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I was able to solve almost everything in Zork except the bell, book, & candle puzzle. I only discovered the answer a couple of years later when they revealed the solution in the Zork books: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zork_books

I finished the game after that.

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True. Infocom games were largely fair, but difficult as they grew out of MIT geek culture where the level of puzzle solving was high. It's the lesser efforts from companies like Sierra that used "moon logic" puzzles that literally nobody could solve other than either by luck or by buying expensive hint books.

I had no idea the "bell, book, and candle" in Nethack were from Zork. I gathered that it was from _something_ (since nearly everything else in it is) but didn't know what.

It is much older than that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell,_book,_and_candle

I believe in contemporary use it has become associated with witches, and I have seen it used as a general "occult" reference.

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