Why You're Not Allowed Inside the Catacombs Beneath Paris

hey 42 here for many years the holy innocent cemetery in paris was the largest graveyard in the city built sometime in the 12th century it wasn't long before it was simply too full to accept individual burials instead opting to inter its dead in mass graves of 1 500 souls apiece when one of these was full they would simply dig another and start piling up the bodies once more by the late 1700s after a good 500 years or so with operation the holy innocent cemetery was said to be so full of half decomposed putrescent bodies buried not quite far enough beneath the surface that the air within the graveyard had the power to spoil milk and rot meat even worse the noxious air and saturated soil was so oxygen poor that proper decomposition of the dead was impossible meaning that instead of rotting away completely those buried in the cemetery slowly turned into gelatinous mounds of fatty horribleness known as corpse wax so many people were buried there that the cemetery was quite literally fit to burst and in 1780 it did exactly that when the basement wall of a neighboring building collapsed under the sheer weight of the dead spilling corpses inside king louis xvi ruler at the time was forced to take action ordering that all cemeteries within paris's city limits be closed but a problem remained just what were they going to do with all the bodies one thing was for sure they couldn't just leave them there conditions surrounding the holy innocent cemetery and others like it was so bad they formed a kind of exclusion zone in which people feared to live and businesses were unable to operate so king louis did what any responsible adult would when faced with an annoying problem he put it in an out of the way corner and did his best to forget all about it and no corner is more out of the way than one buried 20 meters underground take that annoying problems over the course of the next two years bodies from holy innocent cemetery and other graveyards across the city were exhumed and relocated to a series of caverns and tunnels beneath the city itself it's hard to say whether parisians were happy to have cleared the air so to speak or were appalled at this decidedly unceremonious treatment of their recently deceased loved ones although there was one subsection of society who greatly approved of this decision paris's soap boilers and chandlers were more than happy to relieve city officials of the tons and tons of corpse wax left over after the exercise industriously turning it into thousands of candles and bars of soap for resale back to the city's residence because nothing says squeaky clean like lavaring your ass crack with the rendered fat of your dead ancestors incredibly it's fought the ossuary that's a container or room used for storing the bones of the dead you know we all have one of those lying around beneath paris is the final resting place of some six million parisians meaning there are around three times as many dead people in paris as they're all living to begin with the bones were pretty much just dumped below the ground in enormous piles but in 1810 the city decided to have a bit of a spring clean you might be picturing neat stacks of coffin-like boxes to house the bones but parisians have always had a flair for design instead of simply tidying them away city officials used the bones themselves as decoration building undulating walls out of grinning skulls and stacked femoral heads it should be horrifying but i don't know it does kind of work maybe i'll get one for the studio today the ossuary is a tourist attraction with thousands of people paying their entry fee to go and look at the pretty dead people unsurprisingly considering how many bones are housed there the ossuary is big spanning some 1.5 kilometers of tunnels pretty impressive i'm sure you'll agree but believe it or not this makes up only a tiny portion of the true extent of caverns and tunnels that lie hidden beneath paris's famous cafe line streets and plush luxury fashion boutiques you see the tunnels king louie used to house the bones of paris is dead were not dug expressly for that purpose they were already there one small part of a far larger complex of mines that crisscrossed the city's earthy underbelly to this day and you can be one small part of a far larger community of entrepreneurs with today's sponsor trends if you're a budding entrepreneur investor or just have ambitions for personal growth trends is an absolute gold mine let me tell you in business timing and insider knowledge are everything when you subscribe to trends you get access to a community of industry leaders in virtually every field where you can learn how to capitalize on emerging opportunities want to identify soon to be highly profitable markets so you can launch now and pipple your potential competitors to the money tree well trend provides regular signals that tell you exactly what those emerging markets are and it's the only place i've found to get that information 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from stone packed with millions of tiny diamonds the town was built in a 15 million year old crater and the meteorite which made it happens to impact a large graphite's deposit creating an estimated 000 tons of micro diamonds embedded in the surrounding stone which was later quarried and used for building you can imagine the local