Last week I went to Paris. While in Paris I got to go on a tour in the Catacombs, also known as the maze of bones. The Catacombs is a series of tunnels under Paris. The tunnels were originally created for mining, but eventually due to lack of support the tunnels started collapsing, making Paris collapse as well. The first street to collapse name translates to hell in English. The reason there are bones there is because they ran out of space to bury dead bodies at churches. 

          The tunnels are 300 kilometers, though only about 2 kilometers are legally accessible. Cataphiles are people who sneak into the illegal parts of the Catacombs. There’s many different groups of Cataphiles. There’s a group who sneaks into the Catacombs to clean. There are people who sneak into the Catacombs party. There was one story of Cataphiles that I found really cool. The police force uses the Catacombs for training and one day two cops split off from the group and heard dogs barking. They decided to go investigate and found a whole cinema. There was a spot to buy tickets, a spot to buy drinks, and the movie area. There was even a device they thought at the time to be a bomb, but turned out to be a couscous maker. The two officers went to get the others, but by the time they got back the entire area was clean. The only thing there was a note which translates to Don’t Search. 

          Another thing our tour guide told us about was several years ago Airbnb offered a chance to stay overnight in the catacombs. They had a big feast, then read spooky stories. They went to bed, though some people ended up leaving. The interesting thing is no one actually knows what happened during it. There are no interviews with the people involved. There are articles about it beforehand, but none after. Those were some cool facts my tour guide told me during the tour.