“Stop. This is the empire of death.”

The Catacombs of Paris are underground ossuaries in Paris, France, which hold the remains of more than six million people in a small part of a tunnel network built to consolidate Paris’ ancient stone mines, the ossuary was created as part of the effort to eliminate the city’s overflowing cemeteries.

Preparation work began not long after a 1774 series of gruesome Saint Innocents-cemetery-quarter basement wall collapses added a sense of urgency to the cemetery-eliminating measure, and from 1786, nightly processions of covered wagons transferred remains from most of Paris’ cemeteries to a mine shaft opened near the Rue de la Tombe-Issoire.

So basically…
Paris’ population: “We have buried people too close to where we live and now they are tumbling about the pace like a freaking “Walking Dead”-scenario… We need somewhere to store all the stiffs.”
The rest of Paris’ population: “Hold my croissant.”

I can just imagine the carts full of dead corpses being shuffled through the streets and bones being chucked down the chutes… 6 million people are down there. Luckily for my OCD, someone cleaned the place up and now the bones are carefully positioned to make (rather morbid, yet decorative) features down here.

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It’s definitely worth going. It’s less claustrophobic that I thought it would be and much better lit than I thought. It did not come across as dangerous at all and there were a bunch of kids down there who obviously thought it was amazing. Fun for all. BUT: order a fast track online for a given date. It was SO worth it to just walk straight past the line of hundreds of people. I went straight up to the fast track entrance and upon showing my ticket I was let in at 12 noon on the dot. I waited a total of 6 minutes because I was early.