February 4, 2025 • 46 mins
Beneath Paris lies the bones of more than 6 million people. And you can walk among them for 31 euros. These are the Paris catacombs.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and
there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and we are going deep
underneath the City of Perry, City of Lights, City too
busy to sleep because it eats big apples in this
episode of Stuff You Should Know.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
That's right, big thanks to Anna for the contribution here
on the Paris Catacombs. Have you ever toured the Paris Catacombs?
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Yes? I have?
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Have you I have not, and I think I remember
you telling me that you had. I've been to Paris
three times, have not yet done this. It was not
on my radar the first two, didn't have time the
third trip. So if and when I ever get back
to Paris, it's on the list I recommend.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
Have you ever been to the Mulin Rouge?
Speaker 3 (00:57):
Yes?
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Okay, so the Mulan Ruge is generally topless dance numbers
typically right, Yeah, did you notice that when you're at
the Mulan Rouge, boobs just there were so many boobs
everywhere that they just totally lost all context and meaning.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
Yeah, twelve year old Chuck was like, I don't understand what's.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
Happening, right, But I'll bet even twelve year old Chuck
was like yawning by the end of it, right, because
there's just so many boobs everywhere that they're just it
doesn't doesn't mean anything anymore. The catacombs are the Mulan
Rouge of human bones.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
Oh, so many skulls that it's just like whatever, there's
another skull.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
Yeah. Yeah, it's bizarre because you realize you're just like,
ho hum, there's another dead body. There's another dead body,
there's another leg bone. But it's still worth going to
just because it's so bizarre. But there's just so many
human bones around you that you just it's like your
brain just gets saturated and you just stop thinking of
(01:57):
them like that.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
So the JSA, the Josh SAT would be Mulin Rouge
is to boobs, as the Paris Catacombs is to blank
human bones.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
Yeah, that'd be the right answer choice A. What would
be the other choices?
Speaker 3 (02:12):
Oh?
Speaker 1 (02:12):
Man, I don't know. I haven't taken a test like
that in so long. I'd hope you have been to
take the SAT again.
Speaker 3 (02:17):
What it I think?
Speaker 2 (02:19):
So?
Speaker 3 (02:19):
Okay, how long does that take?
Speaker 2 (02:22):
I don't know, but it's changed since we were there hours?
I remember it taking hours. It used to actually test
IQ and now it just tests like retention.
Speaker 3 (02:32):
Oh well, I'm screwed.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
So here's the other answers. Chuck cod fishing, Yeah, modge podge.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
And there's got to be one close one like like
like gravesite or something. Okay, there you go and you'd
be like, no, no, grave wax.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
Do you remember that from back in the day.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
Is that the human goop that seeps out that you
can make soap out of?
Speaker 3 (02:57):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (02:58):
Pretty awesome.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
All right, that's a that's a great j Sat. We
should have our own stuff. You should know, Sat. That'd
be a fun thing to design.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
I have, It would be fun. I have one more
story about the catacombs, let's hear it. So when we went,
I've only been once, uh and it was a few
years back. But we went with my brother in law
and sister in law and our niece, a very famous
Mila who's been in the movies. She played young Mary
(03:25):
in the movie Mary that came out on Netflix this
past Christmas. Did you know that? No?
Speaker 3 (03:30):
And you didn't.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
You didn't shout that one out, So I'm glad you are.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
Well. We were off so I didn't get a chance to,
but it's it's definitely worth watching. It's like pretty religious movie.
I mean it's about Mary the mother Mary Mary. Yeah,
yeah that Mary. You're like, ah Mary Mary, Sure. And
it is fascinating, like my actually my brother in law
also was a producer on it too, and they it
(03:55):
has like action, it has like it's a thriller. It
has like a really evil villain played by Anthony Hopkins.
Like it's just a really good movie that you'll watch
from beginning to end. Be like, this is pretty good.
Speaker 3 (04:09):
I have to check it out.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
And I'm also going to forgive you for when I said, Mary, Mary,
for not saying.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
Why you bugging thank you?
Speaker 3 (04:18):
You passed. You're back in the good graces.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
Well anyway, Oh back to my story. So little Mila,
she must have been fivesh at the time, she went
to the catacombs with us, right, so she's walking around
this ossiery with bones and human skulls everywhere, and you
me or I asked her, like, are are you scared
right now? And she said, I boobs right, she right,
(04:42):
she said I would be if these were real. We're like,
we just looked at each other out of the corners
of our eyes, and we were like, well, let's look
over here now, right exactly.
Speaker 3 (04:53):
Yeah, Wow, that's adorable.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
It was very adorable. What's funny is the irony of
the whole thing is this is the same kid had
about the same age, who was scared to death on
the movie ride at Disney Hollywood Studios, but is standing
there in the ossiary right, millions of bones, human bones
and skulls, and.
Speaker 3 (05:11):
Is like, yeah, that's pretty funny.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
Yeah. So those are all my stories about the Catacombs.
I figured we should probably start talking about it.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
Yeah, so this is I mean, let's go back in time,
I guess. I mean we know already what it is.
It's a series of underground tunnels where more than six
million Parisians are are there, you know, forever. What's crazy
they decided to move them again, right.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
Right, But you have no idea who's who, Like one
bone doesn't belong to another bone, no idea whose skull
is who? It's crazy.
Speaker 3 (05:45):
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
So if you go back in time, let's say forty
five million years during the Lutesian period, there was an
erosion event that caused a lot of what became to
be known as Lutesian or Paris rock or Paris limestone
or Parisian limestone deposited there, and that is if you
(06:08):
go to Paris and you see everything as a sort
of creamy gray, that's what that is. And that's what
gives Paris its distinct look because they had loads and
loads and loads of it. And the reason we're starting
with this is because the mining of that Lutetian limestone
is where these tunnels started, about two thousand years ago,
(06:30):
on the banks of the rivers. There they had these
quarries where they would mine the heck out of this stuff,
and before you know it, Paris is sitting on top
of a vast network of tunnels.
Speaker 2 (06:43):
Yeah, something like thirty two square kilometers of tunnels, which,
to put in American terms, is like a lot of bananas. Yes,
ten times the size of Central Park apparently is underneath Paris. Yeah,
I think it's three hundred kilometers of tunnels. Isn't that
just nuts?
Speaker 3 (07:03):
It's a lot.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
But I mean, if you think about it, if you
mine an area, a small, relatively small area, for a
couple thousand years, you're gonna you're gonna make some headway eventually.
And that's what they did. The key is this chuck. Originally,
these quarries were sensibly well outside of the city of Paris. Yeah,
but we're talking about a very very tiny original city
(07:25):
of Paris that eventually grew and grew and grew, and
over time Paris overtook these old quarries that in most
cases were no longer used or mined any longer. So
the city built itself over abandoned mines that people had
just plumb forgotten about.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
That's right, and that you know, that presents a couple
of very big problems. First of all, if you've got
a city growing and growing and getting built on and
built on and getting heavier and heavier, and a lot
of the underground has been dug out, that is a problem.
And there were numerous incidents of sinkholes, of buildings collapsing
(08:03):
into themselves, of all kinds of you know, tragedies happening
over the years throughout the history of Paris because it
was built on, you know, hollow ground in a lot
of places.
Speaker 2 (08:13):
Right. That's why another very famous nickname for Paris is
the Florida of Europe.
Speaker 3 (08:18):
Right, I'm sure they love that.
Speaker 1 (08:23):
The other big problem is that Parisians used to love
burying themselves in Paris, like you wanted to be laid
to rest in the city where you grew up and lived.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
Your life at your church typically too.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
Yeah, like very very locally. And by the eighteenth century,
late eighteenth century, this was a big, big problem. There
were too many bodies those disease was being spread. So
this led to a couple of things. I think in
the seventeen thirties there was an actual parliamentary commissioned study
(08:57):
about how disease from these you know, dead people everywhere
in Paris was hurting the city. And then it took
about forty years. Eventually, in seventeen seventy seven, King Louis
what is that sixteenth created the IGC You want to
pronounce that?
Speaker 2 (09:16):
Oh yes, please? The Inspection General des Cartiers.
Speaker 3 (09:22):
And what were they charged with?
Speaker 2 (09:24):
So carriers is French for careers, and another word for
career is a path or tunnel. So this was the
commission overseeing minds and mind shafts in.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
Paris, right, So basically, hey, we got this report forty
years ago that no one's acted on, so we need
to really start looking into this stuff. And a chief inspector,
can you pronounce.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
His name, Charles excel f Guillemote.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
He came along as the chief inspector and said, all right,
you know what, we're gonna shore up these minds and
make sure that they're not gonna keep collapsing. And also
we're gonna start moving bodies out of here. We had
a body problem, not a three body problem, we have
a million's body problem. Yeah, and we're gonna start moving
bodies out of Let's start with the oldest one, the
(10:18):
Holy Innocent Cemetery, which has been around since eleven eighty six.
Let's start moving things out of here and from other cemeteries.
Close these things down and start moving him into these
old mind shafts.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
Yeah. And like you said, there was a body problem,
I think you kind of touched on it a second ago,
where there was a general sense of disease coming from
these putrefying bodies that were just piling up in the cemeteries.
But structurally speaking also so like I guess at the
time in France, they would bury you with a bunch
of other people who died at the same time in
(10:50):
a group pit let you decompose. After five years, they
would bury you up and then they would just deposit
your bones into ossiery. They just they were like, here's
a bunch of bones, move on to the next group
of people and bury them for five years. So many
people's bones built up over the years that neighborhoods built
near this. They're like sellers would collapse in and bones
(11:12):
would just come out because of the pressure put on
these huge piles of bones that were building up. So
there was a huge problem with it. But I also
read that that was a bit of like a cover story,
that they were really interested, that the government of Paris
was interested in reclaiming some really great real estate now,
(11:34):
and so they did this, whether people liked it or not.
And they actually went into these cemeteries and moved the
bones under the cover of night.
Speaker 1 (11:45):
That's right to the tunnels and people, you're doing what, Yeah,
And they said, don't don't worry about it, just go
back to sleep. And from seventeen eighty five to seventeen
eighty seven, over a couple of years, they not only
from Holy Innocence, but all the nearby cemeteries they moved
(12:05):
these bodies. In April of seventeen eighty six, the catacombs
were consecrated officially that was called the Paris Ostuary at first,
but catacombs sounds creepier.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
I guess, hey, have I been saying ossiery?
Speaker 3 (12:21):
I think so?
Speaker 2 (12:22):
Oh man, thank you for gently correcting me.
Speaker 3 (12:25):
Well, I wasn't sure I was pronounced.
