The Catacombs of Paris

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Speaker 1 Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 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 Paris,

Speaker 2 city of lights, a city too busy to sleep because it eats big apples.

Speaker 2 In this episode of Stuff You Should Know.

Speaker 4 That's right.

Speaker 4 Big thanks to Anna for the contribution here on the Paris Catacombs.

Speaker 4 Have you ever toured the Paris Catacombs?

Speaker 2 Yes, I have. Have you?

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 So if and when I ever get back to Paris, it's on the list.

Speaker 2 I recommend it. Have you ever been to the Moulin Rouge?

Speaker 4 Uh, yes.

Speaker 2 Okay. So the Moulin Rouge is generally topless dance numbers, typically, right? Yeah.

Speaker 2 Did you notice that when you were at the Moulin Rouge, boobs just, there were so many boobs everywhere that they just totally lost all context and meaning?

Speaker 4 Yeah. 12-year-old Chuck was like, I don't understand what's happening.

Speaker 2 Right. But I'll bet even 12-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 mean anything anymore.

Speaker 2 The catacombs are the Moulin Rouge of human bones.

Speaker 4 Oh, so many skulls that it's just like, whatever, there's another skull. Yeah.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 But it's still worth going to just because it's so bizarre.

Speaker 2 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 them like that.

Speaker 4 So, the JSAT, the Josh SAT, would be Moulin Rouge is to boobs as the Paris Catacombs is to blank.

Speaker 2 Human bones. Yeah, that'd be the right answer.

Speaker 4 Choice A.

Speaker 2 What would be the other choices? Oh, man.

Speaker 4 I don't know. I haven't taken a test like that in so long.
I'd be fun to take the SAT SAT again.

Speaker 2 Would it?

Speaker 4 I think so. Okay.

Speaker 2 Sure. How long does that take? I don't know, but it's changed since we were there.
For hours. I remember it taking hours.
It used to actually test IQ, and now it just tests like retention.

Speaker 4 Oh, well, I'm screwed.

Speaker 2 So here's the other answers, Chuck. Cod fishing.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Mod Podge.

Speaker 4 And there's got to be one close one.

Speaker 2 Like

Speaker 4 Gravesite or something.

Speaker 2 Okay, there you go.

Speaker 4 And you'd be like, no.

Speaker 2 No, grave wax. Do you remember that from back in the day?

Speaker 4 Is that the human goop that seeps out?

Speaker 2 Mm-hmm.

Speaker 4 That you can make soap out of?

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Pretty awesome.

Speaker 2 All right.

Speaker 4 That's a that's a great JSAT. We should have our own stuff you should know SAT.
That'd be a fun thing to design.

Speaker 2 I have, it would be fun. I have one more story about the catacombs.

Speaker 4 Let's hear it.

Speaker 2 So when we went, I've only been once, and it was a few years back, but we went with

Speaker 2 my brother-in-law and sister-in-law and our niece a very famous meela who's been into the movies um she played young mary in the movie mary that came out on netflix this past christmas did you know that no and you didn't uh you didn't shout that one out so i'm glad you are well we were off so i didn't get a chance to but it's it's definitely worth watching it's like

Speaker 2 Pretty religious movie. I mean, it's about Mary, the mother.
Oh, Mary, Mary. Yeah, yeah, that Mary.
You're like, ah, Mary, Mary, sure. sure.

Speaker 2 And it is fascinating. Like, my actually, my brother-in-law also was a producer on it, too.

Speaker 2 And they, it has like action, it has like, it's a thriller, it has like a really evil villain played by Anthony Hopkins.

Speaker 2 Like, it's just a really good movie that you'll watch from beginning to end and be like, this is pretty good.

Speaker 4 I'll have to check it out. And I'm also going to forgive you for when I said Mary Mary for not saying.

Speaker 2 Why are you bugging? thank you

Speaker 2 you passed you're back at the good phrase well anyway oh back to my story so little Mila she must have been five-ish at the time

Speaker 2 she went to the catacombs with us right so she's walking around this ossiary with bones and human skulls everywhere and um you me or i asked her like are you are you scared right now and she said i would be

Speaker 2 boobs right she right she said i would be if these were real

Speaker 2 we're like we just 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.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Wow, that's adorable. It was very adorable.

Speaker 2 What's funny is the irony of the whole thing is this is the same kid at about the same age who was scared to death on the movie ride at Disney Hollywood Studios, but is standing there in an ossiary with millions of bones, human bones and skulls, and is like, meh.

Speaker 4 Yeah, that's pretty funny.

Speaker 2 Yeah. So those are all my stories about the catacombs.
I figure we should probably start talking about it.

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 more than six million Parisians

Speaker 4 are there,

Speaker 4 you know, forever.

Speaker 4 What's crazy? Unless they decide to move them again.

Speaker 2 Right. Right.
But and 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 4 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 4 uh so if you go back in time um let's say 45 million years during the lutesian period uh there was an erosion event that caused a lot of what became to be known as lutesian uh or paris rock or paris limestone or parisian limestone deposited there

Speaker 4 and that is

Speaker 4 If you go to Paris and you see everything as that 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.

