Do this news blogging stuff for long enough and you’ll notice patterns emerge. For instance, you think that someone receiving a delivery of a human body part in the mail that they were not expecting would be a much rarer story than it is, and yet I kicked off my week with a new story about a woman who was expecting a shipment of medicine but got a box of human fingers instead.
Today, I bring you a similar story. Franz Zehetner, archivist of Vienna’s St. Stephen’s Cathedral, tore open a package earlier this year. He didn’t know what to expect inside, but he probably didn’t expect to find one very old human skull. He probably also didn’t expect a note to accompany said old human skull, specifically a handwritten note from a man in northern Germany.
The BBC reports that this North German man admitted that he had stolen the skull when he was just a young tourist 60 years ago. The incident occurred during a guided tour of the cathedral’s catacombs, famously home to a dark and dank labyrinth morbidly filled with the skeletal remains of around 11,000 people, most of whom died in the 18th century.
The man, now in his twilight years, probably racked with guilt over a small act of desecration he committed over a half-century ago, said he’d been feeling bad about the whole stealing the skull thing, so he felt like he needed to repent a little by mailing it back.
Zehetner told the BBC that the gesture was “touching,” calling it an attempt to make amends for an act of “youthful exuberance.”
He seems genuinely moved by the gesture, and not just because the guy finally confessed and did the right thing by returning it, but by keeping it for all of these years instead of burying it somewhere or losing it during the move or storing it in a river or any number of ways he could have disposed of a mistake to obliterate it from his memory and conscience.
There’s no way to tell whose skull it was. The thousands upon thousands of skeletal remains beneath St. Stephen’s include everyone from plague victims to members of Vienna’s high society. It could’ve been a prince or a pauper. Either way, now that it’s been returned, the skull has been reintroduced to its natural macabre environment.
The post Tourist Stole a Skull From a Cathedral 60 Years Ago—and Just Returned It appeared first on VICE.
