Entry to hell?

The Door to Hell

The name of the location is a little daunting.  It makes you wonder about human nature when people are more likely to flock to a place with such a title than avoid it.  But apparently we aren’t as wise as we think we are, and thousands of people visit.

The door to hell is actually more of a pit or hole.  And it’s totally man made.  In 1971, a drilling platform was built to seek out natural gas.  It is located in Turkmenistan, and Soviet scientists meant it to allow the use of this valuable energy source.  But the platform collapsed and the gas started to escape.  In an effort to keep the poison from the atmosphere, scientists set the open crater on fire.  The plan was a controlled and limited burn that would cease in a short time.  And that was 40 some years ago.

This scientific attempt to control nature and energy certainly backfired.  The result is a 230 foot wide, 70 foot deep crater burning with incredible heat.  The light from the flames can be seen at a distance and spreads up into the darkened sky.  It is heat in the desert, a sparsely populated place.

I’m not sure that this is actually named appropriately.  Granted, it’s hot and flaming, but the devil made no one do it.  And it wasn’t due to some cruelty of spirit.  No one meant for the fire to burn on, and since it is located away from most towns, it hasn’t really caused any loss of life.  It was a mistake, not an attack, a botched attempt at fixing something. 

Perhaps I’ll go with Fiery Folly. 

And this is one that I might want to visit one day.

Any other ideas for a name? 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/20/door-of-hell_n_4311694.html

Crazy About my Pets

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Haunted Village, Victim of War

Oradour-sur-Glane

When I think of spooky places, places haunted by history and events, I often, naively, forget the remnants of war.  In the United States, it’s easier to slip over the uncomfortable history of loss because so many of our battles have been fought on foreign soil.  We forget, sometimes, what it’s like to live amid the shadows of the past.

Oradour-sur-Glane, a little village in France, is frozen forever in its haunted state, a deliberate attempt to keep tragedy in our minds, hopefully to teach us something.

In 1944, the Nazi’s descended on the town, bringing with them unspeakable cruelty.   No one was spared, not the children or the elderly, the only survivors, people who were missed or hid, and precious few of them.  The little town was not part of the fight, but removed from the war.  Most had never even seen a German until the soldiers came.  And in one stoke, 642 people were killed, the buildings burned, remains of inhabitants with them until few bodies were left to be buried.  The aftermath of the massacre was inexplicable.  No one knew the reason for the brutality of the attack, and it was total.  The village was gone, never to be rebuilt.

And so Oradour-sur-Glane remained.  The French Government decided that they wanted the village as it was, a testament to the war, its destruction complete.  Rubble frames what once was homes, naked facades with no buildings supporting them, gates keeping no one out or in.  It is a dead land.   People now visit to pay respect and to honor the innocent that were lost. 

The walls are slowly eroding, crumbling into dust.  The buildings, frozen in destruction, cannot withstand the passage of time and now the government is being forced to make a decision.  Do they push more money into the time forgot town to save it, or allow the earth to swallow it?   

My thanks to: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/03/oradour-sur-glane-nazi-massacre-village

Dearly Departed, Book one of the Grave Reminders series

Another strange place: Varosha by the sea

A salty breeze slithers between the buildings, creeping through cracks and whistling empty echos of sound.  The sounds of laughter, of footfalls and chatter, are gone.  Windows lie in broken shards, winking like diamonds, littering the sidewalks and dusty floors.  The city is empty.  The stores still boast frozen people in fashions of years before, their plastic hands outstretched.  But trees have stabbed up through the roof and plants thrust the concrete up into buckled gaps.  Their churches are empty but for spirits.

The city is the abandoned resort of Varosha, a victim of a battle between the Greek people of Cyprus and the Turks. It was once a brilliant, glittering tourist attraction, tucked in the sandy beaches.  It now stands, fenced off from the rest of the world, abandoned and left to gradually decay.

The story is fascinating and sad, definitely worth reading.  But my writer's mind wonders beyond the fence.  What must it be like?  What would it feel like to walk the abandoned streets? To peer through the windshields of cars parked permanently for decades?  The city is heavily guarded now, but what if it wasn't?  The looted city has been left for so long, but what could live there?  What might live there hidden in the dark, creeping in the abandoned rooms, feeding off the overgrown gardens?

Here is another place where even a visit would give you shivers.  A haunted past, a violent past, and an unknown future.

strange things...the Mutter Museum

If strange places and academic places were ranked in importance, the Mutter Museum would rank at the top for both categories.  Located in Philadelphia, it houses an expansive and gruesome collection of items to provide education for medical professionals, and just creep out the rest of us.  It's primary web site asks, "Are you ready to be disturbingly informed?" Exhibitions include Civil War artifacts including body specimens with the opportunity to imagine what it would have been like to have an arm amputated.  Educational?  Other charming items include surgical instruments, a huge collection of human skulls, and slivers of Einstein's brain. Additional bodies and bits are proudly preserved, originated from the collections from Dr. Thomas Dent Mutter, who was devoted to medical education.
I imagine the visit would be fascinating.  Rows upon rows of organs floating in jars, hundreds of articulated skeletons, and dehydrated body parts.
When I was a student in the college of medicine, one of our labs centered on the dissection and examination of cadavers.  These real bodies were invaluable to learn about the layers of muscles, the tiny articulated bones, and the fascinating web of membranes that made up the body in front of us.  But it always remained in the back of my mind that this was the shell of a person, a real, thinking, caring person who gave a gift for me to learn.
And in a very real way, once you learn of the complexity of the human body, the frailty and the miraculous symmetry, you see the design in the form and function.

Bones and Catacombs

Strange places: bones and catacombs

 

 

 

Deep beneath the pavement of Paris, France, older, even, than some of its more well-known monuments, lies a labyrinth of tunnels lined with stacks of bones.  These are the remains of millions of Parisians, entombed there for all time, in a place that reeks of age and time.  The tunnels are world borne, created by ancient tropical seas which left the layers of stone in their wake as they yielded up to the land.  This limestone then became a vital building block for the civilization that came after it, building great Cathedrals, palaces, and city streets.  The spaces left from the mining were vast systems of passages that became the second grave for many bodies when graveyards were closed in the city.   Now close to six million bodies lay under the city of Paris in an area referred to as “France’s Empire of the Dead”.

 

Visitors to Paris can tour the Catacombs with tour guides and lit passages.  There are reputed to be street signs carved into the walls to indicate where under the city that the visitor is located.  The area is now monitored and protected by police.  But what must it been like before it became a tourist location?  And what of the infinitely more unexplored tunnels?  What might they hold?

 

The bodies were originally moved in the early 1780’s because of the severe crowding in Paris cemeteries and church yards.  Bodies and bones were erupting into people’s cellars.  The extensive space under the city seemed to be a good alternative.  But if your loved one was tucked into one of the cold niches under the city, would you visit with a bouquet of flowers?  If you were looking for a long lost grand relative, would you wade through the tunnels of bones to pay a call?  Under the watchful eye of a guide, I might be tempted to journey into the depths to get a small taste of history, but no further.  I have a healthy respect for the dead and would ultimately want them to rest in peace.  I surely wouldn’t want to bring something back home with me!

 

If given the chance, would you go for the tour?  Would you go with the guide, or are you a more adventurous sort?  Are you the type to creep into one of the hidden entrances to brave the dark by yourself?

Would you be afraid?

 

Thanks to: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2184393/Paris-catacombs-The-skulls-bones-inside-Frances-Empire-Dead.html