Speaker 4 And the reason we're starting with this is because the mining of that lutetian limestone

Speaker 4 is where these tunnels started. About 2,000 years ago on the banks of the rivers there, they had these quarries where they would mine the heck out of this stuff.

Speaker 4 And before you know it, Paris is sitting on top of a vast network of tunnels.

Speaker 2 Yeah, something like 32 square kilometers of tunnels, which to put in

Speaker 2 American terms is like a lot of bananas. Yes.
10 times the size of Central Park, apparently, is underneath Paris. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I think it's 300 kilometers of tunnels. Isn't that just nuts? It's a lot.
But I mean, if you think about it, if you mine an area, a small, relatively small area for a couple thousand years,

Speaker 2 you're going to make some headway eventually. And that's what they did.
The key is this, Chuck.

Speaker 2 originally these um quarries were sensibly well outside of the city of paris yeah but we're talking about a very very tiny original city 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 the city built itself over abandoned mines that people had just plumb forgotten about.

Speaker 4 That's right. And that, you know, that presents a couple of very big problems.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And there were numerous incidents of

Speaker 4 sinkholes, of buildings collapsing into themselves, of all kinds of tragedies. happening over the years throughout the history of Paris because it was built on

Speaker 4 hollow ground in a lot of places. Right.

Speaker 2 That's why another very famous nickname for paris is the florida of europe right

Speaker 4 i'm sure they love that uh the other big problem is that parisians used to love burying themselves in paris like that you wanted to be laid to rest in the city where you grew up and lived your life at your church typically too Yeah, like very, very locally.

Speaker 4 And by the 18th century, late 18th century,

Speaker 4 this was a big, big problem. There were too many bodies.

Speaker 4 The disease was being spread so this led to a couple of things i think in the 1730s there was an actual uh parliamentary uh commission study about how disease uh from these you know dead people everywhere in paris was hurting the the city and then it took about 40 years uh eventually in 1777 king louis the what is that 16th

Speaker 4 um created the igc uh you want to pronounce that Oh, yes, please.

Speaker 2 The Inspection Générale des Carrières.

Speaker 4 And what were they charged with?

Speaker 2 So carriers is French for careers, and another word for career is a path or tunnel.

Speaker 2 So this was the commission overseeing mines and mine shafts in Paris.

Speaker 4 Right. So basically, hey, we got this report 40 years ago that no one's acted on.
So we need to really start looking into this stuff. And Chief Inspector,

Speaker 4 can you pronounce his name?

Speaker 2 Charles Axel F. Guillamote.

Speaker 4 He came along as the Chief Inspector and said, all right, you know what? We're going to shore up these mines and make sure they're not going to keep collapsing.

Speaker 4 And also, we're going to start moving bodies out of here. We got a body problem.
Not a three-body problem. We have a millions body problem.

Speaker 4 And we're going to start moving bodies out of, let's start with the oldest one, the Holy Innocence Cemetery, which has been around since 1186.

Speaker 4 Let's start moving things out of here and from other cemeteries, close these things down and start moving them into these old mine shafts.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and like you said, there was a body problem.

Speaker 2 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 the cemeteries.

Speaker 2 But structurally speaking also, so like I guess at the time in France, France, they would bury you with a bunch of other people who died at the same time in a group pit, let you decompose.

Speaker 2 After five years, they would bury you up and then they would just deposit your bones in an ossiary.

Speaker 2 They just, they were like, here's a bunch of bones. Let's move on to the next group of people and bury them for five years.

Speaker 2 So many people's bones built up over the years that neighborhoods built near this, their like cellars would collapse in and bones would just come out because of the pressure put on these huge piles of bones that were building up.

Speaker 2 So there was a huge problem with it. But I also read that that was a

Speaker 2 bit of like a cover story. That they were really interested, the government of Paris was interested in reclaiming some really great real estate now.

Speaker 2 And so they did this, whether people liked it or not.

Speaker 2 And they actually went into these cemeteries and moved the bones under the cover of night.

Speaker 4 That's right.

Speaker 2 To

Speaker 4 the tunnels. And people are like, you're doing what?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 4 And they said, don't worry about it. Just go back to sleep.

Speaker 4 And from 1785 to 1787, over a couple of years, they, not only from Holy Innocence, but all the nearby cemeteries, they moved these bodies.

Speaker 4 In April of 1786, the catacombs were consecrated officially.

Speaker 4 It was called the Paris Ossuary at first, but catacombs sounds creepier, I guess.

Speaker 2 Hey, have I been saying ossiary?

Speaker 4 I think so.

Speaker 2 Oh, man. Thank you for gently correcting me.

Speaker 4 Well, I wasn't sure how it was pronounced, to be honest.

Speaker 2 I sound like a six-year-old kid trying to pronounce it.

