One of the most eerily mysterious and uniquely creepy experiences we’ve had in our many travels. Brooklin and I found ourselves drawn to the curiosity of decending down, 20 meters down (roughly the depth of a 6 story building). Under the city streets and everyday life of Paris, there lye the resting place of 6 million disjointed skeletons. Stacked in rows deep into the caverns as far as our eyes could see, meticulously arranged into mosaics and boney sculptures. This is where Paris’s hundreds and hundreds of years of overflowing grave yards and mass graves have been stored and laid to rest as a remarkable feat of macabre engineering. Every skull and femur here tells a silent story of a life once lived above, long before the tunnels became a tourist’s rite of passage into the unknown. As we wound our way through the narrow, cool passages, the weight of history pressed in around us — a strange blend of reverence and unease settling over both of us. It’s one thing to read about death on this scale, and another entirely to walk through it, inches away from the remains of people who once filled the same streets we’d been wandering just moments before. By the time we emerged back into the daylight, blinking and disoriented, Paris felt different somehow — as if we’d glimpsed something the city usually keeps carefully hidden beneath its polished, postcard surface.
