Professional Obsession
It’s hard enough to imagine being a professional mortician (unless you are one), but becoming a professional bone preparer is on a whole other level of creepy. In 1891, the Helena Independent newspaper reported a story of a French man called M. De Robaire lived in Philadelphia. He was a professional skeleton salesman by trade who had prepared over 5,000 skeletons during the course of his career, and he kept dozens of specimens for himself.
He lived alone in a house in the poor section of Philadelphia, and his skeleton collection was hanging out in literally every single room in his house. At the time the story was reported, he had already been living like this for over 20 years. Instead of paintings hanging on the walls, real human skulls were tacked like art pieces. A skull was turned into a lamp, and dried human skin hung from the ceiling like curtains.
While it’s hard to imagine ever wanting this job in the first place, there was a big payout once a skeleton actually sold. De Robaire told the reporter from the Helena Independent that the field was actually very competitive, so he had to struggle to make money and find clients when he first got started. He was afraid he would get shut down by the police, so he set up a storefront to make his home look like a pharmacy.
Eventually, he became well-known for his work, and he was able to save a fortune. We will never know the true amount of money this man made, but after dissecting over five thousand bodies at the modern-day equivalent of $8,000 each, that is like netting $40 million. This was more than enough to allowed him to retire early and maybe get married and start a new career. However, he genuinely enjoyed taking people apart. This guy may or may not have been a serial killer. Or, maybe his obsession with bones satiated his desires. He chose to continue making human skeletons over having a normal life.