If you think of “Halloween destinations”, Paris should top the list. Yes, the lovely city of lights has a creepy past.Around the 10th century, when Paris’s population was on the increase and cemetery space became scarce, a decision was made to bury the less wealthy in mass graves. Maybe it was due to the Parisians untenable burial practices that there was a lack of ideas for disposing of the dead exhumed from the city’s intra-muros parish graveyard. Seven hundred years later, bones were exhumed and transported to old abandoned quarry sites. The Catacombs (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bElIDgAFaiM&feature=related) was one such site, where skulls and bones were deposited and later on arranged onto a bizarre wall.
The Catacombs are open to the public, and run beneath the city’s 14th arrondissement — at least that is what is open to official tours. When I first saw them as a student in 1980, it was months before Halloween. After descending down narrow, spiraling stone stairs and cold curving corridors, there they were. Prior to that my trip had been more intellectual than sensory– but the image reminded me that I am human and alive and sent a tingle up my ingenue spine, but it didn’t deter me. They captured my imagination and as a traveler because I didn’t know when I’d be back, being in the presence of a vast piles of bones and wanting to stay awhile I convinced myself that they looked like decorative Art. I don’t think I would have gone any further, not at least without an amulet; perhaps a necklace strung from raw garlic. What about you? Have you ever done something wild or wicked in an innocent act of horror where you surprised yourself?
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