Speaker 4 So catacombs took over as the sort of, you know, the go-to word. And

Speaker 4 they kind of just... dumped him in there for a while until in 1810 uh there was a new quarry inspector who said, Maybe we can have a little fun with this.

Speaker 2 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 bones into the mine shaft, and they would just pile up where they fell at the bottom of the mine shaft.

Speaker 2 That's how they were transferred. And like you said, finally, one of the inspectors, a quarry inspector named Louis Etienne Haricard de Turi, Pretty sure I said that right.
Nice.

Speaker 2 He said, like you said, let's have some fun. So he got busy with his quarrymen

Speaker 2 stacking bones into these now famous configurations of tibias and fibias and finger bones and thigh bones and neck bones and then head bones finally. all of them with their eye sockets facing out.

Speaker 2 They built walls throughout the whole, these whole catacombs where the that had been designated an ossiary or in French an ossuary.

Speaker 4 That's right. And I think from now to the end of time, a skull should be known as a headbone.

Speaker 2 Isn't that what it is? In that old dry bone song? Isn't that what they call it?

Speaker 4 Oh, is it what? Connected to the headbone?

Speaker 2 Yeah, don't they say that?

Speaker 4 Oh, I don't know.

Speaker 2 I think so. I don't remember that part.
That's like the part.

Speaker 4 Oh, well.

Speaker 4 What was connected to it?

Speaker 2 I think the neckbone, yeah.

Speaker 4 Yeah, probably so.

Speaker 4 And the neckbone's connected to the skull.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 2 And then everybody just stops singing and goes home.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 4 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, a very famous statesman, is there.

Speaker 4 There's a painter named Simon Vouet.

Speaker 2 Probably.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 4 What? How would you say that?

Speaker 2 A, yeah, you're right. I was going to say et, but there'd be an extra TE, I think.
Oh, okay.

Speaker 4 And then this guy, I think we should maybe do a show on at some point. Charles, I would say Peralt as an American, but what is that, Peral?

Speaker 2 Let's just go with your.

Speaker 2 I say Ossieri, so I don't know why you're asking me.

Speaker 4 Well, you took French. I didn't.
This guy was like the granddaddy of the modern fairy tale. So

Speaker 4 he wrote Little Red Riding Hood and Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty and Puss in Boots. And

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 he certainly made Mother Goose a star.

Speaker 4 You're going to go a long way, baby. Stick with me.

Speaker 4 Should we take a break or you got something else?

Speaker 2 Oh, well, we should probably say that the reason why there's not a lot of people that you've heard of today is because they stopped adding bones in 1860. They said, that's enough.

Speaker 2 This is a little nuts. Somebody thought of this almost 100 years ago.
They were clearly insane. Paris went along with it.
Let's just pretend like it was okay, but just stop doing it any further.

Speaker 4 Yeah, Jim Morrison can stay where he's at.

Speaker 2 I looked to see if he ever went and visited the catacombs, and I could not find that he ever did. So let's just say he didn't.

Speaker 4 Oh, just as a tourist?

Speaker 2 Mm-hmm.

Speaker 2 Oh, interesting.

Speaker 2 I just was curious.

Speaker 4 Today I went to the catacombs. I found my solace there.

Speaker 2 Right. It was awesome.

Speaker 4 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.

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Speaker 2 So, Chuck, there's been at the catacombs a lot of bone deposits, bone stacking, that kind of stuff.

Speaker 2 But that, I think we said at the outset, that takes up just a really small amount of all of the tunnels that

Speaker 2 are under Paris. They've done some other really fascinating stuff.
Dozens and dozens of different interesting,

Speaker 2 really creative, inventive things with these tunnels, right? Hundreds of different things.

Speaker 4 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 say out loud.

Speaker 2 Oh, I want to know.

Speaker 2 I'll tell you later. Oh, I know.

Speaker 4 Yeah, yeah. So

Speaker 4 a lot of, I mean, monks used to make chartreuse down there.

Speaker 4 Was that the birthplace of chartreuse?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 4 In the catacombs. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I don't remember mentioning that in our Amero episode, but we definitely talked about chartreuse.

Speaker 4 Yeah, for sure. So that's one thing that happened back then.

Speaker 4 Mushroom farming, there's been a great tradition of alcohol brewing actually over the years

Speaker 4 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 60 degrees Fahrenheit always.

Speaker 2 Yeah, which is about 15 and a half degrees Celsius for our French friends.

Speaker 4 That's right. And so that means you can do a lot of stuff from like storing wine to

Speaker 2 brewing beer. Exactly.
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.

Speaker 2 This is also real estate in the heart of Paris

Speaker 2 that you can use some steps and go up street side and all of a sudden you're right there at your customers without having to pay the incredibly high price of real estate in Paris topside.

Speaker 2 Oh, good point. It's not onside Paris.

Speaker 2 I've read it somewhere.

Speaker 4 Mushroom farming was another big deal because one thing you don't need a ton of for most mushrooms is light.