Speaker 2 (12:27):
To be honest, I sounded like a six year old
kid trying to pronounce it.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
So catacombs took over as the sort of, you know,
the go to word, and they kind of just dumped
him in there for a while, until in eighteen ten
there was a new Quary inspector who said, maybe we
can have a little fun with this.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
Yeah, So, just to be clear, when they moved the
bones from the graveyard to these abandoned mine shafts, they
would just go up to a hole in the ground
and dump bone into the mine shaft and they would
just pile up where they fell at the bottom of
the mine shaft. That's how they were transferred. And like
you said, finally one of the inspectors, a Quorey inspector
(13:12):
named Louis Etienne Harry card Deturi. Pretty sure, I said
that right. Nice. He said, like you said, let's have
some fun. So he got busy with his quarry men
stacking bones into these now famous configurations of tibias and
phibias and finger bones and thigh bones and neck bones
(13:36):
and then headbones. Finally all of them with their eye
sockets facing out. They built walls throughout the whole, these
whole catacombs where that had been designated in ossiary or
in French and ossuary.
Speaker 1 (13:50):
That's right, And I think from now to the end
of time, a skull should be known as a headbone.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
And that what it Isn't that old drybone song and
that what they call it?
Speaker 1 (14:00):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (14:00):
Is it? What connected to the headbone? That one?
Speaker 2 (14:02):
Yeah? Don't they say that?
Speaker 1 (14:04):
Oh I don't know, I think so, I don't remember
that part. That's like the part, oh well, what was
connected to it? I think the yeah, yeah probably and
the neck bone is connected to the skull.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
Right, And then everybody just stopped singing and goes yeah yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:25):
So, like you mentioned, there are no headstones there, so
you don't know who is who. We do know there
are some famouses there, like Robespierre, very famous statesman is there.
There's a painter named Simon Vouet. What how would you
say that?
Speaker 2 (14:43):
Hey, yeah, you're right, I was gonna say, but there'd
be an extra te I.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
Think, okay, and then this guy, I think we should
maybe do a show on at some point Charles, I
would say paralt as an American. But what is that Paral.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
Let's just go with your I say, Ossiery. So I
don't know why, asking me, well.
Speaker 1 (15:03):
You took French, I didn't. This guy was like the
granddaddy of the modern fairy tale. So he wrote Little
Red Riding Hood and Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty and Pussing
Boots and yeah, did you know about this guy?
Speaker 2 (15:14):
He put them all into a collection that he attributed
to Mother Goose. So I couldn't find definitively that he
invented Mother Goose, but he certainly he certainly made Mother
Goose a star.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
You're gonna go a long way, baby, stick with me.
Should we take a break or you got something else? I?
Speaker 2 (15:32):
Oh, well, we should probably say that. The reason why
there's not a lot of people that you've heard of
today because they stopped adding bones in eighteen sixty. They
said that's enough. Sure, this is a little nuts. Somebody
thought of this like almost one hundred years ago. They
were clearly insane. Paris went along with it. Let's just
pretend like it was okay, but just stop doing it
(15:54):
any further.
Speaker 3 (15:55):
Yeah, Jim, Jim Morrison can stay where he's at.
Speaker 2 (15:57):
I look to see if he ever went and visited
the cattle combs, and I could not find that he
ever did. So let's just say he didn't.
Speaker 3 (16:04):
Oh, just as a tourist.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
Oh interesting, I just was cured diary today.
Speaker 3 (16:11):
I went to the catacombs. I found my solace there.
Speaker 2 (16:15):
Right, it was awesome.
Speaker 1 (16:17):
All right, So now that break, and we're going to
come back and talk about all the weird stuff that's
happened there over the decade since.
Speaker 2 (16:44):
So, Chuck, there's been at the catacombs a lot of
bone deposits, bone stacking, that kind of stuff. But that
I think we said at the outset that takes up
just a really small amount of all of the tunnels
that are under that are under Paris. They've done some
other really fascinating stuff. Dozens and dozens of different interesting,
(17:08):
really creative, inventive things with these tunnels, right, hundreds of
different things.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
Yes, for sure. And I don't want to make you
feel self conscious. I was laughing at a dirty joke
that I couldn't sail loud.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
Oh, I want to know.
Speaker 3 (17:23):
I'll tell you later.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
Oh I know.
Speaker 3 (17:25):
Yeah. Yeah, So.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
A lot of i mean monks used to make chartruse
down there. Was that the birthplace of chartreuse. Yeah, in
the catacombs.
Speaker 2 (17:36):
Yeah. I don't remember mentioning that in our Marrow episode,
but we definitely talked about chartreuse.
Speaker 3 (17:42):
Yeah for sure. So that's one thing that happened back then.
Mushroom farming.
Speaker 1 (17:47):
There's been a great tradition of alcohol brewing actually over
the years, because I mean, one of the great things
about having an underground system like that is it's very
stable temperature wise. It's about sixty degrees fahrenheit always.
Speaker 2 (18:00):
Yeah, which is about fifteen and a half degree celsius
for our French friends.
Speaker 3 (18:04):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (18:05):
And so that means you can do a lot of
stuff from like storing wine to storing brewer beer exactly.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
One of the things that made it so appealing. In
addition to being able to keep it at like a
constant cave temperature, cave age to anything is pretty great. Typically,
this is also real estate in the heart of Paris. Yeah,
that you know, you can use some steps and go
up street side and all of a sudden you're right there,
your customers without having to pay the incredibly high price
(18:34):
of real estate in Paris top side.
Speaker 3 (18:37):
Oh good point, it's not.
Speaker 2 (18:40):
I've read it somewhere.
Speaker 1 (18:42):
Mushroom farming was another big deal, because one thing you
don't need a ton of for most mushrooms is light. Sometimes,
you know, you want them to fruit. You may be
able to manipulate light or something like that, but generally
mushroom growing can be done in very dark places. And
so starting in the nineteen century, actual mushroom farming and
(19:03):
not just like I'm gonna grow a few mushrooms like
they were producing about a thousand tons of catacom mushrooms
a year.
Speaker 2 (19:09):
Yeah. For some reason, I'm gonna have to ask you
never to use the word fruit and mushroom near each
other again. I find it troubling for some reason. Really, Yeah,
mushrooms fruiting is I don't like that at all.
Speaker 3 (19:24):
That's really funny.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
Yeah all right, but I'm serious though.
Speaker 3 (19:28):
No, I'll never do it.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
Okay, thank you, although you do owe me about seven
or eight mentions for that oysters too.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
Oh that's right, I feel better now, okay, Oh yeah,
that's right.
Speaker 2 (19:37):
You should tell everybody you're finally feeling good.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
Yeah, I'm finally feeling well. It was I had some
fruity mushrooms and everything's fine.
Speaker 2 (19:47):
Yeah, So let's see what else chuck Oh, I was
totally joking when I said there's been hundreds of creative uses.
There's been basically three, and two of them are technically
the same, which is brewing alcohol.
Speaker 3 (19:58):
At mushroom farming.
Speaker 2 (19:59):
And what's third, brewing alcohol and brewing alcohol depending on
which kind of alcohol, beer or scharchers. That's it.
Speaker 1 (20:08):
It's also been a good Heidi spot over the years,
depending on what's going on with the government. During the
French Revolution, revolutionaries hit out down there and were chased
down there. Sure, there was an alt right group in
the thirties called how would you pronounce that?
Speaker 2 (20:23):
Joshchaoul Lac of Ghoul.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
They not only hid down there, but would use it
as a way to get around and potentially break into
government buildings I guess from the bottom.
Speaker 2 (20:36):
Yeah. Until the fifties, and in some cases even decades
after that, there were a lot of buildings in Paris
who had doors, sometimes forgotten doors in their cellars or
basements that led directly to the catacombs or the underground
tunnels in Paris.
Speaker 3 (20:54):
Yeah, pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (20:54):
So it was kind of easy to get down there
for a very long time. It's actually really recent that
it's now very hard to get into the off limits parts.
But as we'll see, that doesn't actually deter anybody.
Speaker 1 (21:08):
No, of course not during World War Two. Obviously there's
going to be either Nazis down there or the French
Resistance might be down there.
Speaker 2 (21:17):
Did you just see them in like adjoining tunnels but
not knowing that the other one's there.
Speaker 3 (21:21):
Yeah, that sounds like a Tarantino thing.
Speaker 2 (21:24):
Yeah, it does.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
But what they're most famous for now is being able
to go down there with your your niece the movie star. Yeah,
it's been a tourist attraction since Napoleon said, you know,
it would be great. The year's eighteen oh nine. I
think it's high time we start letting people down there
to tour this pretty cool thing. And it's sort of
vacillated over the years. It used to be like, you know,
(21:46):
you could go down there once a month be you
were citizen of Paris. Only sometimes it was like quarterly.
Finally they said, you know what, let's just make money
on this, right and it's open what Tuesday to Sunday.
I guess it close on Monday, like a lot of
museums do. Ninety five to eight thirty. It'll cost you
(22:08):
thirty one euros these days, which is about the same
in dollars I think right right now.
Speaker 2 (22:14):
It's like point ninety six euros to the dollar I
think today.
Speaker 3 (22:17):
Okay, so pretty close, man, you really keep up with that.
Not bad.
Speaker 2 (22:22):
Thanks.
Speaker 3 (22:23):
Let me see how my eurostocks are doing. No.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
Actually, to tell you the truth, I was going to
translate the dollar that you could make off of a
cow in our our Tragedy of the Commons episode euros
and we never got around to it.
Speaker 3 (22:42):
That's funny.
Speaker 2 (22:42):
I can also tell you zero point eight pounds to
the dollar today as well. But a dollar one sixty
Australian dollars to the dollar.
Speaker 1 (22:51):
Well, I just came back from Mexico City, so I
basically just divide by twenty?
Speaker 2 (22:56):
Is it twenty now? It was like ten last time
we were there.
Speaker 3 (23:00):
Has it changed twenty?
Speaker 2 (23:01):
Has it was? Am I just wrong? It was twenty
back then.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
I don't know, but I think you divide by twenty
ish now. And but my friends that we were with
were like, I can't even think of it that way.
Speaker 3 (23:11):
I have to.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
I heard if all you have to do is like
drop a zero and then divide that in half, so
everyone has to.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
Jump on one and shout how much is this?
Speaker 3 (23:24):
Exactly?
Speaker 1 (23:26):
How long does the tour take? Josh, you went through it? Uh?
Speaker 2 (23:29):
An hour? I don't remember it taking an hour more
or less. I don't it was. It's weird because when
you're in the catacombs, you're out of time, like there
is no no light whatsoever reaching you. The only light
in there is electric and apparently that's only been around
since the seventies. Before that, they give you a candle
and take good luck, but it's it's the light that
(23:52):
isn't there is almost It makes it even eerier because
it's sodium light, so it's got a kind of an
orangish yellowish cast to it. Oh yeah, it's just a
weird place to be. So I believe that it's an hour,
but I have no recollection of how long it took.
Speaker 1 (24:07):
Okay, that sounds about right. You go down a big
spiral staircase. There's a lot of stair climate obviously, right.
Speaker 2 (24:13):
Yeah, it's yes, there is, Okay, like five hundred steps
or something. Like that. So, yeah, you go down like
a spiral staircase and there's multiple stairs.
