There are 206 bones in the human body and for the entirety of his adult life, Jon Pichaya Ferry has been busy collecting them.
The way he likes to tell it, his father — a manager at a Sanmina chip factory in Bangkok —inadvertently introduced a barely teenage Ferry to the appeal of bones by giving him a mouse skeleton when he was just 13. It didn’t seem “creepy, dark or scary,” Ferry says, but instead “educational and academic.” It helped that his mother, a Thai academic his father had met, an architecture professor at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, had encouraged him “to view the skeletal system not just through a biological lens but as a marvel of structure and design.”
The idea eventually would make its way to human remains when Ferry spotted a skull in a since-shuttered East Village curiosity shop. Now he’s a major figure in the world of bones.
“There are a lot of major [bone] museums in the country, such as the Mutter Museum, the Medical Museum of DC and the Bone Museum in New York that exist,” Ferry tells me enthusiastically.
That last one, the Bone Museum in New York, is Ferry’s own creation and it’s in Bushwick. When I meet him, he comes as demure, his face brightening under a mountain of hair when listing defunct bone distributors from the last century. He sticks to a simple dress shirt under a custom-made jacket animated with x-rays of human skulls. It was made by Wole Olosunde, a New York nurse who runs a small indie fashion brand on the side called “Against Medical Advice.” (“We at JonsBones were so excited to partner with Wole by providing two skeletons to exhibit at his pop-up,” Ferry writes in a blog post on his website.)
He just reopened the museum last month inside the McKibbin Street Lofts, after previously housing his collection inside a far smaller showroom in a different corner of Bushwick. He had moved to the lofts a year earlier but was forced to shut down shortly after, when the curious earthquake that randomly struck New York that year had caused Ferry’s ground floor rental to suddenly flood.
“The lofts are quite infamous, they were known for their parties back in the day,” Ferry says about his decision to relocate there. He says he read a wikipedia page about the building’s various notable tenants over the years, events like a FBI raid that arrived too late to catch members of the hacking collective Anonymous. Last December, shortly after Ferry first set up shop there, an IP address located in Thailand (Ferry was born there and returns often) would anonymously add a lengthy, and detailed paragraph about the Bone Museum’s various wares to the page.
The museum itself consists of a single room, roughly the size of an apartment. In the center sits a glass case filled with skulls and old photographs of medical students posing with them. On both ends, Ferry has put up fully articulated human skeletons, next to signs that read “Do not touch.” There is an exhibit dedicated to the use of bones by notable fraternity groups, there is another line of human skulls taken from each period of human life, going back to infants. Another collection of human remains he calls “one of the largest collections of traumas and pathologies on public display.”
Among its newer additions is the “brand-new Gigantism exhibit,” which consists of a somewhat large body, of some advanced height. “A rare glimpse into a life lived on such an extraordinary scale,” reads an Instagram post from Ferry’s website.
The origins of these bodies among the world of the living remains elusive. On a wall, Ferry has authored a moral justification for the business, which is that the skeletons are too told to perform DNA tests on, so any idea about where they come from is foggy at best. In conversation, he calls the bones “this perpetual item,” never buried and too precious to destroy, in a kind of eternal purgatory. Which is to say the bones cannot return because there is nowhere for them to go beyond the world of the living. And so they live here, in the room’s cavernous mausoleum-like silence that’s interrupted only by Ferry’s voice.
“It came from a physician who passed away, he was a doctor from the 50s to the 80s, and his next of kin inherited it and didn’t know what to do with it, and eventually sold it to the Anatomy of Death Museum in Michigan,” says Ferry about the titular giant of Ferry’s gigantism show. Despite the body’s conceptual divorce from humanity, a nearby measuring stick compares the giant’s height to that of Dwayne Johnson. In an old story we ran on Ferry’s earlier bone-showcasing exploits, Ferry says that he could could see himself handling from the hooks on his walls, telling us: “I would love myself to be skeletonized.”
In person, and online, Ferry is an assiduous self-promoter; coming off, at times, like a curiously post-millennial mix of Mark Zuckerberg and P.T. Barnum, with the haircut of Jared Leto’s Adam Neumann. He points to a photo of a graduating class at a mid-century medical school, a group of some hundred white men sporting identical haircuts, part of his museum’s somewhat extensive catalog of the human bone trade’s most professional customers, doctors. “What a diverse class,” he jokes.
“My background is in industrial design, so my subspecialty in the museum is looking at how the skeletons were articulated,” says Ferry. “For instance, there are 63 different styles of latches,” which are used to connect bones together in a reconstructed skeleton.
Unlike the doctors who collected many of the skeletons that have landed in Ferry’s collection, he doesn’t purport to a background in studying medicine.
He moved to New York to get a degree in product design from the Parsons School of Design and was getting into the bone business even then, giving birth to JonsBones in his dormroom. (“I had a human skull on my desk and my roommates hated it.”) He soon operated as a supplier to medical and dental schools, working as a middleman between them and the many random people around the country who find themselves suddenly in need of disposing human bones.
