Paris is one of the most beautiful cities in the world with the reputation for romance and adventure. Over 40 million people visit Paris a year, but not all may know they are walking over 200 miles of tunnels filled with bones underneath the city. Today, we will take a look into the stories from the Catacombs of Paris.

Brief History

The beginning of the Catacombs were caused from the Bubonic Plague where there were too many bodies to bury. Over the course of Paris’s history, there was so much death from disease and war that the cemeteries started to burst from the seams. The solution became burial tunnels which came to be the famous Catacombs.

Hauntings and Legends

In the early 1990’s, a groups of experts who specialized in studying the Catacombs came across a video camera lying on the ground. It had footage still on it and what they saw was truly terrifying. The video was of a man clearly lost in the tunnels with disturbing noises in the background. The man was going insane and not making much sense of what he was saying. He was lost in the maze of bones surrounding him with no idea how to escape. The video ends with him dropping the camera. To this day, no one knows if he made it out alive or not. While the true origins of the film still need to be found, it still sounds like a fake video made to scare people to me.

Photo by Kyle Loftus from Pexels

Another legend is said that at Midnight, you can hear voices within the walls. They are said to tell you to keep going deeper and deeper so you get lost within the tunnels. One voice is said to be a man named Philibert Aspairit who died in the Catacombs in 1793. He was a doorkeeper of a military hospital and he had ventured into the Catacombs without his intentions being clear as to why. Whatever the reason, he had gotten lost and died within the tunnels. His body was found 11 years later with the hospital keys attached to his belt. It is thought that he became lost after his candle went out. People say that if you bring a lit candle with you, you can hear his disembodied voice before your candle suddenly goes out.

These tunnels hold so much history and mystery that it is impossible to ignore. Regardless if it is haunted or not, you will still feel creeped out with the thousands of anonymous bones that line the walls of the place. Would you like to visit the Catacombs in Paris, France?