A question for cultural linguistics geeks

I've always struggled with the locative case. I mean I understand that a grammatical case involves distinct noun forms, and that this one refers specifically to location. But in English prepositional phrases are used to indicate location.

It's like the English language fetches things from somewhere 'out there' and puts them in place, while languages that use the locative case seem to structure the world so that things only ever exist in place.

Does this make sense?