Speaker 1 (24:23):
Yeah, so you're walking down, down, down Before you enter
you go, you go through something called the Port Mahone Corridor,
which has a replica of the Port Mahone Fortress. I
imagine that looks kind of cool, right, it does.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
I don't remember it, but I looked up a picture
and a little bit on that. The guy who carved
that was a not a hostage, an inmate at this
prison for years and redid it from memory, carved into
the stone.
Speaker 3 (24:57):
Wow, that's pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (24:58):
And he actually died there from a landslide or a
rock in or something like that. I can't remember what
it's called. While he was building some steps to get
to it.
Speaker 3 (25:11):
Oh geez.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
Yeah, he really he dedicated his life to that thing.
Speaker 3 (25:16):
That's very sad.
Speaker 2 (25:18):
Yeah, but appropriate for the catacombs. Yeah, if you think about.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
It, if you can just stay right there, if you die,
Like you mentioned, seventy two is when electricity came along.
There is something called Ariadne's thread, a black line to
ensure that you don't get lost. And I thought, well,
what a strange name that is.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
Oh, you looked it up too.
Speaker 1 (25:41):
Yeah, so Ariadney was a daughter of King Minus and
was associated with mazes and labyrinths. And while it is
a literal thing painted there, it's also you know, ties
back to Ariadne and the sort of like while she
was a person, it's also like a logic, like applying
(26:01):
logic to all possible routes of a maze to get
out is Ariadne as well?
Speaker 2 (26:06):
Yeah, I also saw that she helped theseus get out
of the labyrinth by leaving a thread for him to
follow back after he slew the minotaur.
Speaker 1 (26:16):
Yeah, what does this look like? Though I couldn't find
any pictures of this actually in the cateculmy.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
I don't remember it either. Okay, it's supposedly on the ceiling,
and I think it's just a black line.
Speaker 3 (26:28):
Okay, that's yeah, Boy, you don't remember much about.
Speaker 2 (26:30):
This, I don't. It's weird, Like I have pictures of it,
and I remember the thing with Mila, But like a
lot of these pictures that I went and looked at online,
I'm like, I don't remember seeing that at all. I
don't think I was drunk. I'm pretty sure I was
fairly sober. I think I just my episodic memories shot
the Holy.
Speaker 3 (26:51):
Heck you remember those boobs?
Speaker 2 (26:55):
I do. I guess they made more of an impression
on me than I remembered.
Speaker 3 (27:00):
You mentioned.
Speaker 1 (27:01):
Well, let's talk about some of these chambers. A lot
of them are like the coolest parts of the catacombs
are not open to the public and technically officially illegal
and off limits.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
So okay, but that might that may be why I
don't remember some.
Speaker 1 (27:16):
Of these, because they weren't the super cool once we're
not on the tour.
Speaker 2 (27:21):
I guess I'm just hey man, I'm just grasping at
straws here. Help me out.
Speaker 1 (27:25):
Well, I looked at some pictures of some of these.
The Laplage, which means the beach, is a really cool
room because it's got a sandy floor and they painted
like a beach scene on the wall. But it's it
looks I mean, all these places look like the like
where the Lost Boys might hang out.
Speaker 2 (27:40):
You know. That was one of the coolest things about
that movie, that backstory that the crazy, amazing rich hotel
slid into the ocean and now that's where they lived
and there were old chandeliers coming hanging.
Speaker 3 (27:54):
Out about that.
Speaker 1 (27:55):
Yeah, yeah, totally what it was super cool. Yeah, what else?
What other cool rooms are off?
Speaker 2 (28:00):
That's it.
Speaker 3 (28:03):
You're not gonna talk about Sala z or Z.
Speaker 2 (28:09):
I did not look that one up, but there are
let me, let me give you a couple other ones.
There was a group called the Mexican de la pearfores PAFA.
Let's just say it like that. They overtook one of
the caves beneath the Palais de Chillo and set up
a movie theater there with a bar and room for
(28:29):
twenty people to watch a movie. And I did not
find what movie they showed.
Speaker 1 (28:33):
Yeah, that is super cool.
Speaker 3 (28:35):
That was.
Speaker 1 (28:38):
A subset of a group called UX, short for Urban Experiment,
and they are these It's an artist collective in Paris,
founded in nineteen eighty one and by a group of
teenagers back then that like they'll do this cool stuff,
like they snuck into the Pantheon for months in a
row to restore a clock there, but like on the
(29:01):
on the down low.
Speaker 2 (29:02):
Yeah that I saw. That was a subgroup of UX
called the unter Gunther and they were the ones that
actually did the clock. UX is almost like an umbrella group.
Speaker 1 (29:12):
Yeah, just like the group that did the movie theater.
Speaker 2 (29:14):
They were a subgroup, right exactly. And then UX also
is like a acronym for urban explorer too, which these
people also are. So they kind of almost made a
play on slang, which is really something.
Speaker 3 (29:29):
Yeah, that is really something.
Speaker 1 (29:30):
But all of these people who sneak down there and
do stuff are known as cataphiles, and those are the people,
the urban adventurers who illegally find their way into the
catacombs to to party, to hang out, to show movies,
to have concerts and parties and like.
Speaker 3 (29:53):
All things. All kinds of things.
Speaker 1 (29:55):
Are going on down there over the decades, and it
seems to have re kicked off. I mean they've been
doing it since the eighteen hundreds. I think they had
a a Chopin, like forty five piece orchestra did a
Chopon concert down there.
Speaker 2 (30:10):
Yeah, they played Chopin's Funeral March and I was like, yeah,
I'm not familiar with that one. It's Darth Vader's.
Speaker 1 (30:16):
Theme, is it or does it just sound like it?
Speaker 2 (30:22):
It's Darth Vader's There's it's not possible that John Williams
just coincidentally came up with that. As to the theme, Yeah,
it's like an adaptation of the funeral march.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
Okay, well that's probably a well known thing, then.
Speaker 2 (30:35):
It's gotta be. I've never heard that before though now
I know everything there is about Star Wars. Just try me.
Speaker 1 (30:44):
In the seventies and eighties is when it seems like
the cataphiles really kind of you know, took roost down
there because it was a great place to go hide,
like the punk rock movement kind of moved downstairs, underground
literally underground.
Speaker 2 (30:59):
Hey.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
Then they've tried to keep people out over the years,
but like you said, people are going to find a
way in if they want to.
Speaker 2 (31:03):
That's right. And I say, we take another break and
we'll come back and find out. Do people find their
way in if they want to after this, let's do it.
Speaker 1 (31:37):
So, Yeah, people do find their way in, like I said,
And they've been doing that a lot since the beginning.
And you know, besides partying and doing drugs, like there
are all kinds of like cool works of art, the
murals painted on some walls, obviously, all kinds of graffiti.
Sometimes they leave messages and leaflets and things for each
other to find and try to avoid. The cataflix, which
(32:01):
is literally translated as catach.
Speaker 2 (32:03):
Cops Yeah, this is a special detachment of the Gendarmes
that their whole thing is catching people down in the tunnels.
And from what I read that, if you're a true cataphile,
and I guess there was an article in the I
think twenty fifteen or something like that that estimated there's
around one hundred genuine cataphiles, the cataflicks are probably going
(32:29):
to leave you alone at the very least, just maybe
give you a warning or something like that. If you're
a tourist in the sense of like the fight club
support group tourists, then you're probably going to get that
sixty euro fine because you really, as far as the
cataflics are concerned, you have no business being down there.
It's dangerous. You got no respect for tradition, like the
(32:52):
actual cataphiles too. And something else I read, Chuck, you're
actually trespassing a private property because if you buy a
piece of real estate in Paris, your ownership extends to
whatever is below it in the underground. Wow, that sounds
kind of cool until your house caves in and the
city's like it's your property top to bottom. So good
(33:15):
luck with that.
Speaker 1 (33:16):
Yeah, wow, I didn't know that that's pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (33:19):
And they actually at city hall make that sound when
you come in to ask them for help.
Speaker 3 (33:24):
You know, Parisians pioneered the fart noise.
Speaker 1 (33:27):
Yeah, the raspberry, the the spine. That's sixty euros you mentioned,
I saw sixty five. I mean that's just like double
the cost of legal entry. So it's it's not the
biggest fine.
Speaker 2 (33:38):
No, no, no, And it kind of does kind of
give you a sense that it's not considered like the
the crime of the century in Paris. But at the
same time there's a special police attachment to catch people
doing that, so there's almost mixed messages with that.
Speaker 1 (33:55):
Yeah, for sure, the IGC, that inspection group with a
French name, still maintains it and they've been doing so
since seventeen seventy seven, and there are still collapses here
and there, but it is mainly short up. Oh. This
other thing I thought was fun that the ways that
people have found their way in. When they close off
(34:15):
an area, sometimes the cataphiles will go in there and
like reopen it and make a way to get in,
and they're called I don't know how you would say
it in French, but it translates as cat flaps like
a cat door.
Speaker 3 (34:27):
Kind of cool.
Speaker 2 (34:27):
Shatty ears, shatty airs shot is chat that's cat and
e airs is flaps. I guess.
Speaker 1 (34:36):
Yeah. It's been in a bunch of movies and stuff too, right.
Speaker 2 (34:40):
Yeah. One of the most famous uses of the Paris
Underground came in The Phantom of the Opera. And I'm
not sure if it was in the original novel, although
it probably was, but I certainly know that in the
stage play or the musical, that's where the Phantom lives.
But more of the point, there's suppose like an underground
(35:01):
lake there that the Phantom like ros Is gondola on. Right. Cool,
There actually is an underground reservoir under the Paris Opera House.
It's not an urban legend that guesst On throw made up.
It was or Andrew Lloyd Webber, one of the two
that when they were building the Opera House, to keep
the foundation from just filling up with water over and
(35:23):
over again while they were building it, they built a
reservoir to impound the water in, and so it's like
a twelve feet deep by almost I think like sixty
yards sixty meters long. Hey, little reservoir that you could
conceivably sale of gondola on if you were the kind
of person to live underground.
Speaker 1 (35:43):
Do you know if the water is it continually filling up?
Speaker 2 (35:48):
I don't know. Give me a break, man.
Speaker 1 (35:53):
Oh what about the average?
Speaker 2 (35:56):
Right? But I mean so it definitely has to be
constantly replace because they had to build this reservoir, yeah,
to hold the water that was always trickling in. But yeah,
it makes sense. Why why wouldn't it overflow once in
a while.
Speaker 3 (36:08):
I don't know that shouldn't a beast?
Speaker 2 (36:10):
I don't know, you're ruined the story.
Speaker 1 (36:12):
But gamers might recognize the catacombs from Assassin's Creed unity
pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (36:19):
I was looking at screenshots of that. It's pretty neat.
Did you play that?
Speaker 3 (36:22):
Yeah? No, I didn't play that.
Speaker 1 (36:23):
Do you play any of them Assassin's Creeds?
Speaker 3 (36:26):
No?
