The Parisian catacombs are a network of tunnels and caves that stretch more than 300 km under the city. These places are famous for paranormal phenomena and an unkind aura. It all started a long time ago …
Building material was required to build the city. The Romans were the first people to mine limestone in the area in the 6th century BC. In open-pit mines, the Romans dug up unprotected rock.
As the city grew and took up more and more space, the first tunnels appeared in the quarries. They have grown in size and complexity, and have provided building resources for centuries. The quarrying continued with reckless speed until problems began to arise.
By the 18th century, Paris had grown impressively, and a large number of voids had formed underground, due to which some buildings began to collapse and sink into the ground. To tackle this problem, a general quarry inspection was formed in Paris to repair, fill or close some of the tunnels deemed dangerous.
At the beginning of the 18th century, the Parisians faced a second problem: severe overcrowding in cemeteries. More than 30 generations of human remains have been buried in the Cemetery of the Innocents alone. The priests decided to build a kind of common grave for the dead called "charnier". It was there that the bodies of the dead were taken for a long time.
Since the growing city even surrounded the cemeteries, there was no more free space in it. Near the end of the closure of the Cemetery of the Innocents, as well as several other cemeteries, the ground rose more than 10 feet above the road. The smell plagued those who lived in the immediate vicinity of the cemetery.
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Some of the walls of the cemetery actually collapsed, from where rotting bodies fell out onto the streets and into the basements of some adjacent buildings. Soon, the people living nearby began to get sick and die from the poisons evaporating from the corpses. The decision was made to begin clearing the cemetery and placing the bones in a network of tunnels under the city. In 1785, when all the bones were placed underground, the quarries became the Catacombs Museum.
A spiral cement staircase takes visitors down 130 steps, 20 meters deep. At the bottom of the stairs there are two rooms with many photographs of ancient graffiti inside the Catacombs Museum, as well as some underground structures. After passing through two small rooms, a person will find himself in real catacombs.
On average, the lowest ceiling height is 1.8m, and the highest is over 3m, although some sections have cathedral-style ceilings that rise high above your head. Dim lighting is gradually depressing. The limestone walls are yellowish brown in color and cool to the touch. Coarse gravel crunches underfoot with every step, and the only other sound is occasional dripping somewhere in the tunnels.
In the next hall, the guest is greeted by an inscription that translates as “Stop! Here is the Empire of the Dead. In these sections, bones and skulls form ornaments depicting crosses, hearts, arcs and other symbols.
If you think about the bones of more than 6 million bodies in the entire creepy crypt, then it becomes somehow uncomfortable. Indeed, in these eye sockets there was once life and they contemplated and felt this world just like we do.
The tourist route shows the viewer only 1.7 km from the entire huge necropolis. The entrance to further tunnels is closed. They say that no one was involved in the design of the bones and they are randomly scattered across the floor.
The negative energy of properly unburied bodies and the rare presence of people could give birth to the light, or rather into the darkness, terrible mystical secrets. We can only guess what several hundred kilometers of little-explored dark tunnels hide from the prying eyes.
Catacombs of Paris 2015:
Excursion to the Paris Catacombs: