Before we get into the secret world of these mysterious tunnels under the city of Paris,
we should probably explain to those who don’t know what the catacombs actually are.
And before you get carried away with your imagination, these are not as has been depicted
in cinema, with hordes of ravenous zombies living down there.
According to “Les Catacombes Des Paris” website, the reason these holes in the ground
got started was because in the 18th century Paris had a major problem on its hands.
The issue was the fact the cemeteries were too full and a place was needed to put a lot
of dead bodies, and we are talking about millions.
Stuck with this morbid task the Parisian authorities chose a site called the Tombe-Issoire quarries.
Those quarries were no longer in use, having been dug in the 15th century and onwards but
abandoned some time later.
These underground tunnels stretched for 800 hectares (over 3 square miles) under the city
of Paris.
The job at hand was called “bone transfer” and the man responsible for emptying the cemeteries
and moving the remains of once-moving/laughing/eating/procreating and dying Parisians was a guy called Charles
Axel Guillaumot.
With his department, he started the moving-house process in 1785 and the excavation of bones
was done from the biggest cemetery in Paris at the time, called the Saints-Innocents cemetery.
It had been closed 5 years prior as there was literally no space for anymore dead people.
It had been taking corpses by that time for 10 centuries, which is a lot of bones.
A no room at the dead man’s inn scenario was not just a French problem.
If you read Bill Bryson’s book “At Home: A Short History of Private Life” you can
read that France’s neighbor, Great Britain, was having its own problems with getting rid
of the dead.
Back to France, and this operation of bone transfer was done under a cloak of darkness
lest people get offended by someone manhandling their deceased family member’s bits and
pieces.
The bones were taken down to the quarries and put into what are called galleries.
Work stopped for a while and upstairs some of the French were busy revolting and quite
a lot were dying, making the burial situation even worse.
Following the revolution work commenced and smaller cemeteries around Paris had their
bones taken from them.
While the site was officially called the “Paris Municipal Ossuary” it began to take on mythical
proportions and was informally called the catacombs, after the tunnels under the ancient
city of Rome.
So there we have it, an abridged version at least.
Paris needed a place for bones because the cemeteries were bursting at the seams, and
that’s why those underground tunnels were made.
As you can imagine, such a place was kind of spooky for the French, and back then people
weren’t always opposed to stories of the dead rising and other superstitious beliefs.
If you get spooked by graveyards now, imagine what the average Parisian thought back then
of a place where millions of the dead were buried, not all with content souls.
In fact, it’s said the catacombs hold around 7 million people.
You might even call it “The City of the Dead”, so it’s no wonder that filmmakers
have chosen it as a spot for horror flicks.
Next time you’re in Paris you should take your Ouija board down there, but remember
not to say, “Is there anybody here?” because the spirits probably won’t understand you.
Instead say, “Y a-t-il quelqu'un ici ?”
It might have been scary, but after 1809 when the place was opened to the public it attracted
a lot of visitors from France and abroad.
It got even more visitors when well-known people were sent to live for eternity down
there, including the once President of France Napoleon III – related to the bellicose
Napoleon you all know well.
At times the hordes of visitors got too much for the authorities and they limited entrance
or just closed the place to the public for months on end.
These days you can go down there any time of the year and it’s said annually about
550,000 people do just that.
Ok, so that’s the history, but what about the mystery and intrigue.
Well, one would think that an underground place of that size would have an underground
society.
That it did, and we are told on August 23, 2004, cops went down there and had quite the
surprise, finding a cinema.
We must mention here that some parts of the catacombs are closed off from the public,
but it seems some people get past the barriers.
This is what Gizmodo tells us about this discovery, “They found 3,000 square feet of subterranean
galleries, strung with lights, wired for phones, live with pirated electricity.
The officers uncovered a bar, lounge, workshop, dining corner and small screening area.”
When they found a metal container with fat and wires in it they thought they’d come
across a bomb and that something very ominous was going on down in those holes, but the
bomb squad said what they found was merely a cous-cous maker.
Who were these people?
The cops didn’t know, and when they returned a few days later with more authorities they
found most of the equipment gone and a letter left for them reading, “Ne cherchez pas,”
meaning “Don’t search.”