They are all old bones, Ferry says, from people who died before “the crash” in the human bone trade in the 1980s. On the walls of his museum, an elaborate timeline educates visitors about the rough contours of this history.
“Back in the day, there was rampant grave robbing,” says Ferry. “During the 1950s, India became the primary exporter of human remains and then all of the [medical supply] companies began relying on India as their primary exporter,” he says.
How these Indian suppliers would deliver these bones to medical institutions around the world was sometimes disquieting. An account in the Los Angeles Times describes “the international trade in human skeletons” as once bringing “more than $1 million a year into Calcutta’s economy,” something powered by the city’s doms, a Hindu caste historically responsible for manning cremation pyres.
“The doms would bring us the unclaimed bodies from city hospitals or ones they found floating in the river. They would cut away the flesh, bring us the bones, and we would assemble them into fully articulated skeletons. Our customers would order them in quantity,” Bimalendu Bhattacharjee, a third-generation bone seller, would tell the newspaper, which maintained “if a biology classroom had a human skeleton hanging in the corner, it was a virtual certainty that it had begun its journey here, in a Calcutta alley or morgue or floating in the Ganges River.”
This trade crashed in 1985, when India officially banned the trade. Despite the near monopoly Calcutta had on the bone market for much of the last century, Ferry says that he had hired a forensic anthropologist who “verified that 70% of our collection was European.”
In a curious way, the incoming onslaught of human remains comes in the form of a dying gasp of the last generation of baby boomer doctors, who kept their skeletons safely enclosed in their closest, perhaps confounding their heirs.
“All of these skulls are coming back into the public market and people just don’t know what to do with them,” Ferry says, adding “we get 50-100 emails a month.”
“A retail price for a skeleton can be anywhere from between $3,000-10,000,” he says. Skulls sell for “anywhere from between $1,500-$3,000.” He promises sellers a “fair market rate” for their bones. Sales, he says, have “to be for educational value.”
“If someone purchases for not the right reasons, we would typically veto the sale,” he says.
He is as frank about this in person as he is online.“Intentional or not, sometimes we end up with a skeleton in our closet. In the United States, it is legal to own and sell human osteology — paper work is not required and neither is a license,” reads the “sell” section of his website. “Unfortunately, we do not purchase any wet specimens,” this goes on to read.
Naturally, he has been written about often, something he invites. He has supplied the New York Post with no fewer than two stories about his wares. (“This local skull-ebrity has a new home for his skele-ton of inventory,” reads one of them.) A headline in the Guardian reads: “Death and the salesman.” A BBC video from earlier this March claims that his bone collection is worth “over $600,000.” “The 23-year-old owner swears there’s nothing creepy about his business,” reads a more skeptical headline in New York.
In front of his wall of human spines — “the largest display of human spines on public display in the country,” he tells me — Ferry appears repeatedly as a talking head on behalf of the legal bone dealing industry in a CBS station documentary “Dealers of the Dead: Inside the Body Parts Business,” a lengthy news report on the arrest of Jeremy Pauley, an intensely tattooed man who was sentenced to two years of probation for stealing human remains that were donated to Harvard. (“I was shocked,” Ferry tells Jessica Babb, a reporter for the Baltimore CBS affiliate. Unlike Pauley, “Ferry is selling legally, a business model that’s above board,” Babb later concedes.)
Somewhat surprisingly, Ferry announces to me that he’s trying to quit the bones business. Selling bones to doctors was never the point, he says. The business is all tied up with school calendars and thin in the months in between. A bone museum was always the goal.
“We’re pivoting toward the museum, we want to eventually close down JonsBones,” he says. Of course, “it’s a lot easier to sell a skull for $10,000 than to collect a $20 general admission ticket.” Next to the doors, he sells t-shirts that read “I Got BONED at the Bone Museum” and bone-themed jewelry from local artists.
In Ferry’s mind, there is a strong moral virtue in having human bones presented in this way. He tells me that he’s talked to graduates of medical programs who say that his museum was the first time they ever had the chance to look at the outlines of real human bodies. This had moved some of them to tears, he says. (in the years since the crash of the bone trade, many undergrad medical programs have moved on to using elaborate plastic casts of a generalized human body in lieu of the real thing itself.) Ferry repeats, many times, the word accessibility.
“You have to understand the nuances of the human skeleton,” says Ferry. “There’s been a 50% increase in medical students having to retake their entrance exams because of inadequate anatomical understanding since plastic casts were implemented into the teaching curriculum, and a seven times increase in medical malpractice lawsuits,” he claims.
For many who visit, it will be their closest encounter with the real de-humanized body, a long reoccurring figure in our collective nightmares, a symbol constantly of death, indisputably sacred and, likely haunted in some literal way. At the end of tours, Ferry generally gives people the chance to touch a spine, or hold a skull if they like.
“I don’t believe in hoarding,” he says.
The Bone Museum is located at 255 McKibbin Street, Studio 0014. Admission goes for $20. Open Wednesday to Friday, 11am to 7pm and Saturday and Sunday from 11am to 8pm. Keep up with the museum’s hours on Instagram.
Photos taken by Michelle Maier.
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