Speaker 2 (36:27):
Do you have something scream?
Speaker 3 (36:29):
No? I just you know, my gaming is limited.
Speaker 2 (36:32):
I see what's your latest game.
Speaker 1 (36:35):
I'm playing a horror game right now called Alan Wake two.
It's the second Alan Wake and I'd never played a
horror game before, and it is pretty scary.
Speaker 2 (36:46):
So it's genuinely scary. Yeah, that's awesome.
Speaker 1 (36:50):
Yeah, Like when you're playing this game and you know,
they look so good now and there's so realistic. So
you're creeping around with a flashlight in these rooms and
you hear noises and see things in it's like it's
super creepy.
Speaker 2 (37:01):
Are they like jump scares or do they just create
like a sense of ongoing dread? Both, Wow, that's master.
Speaker 1 (37:07):
Definitely ongoing dread. And then when the jump scare happens,
when when a bad person comes out.
Speaker 3 (37:11):
It's just yeah, it's it's scares, big grown.
Speaker 2 (37:15):
Boy, chucky, fantastic.
Speaker 3 (37:17):
Alan Wake to everybody, like.
Speaker 2 (37:19):
Alan Wake, like somebody's name, yeah, the second or the sequel?
Speaker 1 (37:25):
The sequel, Okay, it would be Alan Wake Junior. I
think problem, I guess, so don't call me junior.
Speaker 2 (37:31):
Henry Ford the second was not a junior.
Speaker 3 (37:34):
Yeah, because who wants to be called junior?
Speaker 2 (37:36):
I don't know. I'd go with JR. If I was
a junior. Oh, totally call me JR. What does it
stand for? Stands for junior?
Speaker 1 (37:47):
Uh, here's one cool thing, and this guy might be
worth a podcast on his own. But there was a
photographer as he went by the name Nadar. I guess
in a dar And this is in the eighteenth sixties.
His real name is.
Speaker 3 (38:03):
Felix. I guess how would you pronounce that last name?
Speaker 2 (38:06):
Oh to.
Speaker 3 (38:08):
Sean.
Speaker 1 (38:09):
He was a very accomplished dude, sort of the pioneer
of the medium. This is early photography and the guy
in Paris photography wise at the time. But he invented
a battery operated light basically and is one of the
first people ever in the history of photography to use
artificial light to take a picture. And over the course
of three months starting in eighteen sixty one, he went
(38:31):
down into the catacombs with you know, eighteen minutes per exposure. Yeah,
took a lot of pictures of the catacombs and they
are super cool and creepy pictures from eighteen sixty one.
Speaker 2 (38:44):
They are creepy. What's cool is because of that eighteen
minute exposure time, any of the photographs of workers working
in the catacombs are actually dummies as stand ins.
Speaker 3 (38:55):
Ah, that makes sense.
Speaker 2 (38:56):
It makes it even a little creepier too, if you
ask me.
Speaker 3 (39:00):
Yeah, and those headmones weren't moving, so they're fine.
Speaker 2 (39:02):
I've got I have one more thing for you about
dummies in underground places. There's a awesome one of the
great I'm sure. I've talked about before. One of the
greatest tourist attractions I've ever been to in my life
was in Budapest. There's something called the Hospital in the Rock,
and I think it was maybe World War two, maybe
Cold War, but it was a hospital that they dug
(39:23):
out of a cave system on a like a stone
hill in Budapest. Wow, And it's a hospital. It's got
like that white, creepy subway tile, like there's gurneys everywhere still,
and it was like, this is a emergency hospital in
case the town ever got bombed or whatever. And they
have dummies everywhere, mannequins, and that just just chef's kisses
(39:47):
it for me, Like it makes it so scary, even
though they're not trying to make it scary. Yeah, it
just really is. I think if you have dummies in
your tourist attraction, you've just taken it to another level.
Like put dummies in your touris. Don't just leave it
for people use their dumb imaginations, Like give them some
(40:08):
dummies dressed up and it'll really make it. You'll you'll
be rolling in the dough after that. I think.
Speaker 1 (40:14):
Yeah, well, the very least is gonna up the creep
factor because that just dead, dead eyed expression of a dummies.
Speaker 2 (40:20):
Right. Great, But if you ever go to Budapest, you
have to go to the hospital in the rock. It's amazing.
Speaker 1 (40:26):
I'm gonna have to ask Emily. You know she took
a solo trip there a couple of years ago. I
need to see if she went there.
Speaker 2 (40:31):
I think I asked you if she did or not,
And I don't know if she did.
Speaker 3 (40:35):
But probably not because she would have. I feel like
I would have remembered her telling you.
Speaker 2 (40:38):
It definitely seems like it would have been up her
alley though, for sure.
Speaker 1 (40:42):
Yeah, She's like, were their paintings there then?
Speaker 3 (40:44):
I didn't know.
Speaker 2 (40:46):
The dummies their faces were?
Speaker 1 (40:48):
Oh that's true.
Speaker 3 (40:50):
What about crime?
Speaker 1 (40:51):
There's been a lot of crime there over the years, because,
like you said, that's a good place to pop underground
and then pop up into somebody's like expensive wine cellar
or something.
Speaker 2 (41:01):
Yeah. Apparently in twenty seventeen some thieves stole over a
quarter of a million dollars worth of wine that was
cooling in a cave I guess belong to some winery.
Speaker 3 (41:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (41:14):
Cool.
Speaker 1 (41:16):
People have been stealing bones down there since. There have
been bones down there, highly illegal.
Speaker 2 (41:21):
Yeah, you don't want to do that, I mean, just
not just for the illegality, that's really disrespectful.
Speaker 3 (41:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (41:26):
I think that a lot of them back in the
day were to sell to sort of like kidaber Selta
medical students, like, hey, here's a headbone for however many francs.
Speaker 2 (41:37):
Right, shekels, Yeah, what about ghosts, chuck.
Speaker 1 (41:43):
Yeah, of course there's going to be ghosts down there.
And there's a couple of more well known than others.
I think the most well known is a guy named
Philibert Aspare.
Speaker 2 (41:55):
Yeah. You can put a little little emphasis on the
tea at the end.
Speaker 1 (41:58):
There as sperit.
Speaker 2 (42:00):
So maybe that's a little too much. But somewhere in
between those two.
Speaker 1 (42:03):
I know I'm wrong, But when it comes to French,
I just want to drop the last letter of everything.
Speaker 4 (42:07):
Well, they do that a lot, get you exactly exactly Anyway,
He worked at a military hospital in the late eighteenth
century and apparently in seventeen ninety three got lost in
the catacombs.
Speaker 1 (42:22):
With his own loan candle and never found his way out.
And just like like I said, the convenient thing about
dying down there is you just stay there and apparently
if you bring a candle there, you hear his voice
just before the candle goes out.
Speaker 2 (42:37):
He says, welcomin bienviny.
Speaker 1 (42:44):
Were you creeped out down there? Was it just like, oh,
this is a cool thing.
Speaker 2 (42:47):
It was not at all creepy. It's not presented to
be creepy either. It's just it is what it is, right,
a bunch of bones. Yeah, I was not at all
creeped out.
Speaker 3 (43:00):
Yeah, I gotta go check it out next time.
Speaker 1 (43:03):
Did you look at that video, by the way, the
one that's like highly likely faked.
Speaker 2 (43:08):
Yeah, I didn't. I wasn't moved by it at all.
Speaker 1 (43:10):
Were you No, there's this videotape that I think it
was like twenty seventeen that circulated that was like, you know,
it's like a blair witch thing, like is it real?
Speaker 3 (43:21):
Is it not?
Speaker 1 (43:21):
It was a guy walking through the catacombs and apparently
gets lost and starts to freak out and run and
hear sounds and then the last shot you see is
like the camera falling to the ground into like a puddle,
And some people say it's real, some people say it's not.
Speaker 2 (43:36):
It.
Speaker 3 (43:36):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (43:36):
It feels like it's probably faked, but I wasn't like,
oh my god, it was kind of not that interesting.
Speaker 2 (43:41):
Yeah, agreed, it was like a dull, two sentence horror story.
Speaker 3 (43:46):
Yeah agreed.
Speaker 2 (43:48):
You got anything else about the catacombs?
Speaker 3 (43:51):
Nope, it's on the list.
Speaker 2 (43:52):
Yep, you should go. You'll enjoy it, and don't forget
the hospital in the Rock too.
Speaker 3 (43:56):
Right.
Speaker 2 (43:57):
Since Chuck said write, of course, that means it's time
for a listener.
Speaker 1 (43:59):
May here's a correction to our Gonk Show episode. Hey guys,
there was one big error in this.
Speaker 2 (44:08):
Oh I know what she says is an omission.
Speaker 3 (44:12):
No, something we got wrong. What was our omission?
Speaker 2 (44:15):
Jane Jane the Dancing Machine?
Speaker 1 (44:17):
Oh you believe we.
Speaker 2 (44:18):
Didn't mention Jane Jane the Dancing Machine in the entire episode.
Speaker 1 (44:23):
I thought we had, but apparently we didn't. But yeah,
I think big shout out to Gene Jen a legend
of that show.
Speaker 2 (44:29):
I think both of us thought that we had, because
Olivia clearly included him in the articles in there. I
think we just passed over him and didn't didn't talk
about him. It's just just sad.
Speaker 1 (44:40):
Yeah, no disrespect intended. We both loved Jean Jean. How
do you not exactly, so this was an error. Though
Chuck Barris, guys, did not invent syndication, it has been
around in television forever, with some notable nineteen fifty shows
such as Sea Hunting and Life with Elizabeth. Nor was
the Parent Game the first indicated game show, or even
(45:01):
Chuck's first syndicated show. First indicated game shows came in
nineteen sixty five Everything's Relative and PDQ and Chuck Barris's
first four A in nineteen sixty nine the Game Game.
Initially that was to give local stations some color options,
since old sitcoms wouldn't be in color, but syndication exploded
in nineteen seventy two because FCC gave the seven point
(45:23):
thirty time slot back to the local stations, and for
those stations it was cheaper to buy a game show
than make than to make local content. I know this, guys,
because I'm a bit of a semi pro TV historian.
Oh yeah, yeah, with an emphastest on game shows in particular.
So I feel a duty when something is broadly mistated
as that was, I have to try and correct the record.
(45:45):
I had hoped you use Gong this book as one
of your sources as it was written by a real
life TV historian named Adam Nedef, who I've done some.
Speaker 3 (45:56):
Research for in the past.
Speaker 1 (45:58):
I hope you're enjoying The snow today came a little
while ago, but that is from Mike Berger in Livonia, Michigan.
And Mike, you gotta hang on to your email and
we might hitch up if we ever need any insight
on TV history.
Speaker 2 (46:11):
Yeah, thanks a lot, Mike. I mean, criticism from Caesar.
