Lunatics Radio Hour: The History of Horror
Lunatics Radio Hour is a non-fiction history podcast about the history of horror and the horror of history. Each episode explores real, documented events where fear, violence, survival, and the unknown shaped human lives and cultures. The show also traces how historical events influenced film, examining how real-world horrors became the stories and images that appear on screen.
Topics include dark history, psychological phenomena, folklore rooted in fact, and the historical roots of horror cinema. Most episodes focus on researched historical subjects. Occasional short fiction stories are included and clearly labeled.
If you’re drawn to the darker side of history and the real events behind horror films, Lunatics Radio Hour explores where history, fear, and cinema intersect.
Lunatics Radio Hour: The History of Horror
Episode 193 - The History of The Paris Catacombs
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Watch our footage from the Paris Catacombs HERE.
Beneath the streets of Paris lies one of the most disturbing landmarks in the world: the Paris Catacombs. In this episode, we explore the real history behind the underground tunnels that hold the remains of more than six million people. From collapsing cemeteries and overflowing mass graves to the creation of the vast ossuary beneath the city, the Catacombs tell a story of disease, death, engineering, and urban legend.
We cover how the tunnels were first created as limestone quarries, why human bones were transferred underground in the late 1700s, and how the Catacombs became tied to ghost stories, secret gatherings, wartime history, and modern urban explorers known as cataphiles. We also discuss the darker side of the Catacombs, including reports of people getting lost beneath Paris and the strange discoveries made deep underground.
If you’re interested in dark history, horror history, haunted places, cemeteries, underground cities, French history, or paranormal legends, this episode dives into one of the most infamous locations in the world.
Sources
- The official website of the Catacombs and our visit
- Paris Unlocked article: History of The Paris Catacombs by Courtney Traub
- Culture Veuz article by Antione Vitek: The Unusual History of The Paris Catacombs
- History.com article The Dark Origins of The Paris Catacombs by Jessica Pearce Rotondi
Get Lunatics Merch here. Join the discussion on Discord. Check out Abby's book Horror Stories. Available in eBook and paperback. Music by Michaela Papa, Alan Kudan & Jordan Moser. Poster Art by Pilar Keprta @pilar.kep.
Hello,
Welcome And First Impressions
SPEAKER_05everyone, and welcome back to another episode of the Lunatics Radio Hour Podcast. My name is Abby Brinker, and I'm sitting here with Alan Coudin.
SPEAKER_09Hello.
SPEAKER_05So a few weeks ago, Alan and I were lucky enough to go to Paris and visit the infamous catacombs.
SPEAKER_09Yes, we did.
SPEAKER_05It didn't surprise me that it was a claustrophobic experience, but it did surprise me how emotional it was. Today we are talking about the history of the Paris catacombs. So, Alan, what was your experience like? Because you this was certainly something that I was on my list of things to do, and you graciously came and took some gorgeous photos that we will post online. But tell us what your experience was walking through the catacombs.
SPEAKER_08I was very excited for this. You and I have done a lot of cemeteries, a lot of mausoleums, catacombs, all sorts of stuff.
SPEAKER_00Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_08But without knowing much about it, my one impression was that this is one of the uh that this was kind of like the magnum opus of catacombs in the world.
SPEAKER_05Certainly, absolutely.
SPEAKER_08Is that actually true?
SPEAKER_05For me, it was. I think there's some others that are really gorgeous and striking, and on my list, Portugal has a bunch of them. But I think Paris is one that's like the most accessible and has such an interesting history. So I think it's kind of like one of the top catacombs that you can visit today.
SPEAKER_08I'm glad to hear that my impression was correct.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_08I I must say though, it really does live up to the hype. This was a truly unique experience. And I've I've had to explain this to a few people since we got back of what exactly it was like. Because it's it's a little hard to explain the feeling of being down
The Descent And No Easy Exit
SPEAKER_08there.
SPEAKER_02It really is.