That kind of message obviously caused a frisson of panic in the police as saying don’t search
was what someone with bad intent might say.
Soon the world’s media was speculating.
Was there an underground movement in Paris- it wouldn’t be the first time Parisians
had machinated to attack the powers that be.
This was serious, given that many of the closed tunnels could be home to anything, and there
are supposed to be about 155 miles (250km) of passageways in total.
But nothing sinister was going on, and later a group responsible for the underground cinema
said, “We are the counterpoint to an era where everything is slow and complicated.”
It was discovered the group called themselves “The Mexican Consolidated Drilling Authority.”
That’s the English translation.
This was a serious outfit, given they’d stolen electricity to power their cinema and
got all that stuff down there without anyone seeing.
But others have been fascinated by the catacombs for years, and these folks are often called
“cataphiles”.
Who wouldn’t be fascinated by a place where the Phantom of the Opera hid and where millions
of dead rest?
But many real-life things happened down there that have caused people to be intrigued.
A group known as the Communards (not the 80s British pop duo) killed a bunch of French
monarchists in the tunnels.
The French Resistance hid in them, while the Nazis had a bunker down in the catacombs.
More recently AirBnB paid a whopping $300,000 to rent some part of the tunnels for the night.
What’s more interesting, especially to cataphiles, is that there are many, many secret entrances
to the catacombs.
You might find a doorway to this underground world of the dead in bar cellars, subway tunnels,
and better still, in church crypts.
Not surprisingly, sometimes these doors get found and people go down there to explore.
And let’s face it, you’re not a teenager if you don’t enjoy exploring places you
probably shouldn’t go.
Well, perhaps modern teens do most of their exploration in the digital realm and in games,
but in the past the best thing about being young was sneaking into places and quite often
getting in trouble.
Could there be any place in the world better to sneak into for a bunch of teens than the
Paris catacombs?
Well, that happened in 2017 but as you might expect, it didn’t go too well for the itinerant
teens.
Two boys aged 16 and 17 got lost down there with the dead and were only eventually pulled
out three days later both with a case of mild hypothermia.
Three days under the ground in the cold walking around tunnels with no food and mostly in
darkness takes sneaking into places to another level.
Still, they have a better story to tell than, “I completed level 5.”
Hmm, ok, so it might just be a little irresponsible of us to promote this kind of adventure.
We say this because someone died down there in 2016.
The person didn’t die from cold or being lost, though, he died of a heart attack when
he was partying hard down there.
One thing you should know about the catacombs, they have been a top spot for Parisian people
who like to party.
You could call these events the quintessential underground party.
The French media says a bunch of people took some music down, along with a lot of booze
and some substances not legal in the living world.
Things turned awry when a 45-year old man’s heart had seen too much partying.
There are other reports of people going missing down there.
In 2011, five people went down drunk but it was a prank, and two ran away to leave the
others.
But they didn’t get out and spent two days wandering around.
In other cases, artists have gone to make films and take pictures, some of them even
with an erotic angle.
One of the people who controls how many people go down there says every week people ask him
if they can visit and do something weird or wonderful.
“Obviously, we say no.
This is a sacred place, which houses the remains of six million Parisians.
We only allow serious or scientific documentaries,” he said to the French media.
He says there is a growing problem with what are called naked explorers, and many of them
apparently come all the way from the USA.
We are told that the modus operandi often is for the people to go down there and pretend
they are just tourists, but they then leave lots of equipment and return later.
But for the locals, there is still what you might call an underground cult that visit
the catacombs and discuss art, the end of the world, or just take a swim where pools
of water can be found.
Free from the hustle and bustle of Parisian streets and the pretension of café culture,
some French folks just like to get down with the dead and leave the rest of the world behind.
But as you might expect, such a good hiding place is also attractive to those people inclined
to criminality.
In 2017 there was a case which involved some thieves drilling through walls to get to some
rather special vintage wine that was secretly kept underground.
That wine was said to be worth over $280,000.
That’s not a bad score for a place that usually just keeps a bunch of old bones and
dusty skulls.
Would you go down in those catacombs?
Do you think you’d be up for being a cataphile?
Also, be sure to check out our other video American Things Europeans Find Weird.
Thanks for watching, and as always, don’t forget to like, share and subscribe.
See you next time.