Underground City of Death, Paris, France

Strolling along the wide chic streets of Paris, marveling at the wonderful mellowness of the buildings, you would be shocked to learn that beneath your feet lay the brittle skeletons of over seven million Parisians. Stolen from their graves, these disturbed souls now slumber uneasily in the dark, damp runnels that spread like tentacles beneath the City of Romance.

The tunnels are known as the catacombs or the Empire of Death, and all visitors are disquieted by their ghastly contents. The Empire of Death is a network of tunnels and caves that run for almost 180 miles beneath the city. They date back to Roman times, when limestone was quarried to begin building the Paris we know. The quarried provided centuries of building materials until the threat of collapse forced them to be abandoned.

During the eighteenth century the cemeteries of Paris were suffering from a crisis of overcrowding. The graveyards were so full that bodies were buried one on top of each other, and mass graves were created to help ease the problem. The ground within the graveyards rose higher and higher, in some cases reaching more than twenty feet above the road. Eventually the cemetery walls began to collapse, spilling decayed corpses out onto the pavements. Putrid liquids oozed down the streets, spreading death and disease, and the air was filled with the repugnant smell of rotting fish.

A solution had to be found, and in 1785 a decision was made to empty the cemeteries and move the bones into the catacombs. Disturbing the dead is not a task to be undertaken lightly. Pity the workers who loaded the carts in the sickly light of dawn and made the eerie procession to the mouth of the catacombs every day for two years.

Initially, three million bodies were moved, the combined dead of four hundred years. How the emptied graveyards would have echoed in their absence. The movement of bones continued sporadically for at least seven decades, and the catacombs now hold the remains of at least seven million people.