Welcome to the empire of the dead, ou l’empire de la mort.
I find it charmingly dark to know that Paris at the street level has amazing, old architecture and romantic lights that dance off the water around the city. Below the idyllic city of love is a network of tunnels that are believed to span for hundreds of miles, stacked with bones from millions of people. I leave the land of the living by descending more than 130 steps into the one-mile portion of the tunnels that’s open to the public.
The tunnels smell like dank mold and it’s eerily quiet as I walk around the carefully arranged skulls and stacked femurs. The ossuary was a reminder of my mortality and I felt emotional thinking about how these bones once were living people with thoughts, beliefs, emotions, ideas and lives. But now, here they lay, unnamed remnants.
These remains ended up here in the 18th century as cemeteries in the city began to overflow with bodies and pose a health risk — soup, milk and wine in houses near the cemetery went sour in just a few hours and disease was more likely. Cellars of houses that surrounded cemeteries in the city sometimes collapsed from the weight of the bodies piling up.
So, the bodies were exhumed, blessed by a priest and moved into the city’s former quarries at night and made into an ossuary.
Even though most of the subterranean city is off-limits and guarded by police, illegal exploration is so popular that these types of explorers have their own name — cataphiles. I’ve heard rumors of illegal parties and even movie screenings in the off-limit parts of the maze.
And, this underground empire has its share of lore. Allegedly, a man in the 1990s explored the tunnels on his own and disappeared. But, his camcorder and videotapes were found and showed him panic, run and drop the camera. Whether it’s true or not, it’s material for a great horror movie. In fact, the Paris Catacombs inspired the film, “As Above, So Below.”
