Googling the ghosts of Montparnasse cemetery

By Hugh Schofield BBC News, Paris

Paris is well-known for its cemeteries, the most famous being Pere Lachaise, where tourists seek out the tomb of Oscar Wilde. But I live next to another great 19th Century cemetery in Montparnasse - and when I go there I always take my phone.

It is funny how we love a graveyard.

You would think we would find contemplation of all that decomposition and mortality to be off-putting, but we do not. Or at least I do not. Over the last 10 years I have become an aficionado of the pathways and sculptures and chapels and memorials of my local, Montparnasse cemetery.

By now I know all the famous graves - Serge Gainsbourg, the singer and poet, his slab covered with flowers and metro tickets left by fans in reference to one of his best-known songs......

.....Thanks to technology, these obscure ghosts are getting a new chance at perpetuity.

The other day I passed a tomb graced with a simple French tricolour. A soldier, dead in 1914, name of Marie-Joseph Bridoux. Never heard of him? No-one has. But it turns out, thanks to a quick internet search, that he was the first French general to die fighting the Germans in World War I, just a few weeks after its outbreak....

Continue Reading Here

Stonehenge Spirit Dissipates Into A Boulder

Internet hoax photo revives legend of tragic Mira’s ghost

Mischievous Ghosts Bring Prosperity in Japan