Speaker 4 Sometimes, you know, if 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.

Speaker 4 And so starting in the 19th century, actual mushroom farming and not just like, I'm going to grow a few mushrooms. Like they were producing about a thousand tons of catacomb mushrooms a year.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 For some reason, I'm going to 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.

Speaker 2 Mushrooms fruiting is, I don't like that at all. That's really funny.
Yeah. All right.
But I'm serious, though.

Speaker 4 No, I'll never do it. Okay, thank you.

Speaker 2 Although you do owe me about seven or eight mentions for that oyster stew.

Speaker 4 Oh, that's all right. I feel better now.

Speaker 2 Oh, good. Oh, yeah, that's right.
You should tell everybody you're finally feeling good.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I'm finally feeling well. It was had some fruity mushrooms and everything's fine.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 So let's see. What else, Chuck? Oh, I was totally joking when I said there's been hundreds of creative uses.

Speaker 2 There's been basically three, and two of them are technically the same, which is brewing alcohol.

Speaker 4 And mushroom farming, and what's the third?

Speaker 2 Brewing alcohol and brewing alcohol, depending on which kind of alcohol, beer or chartreuse. That's it.

Speaker 4 It's also been a good hidey spot over the years, depending on what's going on with the government. During the French Revolution,

Speaker 4 revolutionaries hid out down there and were chased down there. Sure.
There was an alt-right group in the 30s called,

Speaker 4 how would you pronounce that, Josh?

Speaker 2 La Cagoul.

Speaker 4 La Cagoul,

Speaker 4 they

Speaker 4 not only hid down there, but would use it as a way to get around and potentially break into government buildings, I guess, from you know, from the bottom.

Speaker 2 Yeah, until the 50s 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 4 Yeah, pretty cool.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 But as we'll see, that doesn't actually deter anybody.

Speaker 4 No, of course not.

Speaker 4 During World War II, obviously, there's going to be either Nazis down there or the French resistance might be down there.

Speaker 2 Can't you just see them in like adjoining tunnels, but not knowing that the other one's there?

Speaker 4 Yeah, that sounds like a Tarantino thing.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it does.

Speaker 4 But what they're most famous for now is being able to go down there with your niece, the movie star.

Speaker 4 It's been a tourist attraction since Napoleon said, you know what would be great? The year is 1809. I think it's high time we start letting people down there to tour this pretty cool thing.

Speaker 4 And it's sort of vacillated over the years. It used to be like, you know, you could go down there once a month if you were a citizen of Paris only.
Sometimes it was like quarterly.

Speaker 4 Finally,

Speaker 4 they said,

Speaker 4 you know what, let's just make money on this. Right.
And it's open, what,

Speaker 4 Tuesday to Sunday. I guess they close on Monday like a lot of museums do.

Speaker 4 9.45 to 8.30.

Speaker 4 It'll cost you 31 euros these days, which is about the same in dollars i think right right now it's like 0.96 euros to the dollar i think today okay so pretty close uh man you really keep up with that not bad

Speaker 2 thanks

Speaker 2 let me see how my uh my euro stocks are doing no actually to tell you the truth i was um going to translate the dollar that you could make off of a cow in our

Speaker 2 our tragedy of the commons episode euros and stuff

Speaker 2 but we never got around to it that's funny I can also tell you it's 0.8 pounds to the dollar today as well. But a dollar, 160 Australian dollars to the dollar.

Speaker 4 Well, I just came back from Mexico City, so I basically just divide by 20.

Speaker 2 Is it 20 now? I thought it was like 10 last time we were there.

Speaker 2 Has it changed or

Speaker 2 am I just wrong? It was 20 back then? Like last time? Oh, I don't know.

Speaker 4 But I think you divide by 20-ish now.

Speaker 4 But my friends that we were with are like, I can't even think of it that way. I have to, I heard if you all you have to do is like drop a zero and then divide that in half.

Speaker 4 So everyone has their own way on one foot

Speaker 2 and shout, how much is this?

Speaker 2 Exactly.

Speaker 4 How long does the tour take, Josh? You went through it?

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 light whatsoever reaching you. The only light in there is electric.
And apparently that's only been around since the 70s. Before that, they gave you a candle and said, good luck.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 the light that is in there is almost, it makes it even eerier because it's sodium light. So it's got kind of an orangish-yellowish cast to it.
Oh, yeah. It's just a weird place to be.

Speaker 2 So I believe that it's an hour, but I have no recollection of how long it took.

Speaker 4 Okay, that sounds about right.

Speaker 4 You go down a big spiral staircase. There's a lot of stair climbing, obviously, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's yes, there is.

Speaker 2 Okay. Like 500 steps or something like that.
So, yeah. You go down like a spiral staircase and there's multiple stairs.

Speaker 4 Yeah. So you're walking down, down, down.

Speaker 4 Before you enter, you go through something called the Port Mahon corridor,

Speaker 4 which has a replica of the Port Mahon Fortress.

Speaker 4 I imagine that looks kind of cool, right?

