Florida officials have been left searching for answers after a mysterious skull turned up at a thrift store, marking at least the second time in recent years that a real human cranium was found at a second-hand shop in the state.
The Hernando County Sheriff’s Office said in a Facebook post Friday that the skull was donated to the Jericho Ministries Thrift Store in Brooksville, about 40 miles north of Tampa, on May 16.
Authorities were asking the public for help identifying who “dropped off what may have been believed to be a novelty skull (but was actually a real skull) along with other items,” the sheriff’s office wrote.
The skeletal head was dropped off at the store between 11 a.m. and noon. Detectives are working to identify and speak with the person, or persons, involved, officials said.
The shocking discovery comes several years after an anthropologist browsing the Halloween section of a Fort Myers thrift store discovered a real human skull stashed in the decor in 2023.
The expert, Michelle Calhoun, immediately alerted the Lee County Sheriff’s Office, which sent detectives to investigate. Authorities later confirmed that the skull was in fact real, Smithsonian Magazine reported at the time.
The store owner told police that the skull had been found in a storage unit they bought years ago.
At the time, authorities said the case was “not suspicious in nature.”
The skull was believed to be about 75 years old and didn’t show any signs of trauma.
Calhoun said at the time that she believed the skull may have belonged to a young Native American woman. It was not immediately clear if that determination was ever made.
A store employee pulled the skull out of storage to put on display ahead of the Halloween season and priced it at $4,000 thinking nobody would pay that much for it, according to The Washington Post.
In Florida, it is illegal to knowingly sell or buy any human organ or tissue for valuable consideration, including bones.
For this latest case, detectives with the Hernando County Sheriff’s Office are urging anyone with information to reach out to them.