SPEAKER_08But the the experience is very straightforward in the you know, kind of the literal sense of the word, uh, in that you just go directly down, you know, you're just spiraling down the staircase for quite some time.
SPEAKER_05Quite some time.
SPEAKER_08And then you have to walk along this nearly straightaway corridor that's still on a gentle on a gentle slope down. It's you're just getting deeper and deeper and deeper. And because this is such like a historical site, they they have not added emergency stairwells or you know, quick ways to get out of there. If you need to get out of there, you need to go like the the half kilometer back.
SPEAKER_04Right. You either go back or you go forward.
SPEAKER_08Right, you either go all the way through or you turn around. And like after walking for, you know, almost half an hour in one direction and still seeing the sign saying, you know, if you need to get out of here, you have to turn around and go back. Like that that's kind of scary. And this was a good reminder that I I I do have some claustrophobia. Oh, yeah. Because that started to peak pretty hard. They also give you a headset that is, you know, it's tripped at certain points. When you get near it, it starts giving you some fun facts about the the area that you're in. And during that straightaway, just kept talking about collapse after collapse.
SPEAKER_05They they put that on you really early, and so it's it really freaked, I think, both of us out because it's like one of the first audio cues is talking about the history of like collapse and people being crushed to death. And so we were like, oh shit, this is scary.
SPEAKER_08And it's like simple stuff where it's like, oh, you know, they pulled the wrong rock, yeah, and then they all died.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_08So that was fun.
Entering The Ossuary Changes Everything
SPEAKER_08But once you get to the ossuary, which is just the start of the effective bone tunnel, everything changes. Because for me, it stopped being just like a very claustrophobic mind shaft and became one of the most unique and authentic historical experiences I think I've had.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, absolutely.
SPEAKER_08It's something that you would never see in America. America certainly has, you know, catacombs and mausoleums and stuff like that, but nothing like this. You'd never just be surrounded by, you know, human remains with no in if this was America, there would be plexiglass or like guardrails or something that makes it so that you you couldn't interact with them. And here they just require you to have basic human decorum, which is a steep ask of Americans.
SPEAKER_05Well, the thing that's so interesting about the catacomb is one of the things for me was that the either end of it is quite modern. Like it feels like the museum itself is is very newly redone and very sleek. And like Alan said, you just go through, like you just walk, you know, you come in in one place and you walk a half mile and then you exit, like a half mile away from where you started, but there's no security down there. Like there's maybe one person we saw that worked there in the catacombs themselves. And then at the end they check your bag to make sure you didn't take any bones, which is great because they talk about how that's a huge problem. They pretty much, like Dallas' point, like they're just like, okay, go forth into this really like sacred historic place full of human remains, and we trust you. And like that's nothing in the US that could ever exist.
SPEAKER_08Yeah, there's there's no one else. You can effectively have the place to yourself.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, and you do for for periods of time. Yeah, they allow 200 people in at a time, and there's like a counter, and so when people exit on the other side, they let the next, you know, however many people in.
SPEAKER_08Yes, but 200 people, which sounds like a lot when you spread it over the space uh that large, like we we saw other people, but it was so easy just to go off by yourself.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, yeah. And to Alan's point, we go to a lot of cemeteries, and you know, we we put out a lot of content on YouTube and other places on cemeteries and I'm sorry, I just love it so much and I drag you to all these places. And speaking of, we have uh a documentary on the catacombs that we're gonna put on YouTube so you'll see the visuals of all this. But the thing for me that was really striking about the experience was that it felt like the opposite of going to any other cemetery.
Raw Bones And A Hit Of Mortality
SPEAKER_05Because at any cemetery you go to, you see people's names, you can look up their stories, you see these sort of monuments to them and how people have decided to memorialize those people. Here at the catacombs, you just see raw bones. There's no story, there's no names. And I found that to be quite surprisingly emotional. Like at the beginning, I teared up a little bit because you're you're just hit with like it's millions and millions of bones that are stacked and stacked in a beautiful, artful way and meant to kind of be a memorial, but still it's just like wow, it like it's something about going to the catacombs that reminds you of your own mortality, I think, pretty vividly. And that feels starkly different. The experience felt opposite to me than visiting other cemeteries.
