By the 1780s Paris had a serious corpse problem. The city had been
growing for millenia, and that meant generations upon generations of
its citizens had grown old and then died; the dead were buried in the
cemeteries around the city but space in these was limited. The
Parisians tried solving the problem the best they could – creating mass
graves, and building the cemeteries up so that some loomed ten feet
above street level, but these solutions didn’t take. The mass graves
were open pits of plague, creating illness in the wards surrounding the
burial grounds and providing feeding grounds for all sorts of vermin.
And corpses began falling out of the built up walls of the cemeteries,
leaving the rotting dead in the middle of the street. I can only
imagine the smell.

Something had to be done. In 1785 an idea
was hit upon: close the cemeteries (including the infamous and squalid
pit Les Innocents) and move all the bones underground. Paris is a city
with a secret: hundreds of miles of tunnels sit beneath the wide
avenues and tight, cobblestoned streets. There is of course the Paris
Metro, an extensive subway system, and the famous Paris sewers. But
older than both of them was a series of quarries. Started by the Romans
in BC 60, the quarries were the results of mining for limestone, of
which most of the city is built (giving Paris its distinct beige look).
Humongous amounts of limestone were quarried, and no one was keeping
track of the tunnels created by the mining; in 1776 the streets of
Paris began collapsing into the tunnels. Entire buildings went in.

Men
were sent in to explore and shore up the quarries. It soon became
obvious that these tunnels would be the perfect place to store the
bones of the millions who were buried in Paris’ many now-condemned
cemeteries. Starting in 1786, and continuing every single night for two
years, the bones of six million people were transported to the tunnels.
The bones were escorted by a priest who sang funerary songs; the
tunnels themselves were consecrated by the Archbishop of Paris. While
it took two years to move all the existing bones, bodies would keep
being brought to the catacombs for the next hundred years.

The Paris Catacombs are an integral part of the city’s history, real and imagined. The French Resistance used them to get around the city. Another kind of Resistance uses them in World War Z. They became the site of bloodshed during the 1870s, in the Paris Commune period. Vampires live in them in Anne Rice’s novels. And there’s even a movie called Catacombs, starring Pink, set there, although no film has ever shot in the actual Catacombs. Of course the Catacombs have captured the imagination of horror fans in general for decades; I first became aware of them reading Ripley’s Believe It Or Not.

The Catacombs turned into a tourist attraction more or less immediately
upon their construction. Today about 1.7 kilometers of the catacombs
are open to visitors. Last week I was one of them.

I was in
London for a set visit and decided to spend a little extra time in
Europe. My original itinerary had me flying in on Thursday, seeing the
set on Friday and coming home on Saturday – that’s too much time
traveling, not enough time living. I had never been to Paris, and I was
under the impression that the Eurostar train connecting Paris and
London was reasonably priced (it is if you book three weeks in advance. Do it 7 days in advance like I did and you get raped), so I chose to visit the City of Lights.
Like all tourists, I had an agenda. But mine wasn’t to visit the art
museums or see the Eiffel Tower (although I did and it is completely
and totally worth seeing. Stunning beauty that cannot be captured in
photos or on film). Mine was to visit the dead.

To that end I
booked a hotel very near the entrance to the Paris Catacombs, which is
in the Place Denfort Rochereau, a not terribly touristy section of the
city. I had about 36 hours in Paris and, after checking in, washing up
and getting a bite to eat, I got in line for the Catacombs. You could
easily miss the spot – it’s an unassuming little black building on a
tree lined boulevard. If it wasn’t for the line outside you might never
know there was anything within.

The Catacombs let the last
person in at 4pm; there are only 200 people allowed inside at a time,
and you walk through at your own pace, so there’s no telling how long
the line will take. I lucked out, getting in line at 3pm and being the
second to last person allowed in for the day. I was in town alone, so I
had only George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London to keep me
company. Thankfully every single Parisian woman is beautiful, and I
took advantage of my hour in line to admire as many of them as
possible. One less beautiful woman actually approached me – a filthy
homeless hag, she put her cracked and yellowy hand on my beer gut and
said ‘Une bebe!’ I got trolled by the homeless in Paris.

