Walking back from the store this evening, a distant neighbor called from his porch, “watch out.” In a few seconds, I noticed a bear was in his driveway along with two of her cubs. They were about 20 feet away. I said I was new to the neighborhood and didn’t know it had bears; he said, it’s rare. Bears are beautiful creatures but of course deadly when provoked.
More from the Life magazine edition on haunted places around the world. The entry on Paris notes Princess Obolensky fell almost 1,000 feet from the Eiffel Tower in 1931. She had recently married and seemed happy, but letters she had written found after her death showed she had killed herself. She was one of hundreds of people who have died jumping from the tower since it was built in 1889. In Waiting for Godot, Didi and Gogo recall the time they considered suicide from the tower, and the play ends with them again considering it. “No matter where you look, the City of Lights has a dark side–from spirits in the Louvre, which some have called the city’s most haunted building, to the eerie catacombs, and even nearby Versailles,” the magazine says. At Notre Dame, there is the hunchback, and the opera has a phantom. Other ghosts mentioned include Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust, and Jim Morrison.
Another entry is about St. Patrick’s Purgatory in County Donegal, Ireland, where according to legend Christ showed Patrick a cave leading to Purgatory. The entry then cites other supposed entrances to Purgatory or Hell in Turkey, Turkmenistan, Iceland, the Czech Republic, Japan, Italy (see Virgil’s Aeneid), Pennsylvania, Kansas, New Orleans. In Norway, the word hell simply means “luck.” Maybe that is why Beckett found Dante to be funny.