The Creepiest Thing Ever: L’Inconnue de la Seine

mental_floss Blog � The Creepiest Thing Ever: L’Inconnue de la Seine: "Here’s something that happened. In the early twentieth century, a popular piece of art for the fashionable French home was L’Inconnue de la Seine (translation: “the unknown woman of the Seine”), a completely creepy death-mask (pictured at left) of a young woman whose body had been pulled from the Seine River in Paris, sometime in the 1870s or 1880s. As the (somewhat questionable) story goes, a pathologist at the morgue found the unknown woman’s face enchanting, so he made a death mask, a plaster casting of her face. The resulting cast was widely reproduced and became both a popular objet d’art, as well as extremely influential to writers, artists, and indeed young girls who attempted to replicate her (dead) looks. And you thought your friends were goth in high school…."