On my second day in Paris, I woke up to find the city covered in a thin layer of snow. I immediately got changed, grabbed my camera and hopped on the metro. I wanted to spend my day among the dead, starting with a visit to Cimetière du Père-Lachaise. The cemetery was closed though: apparently the French are not fond of people visiting graves in the snow. So I went to the next best place: les catacombes de Paris.

The metro quickly brought me to Avenue du Colonel Henri Rol-Tanguy, where I bought my ticket to the catacombs and started my underground adventure. A winding spiral staircase of over 100 steps took me over 20 meters down from ground level. I was all by myself already, which was good: it gave me the time to leave my sticker among the many others on the lamps that lit the way down. Soon I entered an old quarry. A few tourists caught up with me, so I lingered around for a while so I could explore the route all by myself. Usually the place is packed and lots of people choose for guided tours, but towards the end of January, I had the catacombs almost all to myself. Exactly what I wanted.


The first couple of hundred meters took me through the 15th-century quarries that provided the city with the stones it needed to build just about anything. I mostly paid attention to the stickers on the electric wires here (and left one of my last ones there too) while daydreaming about books I'd read that were partially set in the catacombs. In Michael Scott's books series about Nicholas Flamel, the catacombs were a prison for the Roman god of war Mars. In World War Z, the place was infested with zombies. None of that exciting stuff was happening during my visit of course, but thinking about those books added to the creepy ambiance.

I walked alone for a good 20 minutes, occasionally letting other tourists pass and get out of earshot again. Then I entered a big room that took me from the quarries into the domain of the dead. The catacombs weren't always a place to stack human remains in an "artistic" way: the started out as the simple quarries I'd just walked through and some of them always remained just like that. Others were turned into underground graveyards. Officially I should use the word "ossuaries", but that's basically a fancy word for a mass grave. The people buried here were for a big part buried in normal cemeteries right after their death, but overpopulation of both the city and its cemeteries plus health risks made it necessary for a lot of skeletons to be moved into the catacombs. You can still visit these poor souls there to this day: they're waiting for you behind the gate that says Arrête! C'est ici l'empire de la Mort.


Stop! This is the empire of the dead. I did not stop. I walked in while wiping my camera lens clean; the humidity in the catacombs made it fog up in no time. Some of the skulls around me were green with algae. It was a fascinating place that made me wish I could see more of the catacombs than what's open to the public. I'd already passed a tunnel that'd lead me to the lower catacombs, but it was completely locked off. For my own good of course, but I couldn't help but think about the things I could have discovered down there.

I roamed through the hallways, took pictures left and right until suddenly, from the deepest part of my soul, a voice screamed: "WHAT SICK BASTARD STACKS PEOPLE'S BONES LIKE THIS?!"
It was shocking, disgusting, but also morbidly interesting. Skulls formed hearts, crosses, weird house-like shapes. I can understand having to move a surplus of anything to a new place, but why were these people taken apart and used as pieces for a mosaic? They're dead, but still they're people... It made me feel so weird when I looked at the skulls, knowing they never chose to be part of this creepy display.

As I followed the route, I gradually felt more and more uncomfortable. I almost jumped out of my skin when I suddenly heard footsteps coming down the empty hallway on the other side of a fence. It turned out to be another tourist who was ahead of me on the route through the empire of the dead, but my mind immediately concluded that I was going to be killed by a World War Z zombie.

A bit further down the hallway, the poetry started. It was all in either French or Latin and all about death. The little bits of it that I could understand were quite depressing and since I didn't want to launch myself into my next existential crisis, I quickly walked past most of the poems. To be honest, I'd had quite enough of the place by then.

After almost two hours, I left the domain of the dead behind me. I hadn't come across Mars or any zombies, but I'd seen what I'd wanted to see for years: the skeletons residing in the catacombs of Paris. Call me morbid, but I loved it. Almost every second of it, until the walls started lecturing me about death and decay. The creepy vibes, the darkness... it reminded me of the Edinburgh Vaults. For someone like me, who got sick and tired of Paris' romantic clichés very quickly, the catacombs were a perfect place to go. Who know, maybe one day I'll go back and try to see more. I've heard there's a hidden movie theater somewhere down there. Care to join me on my search?