If someone has “skeletons in the closet,” then they have embarrassing, bad, or potentially even ruinous things in their past that they are trying to keep hidden (and that they’d really rather you didn’t know about). 

Let’s pry open the closet and shake out the bones of each origin theory.

MEANING AND USAGE

It’s a familiar and evocative turn of phrase that has been in recorded use in English since the 19th century. The Oxford English Dictionary has traced its earliest known use of the phrase back to 1845 (albeit with the phrasing “skeleton in the house”) in a work by the Vanity Fair novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, but earlier writers appear to have been familiar with the phrase—or certainly the idea behind it. The etymologist Gary Martin has unearthed an even earlier attestation of the phrase, dating to 1816, in an essay by the English Congregationalist writer and campaigner William Hendry Stowell. 

HISTORICAL ORIGIN THEORIES

Given that the phrase appears to have been coined or at least become popular in Britain in the early 1800s, it has led to some suggestions that the phrase might allude to actual human skeletons in closets and cupboards, and the so-called body snatching era of questionable scientific endeavor in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Before the medical examination and dissection of cadavers was legalized in Great Britain (by the Anatomy Act of 1832), scientists and anatomists would sometimes purchase dead bodies from underhand dealers— variously known as “body snatchers” or “resurrectionists”—for use in their studies. Oddly, the actual digging up of a dead body was not in and of itself illegal (as the corpse was not thought to have any legal standing), but the practice was understandably considered morally reprehensible. As a result, it happened clandestinely and may well have led to actual corpses and anatomical skeletons being kept, with utmost secrecy, in the storerooms and cupboards of the institutions involved. 

Given that the era in which body snatching was occurring certainly aligns it with the earliest use of the phrase “skeletons in the closet” in the early 1800s, it might seem plausible that the two are connected like this. But there may well be a somewhat simpler, yet no less gruesome, explanation here. 

LITERARY INFLUENCES

The 1700s and 1800s were also the era of the Gothic novel, and many classic tales of the macabre featured scenes in which dead bodies were concealed around houses in an attempt to cover up murders—or, in the case of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado, a live person bricked up behind a wall and left to die. It may simply be the case that provocative tales like this, and their popularity at the time, simply inspired the writers of the early 19th century to invent a “skeleton in the closet.” 

Unfortunately, without conclusive evidence either way, it’s all but impossible to say whether it was the literary skeleton and dead bodies of the Gothic era, or the actual skeletons and corpses of the body-snatching era, that inspired this phrase—or, for that matter, a combination of the two. Regardless of its precise origins, the phrase appears to have first emerged in British English in the early 1800s. Its widespread use in popular literature and among influential writers soon cemented its place in the language.

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