My wife and I are watching the show LOST right now and we are close to finishing it. This image would be right at home on that show. Where was it taken? What am I looking at? It's certainly compelling.
I took it at Sedlec Ossuary (a.k.a. "the bone church") in the Czech Republic. It's a burial site that eventually got around to organizing their bones and some guy decided to have fun with them. He made pyramids of bones, a chandelier of bones, a crest of bones, bone garland, and topped it off by signing his name in bones. This is one of the bone piles with some skulls tastefully arranged in front of it as an accent.
At first I found it a mixture of creepy and intriguing, but after a while of being there (I was there for a LONG time taking pictures), I honestly found it more funny than creepy. Some guy was wondering what to do with all the bones... and decided fuck it, he was going to decorate the place with them. It's like macabre upcycling.
Some of the things were actually kind of whimsical, now that you mention it. The coat of arms, or crest comes to mind. I do have to wonder about what that person or people were like to talk to. As in, were they well-adjusted and cheerfully going about their work or something else?
The guy who did it was FrantiĊĦek Rint. Your guess is as good as mine as to why he did it though. I like to think that he was just doing it for shits and giggles rather than to create something dark and scary.
Man, this exchange makes me want to go back to Prague even more. It's a cool area and I'd really like to spend more than a week there, just getting to know the place. By any chance did you go to the natural history museum there? A bit homey for a museum if you ask me, though I did enjoy it for what it was. I remember that the model of the mastodon (or was it a mammoth?) was missing quite a lot of its hair.