SPEAKER_08That is that is interesting. The only annotation, I think, was the occasional like stone placard that said where these bones had come from.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, the cemeteries they'd come from.
SPEAKER_08Yeah. Uh, but there there's zero way to trace who's who.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_08Which that's so crazy.
SPEAKER_05I mean, it we're gonna obviously that's what we're here to talk about today, the history of all this and how this came to be. But it's again, it just reminds you that we're all we're all so small in the vast, vast universe. Let's
Sources And What An Ossuary Is
SPEAKER_05talk about our sources. There is the official website of the catacombs, which has history, and of course what we learned on our visit. There's a Paris Unlocked article, History of the Catacombs by Courtney Traub, a culture vu article by Antoine Vedic, The Unusual History of the Paris Catacombs, and a History.com article, The Dark Origins of the Paris Catacombs by Jessica Pierce Rotundi. And all of these will be linked in the description of this podcast episode. The underground ossuary known today as the Paris Catacombs is perhaps one of the most famous mass graves in the world. An ossuary is a place where human skeletal remains are respectfully stored or deposited. Think of it as sort of more of like a bone archive rather than an active burial ground, right? It's kind of like they were forced to arrange bones, again, we're gonna get there, in a certain way, um, as opposed to kind of like burying them in the way any other cemetery would.
SPEAKER_08Right. There was just too many to fit otherwise.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, so instead of individual graves, bones are usually moved there after bodies have decomposed elsewhere. The word comes from the Latin oserium, meaning container of bones. So situated beneath the modern city of Paris, the catacombs represent one of the most extensive and unusual responses to mortuary overcrowding in European history. From
Limestone Quarries Under Modern Paris
SPEAKER_05the medieval period onward, Paris relied heavily on limestone extracted from underground quarries to build its churches, bridges, and civic architecture. Over time, this extraction produced a vast network of tunnels beneath the city, right? Because as they would take the stone out, it would leave a space, right, where the stone had been extracted from. By the 18th century, these abandoned quarries extended for hundreds of kilometers, largely unregulated and structurally unstable in places, as you might expect. And so as Paris expanded above ground, the city gradually became dependent on this subterranean landscape that was poorly mapped and only partially maintained. This latent infrastructure would later become central to the city's latest crisis. By the late 1700s, Paris faced severe public health issues linked to its burial practices. This is not unique to Paris, right? We saw this in the U.S., we saw this, that's why Greenwood Cemetery exists in New York, Woodlawn Cemetery exists in New York. All of these cemeteries, uh famous cemeteries in the US and across Europe, are responses to kind of in like city center cemeteries that were becoming unsafe. Churches and urban cemeteries, particularly the cemetery of the innocents in Paris, had been continuously used for centuries. I want to talk a little bit just briefly about the Cemetery of the Innocents because it plays a huge role
Cemetery Overcrowding And Public Health Fears
SPEAKER_05here. So the Cemetery of the Innocents was one of the oldest and most significant burial grounds in medieval and early modern Paris. It's located near the central market district of Léol. In use for nearly a thousand years, the cemetery became the primary burial site for ordinary Parisians, which over time led to extreme overcrowding. By the 18th century, the cemetery had been used so extensively that graves were repeatedly reused, mass burials were common, and bones were periodically exhumed and transferred to make room for new internments. The site became notorious not only for its density, but also for the public health concerns associated with decomposition in such a tightly packed urban environment. Right? So this cemetery was downtown Paris essentially, and it's becoming so full of bones, especially in a time when people don't really understand disease and tuberculosis, right, and how that impacts the body after death. And so they're taking bodies out and putting new bodies in. This was a cemetery that'd been used for over a thousand years.
SPEAKER_08How does tuberculosis affect you after death?
