Bonesy

Author
Becky Alexander

Decade

1890s 1910s 2010s

Tags

Relics 

Longtime SFAI instructor Ray Mondini called librarian Jeff Gunderson one day and said he wanted to return something he had taken from the school many years earlier, and then showed up with this actual human skull that had been sitting around his house for the previous few decades.

It’s very likely that the skull was once part of a full human skeleton used in anatomy classes, possibly dating back to the very earliest days of the school. It might even be the one found by student and painter Emily Carr when she was exploring the attic of the school’s early Pine Street location in the late 1800s. She described it in Growing Pains: The Autobiography of Emily Carr (1946):

I climbed the stair and squeezed gingerly through a small door which the wind caught and banged behind me. The attic was low-roofed and dim. My sleeve brushed something that vibrated—a dry crackly rattle, some shadowy thing that moved. I put out my hand to feel for the door knob—the attic was nearly dark. I found myself clutching the rib of a skeleton whose eye-sockets poured ghastly stares over me, vacant, dumbing stares. The dreadful thing grinned and dangled its arms and legs. The skeleton hung rotating from a hook on the low roof. It was angry with my sleeve for disturbing the stillness. I saw the white knob of the door-handle and, wrenching the door open, tumbled down the stairs screeching!

“Heavens, child, look what you’ve done to me!” Miss Hatter was dimmed by a blizzard of powder. “One would think you had seen a ghost up there!”

“Oh, worse—more dead—horrible!”

“Why, that’s only old Bonesy. He lives up there! One of these days you will be drawing him, learning what is underneath human skin and fat.”

“I couldn’t sit up in that spooky attic being stared at by a skeleton!”

“Of course not, Bonesy will come down to you. He loves little holidays and if he can make people’s teeth chatter so much the better. It is the only way he can converse with fellow bones. People are too cluttered with flesh for Bonesy to feel companionable with.”

 BA