That's pretty awesome, totally. Well, if you want to be
like Mike and just completely devastate us in something we
said and just show how utterly wrong we were, we'd
love to hear that stuff, especially if you're an historian,
semi pro or otherwise. You can send us an email
to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (46:37):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and
there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and we are going deep
underneath the City of Perry, City of Lights, City too
busy to sleep because it eats big apples in this
episode of Stuff You Should Know.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
That's right, big thanks to Anna for the contribution here
on the Paris Catacombs. Have you ever toured the Paris Catacombs?
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Yes? I have?
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Have you I have not, and I think I remember
you telling me that you had. I've been to Paris
three times, have not yet done this. It was not
on my radar the first two, didn't have time the
third trip. So if and when I ever get back
to Paris, it's on the list I recommend.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
Have you ever been to the Mulin Rouge?
Speaker 3 (00:57):
Yes?
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Okay, so the Mulan Ruge is generally topless dance numbers
typically right, Yeah, did you notice that when you're at
the Mulan Rouge, boobs just there were so many boobs
everywhere that they just totally lost all context and meaning.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
Yeah, twelve year old Chuck was like, I don't understand what's.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
Happening, right, But I'll bet even twelve year old Chuck
was like yawning by the end of it, right, because
there's just so many boobs everywhere that they're just it
doesn't doesn't mean anything anymore. The catacombs are the Mulan
Rouge of human bones.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
Oh, so many skulls that it's just like whatever, there's
another skull.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
Yeah. Yeah, it's bizarre because you realize you're just like,
ho hum, there's another dead body. There's another dead body,
there's another leg bone. But it's still worth going to
just because it's so bizarre. But there's just so many
human bones around you that you just it's like your
brain just gets saturated and you just stop thinking of
(01:57):
them like that.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
So the JSA, the Josh SAT would be Mulin Rouge
is to boobs, as the Paris Catacombs is to blank
human bones.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
Yeah, that'd be the right answer choice A. What would
be the other choices?
Speaker 3 (02:12):
Oh?
Speaker 1 (02:12):
Man, I don't know. I haven't taken a test like
that in so long. I'd hope you have been to
take the SAT again.
Speaker 3 (02:17):
What it I think?
Speaker 2 (02:19):
So?
Speaker 3 (02:19):
Okay, how long does that take?
Speaker 2 (02:22):
I don't know, but it's changed since we were there hours?
I remember it taking hours. It used to actually test
IQ and now it just tests like retention.
Speaker 3 (02:32):
Oh well, I'm screwed.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
So here's the other answers. Chuck cod fishing, Yeah, modge podge.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
And there's got to be one close one like like
like gravesite or something. Okay, there you go and you'd
be like, no, no, grave wax.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
Do you remember that from back in the day.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
Is that the human goop that seeps out that you
can make soap out of?
Speaker 3 (02:57):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (02:58):
Pretty awesome.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
All right, that's a that's a great j Sat. We
should have our own stuff. You should know, Sat. That'd
be a fun thing to design.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
I have, It would be fun. I have one more
story about the catacombs, let's hear it. So when we went,
I've only been once, uh and it was a few
years back. But we went with my brother in law
and sister in law and our niece, a very famous
Mila who's been in the movies. She played young Mary
(03:25):
in the movie Mary that came out on Netflix this
past Christmas. Did you know that? No?
Speaker 3 (03:30):
And you didn't.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
You didn't shout that one out, So I'm glad you are.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
Well. We were off so I didn't get a chance to,
but it's it's definitely worth watching. It's like pretty religious movie.
I mean it's about Mary the mother Mary Mary. Yeah,
yeah that Mary. You're like, ah Mary Mary, Sure. And
it is fascinating, like my actually my brother in law
also was a producer on it too, and they it
(03:55):
has like action, it has like it's a thriller. It
has like a really evil villain played by Anthony Hopkins.
Like it's just a really good movie that you'll watch
from beginning to end. Be like, this is pretty good.
Speaker 3 (04:09):
I have to check it out.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
And I'm also going to forgive you for when I said, Mary, Mary,
for not saying.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
Why you bugging thank you?
Speaker 3 (04:18):
You passed. You're back in the good graces.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
Well anyway, Oh back to my story. So little Mila,
she must have been fivesh at the time, she went
to the catacombs with us, right, so she's walking around
this ossiery with bones and human skulls everywhere, and you
me or I asked her, like, are are you scared
right now? And she said, I boobs right, she right,
(04:42):
she said I would be if these were real. We're like,
we just looked at each other out of the corners
of our eyes, and we were like, well, let's look
over here now, right exactly.
Speaker 3 (04:53):
Yeah, Wow, that's adorable.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
It was very adorable. What's funny is the irony of
the whole thing is this is the same kid had
about the same age, who was scared to death on
the movie ride at Disney Hollywood Studios, but is standing
there in the ossiary right, millions of bones, human bones
and skulls, and.
Speaker 3 (05:11):
Is like, yeah, that's pretty funny.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
Yeah. So those are all my stories about the Catacombs.
I figured we should probably start talking about it.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
Yeah, so this is I mean, let's go back in time,
I guess. I mean we know already what it is.
It's a series of underground tunnels where more than six
million Parisians are are there, you know, forever. What's crazy
they decided to move them again, right.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
Right, But you have no idea who's who, Like one
bone doesn't belong to another bone, no idea whose skull
is who? It's crazy.
Speaker 3 (05:45):
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
So if you go back in time, let's say forty
five million years during the Lutesian period, there was an
erosion event that caused a lot of what became to
be known as Lutesian or Paris rock or Paris limestone
or Parisian limestone deposited there, and that is if you
(06:08):
go to Paris and you see everything as a sort
of creamy gray, that's what that is. And that's what
gives Paris its distinct look because they had loads and
loads and loads of it. And the reason we're starting
with this is because the mining of that Lutetian limestone
is where these tunnels started, about two thousand years ago,
(06:30):
on the banks of the rivers. There they had these
quarries where they would mine the heck out of this stuff,
and before you know it, Paris is sitting on top
of a vast network of tunnels.
Speaker 2 (06:43):
Yeah, something like thirty two square kilometers of tunnels, which,
to put in American terms, is like a lot of bananas. Yes,
ten times the size of Central Park apparently is underneath Paris. Yeah,
I think it's three hundred kilometers of tunnels. Isn't that
just nuts?
Speaker 3 (07:03):
It's a lot.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
But I mean, if you think about it, if you
mine an area, a small, relatively small area, for a
couple thousand years, you're gonna you're gonna make some headway eventually.
And that's what they did. The key is this chuck. Originally,
these quarries were sensibly well outside of the city of Paris. Yeah,
but we're talking about a very very tiny original city
(07:25):
of Paris that eventually grew and grew and grew, and
over time Paris overtook these old quarries that in most
cases were no longer used or mined any longer. So
the city built itself over abandoned mines that people had
just plumb forgotten about.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
That's right, and that you know, that presents a couple
of very big problems. First of all, if you've got
a city growing and growing and getting built on and
built on and getting heavier and heavier, and a lot
of the underground has been dug out, that is a problem.
And there were numerous incidents of sinkholes, of buildings collapsing
(08:03):
into themselves, of all kinds of you know, tragedies happening
over the years throughout the history of Paris because it
was built on, you know, hollow ground in a lot
of places.
Speaker 2 (08:13):
Right. That's why another very famous nickname for Paris is
the Florida of Europe.
Speaker 3 (08:18):
Right, I'm sure they love that.
Speaker 1 (08:23):
The other big problem is that Parisians used to love
burying themselves in Paris, like you wanted to be laid
to rest in the city where you grew up and lived.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
Your life at your church typically too.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
Yeah, like very very locally. And by the eighteenth century,
late eighteenth century, this was a big, big problem. There
were too many bodies those disease was being spread. So
this led to a couple of things. I think in
the seventeen thirties there was an actual parliamentary commissioned study
(08:57):
about how disease from these you know, dead people everywhere
in Paris was hurting the city. And then it took
about forty years. Eventually, in seventeen seventy seven, King Louis
what is that sixteenth created the IGC You want to
pronounce that?
Speaker 2 (09:16):
Oh yes, please? The Inspection General des Cartiers.
Speaker 3 (09:22):
And what were they charged with?
Speaker 2 (09:24):
So carriers is French for careers, and another word for
career is a path or tunnel. So this was the
commission overseeing minds and mind shafts in.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
Paris, right, So basically, hey, we got this report forty
years ago that no one's acted on, so we need
to really start looking into this stuff. And a chief inspector,
can you pronounce.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
His name, Charles excel f Guillemote.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
He came along as the chief inspector and said, all right,
you know what, we're gonna shore up these minds and
make sure that they're not gonna keep collapsing. And also
we're gonna start moving bodies out of here. We had
a body problem, not a three body problem, we have
a million's body problem. Yeah, and we're gonna start moving
bodies out of Let's start with the oldest one, the
(10:18):
Holy Innocent Cemetery, which has been around since eleven eighty six.
Let's start moving things out of here and from other cemeteries.
Close these things down and start moving him into these
old mind shafts.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
Yeah. And like you said, there was a body problem,
I think you kind of touched on it a second ago,
where there was a general sense of disease coming from
these putrefying bodies that were just piling up in the cemeteries.
But structurally speaking also so like I guess at the
time in France, they would bury you with a bunch
of other people who died at the same time in
(10:50):
a group pit let you decompose. After five years, they
would bury you up and then they would just deposit
your bones into ossiery. They just they were like, here's
a bunch of bones, move on to the next group
of people and bury them for five years. So many
people's bones built up over the years that neighborhoods built
near this. They're like sellers would collapse in and bones
(11:12):
would just come out because of the pressure put on
these huge piles of bones that were building up. So
there was a huge problem with it. But I also
read that that was a bit of like a cover story,
that they were really interested, that the government of Paris
was interested in reclaiming some really great real estate now,
(11:34):
and so they did this, whether people liked it or not.
And they actually went into these cemeteries and moved the
bones under the cover of night.
Speaker 1 (11:45):
That's right to the tunnels and people, you're doing what, Yeah,
And they said, don't don't worry about it, just go
back to sleep. And from seventeen eighty five to seventeen
eighty seven, over a couple of years, they not only
from Holy Innocence, but all the nearby cemeteries they moved
(12:05):
these bodies. In April of seventeen eighty six, the catacombs
were consecrated officially that was called the Paris Ostuary at first,
but catacombs sounds creepier.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
I guess, hey, have I been saying ossiery?
Speaker 3 (12:21):
I think so?
Speaker 2 (12:22):
Oh man, thank you for gently correcting me.
Speaker 3 (12:25):
Well, I wasn't sure I was pronounced.
