Ephrata, Pa. A man was arrested in Ephrata a while back simply for engaging in his hobby. He was apparently a collector and I don't know when that became a crime. The stuff he collected was just sitting around. Okay, he had some jewelry. But no one was using even a single piece of it. What's more, no one had any intention of ever using it. Everything in his collection had been abandoned. Even the pacemaker.

Our friend and I use the term in the loosest possible sense, stored his collection in private property, so no infraction there. The whole thing, a hundred human skulls along with assorted body parts — hands, feet, bones, a couple of torsos — was tucked away in his basement, in the backseat of his car and in a rented and paid-up Ephrata storage unit. Delaware County D.A. Tanner Rouse explained, "The skulls were in various states. Some of them were hanging, as it were. Some of them were pieced together, some were just skulls on a shelf,"

D.A. Rouse makes it sound like this kind of thing might be routine around Ephrata, Pennsylvania. Now, I'm a tolerant guy. I am, for example, actually married to a full-blooded Pennsylvanian. Though not from Ephrata, she has her moments. And some of you might remember — or may still be trying to forget — the column I did about my body being stuffed after death and placed standing in our living room, holding the TV remote. Of course, I was joking. (I know it's hard to tell sometimes.) I wasn't hoping to be the centerpiece of a collection, the male Mona Lisa of a morbid museum.

To assemble his collection, the man from Ephrata, let's call him Igor, broke into at least 26 mausoleums and burial vaults in the nation's largest abandoned cemetery. I have no idea who does that ranking, or how you can get your abandoned cemetery considered. But the one to beat has 150,000 gravesites. At least it did before Igor started doing whatever the hell he was doing. Did I mention that Ephrata is a Hebrew name meaning "fruitful" or "place of abundance"? That certainly seems to be the way Igor was looking at it.

"We're trying to figure it out," the D.A. said calmly. With all due respect, sir. I doubt this is one of those figure-outable things. Okay, Igor might have sold the occasional piece, but mostly he was just collecting and hoarding. He's being charged with 100 counts of abuse of a corpse as well as burglary, receiving stolen property and generally being so weird that nobody wants him running around loose. His initial bail was set at a million dollars and I don't think that's nearly enough.

A couple of suggestions for D.A. Rouse. First, register "Skulls on a Shelf" since it's a can't-miss name for a rock group. Then, tell Igor that as soon as he explains all this in a way that makes sense to anybody — anybody at all — you'll drop the receiving stolen property charges. (Just who was he supposed to have received this stuff from anyway?)

I'd love to hear Igor's reasoning. But the only thing less likely than anyone doing this is this bozo coming up with a rational explanation for it.

Though there is this. Doing my usual exhaustive research for this column, I only got as far as typing "When did gr ... " into Google, when it automatically suggested "When did grave robbing become a crime?" like a terrifyingly large amount of people have been asking that question.

So maybe having my body stored safely in the living room isn't such a bad idea.

To find out more about Barry Maher and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Photo credit: Jonathan Rivera at Unsplash