Speaker 2 It does. I don't remember it, but I looked up a picture and a little bit on that.

Speaker 2 The guy who carved that was

Speaker 2 not a hostage, an inmate at this prison for years and redid it from memory,

Speaker 2 carved into the stone. Wow, that's pretty cool.
And he actually died there from a

Speaker 2 landslide or a rock in or something like that. I can't remember what it's called.

Speaker 2 While he was building some steps to get to it. Oh, geez.
Yeah, he really

Speaker 2 dedicated his life to that thing.

Speaker 4 That's very sad.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but appropriate for the catacombs. Yeah, if you think about it.

Speaker 4 You can just stay right there.

Speaker 2 Mm-hmm.

Speaker 4 If you die.

Speaker 4 Like you mentioned, 72 is when electricity came along.

Speaker 4 There is something called

Speaker 4 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 Oh, you looked it up too?

Speaker 4 Yeah. So Ariadne was the daughter of King Minas and was associated with mazes and labyrinths.
And while it is a literal thing painted there,

Speaker 4 it's also, you know, ties back to Ariadne and the sort of

Speaker 4 like while she was a person, it's also like a logic, like applying logic to all possible routes of a maze to get out

Speaker 4 is Ariadne as well.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 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 4 Yeah, what does this look like, though? I couldn't find any pictures of this actually in the catacombs.

Speaker 2 I don't remember it either. Okay.

Speaker 2 It's supposedly on the ceiling. I think it's just a black line.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 4 That's, yeah. But you don't remember much about this.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I don't think I was drunk. I'm pretty sure I was fairly sober.
I think I just, my, my episodic memories shot to holy heck.

Speaker 4 Uh, you remember those boobs?

Speaker 2 That's right. I do.
I guess they made more of an impression on me than I remembered.

Speaker 4 Uh, you mentioned, uh, well, let's talk about some of these chambers.

Speaker 4 Um, a lot of them are like the the coolest parts of the catacombs are not open to the public and technically officially illegal and off-limits.

Speaker 2 So, okay,

Speaker 2 that may be why I don't remember some of these.

Speaker 4 Because they weren't the super cool ones were not on the tour?

Speaker 2 I guess. I'm just, hey, man, I'm just grasping at straws here.
Help me out.

Speaker 4 Well, I looked at some pictures of some of these. The La Plage, 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.

Speaker 4 But it's, it looks, I mean, all these places look like the,

Speaker 4 like where the lost boys might hang out, you know?

Speaker 2 That was one of the coolest things about that movie.

Speaker 2 That backstory that the crazy, amazing, rich hotel slid into the ocean, and now that's where they lived, and there were old chandeliers kind of hanging out. I thought about that.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4 Super cool. That's totally what it was.
Super cool. Yeah.
What else? What other cool rooms are off-limits? That's it.

Speaker 4 You're not going to talk about

Speaker 4 Sala Z

Speaker 2 or Zed?

Speaker 2 I did not look that one up, but there are, let me give you a couple other ones. There was a group called La Mexican de la

Speaker 2 Perforation.

Speaker 2 Let's just say it like that.

Speaker 2 They overtook one of the caves beneath the Palais de Chalot

Speaker 2 and set up a movie theater there with a bar and room for 20 people to watch a movie. And I did not find what movie they showed.

Speaker 4 Yeah, that is super cool. That was...

Speaker 4 a subset of a group called UX, short for Urban Experiment. And they're these, it's an artist collective in Paris, founded in 1981 by a group of teenagers back then

Speaker 4 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 on the down low.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I saw that was a subgroup of UX called the Untergunter.

Speaker 2 And they were the ones that actually did the clock. UX is almost like an umbrella group.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Just like the group that did the movie theater.
They were a subgroup.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 really something.

Speaker 4 Yeah, that is really something. But all of these people who sneak down there and do stuff are known as catophiles.

Speaker 4 And those are the people, the urban adventurers who illegally find their way into the catacombs to

Speaker 4 party, to hang out, to show movies, to have

Speaker 4 concerts and parties and like

Speaker 2 movies.

Speaker 4 All kinds of things are going on down there over the decades.

Speaker 4 And it seems to have really kicked off. I mean, they've been doing it since the 1800s.
I think they had a

Speaker 4 Chopin, like 45-piece orchestra did a Chopin concert down there.

Speaker 2 Yeah, they played Chopin's funeral march. and I was like, I'm not familiar with that one.
It's Darth Vader's theme.

Speaker 2 Is it?

Speaker 4 Or does it just sound like it?

Speaker 2 It's Darth Vader's.

Speaker 2 It's not possible that John Williams just coincidentally came up with that as Darth Vader's theme. Yeah, it's like an adaptation of the funeral march.

Speaker 4 Okay, well, that's probably a well-known thing then.

Speaker 2 It's got to be. I've never heard that before, though.

Speaker 2 And I know everything there is about Star Wars. Just try me.