SPEAKER_05Well, I would direct you to our episode on the New England Vampire Panic for more on that. No, it it fuck off. Your body can uh decompose and um have strange physical symptoms after death, and that's why a lot of people thought if they like buried a loved one who died of tuberculosis and then they dug up their body and it looked malformed or different or bloated from the tuberculosis and decomposition, they thought that they were a vampire because they didn't understand all that. But I think generally there was this wrongful fear that dead bodies could spread these diseases when in reality I don't really think that's the the case. So contemporary accounts describe significant sanitation concerns. Decomposition produced strong odors and contaminated surrounding soil and water sources. So that's a real issue. Structural failures were also reported, including the collapse of cemetery walls that exposed decomposing remains into adjacent properties. So this, I'm laughing, but the cemetery was so full that the walls were collapsing and dead bots, like the you know, the bones of people were spilling out into adjacent properties.
SPEAKER_07It's college all over again.
SPEAKER_05While some of these accounts were later exaggerated, there is consensus among historians that the conditions created legitimate public health anxiety within densely populated districts.
The Wall Collapse That Forces Change
SPEAKER_05So, right, the crisis reached a tipping point in 1780 when a retaining wall at the cemetery of the innocents collapsed, releasing decomposed remains into nearby buildings. And so this event is kind of seen as one of the catalysts, right, for calling for reform and burial practices and prompted the Parisian authorities to consider an alternate solution. They were like, enough is enough. The formal relocation of remains began in 1786. So I just want to pause there. I think a lot of people think the catacombs are kind of this like ancient burial ground of bones or whatever. It's from the seven like late 1700s, early 1800s. It's not that that old when you think about the history of these places.
SPEAKER_08Yeah, but the bones are much older than that.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, certainly. But but this was done in, you know, in kind of like a modern era.
SPEAKER_08Sure. You know, the the Paris catacombs as we think of them may not be ancient because it's like to your point, they started getting filled in the 1700s. But you first off, that's still older than America. But more importantly, the catacombs themselves are significantly older.
SPEAKER_05True.
SPEAKER_08Magnitudes older, really.
SPEAKER_05Tunnels, you mean?
SPEAKER_08Yes, sir. Yes.
SPEAKER_05The infrastructure.
SPEAKER_08Yes. The the whole reason that they exist was because Paris needed limestone for construction, and they just started digging it out underneath the city. And so there's this giant network of tunnels that did you look up when they started actually building these tunnels?
SPEAKER_05So it's interesting, right? Like in some cases, mining in the area of the catacombs began in like the first century BCE. There was a lot more activity like quarrying in Paris in the 13th century, and then a lot of the places we're talking about continue to the 17th and 18th century. So this has been a practice in Paris, you know, for thousands of years.
SPEAKER_08Which which makes sense. They had this giant, you know, as you need limestone, you just kind of dig for it. You just keep expanding the tunnel system, and it just becomes this citywide mine almost. Centuries go by, and you just need a place to store millions of bones, and you're like, well, I got this. I've got these deep pockets. So they decide to put them down there.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. So the formal relocation of remains began in 1786 under the authority of the Paris Police and the General Inspector of Quarries. The objective was not only to address overcrowded cemeteries, but also to repurpose unstable underground spaces into controlled infrastructure. Hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of the Lunatics Radio Hour Podcast. My name is Abby Branker, and I'm sitting here with Alan Coudin.
SPEAKER_09Hello.
SPEAKER_05So a few weeks ago, Alan and I were lucky enough to go to Paris and visit the infamous catacombs.
SPEAKER_09Yes, we did.
SPEAKER_05It didn't surprise me that it was a claustrophobic experience, but it did surprise me how emotional it was. Today we are talking about the history of the Paris catacombs. So, Alan, what was your experience like? Because you this was certainly something that I was on my list of things to do, and you graciously came and took some gorgeous photos that we will post online. But tell us what your experience was walking through the catacombs.
SPEAKER_08I was very excited for this. You and I have done a lot of cemeteries, a lot of mausoleums, catacombs, all sorts of stuff.
SPEAKER_00Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_08But without knowing much about it, my one impression was that this is one of the uh that this was kind of like the magnum opus of catacombs in the world.