Speaker 2 (12:27):
To be honest, I sounded like a six year old
kid trying to pronounce it.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
So catacombs took over as the sort of, you know,
the go to word, and they kind of just dumped
him in there for a while, until in eighteen ten
there was a new Quary inspector who said, maybe we
can have a little fun with this.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
Yeah, So, just to be clear, when they moved the
bones from the graveyard to these abandoned mine shafts, they
would just go up to a hole in the ground
and dump bone into the mine shaft and they would
just pile up where they fell at the bottom of
the mine shaft. That's how they were transferred. And like
you said, finally one of the inspectors, a Quorey inspector
(13:12):
named Louis Etienne Harry card Deturi. Pretty sure, I said
that right. Nice. He said, like you said, let's have
some fun. So he got busy with his quarry men
stacking bones into these now famous configurations of tibias and
phibias and finger bones and thigh bones and neck bones
(13:36):
and then headbones. Finally all of them with their eye
sockets facing out. They built walls throughout the whole, these
whole catacombs where that had been designated in ossiary or
in French and ossuary.
Speaker 1 (13:50):
That's right, And I think from now to the end
of time, a skull should be known as a headbone.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
And that what it Isn't that old drybone song and
that what they call it?
Speaker 1 (14:00):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (14:00):
Is it? What connected to the headbone? That one?
Speaker 2 (14:02):
Yeah? Don't they say that?
Speaker 1 (14:04):
Oh I don't know, I think so, I don't remember
that part. That's like the part, oh well, what was
connected to it? I think the yeah, yeah probably and
the neck bone is connected to the skull.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
Right, And then everybody just stopped singing and goes yeah yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:25):
So, like you mentioned, there are no headstones there, so
you don't know who is who. We do know there
are some famouses there, like Robespierre, very famous statesman is there.
There's a painter named Simon Vouet. What how would you
say that?
Speaker 2 (14:43):
Hey, yeah, you're right, I was gonna say, but there'd
be an extra te I.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
Think, okay, and then this guy, I think we should
maybe do a show on at some point Charles, I
would say paralt as an American. But what is that Paral.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
Let's just go with your I say, Ossiery. So I
don't know why, asking me, well.
Speaker 1 (15:03):
You took French, I didn't. This guy was like the
granddaddy of the modern fairy tale. So he wrote Little
Red Riding Hood and Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty and Pussing
Boots and yeah, did you know about this guy?
Speaker 2 (15:14):
He put them all into a collection that he attributed
to Mother Goose. So I couldn't find definitively that he
invented Mother Goose, but he certainly he certainly made Mother
Goose a star.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
You're gonna go a long way, baby, stick with me.
Should we take a break or you got something else? I?
Speaker 2 (15:32):
Oh, well, we should probably say that. The reason why
there's not a lot of people that you've heard of
today because they stopped adding bones in eighteen sixty. They
said that's enough. Sure, this is a little nuts. Somebody
thought of this like almost one hundred years ago. They
were clearly insane. Paris went along with it. Let's just
pretend like it was okay, but just stop doing it
(15:54):
any further.
Speaker 3 (15:55):
Yeah, Jim, Jim Morrison can stay where he's at.
Speaker 2 (15:57):
I look to see if he ever went and visited
the cattle combs, and I could not find that he
ever did. So let's just say he didn't.
Speaker 3 (16:04):
Oh, just as a tourist.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
Oh interesting, I just was cured diary today.
Speaker 3 (16:11):
I went to the catacombs. I found my solace there.
Speaker 2 (16:15):
Right, it was awesome.
Speaker 1 (16:17):
All right, So now that break, and we're going to
come back and talk about all the weird stuff that's
happened there over the decade since.
Speaker 2 (16:44):
So, Chuck, there's been at the catacombs a lot of
bone deposits, bone stacking, that kind of stuff. But that
I think we said at the outset that takes up
just a really small amount of all of the tunnels
that are under that are under Paris. They've done some
other really fascinating stuff. Dozens and dozens of different interesting,
(17:08):
really creative, inventive things with these tunnels, right, hundreds of
different things.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
Yes, for sure. And I don't want to make you
feel self conscious. I was laughing at a dirty joke
that I couldn't sail loud.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
Oh, I want to know.
Speaker 3 (17:23):
I'll tell you later.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
Oh I know.
Speaker 3 (17:25):
Yeah. Yeah, So.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
A lot of i mean monks used to make chartruse
down there. Was that the birthplace of chartreuse. Yeah, in
the catacombs.
Speaker 2 (17:36):
Yeah. I don't remember mentioning that in our Marrow episode,
but we definitely talked about chartreuse.
Speaker 3 (17:42):
Yeah for sure. So that's one thing that happened back then.
Mushroom farming.
Speaker 1 (17:47):
There's been a great tradition of alcohol brewing actually over
the years, because I mean, one of the great things
about having an underground system like that is it's very
stable temperature wise. It's about sixty degrees fahrenheit always.
Speaker 2 (18:00):
Yeah, which is about fifteen and a half degree celsius
for our French friends.
Speaker 3 (18:04):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (18:05):
And so that means you can do a lot of
stuff from like storing wine to storing brewer beer exactly.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
One of the things that made it so appealing. In
addition to being able to keep it at like a
constant cave temperature, cave age to anything is pretty great. Typically,
this is also real estate in the heart of Paris. Yeah,
that you know, you can use some steps and go
up street side and all of a sudden you're right there,
your customers without having to pay the incredibly high price
(18:34):
of real estate in Paris top side.
Speaker 3 (18:37):
Oh good point, it's not.
Speaker 2 (18:40):
I've read it somewhere.
Speaker 1 (18:42):
Mushroom farming was another big deal, because one thing you
don't need a ton of for most mushrooms is light. Sometimes,
you know, you want them to fruit. You may be
able to manipulate light or something like that, but generally
mushroom growing can be done in very dark places. And
so starting in the nineteen century, actual mushroom farming and
(19:03):
not just like I'm gonna grow a few mushrooms like
they were producing about a thousand tons of catacom mushrooms
a year.
Speaker 2 (19:09):
Yeah. For some reason, I'm gonna have to ask you
never to use the word fruit and mushroom near each
other again. I find it troubling for some reason. Really, Yeah,
mushrooms fruiting is I don't like that at all.
Speaker 3 (19:24):
That's really funny.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
Yeah all right, but I'm serious though.
Speaker 3 (19:28):
No, I'll never do it.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
Okay, thank you, although you do owe me about seven
or eight mentions for that oysters too.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
Oh that's right, I feel better now, okay, Oh yeah,
that's right.
Speaker 2 (19:37):
You should tell everybody you're finally feeling good.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
Yeah, I'm finally feeling well. It was I had some
fruity mushrooms and everything's fine.
Speaker 2 (19:47):
Yeah, So let's see what else chuck Oh, I was
totally joking when I said there's been hundreds of creative uses.
There's been basically three, and two of them are technically
the same, which is brewing alcohol.
Speaker 3 (19:58):
At mushroom farming.
Speaker 2 (19:59):
And what's third, brewing alcohol and brewing alcohol depending on
which kind of alcohol, beer or scharchers. That's it.
Speaker 1 (20:08):
It's also been a good Heidi spot over the years,
depending on what's going on with the government. During the
French Revolution, revolutionaries hit out down there and were chased
down there. Sure, there was an alt right group in
the thirties called how would you pronounce that?
Speaker 2 (20:23):
Joshchaoul Lac of Ghoul.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
They not only hid down there, but would use it
as a way to get around and potentially break into
government buildings I guess from the bottom.
Speaker 2 (20:36):
Yeah. Until the fifties, and in some cases even decades
after that, there were a lot of buildings in Paris
who had doors, sometimes forgotten doors in their cellars or
basements that led directly to the catacombs or the underground
tunnels in Paris.
Speaker 3 (20:54):
Yeah, pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (20:54):
So it was kind of easy to get down there
for a very long time. It's actually really recent that
it's now very hard to get into the off limits parts.
But as we'll see, that doesn't actually deter anybody.
Speaker 1 (21:08):
No, of course not during World War Two. Obviously there's
going to be either Nazis down there or the French
Resistance might be down there.
Speaker 2 (21:17):
Did you just see them in like adjoining tunnels but
not knowing that the other one's there.
Speaker 3 (21:21):
Yeah, that sounds like a Tarantino thing.
Speaker 2 (21:24):
Yeah, it does.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
But what they're most famous for now is being able
to go down there with your your niece the movie star. Yeah,
it's been a tourist attraction since Napoleon said, you know,
it would be great. The year's eighteen oh nine. I
think it's high time we start letting people down there
to tour this pretty cool thing. And it's sort of
vacillated over the years. It used to be like, you know,
(21:46):
you could go down there once a month be you
were citizen of Paris. Only sometimes it was like quarterly.
Finally they said, you know what, let's just make money
on this, right and it's open what Tuesday to Sunday.
I guess it close on Monday, like a lot of
museums do. Ninety five to eight thirty. It'll cost you
(22:08):
thirty one euros these days, which is about the same
in dollars I think right right now.
Speaker 2 (22:14):
It's like point ninety six euros to the dollar I
think today.
Speaker 3 (22:17):
Okay, so pretty close, man, you really keep up with that.
Not bad.
Speaker 2 (22:22):
Thanks.
Speaker 3 (22:23):
Let me see how my eurostocks are doing. No.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
Actually, to tell you the truth, I was going to
translate the dollar that you could make off of a
cow in our our Tragedy of the Commons episode euros
and we never got around to it.
Speaker 3 (22:42):
That's funny.
Speaker 2 (22:42):
I can also tell you zero point eight pounds to
the dollar today as well. But a dollar one sixty
Australian dollars to the dollar.
Speaker 1 (22:51):
Well, I just came back from Mexico City, so I
basically just divide by twenty?
Speaker 2 (22:56):
Is it twenty now? It was like ten last time
we were there.
Speaker 3 (23:00):
Has it changed twenty?
Speaker 2 (23:01):
Has it was? Am I just wrong? It was twenty
back then.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
I don't know, but I think you divide by twenty
ish now. And but my friends that we were with
were like, I can't even think of it that way.
Speaker 3 (23:11):
I have to.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
I heard if all you have to do is like
drop a zero and then divide that in half, so
everyone has to.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
Jump on one and shout how much is this?
Speaker 3 (23:24):
Exactly?
Speaker 1 (23:26):
How long does the tour take? Josh, you went through it? Uh?
Speaker 2 (23:29):
An hour? I don't remember it taking an hour more
or less. I don't it was. It's weird because when
you're in the catacombs, you're out of time, like there
is no no light whatsoever reaching you. The only light
in there is electric and apparently that's only been around
since the seventies. Before that, they give you a candle
and take good luck, but it's it's the light that
(23:52):
isn't there is almost It makes it even eerier because
it's sodium light, so it's got a kind of an
orangish yellowish cast to it. Oh yeah, it's just a
weird place to be. So I believe that it's an hour,
but I have no recollection of how long it took.
Speaker 1 (24:07):
Okay, that sounds about right. You go down a big
spiral staircase. There's a lot of stair climate obviously, right.
Speaker 2 (24:13):
Yeah, it's yes, there is, Okay, like five hundred steps
or something. Like that. So, yeah, you go down like
a spiral staircase and there's multiple stairs.
