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The Owl House is a museum in Nieu-Bethesda, Eastern Cape, South Africa. The house itself was inherited by a woman named Helen Martins after her parents had died. ==Helen Martins== Helen Martins was a reclusive outsider artist who remains something of an enigma.〔Unsolved mysteries of Southern Africa. Marsh, Rob.〕 Born on 23 December 1897 in Nieu-Bethesda, she was the youngest of six children. Helen was schooled in Graaf-Reinet and later obtained a teaching diploma at the teachers college in Graaf-Reinet (now the police training college). In 1919, Helen Martins moved to the Transvaal where she began teaching. A year later, she married a colleague by the name of Willem Johannes Pienaar. The couple travelled around the country acting in theatre productions in the Transvaal, Cape Town and Port Elizabeth. Their marriage was not a happy one, and Helen left her husband on several occasions. She eventually divorced Pienaar in 1926 after he left her to have an affair with another woman. Some time during 1928, Helen returned to Nieu-Bethesda where she stayed for the next 31 years taking care of her elderly parents. Her mother died in 1941, and her father in 1945. Before her father died, Helen moved him into the outside room, which she painted black. It had no windows, only had a potbellied stove and a bed for him to sleep on. She did this because her father had been verbally abusive to her. Her parents left Helen the house. After her parents' death she started to transform the house and the garden. In the years that followed, Helen grew more and more estranged from the outside world. The people of Nieu-Bethesda grew rather suspicious of Helen giving her reason to avoid other people when she went to get her pension from the Post office every month. In 1976, Helen Martins's eyesight began to fail. Dreading the daunting fact that she was going blind, she took her own life by swallowing poison.〔Are We There Yet: Chasing a Childhood Through South Africa By David Smiedt, p. 289〕 She was rushed to a hospital in Graaff-Reinet, where she died three days later, on 8 August 1976. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「The Owl House」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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