estate agents having a field day with that one paris was built in much the same way and many of its buildings including iconic landmarks like the louvre and the intricate facade of notre dame cathedral sadly ravaged by fire in 2019 are built largely from lutetian limestone which has been mined in the region since the late 13th century and what does half a millennium or so of mining get to you well aside from enough stone to build a grand city like paris you're left with an awful lot of holes in the ground though it's hard to gauge accurately there are thought to be some 350 kilometers of tunnels hidden just below the surface of the french capital like some impossibly complex subterranean maze known today as the catacombs of paris these tunnels are so extensive that when filibert aspart doorkeeper of the valdergrass hospital in paris during the french revolution entered them in november of 1793 he never found his way back out again why he went down there isn't known nor is what exactly happened to him beneath the ground perhaps he got lost and succumbed to dehydration maybe he just got unlucky and died of natural causes either way it took 11 years until his body was discovered by which time he was only identifiable by the hospital keys he'd carried in life aspart was buried where he was found i mean it is awfully convenient when people are considerate enough to die inside a mass grave and he remains there to this day in 2017 two teenagers got lost in the catacombs for a full three days and were only tracked down thanks to specialized search and rescue dogs the kids got lucky escaping only with mild cases of hypothermia but if the alarm hadn't been raised they may well have perished lost in the labyrinth the mines are thought to cover some 32 square kilometers beneath the city that's about 10 times the size of central park in new york the area of paris above ground is 105 square kilometers meaning the catacombs cover almost one third of the total area like a whole second city hidden underground but as you can probably imagine having all this empty space beneath a huge and bustling urban metropolis doesn't make for the sturdiest of foundations which begs the question why undermine your own city both literally and figuratively in the first place as you might have guessed they didn't when these mines were created paris wasn't the global city it is today and its inhabitants numbered just three hundred thousand at the time the mines were a perfectly sensible and safe distance from the city but once they were exhausted they were abandoned but as the old saying goes out of sight out of mind as generations went by the existence of the minds was forgotten by just about everyone and over the years paris grew in all directions for the most part nobody knew the city's new houses offices and monuments were being built on the shakiest of foundations that is until 1774 when around 30 meters of the rueda amphur disappeared into a gaping cavern 30 meters deep this collapse and others like it led to the formation of the inspection general de carriere known as the igc which was founded by royal decree of king louis xvi in 1777 to investigate and maintain the mines that's just three years before he would use them to solve his little oh [ __ ] the streets are full of corpses problem by the way despite the work of the igc which is still going strong today they complete hundreds of surveys and interventions each year to ensure the safety of the city above ground collapses still occur in 1961 22 people were killed when a whole neighborhood disappeared overnight in one of paris's suburbs so remember the next time you find yourself woken by a rumbling from below as you lay awake at night in your quaint parisian hotel it might not be the result of those undercooked escargot you gorged on its dinner you may be about to find yourself taking a ride on the world's fastest elevator all the way down to the ground floor and beyond interestingly enough according to parisian law when you buy a house in paris you aren't just buying the house itself you're also taking ownership of the ground beneath it that means if your property starts to subside it's you that has to foot the bill for fixing it something to think about before signing on the dotted line for your swanky parisian townhouse in the years since their creation the paris catacombs have served many different purposes for much of the 20th century farmers used the empty quarries to cultivate mushrooms known as champagne de paris growing over one 000 tonnes of them each year at peak production members of the french resistance used the tunnels for their covert operations during the second world war as did the nazis they were attempting to thwart the germans built a large bunker in an abandoned mine below laissez montagna one of paris's most famous schools whose alumni includes carl lagerfeld and several prime ministers the catacombs also served as the location of a publicity stunt for airbnb when they offered two lucky guests the chance to spend the night in what they described as the world's largest grave it was reported at the time that airbnb paid the city 350 000 euro for the privilege today only the ossuary portion of the catacombs accessible via guided tour is open to the public the rest of the 350 kilometers of sprawling labyrinth is strictly off limits it's been illegal for the general public to enter since 