Haunted Location – The Pairs Catacombs
Paris, the capital of France, is often called La Ville Lumière (meaning ‘The City of Light’), however, beneath this bustling European city of 12 million people, lies a dark subterranean world holding the remains of 6 million of its former inhabitants. These are the Paris Catacombs: a network of old caves, quarries and tunnels stretching hundreds of miles, and seemingly lined with the bones of the dead. It has more recently been plagued with disappearances, demonic hauntings and the odd satanic cult. I bet there are even a couple of clowns lurking down there at the moment. But is this one of the world´s most haunted locations…
Origins
The Parisian Catacombs began life as limestone quarries on the outskirts of town, during the Roman era. They used this natural resource to built many of the structures in all of the surrounding area. However, their population began to grow and with it so did their demands. They ended up mining over 300km of tunnels under Paris itself.
However 600 years later and Paris is a new city, a city riddled with disease and death. So much in fact that the graveyards began to overflow. The Parisian’s began to dispose of their dead using open graves and digging up other corpses to place the body they possessed in… leaving the unearthed corpse to rot in the sun.
The Beginnings of the catacombs.
The stench became unbearable and the rapid spread of disease led to even more death and a greater amount of overpopulated burial sites. In 1780 a long period of heavy rain broke down the wall of the largest graveyard in Paris, Les Innocents. King Louis VX took notice and demanded that all corpses and bones from the city be taken down into the mining tunnels beneath the city to prevent further spread of the disease.
It took no less than two decades to move the human remains into the mines and an estimated 2 – 3 million corpses. Some of the remains dated back to the 12th century. But today, millions of bones are stacked up in an elaborate fashion and the people who once belonged to the bones don’t seem to happy about it. But there is also rumors that there are more than human spirits down there, something that has been terrorizing the Parisians for countless generations…
The Legend’s & Hauntings of the Parisian Catacombs
The Paris Catacomb’s are a historical site that has played its part during the French Revolution and many other important times. However today it is a place of fear, legend, inspiration and exploration. The first thing you will see above the main entrance are the words ” Stop! This is the empire of the dead”, etched into a great stone slab. If that isn’t warning enough I don’t know what is…
Most of the stories come from the “Cataphiles” , daredevils who devote their life to exploring the tunnels in depth, even into the sections of the catacombs that are off limits.
The Cataphiles have been collecting stories for generations and some of the are horrific. They surface from the tunnels with tales of, Nazi gatherings, satanic cults, murder, corpses, ghosts and it is even believed that there is a werewolf down there !? Funny enough the footage captured down there always seems to go missing or it is online for a few days and after that, it’s impossible to find. Seems like the French government would like to keep the income from the tours down to the tunnels alive… However, there was one piece of footage captured by a lost french student found in one of the deepest corridors of the catacombs, for more info on that real down below.
The Ghost Adventures team recently ventured down there. They spent a lot of time going over some of the rumors and legends of the catacombs but they did capture something that looks like the back of a person tripping over, as well as having a lot of equipment disappear.
