten me yet don't actually sit to rationally think about how in ground cemetaries [sic] actually continue to be able to have bodies buried there. I made a quick decision when I watched a few bones tumble from the dirt and into the street. I picked them up and went through the grave yard and picked up ones I saw on my path."

She added, "Magic is dark. Magic is bloody. Magic is scary. Magic isn't just fucking white light, fairy dust, bowls of honey on your damn alter." The fuckinheathen and original littlefuckinmonster accounts have since been deleted.

Darling appears to be part of "Vulture Culture," a Tumblr community of collectors and enthusiasts of death-related items like bones, taxidermy, and insects. Tumblr has long hosted an active community of people who practice paganism, magick, and other kinds of witchcraft. Users in these communities have made hundreds of posts about so-called #bonegate, ranging from defenses of the practice to distancing the communities from such acts.

"Yes, witchcraft and paganism is still very much alive today in many forms including but not limited to Wicca, Drudaic forms, Celtic, Secular, and so on," one user wrote. "How people worship and connect themselves to this varies widely and yes, some people do in fact use bones and remains…There are ways to ethically obtain human remains and so people who do so may also use them in spiritual belief."

It is not clear whether Darling is truly responsible for the theft, or, if she is, whether any charges would be filed against her. Requests for comment sent to Tumblr and the Facebook page for Ender Darling were not immediately returned.