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Wednesday, May 14, 2014

Terre Des Morts – Land of the Dead

One of the unique things about the City of Lights is there is an underground city of darkness.

No trip to Paris is complete without a visit to Catacombes de Paris if you're looking for something unique, unusual and creepy. The ossuaries are located south of the former city gate outside of the current location of Place Denfert-Rochereau.

There are about six million people's remains neatly displayed here through two kilometres of renovated tunnels and caverns.


After joining a line-up of hundreds that stretched around the block and waiting a couple hours, we were at the entrance way, which, in itself, looks like the doorway to a haunted house.

A woman working at the museum asked if I was pregnant because I had been wearing a bulky sweater underneath my coat. In hindsight, I should've said yes and skipped the tenuous wait in the rain.

As I carefully walked down the 84 tight and winding steps, I asked Mike, "Uh, so is this how you get vertigo?" He cheekily replies, "No, you have to see James Stewart first."

The ossuary entrance was marked in stone with the inscription Arrête! C'est ici l'empire de la Mort ('Stop! Here lies the Empire of Death.') I can picture zombies from 28 Days Later inheriting this portal.

Marco Chown Oved, a reporter for the Star, but who used to work for AP in Paris, told me about a story on the Catacombes he wrote a few years ago. There are a group of people who illegally break into the tunnels that are not open to tourists and take you past the closed off gates and into the underground network. People have gotten lost down there and died. A bit unnerving to say the least.

But of course, we stuck to the designated path. Really, there was no other place to go but forward.











And as creepy as it was – I am superstitious to an extent, refusing to touch any of the bones for fear of bad juju – it was also eerily peaceful. So much, in fact, that at one point, while waiting for Mike to catch up, I sat down and took a mini nap. And I thought, no wonder the dead love cemeteries. It's a great place for an eternal snooze.

So, what kind of freaked me out after the fact, was this weird light in the picture Mike took of Vivian and me. Bad juju?


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