Once upon a time, around 1750, there was a cemetery in Paris known as the Cemetery of the Innocents. This cemetery had been there for ages and was turning into a rather disgusting dump. It was so bad that citizens living near the cemetery were getting sick and disease from the bodies in the mass graves was spreading. The government decided to step in and dug a series of tunnels on the south side of the city where all the bones could be moved. Starting in 1788 bones were moved from the cemetery to the tunnels, eventually known as the Catacombs.
Just think of what a disgusting job that would have been. For whatever reason, the people in charge of moving the bones decided to be a little creative with the placement of bones within the catacombs. Piles of bones these are not. See below for some examples.
Some of the pictures below also show Katherine with a rather hesitant facial expression. She didn’t know we’d be seeing bones until we were already underground and wanted to get through as quickly as possible. I told her to pretend we were window-shopping at the mall. It didn’t work.
When we finally left there was someone at the exit checking bags to make sure no skulls left the tomb. Many people tried because the table next to him was full of skulls and bones people had tried to smuggle out.