Speaker 4 In the 70s and 80s, is when it seems like the catophiles really kind of

Speaker 4 took roosts down there because it was a great place to go hide.

Speaker 4 Like the punk rock movement kind of moved downstairs underground, literally underground. Hey.
And they tried to keep people out over the years.

Speaker 4 But like you said, people are going to find a way in if they want to.

Speaker 2 That's right. And I say we take another break and we'll come back and find out: do people find their way in?

Speaker 2 If they want to?

Speaker 2 After this,

Speaker 4 let's do it.

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Speaker 4 So, yeah, people do find their way in, like I said, and they've been doing that a lot since the beginning.

Speaker 4 And, you know, besides partying and doing drugs, like there are all kinds of like cool works of art. There's murals painted on some walls, obviously, all kinds of graffiti.

Speaker 4 Sometimes they leave messages and leaflets and things for each other to find and try to avoid the cataflicks, which is literally translated as cata cops.

Speaker 2 Yeah, which is a special special detachment of the gendarmes that

Speaker 2 their whole thing is catching people down in the in the tunnels.

Speaker 2 And from what I read that if you're a true catafile and I guess there was an article in the I think 2015 or something like that that estimated there's around a hundred genuine cadafiles the the um cataflix are probably going to leave you alone at the very least to maybe give you a warning or something like that if you're a tourist in the sense of like the fight club support group tourist,

Speaker 2 then you're probably going to get that 60 euro fine because you really, as far as the cataflicks are concerned, you have no business being down there. It's dangerous.

Speaker 2 You got no respect for tradition like the actual cataphiles do. And something else I read, Chuck, you're actually trespassing on private property.
Because if you buy...

Speaker 2 a piece of real estate in Paris, your ownership extends to whatever's below it in the underground. Wow.

Speaker 2 That sounds kind of cool until your house caves in and the city's like, it's your property, top to bottom. So good luck with that.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Wow.
I didn't know that. That's pretty cool.

Speaker 2 And they actually at City Hall make that sound when you come in to ask them for help.

Speaker 4 You know, Parisians pioneered the fart noise. Yeah.

Speaker 2 The raspberry.

Speaker 4 The

Speaker 4 fine, the 60 euros you mentioned, I saw 65. I mean, that's just like double the the cost of legal entry.
So it's not, it's not the biggest fine.

Speaker 2 No, no, no.

Speaker 2 And it kind of does kind of give you a sense that it's not considered like the crime of the century in Paris, but at the same time, there's a special police detachment to catch people doing that.

Speaker 2 So there's almost mixed messages with that.

Speaker 4 Yeah, for sure. The IGC, that inspection group with the French name, still maintains it.

Speaker 4 They've been doing so since 1777.

Speaker 4 And there are still collapses here and there, but it is mainly shored up.

Speaker 4 Oh, this other thing I thought was fun: the ways that people have found their way in.

Speaker 4 When they close off an area, sometimes the catophiles will go in there and like reopen it and make a way to get in. And they're called,

Speaker 4 I don't know how you would say it in French, but it translates as cat flaps, like a cat door.

Speaker 4 Kind of cool. Chatiers.

Speaker 4 Chatieres?

Speaker 2 Chat is C-H-A-T. That's cat.
Oh. And E-Airs is flaps, I guess.
Yeah,

Speaker 4 it's been in a bunch of movies and stuff, too, right?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 But I certainly know that in the stage play or the musical,

Speaker 2 that's where the Phantom lives. But more to the point, there's supposedly like an underground lake there that the Phantom like Rows' gondola on, right? Cool.

Speaker 2 There actually is an underground reservoir under the Paris Opera House. It's not an urban legend that Gaston Thoreau made up.
It was, or

Speaker 2 Andrew Lloyd Weber, one of the two,

Speaker 2 that when they were building the opera house to keep the foundation from just filling up with water over and over again while they were building it, they built a reservoir to impound the water in.

Speaker 2 And so it's like

Speaker 2 12 feet deep by almost, I think, like 60 yards, 60 meters long. Hey.
Little reservoir that you could conceivably sail a gondola on if you were the kind of person to live underground.

Speaker 4 Do you know if the water is continually

Speaker 4 filling up?

Speaker 2 I don't know. Give me a break, man.

Speaker 4 Well, what about the evaporation?

Speaker 2 But I mean, so it definitely has to be constantly replaced because they had to build this reservoir to hold the water that was always trickling in. But yeah, it makes sense.

Speaker 2 Why wouldn't it overflow once in a while? I don't know. That shouldn't have asked.
I don't know. You ruined the story, but

Speaker 4 gamers might recognize the catacombs from Assassin's Creed Unity.

Speaker 2 Pretty cool. I was looking at screenshots of that.
It's pretty neat. Did you play that one? Yeah.

Speaker 4 No, I didn't play that one.

Speaker 2 Do you play any of them?

Speaker 4 Assassin's Creeds? No.

Speaker 2 Do you have something against them?

Speaker 4 No. I just, you know, my gaming is limited.
I see.