Speaker 1 (24:23):
Yeah, so you're walking down, down, down Before you enter
you go, you go through something called the Port Mahone Corridor,
which has a replica of the Port Mahone Fortress. I
imagine that looks kind of cool, right, it does.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
I don't remember it, but I looked up a picture
and a little bit on that. The guy who carved
that was a not a hostage, an inmate at this
prison for years and redid it from memory, carved into
the stone.
Speaker 3 (24:57):
Wow, that's pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (24:58):
And he actually died there from a landslide or a
rock in or something like that. I can't remember what
it's called. While he was building some steps to get
to it.
Speaker 3 (25:11):
Oh geez.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
Yeah, he really he dedicated his life to that thing.
Speaker 3 (25:16):
That's very sad.
Speaker 2 (25:18):
Yeah, but appropriate for the catacombs. Yeah, if you think about.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
It, if you can just stay right there, if you die,
Like you mentioned, seventy two is when electricity came along.
There is something called Ariadne's thread, a black line to
ensure that you don't get lost. And I thought, well,
what a strange name that is.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
Oh, you looked it up too.
Speaker 1 (25:41):
Yeah, so Ariadney was a daughter of King Minus and
was associated with mazes and labyrinths. And while it is
a literal thing painted there, it's also you know, ties
back to Ariadne and the sort of like while she
was a person, it's also like a logic, like applying
(26:01):
logic to all possible routes of a maze to get
out is Ariadne as well?
Speaker 2 (26:06):
Yeah, I also saw that she helped theseus get out
of the labyrinth by leaving a thread for him to
follow back after he slew the minotaur.
Speaker 1 (26:16):
Yeah, what does this look like? Though I couldn't find
any pictures of this actually in the cateculmy.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
I don't remember it either. Okay, it's supposedly on the ceiling,
and I think it's just a black line.
Speaker 3 (26:28):
Okay, that's yeah, Boy, you don't remember much about.
Speaker 2 (26:30):
This, I don't. It's weird, Like I have pictures of it,
and I remember the thing with Mila, But like a
lot of these pictures that I went and looked at online,
I'm like, I don't remember seeing that at all. I
don't think I was drunk. I'm pretty sure I was
fairly sober. I think I just my episodic memories shot
the Holy.
Speaker 3 (26:51):
Heck you remember those boobs?
Speaker 2 (26:55):
I do. I guess they made more of an impression
on me than I remembered.
Speaker 3 (27:00):
You mentioned.
Speaker 1 (27:01):
Well, let's talk about some of these chambers. A lot
of them are like the coolest parts of the catacombs
are not open to the public and technically officially illegal
and off limits.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
So okay, but that might that may be why I
don't remember some.
Speaker 1 (27:16):
Of these, because they weren't the super cool once we're
not on the tour.
Speaker 2 (27:21):
I guess I'm just hey man, I'm just grasping at
straws here. Help me out.
Speaker 1 (27:25):
Well, I looked at some pictures of some of these.
The Laplage, which means the beach, is a really cool
room because it's got a sandy floor and they painted
like a beach scene on the wall. But it's it
looks I mean, all these places look like the like
where the Lost Boys might hang out.
Speaker 2 (27:40):
You know. That was one of the coolest things about
that movie, that backstory that the crazy, amazing rich hotel
slid into the ocean and now that's where they lived
and there were old chandeliers coming hanging.
Speaker 3 (27:54):
Out about that.
Speaker 1 (27:55):
Yeah, yeah, totally what it was super cool. Yeah, what else?
What other cool rooms are off?
Speaker 2 (28:00):
That's it.
Speaker 3 (28:03):
You're not gonna talk about Sala z or Z.
Speaker 2 (28:09):
I did not look that one up, but there are
let me, let me give you a couple other ones.
There was a group called the Mexican de la pearfores PAFA.
Let's just say it like that. They overtook one of
the caves beneath the Palais de Chillo and set up
a movie theater there with a bar and room for
(28:29):
twenty people to watch a movie. And I did not
find what movie they showed.
Speaker 1 (28:33):
Yeah, that is super cool.
Speaker 3 (28:35):
That was.
Speaker 1 (28:38):
A subset of a group called UX, short for Urban Experiment,
and they are these It's an artist collective in Paris,
founded in nineteen eighty one and by a group of
teenagers back then that like they'll do this cool stuff,
like they snuck into the Pantheon for months in a
row to restore a clock there, but like on the
(29:01):
on the down low.
Speaker 2 (29:02):
Yeah that I saw. That was a subgroup of UX
called the unter Gunther and they were the ones that
actually did the clock. UX is almost like an umbrella group.
Speaker 1 (29:12):
Yeah, just like the group that did the movie theater.
Speaker 2 (29:14):
They were a subgroup, right exactly. And then UX also
is like a acronym for urban explorer too, which these
people also are. So they kind of almost made a
play on slang, which is really something.
Speaker 3 (29:29):
Yeah, that is really something.
Speaker 1 (29:30):
But all of these people who sneak down there and
do stuff are known as cataphiles, and those are the people,
the urban adventurers who illegally find their way into the
catacombs to to party, to hang out, to show movies,
to have concerts and parties and like.
Speaker 3 (29:53):
All things. All kinds of things.
Speaker 1 (29:55):
Are going on down there over the decades, and it
seems to have re kicked off. I mean they've been
doing it since the eighteen hundreds. I think they had
a a Chopin, like forty five piece orchestra did a
Chopon concert down there.
Speaker 2 (30:10):
Yeah, they played Chopin's Funeral March and I was like, yeah,
I'm not familiar with that one. It's Darth Vader's.
Speaker 1 (30:16):
Theme, is it or does it just sound like it?
Speaker 2 (30:22):
It's Darth Vader's There's it's not possible that John Williams
just coincidentally came up with that. As to the theme, Yeah,
it's like an adaptation of the funeral march.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
Okay, well that's probably a well known thing, then.
Speaker 2 (30:35):
It's gotta be. I've never heard that before though now
I know everything there is about Star Wars. Just try me.
Speaker 1 (30:44):
In the seventies and eighties is when it seems like
the cataphiles really kind of you know, took roost down
there because it was a great place to go hide,
like the punk rock movement kind of moved downstairs, underground
literally underground.
Speaker 2 (30:59):
Hey.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
Then they've tried to keep people out over the years,
but like you said, people are going to find a
way in if they want to.
Speaker 2 (31:03):
That's right. And I say, we take another break and
we'll come back and find out. Do people find their
way in if they want to after this, let's do it.
Speaker 1 (31:37):
So, Yeah, people do find their way in, like I said,
And they've been doing that a lot since the beginning.
And you know, besides partying and doing drugs, like there
are all kinds of like cool works of art, the
murals painted on some walls, obviously, all kinds of graffiti.
Sometimes they leave messages and leaflets and things for each
other to find and try to avoid. The cataflix, which
(32:01):
is literally translated as catach.
Speaker 2 (32:03):
Cops Yeah, this is a special detachment of the Gendarmes
that their whole thing is catching people down in the tunnels.
And from what I read that, if you're a true cataphile,
and I guess there was an article in the I
think twenty fifteen or something like that that estimated there's
around one hundred genuine cataphiles, the cataflicks are probably going
(32:29):
to leave you alone at the very least, just maybe
give you a warning or something like that. If you're
a tourist in the sense of like the fight club
support group tourists, then you're probably going to get that
sixty euro fine because you really, as far as the
cataflics are concerned, you have no business being down there.
It's dangerous. You got no respect for tradition, like the
(32:52):
actual cataphiles too. And something else I read, Chuck, you're
actually trespassing a private property because if you buy a
piece of real estate in Paris, your ownership extends to
whatever is below it in the underground. Wow, that sounds
kind of cool until your house caves in and the
city's like it's your property top to bottom. So good
(33:15):
luck with that.
Speaker 1 (33:16):
Yeah, wow, I didn't know that that's pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (33:19):
And they actually at city hall make that sound when
you come in to ask them for help.
Speaker 3 (33:24):
You know, Parisians pioneered the fart noise.
Speaker 1 (33:27):
Yeah, the raspberry, the the spine. That's sixty euros you mentioned,
I saw sixty five. I mean that's just like double
the cost of legal entry. So it's it's not the
biggest fine.
Speaker 2 (33:38):
No, no, no, And it kind of does kind of
give you a sense that it's not considered like the
the crime of the century in Paris. But at the
same time there's a special police attachment to catch people
doing that, so there's almost mixed messages with that.
Speaker 1 (33:55):
Yeah, for sure, the IGC, that inspection group with a
French name, still maintains it and they've been doing so
since seventeen seventy seven, and there are still collapses here
and there, but it is mainly short up. Oh. This
other thing I thought was fun that the ways that
people have found their way in. When they close off
(34:15):
an area, sometimes the cataphiles will go in there and
like reopen it and make a way to get in,
and they're called I don't know how you would say
it in French, but it translates as cat flaps like
a cat door.
Speaker 3 (34:27):
Kind of cool.
Speaker 2 (34:27):
Shatty ears, shatty airs shot is chat that's cat and
e airs is flaps. I guess.
Speaker 1 (34:36):
Yeah. It's been in a bunch of movies and stuff too, right.
Speaker 2 (34:40):
Yeah. One of the most famous uses of the Paris
Underground came in The Phantom of the Opera. And I'm
not sure if it was in the original novel, although
it probably was, but I certainly know that in the
stage play or the musical, that's where the Phantom lives.
But more of the point, there's suppose like an underground
(35:01):
lake there that the Phantom like ros Is gondola on. Right. Cool,
There actually is an underground reservoir under the Paris Opera House.
It's not an urban legend that guesst On throw made up.
It was or Andrew Lloyd Webber, one of the two
that when they were building the Opera House, to keep
the foundation from just filling up with water over and
(35:23):
over again while they were building it, they built a
reservoir to impound the water in, and so it's like
a twelve feet deep by almost I think like sixty
yards sixty meters long. Hey, little reservoir that you could
conceivably sale of gondola on if you were the kind
of person to live underground.
Speaker 1 (35:43):
Do you know if the water is it continually filling up?
Speaker 2 (35:48):
I don't know. Give me a break, man.
Speaker 1 (35:53):
Oh what about the average?
Speaker 2 (35:56):
Right? But I mean so it definitely has to be
constantly replace because they had to build this reservoir, yeah,
to hold the water that was always trickling in. But yeah,
it makes sense. Why why wouldn't it overflow once in
a while.
Speaker 3 (36:08):
I don't know that shouldn't a beast?
Speaker 2 (36:10):
I don't know, you're ruined the story.
Speaker 1 (36:12):
But gamers might recognize the catacombs from Assassin's Creed unity
pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (36:19):
I was looking at screenshots of that. It's pretty neat.
Did you play that?
Speaker 3 (36:22):
Yeah? No, I didn't play that.
Speaker 1 (36:23):
Do you play any of them Assassin's Creeds?
Speaker 3 (36:26):
No?
Speaker 2 (36:27):
Do you have something scream?
Speaker 3 (36:29):
No? I just you know, my gaming is limited.
