diff --git a/src/raw.jl b/src/raw.jl
index 29d0a10..00ec743 100644
--- a/src/raw.jl
+++ b/src/raw.jl
@@ -67,7 +67,23 @@ struct Raw
     ctx::Vector{Bool} # Context for xml:space (Vector to support inheritance of context)
     has_xml_space::Bool # Whether data contains `xml:space` attribute at least once
 end
+# Honor a leading byte-order mark (XML 1.0 §4.3.3): decode UTF-16 to UTF-8 and
+# strip a UTF-8 BOM so the byte-oriented tokenizer always sees UTF-8.
+function _normalize_bom(data::Vector{UInt8})
+    n = length(data)
+    if n >= 2 && data[1] == 0xFF && data[2] == 0xFE
+        units = reinterpret(UInt16, data[3:end])
+        return Vector{UInt8}(transcode(String, units))
+    elseif n >= 2 && data[1] == 0xFE && data[2] == 0xFF
+        units = bswap.(reinterpret(UInt16, data[3:end]))
+        return Vector{UInt8}(transcode(String, units))
+    elseif n >= 3 && data[1] == 0xEF && data[2] == 0xBB && data[3] == 0xBF
+        return data[4:end]
+    end
+    return data
+end
 function Raw(data::Vector{UInt8})#, ctx::Vector{Bool}=Bool[false])
+    data = _normalize_bom(data)
     needle = Vector{UInt8}("xml:space")
     has_xml_space = findfirst(needle, data) !== nothing
     return Raw(RawDocument, 0, 0, 0, data, [false], has_xml_space)
diff --git a/test/runtests.jl b/test/runtests.jl
index 89978eb..5646a8d 100644
--- a/test/runtests.jl
+++ b/test/runtests.jl
@@ -642,5 +642,28 @@ end
     kw = NamedTuple(OrderedDict(Symbol(k) => Int(k) for k in 'a':'z'))
     xyz  = XML.Element("point"; kw...)
     @test collect(keys(attributes(xyz))) == string.(collect('a':'z'))
+
+    # https://github.com/JuliaComputing/XML.jl/issues/62 (UTF-16/BOM input)
+    text = """<?xml version="1.0"?><root>hello</root>"""
+    units = transcode(UInt16, text)
+    le = vcat(UInt8[0xFF, 0xFE], reinterpret(UInt8, units))
+    be = vcat(UInt8[0xFE, 0xFF], reinterpret(UInt8, bswap.(units)))
+    utf8_bom = vcat(UInt8[0xEF, 0xBB, 0xBF], Vector{UInt8}(text))
+    for bytes in (le, be, utf8_bom)
+        doc = Node(XML.Raw(bytes))
+        root = only(filter(n -> nodetype(n) == Element, children(doc)))
+        @test tag(root) == "root"
+        @test value(only(children(root))) == "hello"
+
+        # read(file) round-trip exercises the Mmap.mmap path (the real .xlsx case)
+        mktemp() do path, io
+            write(io, bytes)
+            close(io)
+            file_doc = read(path, Node)
+            file_root = only(filter(n -> nodetype(n) == Element, children(file_doc)))
+            @test tag(file_root) == "root"
+            @test value(only(children(file_root))) == "hello"
+        end
+    end
 end