SPEAKER_05Certainly, absolutely.
SPEAKER_08Is that actually true?
SPEAKER_05For me, it was. I think there's some others that are really gorgeous and striking, and on my list, Portugal has a bunch of them. But I think Paris is one that's like the most accessible and has such an interesting history. So I think it's kind of like one of the top catacombs that you can visit today.
SPEAKER_08I'm glad to hear that my impression was correct.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_08I I must say though, it really does live up to the hype. This was a truly unique experience. And I've I've had to explain this to a few people since we got back of what exactly it was like. Because it's it's a little hard to explain the feeling of being down there.
SPEAKER_02It really is.
SPEAKER_08But the the experience is very straightforward in the you know, kind of the literal sense of the word, uh, in that you just go directly down, you know, you're just spiraling down the staircase for quite some time.
SPEAKER_05Quite some time.
SPEAKER_08And then you have to walk along this nearly straightaway corridor that's still on a gentle on a gentle slope down. It's you're just getting deeper and deeper and deeper. And because this is such like a historical site, they they have not added emergency stairwells or you know, quick ways to get out of there. If you need to get out of there, you need to go like the the half kilometer back.
SPEAKER_04Right. You either go back or you go forward.
SPEAKER_08Right, you either go all the way through or you turn around. And like after walking for, you know, almost half an hour in one direction and still seeing the sign saying, you know, if you need to get out of here, you have to turn around and go back. Like that that's kind of scary. And this was a good reminder that I I I do have some claustrophobia. Oh, yeah. Because that started to peak pretty hard. They also give you a headset that is, you know, it's tripped at certain points. When you get near it, it starts giving you some fun facts about the the area that you're in. And during that straightaway, it just kept talking about collapse after collapse.
SPEAKER_05They they put that on you really early, and so it's it really freaked, I think, both of us out because it's like one of the first audio cues is talking about the history of like collapse and people being crushed to death. And so we were like, oh shit, this is scary.
SPEAKER_08And it's like simple stuff where it's like, oh, you know, they pulled the wrong rock, yeah, and then they all died.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_08So that was fun. But once you get to the ossuary, which is just the start of the effective bone tunnel, everything changes. Because for me, it stopped being just like a very claustrophobic mind shaft and became one of the most unique and authentic historical experiences I think I've had.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, absolutely.
SPEAKER_08It's something that you would never see in America. America certainly has, you know, catacombs and mausoleums and stuff like that, but nothing like this. You'd never just be surrounded by, you know, human remains with no in if this was America, there would be plexiglass or like guardrails or something that makes it so that you you couldn't interact with them. And here they just require you to have basic human decorum, which is a steep ask of Americans.
SPEAKER_05Well, the thing that's so interesting about the catacomb is one of the things for me was that the either end of it is quite modern. Like it feels like the museum itself is is very newly redone and very sleek. And like Alan said, you just go through, like you just walk, you know, you come in in one place and you walk a half mile and then you exit, like a half mile away from where you started, but there's no security down there. Like there's maybe one person we saw that worked there in the catacombs themselves. And then at the end they check your bag to make sure you didn't take any bones, which is great because they talk about how that's a huge problem. They pretty much, like Dallas's point, like they're just like, okay, go forth into this really like sacred historic place full of human remains, and we trust you. And like that's nothing in the US that could ever exist.
SPEAKER_08Yeah, there's there's no one else. You can effectively have the place to yourself.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, and you do for for periods of time. Yeah, they allow 200 people in at a time, and there's like a counter, and so when people exit on the other side, they let the next, you know, however many people in.