1955. that's partly because they're dangerous partly because damaging them might cause half the city to fall down and partly because as i mentioned parisian law states that the ground beneath a home belongs to its owner by entering the catacombs you are quite literally trespassing on other people's property but a vast underground city brimming with secret passageways and unexplored caves has over the years proven irresistible to paris's more adventurous citizens like a real life london below from neil gaiman's novel neverwhere only in paris obviously the catacombs represent a whole other city hidden away just below the surface unknown to most who walk in the daylight above caterphiles that's the name given to the people who venture into the catacombs have been busy exploring it for decades many are artists drawn by what is an enormous blank canvas where freedom of expression is king and the normal rules don't apply others are simple explorers attracted by the irresistible pull of the unknown and the chance to map the endless uncharted tunnels and galleries some are in it simply for fun secret parties concerts art festivals and raves are common occurrences in the catacombs attracting the kind of ultra-hip crowd that paris does better than anywhere else some chambers are said to be big enough to hold over a thousand partygoers at a time getting into the catacombs however is not straightforward police and private homeowners have been blocking off known entry points for years with the location of many of those that remain hidden in metro tunnels sewers and under bridges and known only to a select few you might assume being a cataphile was a young man's game but it isn't only hipsters and adventurers who spend their nights beneath the city billionaire xavier neal the 21st richest man in france according to forbes claims to head down there twice a week via a secret staircase he had specially installed in his basement he's been a regular in the catacombs since his younger days when he first struck gold investing in the online sex chat industry reminds me of my own youth only i didn't make any money as you might expect below ground there is also something of a criminal underworld at work in the catacombs in 2017 in a heist worthy of oceans 15 16 an enterprising group of thieves stole 250 000 euro worth of vintage wine after boring into the wine cellar of an extensive home directly from the catacombs the operation was meticulously planned and perfectly executed with the precious bottles spirited away through the winding tunnels and never seen again the secret society known only as le ux are perhaps the most famous frequencies of the catacombs the group came into being when six parisian teenagers pulled off a stunt worthy of fred and george weasley using the catacombs to infiltrate the ministry of telecommunications and coming away with the jackpot the city schematics of the entire tunnel network leg ux had found their very own marauders map and they've been using it to manage mischief in the catacombs ever since it was a subsection of lay ux known as the mexican consolidated drilling authority yeah i don't get the names either who took credit for a bizarre discovery made there by parisian police during a training exercise in the catacombs in 2004 hidden beneath the city in a dusty and rarely explored corner of the tunnel network was an entire cinema described as resembling an underground amphitheater complete with full-sized screen high quality projector and chairs cut right out of the rock a neighboring cave had even been turned into a restaurant and bar stocked with bottles of spirits and a pressure cooker somehow the group had managed to connect the cinema to the electrical grid and they'd even installed phone lines down there the whole thing was guarded by a motion detecting cctv setup which was designed to trigger the sound of dogs barking whenever someone approached presumably to scare away any catophiles who stumbled on it by accident according to sources from the group the cinema had been in use for many years by the time it was discovered when the police returned to the site three days later to take the cinema down they found the space had already been gutted with all the equipment removed and electricity and phone lines cut la ux had been kind enough to leave a note for the police though it simply read don't try to find us not creepy at all if caterpiles are to be believed there are dozens of these kinds of hidden away spaces beneath the city most of which will only ever be found by those who are brave enough to go looking for them which i hasten to add most certainly won't be me thanks for watching thanks again to trends for sponsoring this video don't forget to check them out using the link in the description

Channel: Thoughty2

Views: 1,780,059

Rating: 4.9288907 out of 5

Keywords: catacombs, paris, spooky, underground, bones, mystery, tunnels, paris catacombs

Id: ENEohyB6AhE

Length: 19min 54sec (1194 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 25 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/lumpking69]

This guy needs to turn down his compression a bit. He sounds like a morning UK radio show.

[u/sequestercarbon]

You are allowed inside the catacombs. And he never says you aren't

[u/cavedwellersysadmin]

The documentary: As Above, So Below shows some amature exploration of these catacombs.

[u/Stu_Pididiot]

TLDW?