Are the Catacombs truly haunted?

 

As we are nearing Halloween and we are in the designated creepy month of October, I thought, why don't I do a small segment on the  Paris Catacombs.

There is one thing that I have always wondered ever since I took art history a year ago and learned about the catacombs in Paris, France (yes, there is substantial works of art in the catacombs). Are the catacombs haunted? In my mind I thought, I mean how aren't they?

The catacombs in Paris is essentially a massive underground burial ground that consists of about 200 miles of just human bodies. There are roughly 6 million bodies that were buried in the catacombs. The French were having an issue because they did not have enough space to bury anymore bodies essentially, so things were getting a bit unsanitary and smelly in France. There would be dead bodies in the streets because there was just no place to bury them. The solution to this was to create a vast underground system where a person can go and bury their dead.

In about the 1950's they closed a majority of the catacombs and now only a few parts remain open to the public for tours and what not. A lot of this had to do with dare devil risk takers who enjoyed to scavenge the tunnels, some of these people actually got lost in the tunnels for three days and suffered from being lost.

Just recently this past Sunday I watched a horror film called As Above So Below (here is a trailer to the movie https://youtu.be/Fq358xHbzN4 ), which is an incredible horror film with an amazing concept. The main characters essentially got lost in the catacombs and encountered their personal hell's. This film brought more ideas to my brain and led me to think deeply about the catacombs again as I tend to struggle in thinking about how 6 million people can be buried there (often open bones no caskets) and not be haunted?

The film was created as a "real-life" documentary footage style movie, similar styles have been seen in movies like Paranormal Activity or The Fourth Kind. But as I was watching the movie and how it was created I thought to myself, how could producers completely make up this whole thing? Well unlike most movies that are filmed in this style of self filming, first-hand accounts none of the footage in the movie was real. But this still had me thinking, how did the creators come up with this concept? so I dug deeper.

It turns out that in the early 90's a man decided to go and explore the catacombs on his own, but if that is not scary within itself, he brought a camcorder with him. I found the special, not only is the video scary (I turned on my lights) but the narration voice is creepy too which does not help. Here is the video in 2 parts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxJkMlqYrys  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hi5iKa3DFnM

The film As Above So Below touches the subject of a personal hell like the one mentioned in the ABC Family special. No one knows what happened to this man, if he escaped I would have no doubt that he would have went viral. So did this man get trapped in his own supposed hell? The tunnels are so extensive that we are not exactly sure how far down the tunnels go. I mean whatever this man was doing, he had to step on thousands of corpses, probably more than that to get to where ever he wanted to go.

All in all, the tunnels are one of the biggest mysteries that I have encountered and I think this one will never be solved. But please be aware that you should not go digging your way through the catacombs alone as it is a vastly dangerous activity to do by yourself.

Happy October :)