SPEAKER_08Yes, but 200 people, which sounds like a lot when you spread it over the space uh that large, like we we saw other people, but it was so easy just to go off by yourself.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, yeah. And to Alan's point, we go to a lot of cemeteries and you know, we we put out a lot of content on YouTube and other places on cemeteries and I'm sorry, I just love it so much and I drag you to all these places. And speaking of, we have uh a documentary on the catacombs that we're gonna put on YouTube so you'll see the visuals of all this. But the thing for me that was really striking about the experience was that it felt like the opposite of going to any other cemetery. Because at any cemetery you go to, you see people's names, you can look up their stories, you see these sort of monuments to them and how people have decided to memorialize those people. Here at the catacombs, you just see raw bones. There's no story, there's no names. And I found that to be quite surprisingly emotional. Like at the beginning, I teared up a little bit because you're you're just hit with like it's millions and millions of bones that are stacked and stacked in a beautiful, artful way and meant to kind of be a memorial, but still it's just like wow, it like it's something about going to the catacombs that reminds you of your own mortality, I think, pretty vividly. And that feels starkly different. The experience felt opposite to me than visiting other cemeteries.
SPEAKER_08That is that is interesting. The only annotation, I think, was the occasional like stone placard that said where these bones had come from.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, the cemeteries they'd come from.
SPEAKER_08Yeah. Uh, but there there's zero way to trace who's who. Yeah. Which that's so crazy.
SPEAKER_05I mean, it we're gonna obviously that's what we're here to talk about today, the history of all this and how this came to be. But it's again, it just reminds you that we're all we're all so small in the vast, vast universe. Let's talk about our sources. There is the official website of the catacombs, which has history, and of course, what we learned on our visit. There's a Paris Unlocked article, history of the Catacombs. Catacombs by Courtney Traub, a culture vu article by Antoine Vedick, The Unusual History of the Paris Catacombs, and a History.com article, The Dark Origins of the Paris Catacombs, by Jessica Pierce Rotundi. And all of these will be linked in the description of this podcast episode. The underground ossuary, known today as the Paris Catacombs, is perhaps one of the most famous mass graves in the world. An ossuary is a place where human skeletal remains are respectfully stored or deposited. Think of it as sort of more of like a bone archive rather than an active burial ground, right? It's kind of like they were forced to arrange bones, again, we're going to get there, in a certain way, as opposed to kind of like burying them in the way any other cemetery would.
SPEAKER_08Right. There was just too many to fit otherwise.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. So instead of individual graves, bones are usually moved there after bodies have decomposed elsewhere. The word comes from the Latin oserium, meaning container of bones. So situated beneath the modern city of Paris, the catacombs represent one of the most extensive and unusual responses to mortuary overcrowding in European history. From the medieval period onward, Paris relied heavily on limestone extracted from underground quarries to build its churches, bridges, and civic architecture. Over time, this extraction produced a vast network of tunnels beneath the city, right? Because as they would take the stone out, it would leave a space, right, where the stone had been extracted from. By the 18th century, these abandoned quarries extended for hundreds of kilometers, largely unregulated and structurally unstable in places, as you might expect. And so as Paris expanded above ground, the city gradually became dependent on this subterranean landscape that was poorly mapped and only partially maintained. This latent infrastructure would later become central to the city's latest crisis. By the late 1700s, Paris faced severe public health issues linked to its burial practices. This is not unique to Paris, right? We saw this in the U.S., we saw this, that's why Greenwood Cemetery exists in New York, Woodlawn Cemetery exists in New York. All of these cemeteries, uh, famous cemeteries in the US and across Europe, are responses to kind of in like city center cemeteries that were becoming unsafe. Churches and urban cemeteries, particularly the cemetery of the innocents in Paris, had been continuously used for centuries. I want to talk a little bit just briefly about the Cemetery of the Innocents because it plays a huge role here. So the Cemetery of the Innocents was one of the oldest and most significant burial grounds in medieval and early modern Paris. It's located near the central market district of Léol. In use for nearly a thousand years, the cemetery became the primary burial site for ordinary Parisians, which over time led to extreme overcrowding. By the 18th century, the cemetery had been used so extensively that graves were repeatedly reused, mass burials were common, and bones were periodically exhumed and transferred to make room for new internments. The site became notorious not only for its density, but also for the public health concerns associated with decomposition in such a tightly packed urban environment. Right? So this cemetery was downtown Paris, essentially, and it's becoming so full of bones, especially in a time when people don't really understand disease and tuberculosis, right? And how that impacts the body after death. And so they're taking bodies out and putting new bodies in. This was a cemetery that'd been used for over a thousand years.
