Real-Life Twin Peaks Is A Town In France: A Halloween Post

Bear with me, Dear Reader.

At the risk of arousing the ire of other Twin Peaks fans, I will add my own far-fetched fan theory as this year’s Halloween post.  For what it’s worth, some of these thoughts have swirled in my mind since the first season of Twin Peaks (so, for decades), even before I knew of the existence of the French town I mention in the title.  In the spirit holiday, please be patient and indulge me. 

Your Halloween Post, Plus An Answer To Your Dad’s Question „How Is Studying Medieval History In Any Way Useful?“

I’ve been hesitating to write about this incident for some time.  I have a couple of guidelines for my Halloween posts that are not easy to meet: the post must be horror-themed, it must be about a true story, but it may not treat human suffering as a source of amusement.  (I guess that pretty much encapsulates the problem with Halloween as such.)  I therefore must apologize to my readers in advance that this post deals with an absolutely horrific death that I wouldn’t wish on my own worst enemy.  If it makes any difference, the victim was a very, very bad person.  Very bad.  So bad, in fact, that „the Bad“ became his royal moniker.  I am, of course, talking about Charles the Bad a/k/a Charles Le Mauvais(*) a/k/a Charles II, King of Navarre from 1349 to 1387.

Lenin’s Tomb (A Halloween Post)

Here is a perfect story for Halloween: the story of how I got to see Lenin’s mummy on the occasion of being inducted into the Young Pioneers.

Cimetière des Saints-Innocents: A Post in Honor of Halloween

Caspar Friedrich, “Abbey Ruins” (1809)

If you go to Paris today, you will see a nineteenth-century city.  That is because — I’m saving you the tedium of reading that guidebook — the medieval city that Victor Hugo described so longingly in The Hunchback of Notre Dame was almost entirely razed beginning in the 1850’s and replaced by a new, unrecognizable one.  New Paris is, of course, much more elegant (and also cleaner) than its predecessor; but, speaking as a medieval history buff and someone writing on Halloween, I have to say New Paris is also a lot less cool.  Old Paris, of which virtually nothing remains today, was, as kids would put it, hardcore.  Nowhere was this more apparent than at the city’s very center, at Europe’s most notorious cemetery, the Cemetery of the Holy Innocents.