Catacombs of Paris

Beneath the Left Bank lies a maze of tunnels left by centuries of limestone quarrying – the stone that built much of Paris. In the 1770s a series of street collapses, beginning on the Rue d’Enfer in 1774, led Louis XVI to create the Inspection Générale des Carrières in 1777 to map and shore up the old workings. At the same time the city’s parish cemeteries had reached crisis point. The Cemetery of the Holy Innocents beside Les Halles had received burials for nearly a thousand years, and in 1780 the wall of a neighbouring cellar gave way under the weight of the mass graves behind it.

The solution was to empty the cemeteries into the consolidated quarries under the Montrouge plain, then outside the city. The ossuary was consecrated on 7 April 1786, and for two years covered wagons carried bones across Paris at night, partly to avoid upsetting parishioners and the Church. Transfers from other cemeteries continued into the 19th century, including those where victims of the Revolution’s guillotine had been buried – Danton, Robespierre and Lavoisier are among the people believed to lie, unidentifiable, in the walls. In the 1810s the quarry inspector Louis-Étienne Héricart de Thury turned the jumbled heaps into the stacked walls of skulls and long bones, chapels and inscriptions seen today.

Only one death in the tunnels is firmly documented. On 3 November 1793 Philibert Aspairt, a worker at the former Val-de-Grâce abbey, went down a staircase into the quarries with a lantern and never came back. His body was found in April 1804, identified by his keys, and buried where it lay; his tomb still stands in the off-limits network, and urban explorers – the cataphiles – treat him as their patron saint. Other tales are harder to pin down, such as the widely shared “lost camcorder” video of a man panicking in the tunnels, which has never been traced to a real person.

Since 2013 the ossuary has been one of the City of Paris museums, welcoming more than half a million visitors a year to a 1.5-kilometre route that recently reopened after a major restoration. The rest of the 300-kilometre network is closed: entering it without authorization has been illegal since a prefectural order of 1955, and police patrol for trespassers.

Visitors describe the sense of being touched or followed, whispers and footsteps behind them, sudden cold patches and an overwhelming urge to leave. Guides and cataphiles trade stories of a figure in old-fashioned clothes thought to be Aspairt and of lights moving in empty galleries.

Most reports come from the ossuary galleries past the entrance inscription “Arrête! C’est ici l’empire de la Mort” (“Stop! This is the empire of Death”), and from the closed tunnels beyond, near Aspairt’s tomb under the Rue Henri-Barbusse.

The catacombs have inspired horror films such as Catacombs (2007) and As Above, So Below (2014), countless documentaries and a 2025 live album by Queens of the Stone Age recorded underground. Cataphiles still mark Aspairt’s anniversary each 3 November, and the museum runs exhibitions on the history of underground Paris.