The catacombs are a bone-chilling labyrinth of haunted tunnels that sit beneath the streets of Paris in France and are considered to be one of the most haunted and eerie places on the planet. In the 17th century, at the end of the second wave from the Black Death pandemic, Paris’ cemeteries were overflowing to the point corpses were uncovered from overcrowding. Business owners in the city started to complain about the strong smell of rotting flesh, however nothing was done until 1780 when rainfall caused one of the walls to collapse, spilling corpses into a neighboring property.
With nowhere to put all the bodies, Paris resulted to moving the bodies to a maze of 13th century tunnel that sat beneath the streets of the capital city. After moving skeletal remains down into the catacombs, the cemeteries began to empty out, but it took the city twelve years to move all the bones into the former quarry tunnels.
There are said to be over seven million bones that were moved there with some of the skeletal remains dating back as far as 1,200 years. Paris were moving bones into the catacombs until 1860. With this many skeletal remains, is there any wonder it’s considered one of the most haunted places in the world?
The catacombs is open to the public today with about a mile of explorable tunnels that takes about 45 minutes to walk through. The entrance is located in Paris’ 14th arrodissement, at 1, avenue du Colonel Henri Rol-Tanguy. The tunnels are open from 10am to 5pm Tuesday-Sunday and you can go into the catacombs for a few euros.
The catacombs earned its spot as one of the most haunted places in the world and in 2014, a blockbuster horror movie was released in the form of ”found footage” titled As Above, So Below. We highly recommend watching it if you haven’t, but be warned, it’s not for the faint hearted.