Speaker 2 What's your latest game?

Speaker 4 I'm playing a horror game right now called Alan Wake 2. It's the second Alan Wake, and I'd never played a horror game before, and it is pretty scary.

Speaker 2 So it's genuinely scary.

Speaker 2 Yeah. That's awesome.

Speaker 4 Yeah, like when you're playing this game, they look so good now, and they're so realistic. So you're creeping around with a flashlight in these rooms, and

Speaker 4 you hear noises and see things, and it's like, it's super creepy.

Speaker 2 Are they like jump scares or do they just create like a sense of ongoing dread? Both. Wow.
That's mastery.

Speaker 4 Definitely ongoing dread. And then when the jump scare happens, when a bad person comes out, it's just, yeah,

Speaker 2 it scares big grown boy Chucky. Fantastic.

Speaker 4 Alan Wake 2, everybody.

Speaker 2 Like Alan Wake, like somebody's name? Yeah. The second or the sequel?

Speaker 4 The sequel. Okay.

Speaker 4 It would be Alan Wake Jr., I think, probably. I guess so.
Don't call me Jr.

Speaker 2 Henry Ford II was not a junior.

Speaker 4 Yeah, because who wants to be called Junior?

Speaker 2 I don't know. I'd go with J.R.
if I was a junior. Oh, totally.
Call me J.R.

Speaker 2 What does it stand for? It stands for junior.

Speaker 4 Here's one cool thing, and this guy might be worth a podcast on his own. But there was a photographer.
He went by the name Nadar, I guess, N-A-D-A-R.

Speaker 4 And this is in the 1860s. His real name is

Speaker 4 Felix, I guess. How would you pronounce that last name?

Speaker 2 Oh, Tournachon.

Speaker 4 Tournachon.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And over the course of three months, starting in 1861, he went down into the catacombs with

Speaker 4 18 minutes per exposure,

Speaker 4 took a lot of pictures of the catacombs and they are super cool and creepy pictures from 1861.

Speaker 2 They are creepy. What's cool is because of that 18 minute exposure time, any of the photographs of workers working in the catacombs are actually dummies as stand-ins.

Speaker 4 Oh, that makes sense.

Speaker 2 It makes it even a little creepier too, if you ask me.

Speaker 4 Yeah, and those headphones weren't moving, so they're fine.

Speaker 2 I've got, hey, 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 ii maybe cold war but it was a hospital that they dug out of a cave system on a like a stone hill in budapest oh wow and um it's a hospital it's got like that white creepy subway tile um like there's gurneys everywhere still uh and it was was like just this emergency hospital in case the town ever got bombed or whatever.

Speaker 2 Um, and they have dummies everywhere, mannequins, and that just just

Speaker 2 chefs kisses it for me. Like, it makes it so scary, even though they're not trying to make it scary.
Yeah, it just really is.

Speaker 2 I think if you have dummies in your tourist attraction, you've just taken it to another level. Like, put dummies in your tourist attraction.

Speaker 2 Don't just leave it for people to use their dumb imaginations. Like give them some dummies dressed up and it'll really make it.
You'll be rolling in the dough after that, I think. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Well, at the very least, it's going to up the creep factor because that just dead-eyed expression of a dummy is very great.

Speaker 2 But if you ever go to Budapest,

Speaker 2 you have to go to the hospital in the Rock. It's amazing.

Speaker 4 I'm going to 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 I think I asked you if she did or not, and I don't know if she did.

Speaker 4 Probably not, because she would have. I feel like I would have remembered her telling it.

Speaker 2 Definitely seems like it would have been up her alley, though, for sure.

Speaker 4 Yeah, she was like, Were there paintings there? Then I didn't go.

Speaker 2 The dummies were painted, their faces were.

Speaker 4 Oh, that's true.

Speaker 2 Um,

Speaker 4 what about crime?

Speaker 4 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 Yeah, apparently, in 2017, some thieves stole over a quarter of a million dollars worth of wine that was cooling in a cave

Speaker 2 that I guess belonged to some winery. Yeah.
Not cool.

Speaker 4 People have been stealing bones down there since there have been bones down there.

Speaker 2 Highly illegal. Yeah, you don't want to do that.
I mean, not just for the illegality. That's really disrespectful.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I think that a lot of them back in the day were to sell to sort of like cadavers, sell to medical students.

Speaker 2 Like, hey, here's a headbone for however many francs right shekels yeah uh what about ghosts chuck

Speaker 4 uh yeah of course there's going to be ghosts down there there's a couple of more well-known than others i think the most well-known is a guy named uh philibert asper

Speaker 2 yeah you can put a little emphasis on the t at the end though aspert i think so maybe that's a little too much but somewhere in between those two i know i'm wrong but when it comes to french i just want to drop the last letter of everything well they do that a lot they it's how to get you

Speaker 2 exactly exactly

Speaker 4 uh anyway he worked uh at a military hospital in the late 18th century and apparently in 1793 uh got lost in the catacombs with uh his own lone candle and never found his way out and uh 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 He says, Welcome in Bienveni.

