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Are you decorating a nursery? If so, I’ve got a great idea for it! Kids love gumball machines. And skulls. Artist Marco Perego combined the two for an exhibit at the Galerie Gmurzynska in Zurich, Switzerland.
Link -via @itscolossal | Museum Website
Who knew jack-o-lanterns had such stunning skulls inside. They must be pretty fragile because I never see them while carving my pumpkins.
I’m not really one for Halloween — or at least making decorations like this for a Halloween party. I mean, everyone would expect this sort of thing. To use Martha’s skull cheese platter to full effect, it should be brought out when no one expects it, such as at Easter or Grandma’s birthday party.
Link -via That’s Nerdalicious!
If you’re the kind of person who finds commercial haunted houses boring and instead loves traveling to macabre places, then you’d better start booking your tickets because we’ve compiled some of the creepiest and scariest places on earth. Of course, if you’re squeamish and don’t like to read about death or look at pictures of long-dead bodies, then you should probably skip ahead because this article just isn’t for you.
At first glance, the Aokigahara Forest near Mount Fuji is an ideal nature destination, filled with stunning trees growing on hard volcanic rock, and icy, rocky caverns. But the forest has a much darker side, one that was popularized with the 1960 novel Nami no T?, where the main characters end up committing suicide in the area. While Aokigahara was always a destination for the forlorn to end their lives, Nami no T? made the idea much more popular and since the book was released, an average of 30 people kill themselves in the area every year, with a record-setting body count of 108 deaths in 2004.
The government has put out a number of signs in both Japanese and English urging people to reconsider their decision and seek psychiatric help. Once a year, a group of volunteers patrols the forest looking for bodies. These body hunters mark off the areas they are exploring with plastic tape that is never removed. Thus, even if you never see a dead body or ghost roaming the forest, you are still bound to see signs of the forest’s secrets wherever you happen to go.
Image Via Al Kaiser [Flickr]
Unless you already have a doll phobia, the idea of an island filled with dolls doesn’t sound all that creepy at first. It’s once you learn that the dolls are mutilated and left hung in trees while they rot away, all in honor of a drowned little girl that you start to realize just how creepy this macabre tourist destination really is.
It all started over fifty years ago, when the island’s only resident, Don Julian Santana found the body of a dead little girl in the canal where the island sits. He was haunted by her memory and soon started hanging dolls in the trees to appease the girl’s spirits and to ward off evil spirits from entering the island. Doll heads, arms, legs, etc. are sprawled out across the island in a strange sacrifice to prevent further evil. Strangely though, in 2001, Don Julian suffered the same fate as the little girl, drowning in the canal beside his home. Some people believe this was the work of the dolls who have since become inhabited by evil spirits. These days, the dolls remain the sole occupants of one of Mexico’s darkest tourist attractions.
Image Via SkilliShots [Flickr]
The Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo started when the local monastery outgrew its original cemetery, so the monks decided to mummify one of their recently deceased brothers before placing him in their newly opened catacombs. The process seemed to work well, so the monks began mummifying all of their fallen comrades and placing them in the catacombs. After a few centuries, word spread about the monk’s unique burial methods and it soon began to be a status symbol for rich people to be entombed in the catacombs buried in their finest clothing. Some people even left wills requesting that their clothing be changed by their family members at regular intervals.
The last friar was buried in the catacombs in 1871, but famous people from the area continued to be interred up until the 1920s. There are now about 8000 mummies lining the walls of the many hallways, which have been organized into categories: men, women, virgins, children, priests, monks and professionals. Some of the bodies are even set in poses, including the bodies of two children who sit together in a rocking chair.
Catherine Martin makes trippy skull models covered with beads in cooperation with the Huichol people of Western Mexico. Her project is appropriately entitled “Our Exquisite Corpse.” It’s only a matter of time before funeral homes make this an option. Interested?
Don’t have a lot of money but still want to have a fearsome Halloween costume? If you have the art skills you can always try making your own skull face painting like this one by Redditor Fakeproject.
Link Via BoingBoing
These porcelain skulls are made by Japanese artist Katsuyo Aoki. Although skulls often bring up thoughts of terror, the intricacy makes the little works of art beautiful and majestic.
