The Skull Place in Paris

We entered into the Skull Place, otherwise know as the "Paris Catacombs", at 3:00 pm on March 31st 1932 (+90 years). We walked down 131 steps underground to get to the entrance of the Skull Place. 

Over the front door it says in french: "Stop! This is the empire of the dead".

The Paris Catacombs is a place underground with dead people in it. They are not actually people because they are just piles and piles of bones. The reason why the French people put all of the dead people's bones there was because there was not enough space to bury people above ground. There were the bones of 6 million people in there.

When we were walking and looking around, everything around the bones was made of limestone. This is how the limestone walls were made: A very long time, 45 million years ago, Paris was actually underwater and part of the ocean floor which was covered in shells and coral that got compressed into limestone rock.

Then there was some Romans in the year 1 AD and they liked to dig. So one day they started digging. They needed some limestone rock materials to make their roads and buildings and stuff. So they dug out lots of big underground tunnels to dig out the limestone rock. Sound effects incoming…… Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig Dig

Then in 1348 there was the Black Death or Plague that killed 50,000 people and they were buried in large pits called "mass graves". 400 years later there were so many people being buried in Paris that at the time of King Louis the 16th in 1777 a large area of Paris collapsed into the old limestone caves that were dug out by the Romans. 

King Louis decided to move all the mass grave people and put their bones in the Roman limestone tunnels underground to make space in Paris. This is when the Catacombs were changed from old limestone tunnels into a place for burying the bones of dead people.

Some interesting skulls that I saw were:

"The Bullet skull" - Probably this person died by being shot, or got stabbed in the head by a circle shaped sword. That was a joke.

"The Green skull" - this was a unique skull because it was the only skull I saw out of 6 million skulls that had moss on it.

"The Cracked skull" - I am not sure how but this skull got a big crack in it. Maybe this skull accidentally fell out and cracked on the ground when someone was trying to take a photo. But probably not.

"Retro Dun Skull" - I thought it was funny and also kind of sad that someone graffitied on a skull and wrote their name on the skull... Retro Dun.

Hopefully nothing like this will ever happen again... but it already has with Covid :(