Speaker 4 Were you creeped out down there or was it just like, oh, this is a cool thing?

Speaker 2 It was not at all creepy. It's not presented to be creepy either.
It's just

Speaker 2 it is what it is.

Speaker 2 Right. Bunch of bones.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I was not at all creeped out.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I got to go check it out next time.

Speaker 4 Did you look up that video, by the way, the one that's like highly likely faked?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I didn't, I wasn't moved by it at all. Were you?

Speaker 4 No, there's this videotape that I think it was like 2017 that circulated that was like, you know, it was like a Blair Witch thing. Like, is it real? Is it not?

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 the camera falling to the ground and into like a puddle.

Speaker 4 And some people say it's real. Some people say it's not.
I don't know. It feels like it's probably faked, but I wasn't like, oh my God, it was kind of not that interesting.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Agreed. It was like a dull two-sentence horror story.
Yeah. Okay.

Speaker 4 Agreed.

Speaker 2 You got anything else about the catacombs?

Speaker 4 Nope, it's on the list.

Speaker 2 Yep, you should go. You'll enjoy it.
And don't forget the hospital and the rock, too.

Speaker 4 Right.

Speaker 2 Since Chuck said right, of course, that means it's time for a listener, Mayo.

Speaker 4 Here's a correction to our Gong Show episode. Hey guys, there was one big error in this.

Speaker 2 Oh, I know what this is. Is it an omission?

Speaker 4 No.

Speaker 4 Something we got wrong. What was our omission?

Speaker 2 Gene Gene the Dancing Machine. Oh, yeah.
Can you believe we didn't mention Gene Gene the Dancing Machine in the entire episode?

Speaker 4 I thought we had, but apparently we didn't. But yeah,

Speaker 4 big shout out to Gene Gene, a legend of that show.

Speaker 2 I think both of us thought that we had because Livia clearly included him in the article as mentioned.

Speaker 2 I think we just passed over him and didn't didn't talk about him. It's just sad.

Speaker 4 Yeah, no disrespect intended.

Speaker 2 We both loved Gene Gene. How do you not?

Speaker 4 Exactly. So this was an era though.
Chuck Barris guys did not invent syndication.

Speaker 4 It has been around in television forever with some notable 1950 shows such as Sea Hunting and Life with Elizabeth.

Speaker 4 Nor was the parent game the first syndicated game show or even Chuck's first syndicated show.

Speaker 4 First syndicated game shows came in 1965 Everything's Relative and PDQ, and Chuck Barris' first foray in 1969, The Game Game.

Speaker 4 Initially, that was to give local stations some color options since old sitcoms wouldn't be in color, but syndication exploded in 1972 because the FCC gave the 7.30 time slot back to the local stations.

Speaker 4 And for those stations, it was cheaper to buy a game show

Speaker 4 than to make local content. I know this guy is because I'm a bit of a semi-pro TV historian.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 4 Yeah, with an emphasis on game shows in particular. So I feel a duty when something is broadly misstated as that was.
I have to try and correct the record.

Speaker 4 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 Nediff,

Speaker 4 who I've done some research for in the past.

Speaker 4 I hope you're enjoying the snow today. So this came a little while ago.

Speaker 4 But that is from Mike Berger in Livonia, Michigan. And Mike, you know, hang on to your email and we might hit you up if we ever need any insight on TV history.

Speaker 2 Yeah, thanks a lot, Mike. I mean, criticism from Caesar.
That's pretty awesome. Totally.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 You can send us an email to stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com.

Speaker 1 Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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Speaker 4 Support for the show today comes from public.com. You're thoughtful about where your money goes.

Speaker 4 You've got core holdings, some recurring crypto buys, maybe even a few strategic options plays on the side. The point is you're engaged with your investments and Public gets that.

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Speaker 2 Stocks, bonds, options, crypto, it's all there. Plus, an industry-leading 3.6% APY high-yield cash account.

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That's public.com slash SYSK.

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Brokerage services for U.S.

Speaker 3 listed registered securities, options, and bonds in a self-directed account are offered by Public Investing Inc., member FINRA and SIPC. CryptoTrading provided by ZeroHash.

Speaker 3 Complete disclosures available at public.com/slash disclosures.

Speaker 2 Hey, everybody, if you care about what's in your vitamins, you're going to love Now. Now Foods employs over 150 scientists who all share an obsession with quality.

Speaker 2 Now it does comprehensive testing for everything from from pesticides and contaminants to potency, and their obsession with quality means they never settle for good enough.

Speaker 2 And when it comes to the vitamins you take, neither should you.

Speaker 2 And now B12 shots provide a full spectrum of B vitamins, including a 10,000 microgram blast of vitamin B12 in convenient on-the-go packets.

Speaker 2 They're sugar-free and vegan and a delicious mixed berry flavor. Visit nowfoods.com/slash stuff to learn more.

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