For around six decades, a human skull taken from the catacombs beneath Vienna's St. Stephen's Cathedral remained far from its original resting place. The skull had reportedly been stolen by a young German tourist during a visit to the cathedral's underground burial chambers and kept for much of his life. Then, near the end of his life, the man decided to return it. According to a report by the Austrian newspaper Krone, the skull unexpectedly arrived back at St. Stephen's Cathedral in a parcel, accompanied by a letter from an elderly man in northern Germany. In the letter, he confessed that he had taken the skull as a young tourist around 60 years earlier and said that, as his life was drawing to a close, he wanted to make peace with himself. The extraordinary return brought an end to a story that had apparently begun with an act of youthful recklessness and concluded decades later with an attempt at remorse and restitution.
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