Link -via Beautiful/Decay
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Swedish archaeologists have pulled a trove of 8,000-year-old human skulls from a peat bog that was formerly a lake near Motala, Sweden.
The rituals at Kanaljorden were conducted on a massive stone pavement constructed on the bottom of a shallow lake (currently a peat fen). Some crania were fairly intact while others were found as isolated fragments. The more intact ones represent eleven individuals, both men and women, ranging in age between infants and middle age. Two of the skulls have had wooden stakes inserted all the way from the base to the top. In another case a woman’s temple bone was found inside the skull of another woman. Besides human skulls, the finds also include a small number of post-cranial human bones and bones from animals, as well as artefacts of stone, wood, bone and antler.
The skull depositions at Kanaljorden are clearly ritual in character. The next step is to find out if the human bones are relics of dearly departed that were handled in a complex secondary burial ritual, or trophies of defeated enemies. The archaeologists hope that the ongoing laboratory analysis [stable isotopes] will give clues as to whether the bones are the remains of locals or people with a distant geographic origin, and if they represent a family group or persons unrelated to each other.
Read more at Aadvarchaeology. Link
(Image credit: Anna Arnberg)
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Artist Jonathan Koshi enjoys remaking a variety of classic icons into Dia de los Muertos skulls, while he has a bunch of them, my favorite is this delightful Mario one complete with pipes and mushrooms in his head. If you like the artworks, you can even buy your own.
Link Via BoingBoing
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I will admit that I feel quite envious whenever I see the human brain in a jar of formaldehyde that Alex keeps on his desk here at the office. But this huge fluorite skull, weighing 145 pounds and measuring 16.9 inches across, may compensate for it. Even better: the advertising for the company (which seems to specialize in skull manufacturing) indicates that if I purchase one of their products, beautiful women will find me attractive. Link -via Geekosystem | Company Website
It is said that Alboin (d. 572), King of the Lombards, had the skull of his enemy, King Cunimind of the Gepids, turned into a drinking cup. It was the ultimate sign of triumph against a defeated foe. This tradition, however, whether for practical or emotional purposes, now appears to date back almost 15,000 years:
Ice Age folk who lived in what’s now southwestern England gruesomely went from heads off to bottoms up. Bones excavated at a cave there include the oldest known examples of drinking cups or containers made out of human skulls, says a team led by paleontologist Silvia Bello of the Natural History Museum in London.[...]
Prehistoric cave denizens cleaned the skulls before using stone tools to shape the upper parts of the brain cases into containers, the researchers say.
Bello suspects that Ice Age Britons hoisted hollowed-out crania in rituals of some kind. Other human bones found near the skull cups show signs of flesh and marrow removal, a result either of cannibalism or mortuary practices. The striking similarities between the cave finds and historical examples of drinking cups made out of skulls further support a ritual role for the Ice Age receptacles, Bello says.
Link | Photo: Natural History Museum
This image of mysterious origin is going around the ‘Tubes today. Which brilliant artist will step forward and claim responsibility?
via Geekologie
Artist Noah Scalin decided to make a representation of a human skull every day for a year. He used a wide variety of media, from spaghetti to sea shells. This video shows all of them.
Link via Dude Craft | Artist’s Website
Designer Beto Janz reuses broken skateboard decks to promote Ultra Skate Store in Curitiba, Brasil. The decks are left near skateboard locations around the city. They look like skulls and display contact information for the store.
This time-lapse video shows artist Paul Alexander Thornton drawing a detailed human skull with bic pens. The four and a half minute video represents two days of work.
via Nerdcore | Artist’s Website (warning: music)
British artist Richard Symons made the life sized “Techno Skull” from cast resin. He’s considering making future versions hollow and adding red LED illumination from the eyes.
The Watchismo Times has a post about a series of rare clocks that were built by Oswald of Germany between 1926 and 1944.
The dials are represented as the eyes separating the hours on the left and minutes to the right. Most of their collection feature cross-eyed genies, monkeys, gnomes, owls, and dogs (LOTS of dogs).