When I
finally got in the anticipation was huge. This is a big tourist
attraction – 100,000 visit it a year – but it’s not major like the
Louvre or the Eiffel Tower. I didn’t actually know anyone who had been
to the Catacombs, and many of the web pages that talked about them were
sketchy. This was obviously the kind of attraction people visited when
they had run out of other things to do in Paris; it’s sort of telling
that this was my very first stop.

Eight Euros later, I went
through a turnstile (a turnstile at either end of the catacombs keeps
count of how many people are down there) and began descending the
stairs. There are 130 steps down, and they’re narrow, winding,
spiraling stairs. You can never see more than a few steps ahead of you,
and you begin to get dizzy making the tighter and tighter turns.
Finally the stairs end in a series of rooms; it looks like any other
museum with large, text-filled illustrations on the walls detailing the
history of the Catacombs. Some of the people who had come in ahead of
me were dilly dallying around there; I had already read up on the
Catacombs’ history and was dying to get to the main show: death.

I
left those rooms and began walking through a series of tunnels. Cramped
and low-ceilinged, these tunnels are lit by very dim lights every few
feet. There’s a sudden change from the initial chambers; it’s cooler
and damper, and the floor is now gravel laid haphazardly over slick
limestone. There were tourists in front of me, and I could hear the
voices of tourists behind me as I made my way through these tunnels.

At
first I was disappointed. Where the hell were the bones? I didn’t come
to Paris to walk through some old tunnels (and they’re old. There are
engravings on the walls marking when they the tunnels were built; the
first one I saw was 1781). But my disappointment faded away as the
tunnels got creepier and creepier. They got darker, it seemed, and they
got colder. The tunnels kept turning right and left; some branching
tunnels were closed off by metal gates. I knew that there was over 300
kilometers of these tunnels under Paris, and the only thing keeping me
from accidentally wandering into that maze was an employee keeping a
gate locked.

As I got further in creepy became actually scary.
I couldn’t see anyone in either direction, and there were no more
voices. The only sounds in the wet, chilly darkness were my feet on the
gravel, my breathing and the dripping water from the ceiling. It was
like being in a dungeon, trapped and alone. There were holes in the
walls; it was so dark I couldn’t see if they were recesses or looked
into other passageways. Either way I didn’t want to get too close – no
one had advertised this as a haunted house type attraction, but it was
too easy to imagine an arm darting out of one of them.

By now
I was getting actually scared. My jet lagged brain, which is pussified
at the best of times, was running a mile a minute – what if some
prankster had closed the gate I was supposed to walk through and opened
another one, sending me into the wrong part of the Catacombs? What if
they closed the tunnels with me still in it? And even less rationally,
how could you have the remains of six million people jumbled together
and not end up with at least one angry spirit? I’m an avid Ghost
Hunters fan, and I have to admit that half the photos I was taking were
attempts to capture the image of a ghost.

Here’s some footage
I took of myself in the Catacombs. If I had known that my Flip Mini had
such good lowlight photography, I would have used it the whole way.
Feel free to laugh at me here, I’m being pretty ridiculous.

Finally
I heard voices ahead of me again. It felt like I had been alone down
there for ages, but it was probably just three or four minutes.
Thankfully I hadn’t yet ascended to that Lou Costello stage of fear,
which is just below wetting your pants, but I think I could have made
it there with another ten minutes of quiet, solitary wandering. How do
people work down in the Catacombs? What does that do to your psyche?

I
tried to ask the next human being I saw, who happened to be a security
guard hanging around at a bend in the tunnels. This part of the
Catacombs had a couple of sculptures – models of castles or cities. I
have to admit that I have no idea what they represented or why they
were there (the explanatory plaques were all in French), but they
looked gorgeous. I approached the guard who was just chilling there in
a little plastic chair (I’m assuming to make sure tourists didn’t make
off with pieces of the sculpture), but he predictably didn’t speak any
English.

Continuing on I came to another small room, this one
with a gated off staircase leading down to a pool of brilliant blue
water. That’s the “Footbath of Quarrymen,” and it was built to allow
some access to water for the workers (I think. All this info was in
French. I’m doing my best here). Still no bones, but I finally felt
like I was getting somewhere.

And indeed I was. It even darker
in the next chamber, and there was another guard sort of hanging
around. I saw a doorway but could not see anything through it; above
the doorway was an ancient sign that read:

ARRETE! C’EST ICI L’EMPIRE DE LA MORT

Stop! This is the Empire of the Dead

Now that’s how you label a doorway. I stepped through.