Based on true story
I had only found out about the Catacombs of Paris recently on YouTube. So when I went to Paris last year, I had to see it for myself. Like with anything in Paris, there was a huge line. The hotel that I stayed at in Le Marais organised a ticket. After about thirty minutes in line, I finally made my way down a long stairway down. It was a decent ten-minute walk down a long, spiral staircase. Then once you get to the bottom which I can only estimate to be at least a hundred metres below the street level, there are arrays of hallways lit dimly lit. The only thing I know about the Catacombs of Paris is that, the cemeteries were getting a bit crowded and the government needed ways to relocate the bodies. So they made the decision to dig underground and store all the bones.
The first thing I noticed when I arrived at the underground entrance was the smell that I can only guess was the smell of bones. I wasn’t scared as there were constant flow of visitors. I have to tell you, I’ve never seen anything like it. The skulls were arranged as walls in a quite an artistic way. The bones of limbs were also arranged in kind of a creepy but decorative manner. That weird, smell doesn’t leave you the whole time you’re down there. It’s still fresh in my mind. It’s kind of musky, dirt smell, maybe the smell of a soul.
Anyway, I’ve never seen human skulls and bones in the flesh until I went down there. They all looked unique and different. Every twenty metres or so, there were actual graves with a person’s name on it. As a made my way through the maze made of bones, I noticed that the visitors were getting scarcer. I was starting to get a little nervous. It takes a good hour to walk through the wall of bones then climb the spiral staircase again and make your way out to a some pretty streets on Paris again. This isn’t some exaggerated story of how I saw ghosts down there.
But let me tell you, if you ever get a chance to visit the catacombs of Paris, you will feel something. There’s definitely a presence down there, not necessarily malevolent but I definitely felt something. I recommend you to visit the catacombs next time you’re in Paris. Personally, I wouldn’t mind visiting it again.
