Look and see if your state has at home Burial services. If they do tell them you want to bury the body at home and you do not want it embalmed. Then buy an absolute fuck ton of Dermestid beetles online. Then, get ready for the horrid smell as they eat the flesh off of your father’s rotting corpse over the course of a year or more.
You Can’t Keep Your Parents’ Skulls [Caitlin Doughty | September 4, 2019 | theatlantic.com]
Under U.S. law, it’s nearly impossible to get permission to decapitate and de-flesh a relative’s remains.
Abuse-of-corpse laws exist for a reason. They protect people’s bodies from being mistreated (ahem, necrophilia). They also prevent a corpse from being snatched from the morgue and used for research or public exhibition without the dead person’s consent. History is littered with such violations. Medical professionals have stolen corpses and even dug up fresh graves to get bodies for dissection and research. Then there are cases like that of Julia Pastrana, a 19th-century Mexican woman with a condition called hypertrichosis, which caused hair to grow all over her face and body. After she died, her husband saw that there was money to be made by displaying Pastrana in freak shows, so he took her embalmed and taxidermied corpse on world tour. Pastrana had ceased to be regarded as human; her corpse had become a possession.
So where do skulls on bookcases come from? In the United States, no federal law prevents owning, buying, or selling human remains, unless the remains are Native American. Otherwise, whether you’re able to sell or own human remains is decided by each individual state. At least 38 states have laws that should prevent the sale of human remains, but in reality the laws are vague, confusing, and enforced at random. In one seven-month period in 2012–13, 454 human skulls were listed on eBay, with an average opening bid of just under $650 (eBay subsequently banned the practice).
If there were any legal wiggle room that might allow a person to get Dad’s head liberated from its fleshy shell, Tanya Marsh would know how to find it. Marsh is a law professor and the expert on human-remains law. “I will argue with you all day long,” she told me, “that it isn’t legal in any state in the United States to reduce a human head to a skull.”^[[1] archive.ph/SE19g]
It’s actually the exact opposite to what he says. In the US you can do almost anything you want with human remains, while in Europe it’s much more restricted. In Denmark for example, you have to have the body/ashes buried in a licensed cemetery. You can’t keep the ashes yourself, you can’t bury them in your backyard, you can’t spread them at some random special place (except for the sea in rare circumstances).
Apparently there’s no federal law (in the US) banning the ownership of human bones because up until the mid to late 20th century it was apparently common practice for med students to purchase real human bones for their studies. Most of them apparently came from India, until the country banned the export of human remains, which must have played a part in causing the practice to fall out of style.
If anyone has anything to correct/add, please do so. This was just a quick google search out of morbid curiosity
I know the POTC ride had a bunch of real skulls (and a few are still there) because, at the time, they were cheaper and easier to get then good looking fakes.
You can absolutely get the corpse unembalmed but you won’t find any mortician willing to do this. You can do it yourself with a ton of Dermestid beetles, though, but it’s gonna smell awful.