Speaker 2 (36:32):
I see what's your latest game.
Speaker 1 (36:35):
I'm playing a horror game right now called Alan Wake two.
It's the second Alan Wake and I'd never played a
horror game before, and it is pretty scary.
Speaker 2 (36:46):
So it's genuinely scary. Yeah, that's awesome.
Speaker 1 (36:50):
Yeah, Like when you're playing this game and you know,
they look so good now and there's so realistic. So
you're creeping around with a flashlight in these rooms and
you hear noises and see things in it's like it's
super creepy.
Speaker 2 (37:01):
Are they like jump scares or do they just create
like a sense of ongoing dread? Both, Wow, that's master.
Speaker 1 (37:07):
Definitely ongoing dread. And then when the jump scare happens,
when when a bad person comes out.
Speaker 3 (37:11):
It's just yeah, it's it's scares, big grown.
Speaker 2 (37:15):
Boy, chucky, fantastic.
Speaker 3 (37:17):
Alan Wake to everybody, like.
Speaker 2 (37:19):
Alan Wake, like somebody's name, yeah, the second or the sequel?
Speaker 1 (37:25):
The sequel, Okay, it would be Alan Wake Junior. I
think problem, I guess, so don't call me junior.
Speaker 2 (37:31):
Henry Ford the second was not a junior.
Speaker 3 (37:34):
Yeah, because who wants to be called junior?
Speaker 2 (37:36):
I don't know. I'd go with JR. If I was
a junior. Oh, totally call me JR. What does it
stand for? Stands for junior?
Speaker 1 (37:47):
Uh, here's one cool thing, and this guy might be
worth a podcast on his own. But there was a
photographer as he went by the name Nadar. I guess
in a dar And this is in the eighteenth sixties.
His real name is.
Speaker 3 (38:03):
Felix. I guess how would you pronounce that last name?
Speaker 2 (38:06):
Oh to.
Speaker 3 (38:08):
Sean.
Speaker 1 (38:09):
He was a very accomplished dude, sort of the pioneer
of the medium. This is early photography and the guy
in Paris photography wise at the time. But he invented
a battery operated light basically and is one of the
first people ever in the history of photography to use
artificial light to take a picture. And over the course
of three months starting in eighteen sixty one, he went
(38:31):
down into the catacombs with you know, eighteen minutes per exposure. Yeah,
took a lot of pictures of the catacombs and they
are super cool and creepy pictures from eighteen sixty one.
Speaker 2 (38:44):
They are creepy. What's cool is because of that eighteen
minute exposure time, any of the photographs of workers working
in the catacombs are actually dummies as stand ins.
Speaker 3 (38:55):
Ah, that makes sense.
Speaker 2 (38:56):
It makes it even a little creepier too, if you
ask me.
Speaker 3 (39:00):
Yeah, and those headmones weren't moving, so they're fine.
Speaker 2 (39:02):
I've got I have one more thing for you about
dummies in underground places. There's a awesome one of the
great I'm sure. I've talked about before. One of the
greatest tourist attractions I've ever been to in my life
was in Budapest. There's something called the Hospital in the Rock,
and I think it was maybe World War two, maybe
Cold War, but it was a hospital that they dug
(39:23):
out of a cave system on a like a stone
hill in Budapest. Wow, And it's a hospital. It's got
like that white, creepy subway tile, like there's gurneys everywhere still,
and it was like, this is a emergency hospital in
case the town ever got bombed or whatever. And they
have dummies everywhere, mannequins, and that just just chef's kisses
(39:47):
it for me, Like it makes it so scary, even
though they're not trying to make it scary. Yeah, it
just really is. I think if you have dummies in
your tourist attraction, you've just taken it to another level.
Like put dummies in your touris. Don't just leave it
for people use their dumb imaginations, Like give them some
(40:08):
dummies dressed up and it'll really make it. You'll you'll
be rolling in the dough after that. I think.
Speaker 1 (40:14):
Yeah, well, the very least is gonna up the creep
factor because that just dead, dead eyed expression of a dummies.
Speaker 2 (40:20):
Right. Great, But if you ever go to Budapest, you
have to go to the hospital in the rock. It's amazing.
Speaker 1 (40:26):
I'm gonna have to ask Emily. You know she took
a solo trip there a couple of years ago. I
need to see if she went there.
Speaker 2 (40:31):
I think I asked you if she did or not,
And I don't know if she did.
Speaker 3 (40:35):
But probably not because she would have. I feel like
I would have remembered her telling you.
Speaker 2 (40:38):
It definitely seems like it would have been up her
alley though, for sure.
Speaker 1 (40:42):
Yeah, She's like, were their paintings there then?
Speaker 3 (40:44):
I didn't know.
Speaker 2 (40:46):
The dummies their faces were?
Speaker 1 (40:48):
Oh that's true.
Speaker 3 (40:50):
What about crime?
Speaker 1 (40:51):
There's been a lot of crime there over the years, because,
like you said, that's a good place to pop underground
and then pop up into somebody's like expensive wine cellar
or something.
Speaker 2 (41:01):
Yeah. Apparently in twenty seventeen some thieves stole over a
quarter of a million dollars worth of wine that was
cooling in a cave I guess belong to some winery.
Speaker 3 (41:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (41:14):
Cool.
Speaker 1 (41:16):
People have been stealing bones down there since. There have
been bones down there, highly illegal.
Speaker 2 (41:21):
Yeah, you don't want to do that, I mean, just
not just for the illegality, that's really disrespectful.
Speaker 3 (41:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (41:26):
I think that a lot of them back in the
day were to sell to sort of like kidaber Selta
medical students, like, hey, here's a headbone for however many francs.
Speaker 2 (41:37):
Right, shekels, Yeah, what about ghosts, chuck.
Speaker 1 (41:43):
Yeah, of course there's going to be ghosts down there.
And there's a couple of more well known than others.
I think the most well known is a guy named
Philibert Aspare.
Speaker 2 (41:55):
Yeah. You can put a little little emphasis on the
tea at the end.
Speaker 1 (41:58):
There as sperit.
Speaker 2 (42:00):
So maybe that's a little too much. But somewhere in
between those two.
Speaker 1 (42:03):
I know I'm wrong, But when it comes to French,
I just want to drop the last letter of everything.
Speaker 4 (42:07):
Well, they do that a lot, get you exactly exactly Anyway,
He worked at a military hospital in the late eighteenth
century and apparently in seventeen ninety three got lost in
the catacombs.
Speaker 1 (42:22):
With his own loan candle and never found his way out.
And just like like I said, the convenient thing about
dying down there is you just stay there and apparently
if you bring a candle there, you hear his voice
just before the candle goes out.
Speaker 2 (42:37):
He says, welcomin bienviny.
Speaker 1 (42:44):
Were you creeped out down there? Was it just like, oh,
this is a cool thing.
Speaker 2 (42:47):
It was not at all creepy. It's not presented to
be creepy either. It's just it is what it is, right,
a bunch of bones. Yeah, I was not at all
creeped out.
Speaker 3 (43:00):
Yeah, I gotta go check it out next time.
Speaker 1 (43:03):
Did you look at that video, by the way, the
one that's like highly likely faked.
Speaker 2 (43:08):
Yeah, I didn't. I wasn't moved by it at all.
Speaker 1 (43:10):
Were you No, there's this videotape that I think it
was like twenty seventeen that circulated that was like, you know,
it's like a blair witch thing, like is it real?
Speaker 3 (43:21):
Is it not?
Speaker 1 (43:21):
It was a guy walking through the catacombs and apparently
gets lost and starts to freak out and run and
hear sounds and then the last shot you see is
like the camera falling to the ground into like a puddle,
And some people say it's real, some people say it's not.
Speaker 2 (43:36):
It.
Speaker 3 (43:36):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (43:36):
It feels like it's probably faked, but I wasn't like,
oh my god, it was kind of not that interesting.
Speaker 2 (43:41):
Yeah, agreed, it was like a dull, two sentence horror story.
Speaker 3 (43:46):
Yeah agreed.
Speaker 2 (43:48):
You got anything else about the catacombs?
Speaker 3 (43:51):
Nope, it's on the list.
Speaker 2 (43:52):
Yep, you should go. You'll enjoy it, and don't forget
the hospital in the Rock too.
Speaker 3 (43:56):
Right.
Speaker 2 (43:57):
Since Chuck said write, of course, that means it's time
for a listener.
Speaker 1 (43:59):
May here's a correction to our Gonk Show episode. Hey guys,
there was one big error in this.
Speaker 2 (44:08):
Oh I know what she says is an omission.
Speaker 3 (44:12):
No, something we got wrong. What was our omission?
Speaker 2 (44:15):
Jane Jane the Dancing Machine?
Speaker 1 (44:17):
Oh you believe we.
Speaker 2 (44:18):
Didn't mention Jane Jane the Dancing Machine in the entire episode.
Speaker 1 (44:23):
I thought we had, but apparently we didn't. But yeah,
I think big shout out to Gene Jen a legend
of that show.
Speaker 2 (44:29):
I think both of us thought that we had, because
Olivia clearly included him in the articles in there. I
think we just passed over him and didn't didn't talk
about him. It's just just sad.
Speaker 1 (44:40):
Yeah, no disrespect intended. We both loved Jean Jean. How
do you not exactly, so this was an error. Though
Chuck Barris, guys, did not invent syndication, it has been
around in television forever, with some notable nineteen fifty shows
such as Sea Hunting and Life with Elizabeth. Nor was
the Parent Game the first indicated game show, or even
(45:01):
Chuck's first syndicated show. First indicated game shows came in
nineteen sixty five Everything's Relative and PDQ and Chuck Barris's
first four A in nineteen sixty nine the Game Game.
Initially that was to give local stations some color options,
since old sitcoms wouldn't be in color, but syndication exploded
in nineteen seventy two because FCC gave the seven point
(45:23):
thirty time slot back to the local stations, and for
those stations it was cheaper to buy a game show
than make than to make local content. I know this, guys,
because I'm a bit of a semi pro TV historian.
Oh yeah, yeah, with an emphastest on game shows in particular.
So I feel a duty when something is broadly mistated
as that was, I have to try and correct the record.
(45:45):
I had hoped you use Gong this book as one
of your sources as it was written by a real
life TV historian named Adam Nedef, who I've done some.
Speaker 3 (45:56):
Research for in the past.
Speaker 1 (45:58):
I hope you're enjoying The snow today came a little
while ago, but that is from Mike Berger in Livonia, Michigan.
And Mike, you gotta hang on to your email and
we might hitch up if we ever need any insight
on TV history.
Speaker 2 (46:11):
Yeah, thanks a lot, Mike. I mean, criticism from Caesar.
That's pretty awesome, totally. Well, if you want to be
like Mike and just completely devastate us in something we
said and just show how utterly wrong we were, we'd
love to hear that stuff, especially if you're an historian,
semi pro or otherwise. You can send us an email
to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (46:37):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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