SPEAKER_08How does tuberculosis affect you after death?
SPEAKER_05Well, I would direct you to our episode on the New England Vampire Panic for more on that. No, it it fuck off. Your body can uh decompose and um have strange physical symptoms after death, and that's why a lot of people thought if they like buried a loved one who died of tuberculosis and then they dug up their body and it looked malformed or different or bloated from the tuberculosis and decomposition, they thought that they were a vampire because they didn't understand all of that. But I think generally there was this wrongful fear that dead bodies could spread these diseases, when in reality, I don't really think that's the case. So contemporary accounts describe significant sanitation concerns. Decomposition produced strong odors and contaminated surrounding soil and water sources. So that's a real issue. Structural failures were also reported, including the collapse of cemetery walls that exposed decomposing remains into adjacent properties. So this, I'm laughing, but the cemetery was so full that the walls were collapsing and dead bots, like the you know, the bones of people were spilling out into adjacent properties.
SPEAKER_07It's college all over again.
SPEAKER_05While some of these accounts were later exaggerated, there is consensus among historians that the conditions created legitimate public health anxiety within densely populated districts. So, right, the crisis reached a tipping point in 1780 when a retaining wall at the cemetery of the innocents collapsed, releasing decomposed remains into nearby buildings. And so this event is kind of seen as one of the catalysts, right, for calling for reform and burial practices and prompted the Parisian authorities to consider an alternate solution. They were like, enough is enough. The formal relocation of remains began in 1786. So I just want to pause there. I think a lot of people think the catacombs are kind of this like ancient burial ground of bones or whatever. It's from the seven like late 1700s, early 1800s. It's not that that old when you think about the history of these places.
SPEAKER_08Yeah, but the bones are much older than that.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, certainly. But but this was done in, you know, in kind of like a modern era.
SPEAKER_08Sure. You know, the the Paris catacombs as we think of them may not be ancient because it's like to your point, they started getting filled in the 1700s. But you first off, that's still older than America. But more importantly, the catacombs themselves are significantly older.
SPEAKER_05True.
SPEAKER_08Magnitudes older, really.
SPEAKER_05Tunnels, you mean?
SPEAKER_08Yes, sir. Yes.
SPEAKER_05The the infrastructure.
SPEAKER_08Yes. The the whole reason that they exist was because Paris needed limestone for construction, and they just started digging it out underneath the city. And so there's this giant network of tunnels that did you look up when they started actually building these tunnels?
SPEAKER_05So it's interesting, right? Like in some cases, mining in the area of the catacombs began in like the first century BCE. There was a lot more activity like quarrying in Paris in the 13th century, and then a lot of the places we're talking about continue to the 17th and 18th century. So this has been a practice in Paris, you know, for thousands of years.
SPEAKER_08Which makes sense. They had this giant, you know, as you need limestone, you just kind of dig for it. You just keep expanding the tunnel system, and it just becomes this citywide mine almost. Centuries go by, and you just need a place to store millions of bones, and you're like, well, I got this. I've got these deep pockets. So they decide to put them down there.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. So the formal relocation of remains began in 1786 under the authority of the Paris Police and the General Inspector of Quarries. The objective was not only to address overcrowded cemeteries, but also to repurpose unstable underground spaces into controlled infrastructure. So I think that's important, right? The idea isn't just to like hide these bones in the basement, it's to you put some use, to your point, to these like abandoned tunnels that are kind of unstable and exist and make them a safe place for people to visit and like an honorable memorial. That's the idea.
SPEAKER_08Right. Before they moved all the bones in, it was just the world's largest daycare.
SPEAKER_05Remains were transferred primarily at night in covered carts, often accompanied by clergy who would be performing rites of consecration.
