In 2013 I shared an hour of Halloween with 6 million dead Parisians residing in  l’Ossuaire Municipal, or, the Paris Catacombs, I know how to party. It’s a space Twenty metres below the Place Denfert Rochero where there are amazing, intricate piles of dead people dating as far back as late Roman times. The catacombs are the publicly accessible part of the vast catacombs below Paris like a Swiss cheese cut through the Cretacious, Bartonian and Cenezoic Lutecéan Limestones that keep Paris mostly on the surface, the area is believed to have been mined for as long as two thousand years.

You enter by a small kiosk near Paris’ former Barrière d’Enfer, one of its city gates. The descent spirals down a nausea inducing stone staircase which makes your head spin, then at the base you enter the old mine system. What makes it special is the fact that it is a vast bone dump and hiding place, or was, for so many ex-Parisians.

The cleansing of Paris started with the Cemetery of Saint Innocents which was very close to Les Halles – for centuries Paris’ main food market, not really something you want next to an overflowing cemetery. Les Halles is still almost a market, though more of a vast temple to Mamon/Mall/retail merde-pit near the Pompidou Centre; currently undergoing renovation, the only thing I could find in its favour was the biggest Fnac I’ve ever seen; think an old style, good WH Smiths but French. I stood outside guarding bags until Le pickpockets drove me in to look at the slightly motley collection of French vinyl along one wall.

Saints Innocents was desperately unsanitary, so full it was spilling out, actually leaking on to the streets, six feet of stinking earth and bone, a soup of human remains. Established in the 5th century and including some likely Roman burials it had grown into a vast bone dump – not just for the church, but the local hospital and morgue. The density had already prompted an earlier removal of older burials and the stacking of some of the bone in passageways and crypts in the area. This is often the way in medieval cities; Norwich, which has more medieval churches than any other city north of the Alps, a fair number of which still have graveyards that are the height of the cemetery walls, others are well above ground surface, St Georges Colegate, St George Tombland, St Peter Mancroft and St John Maddermarket are ones which immediately come to mind. These high cemeteries are the result of over-burial after over-burial for hundreds of years pushing the surface upwards towards the inhabitant’s maker, who wasn’t interested in that bit anyway. The general seeping, leakage, fluids, and stink from Saints Innocents being so close to somewhere you could go and buy a baguette provoked outrage. The final straw came when the cellar of an adjoining building collapsed and filled  with earth and body parts. This event seemed to catalyse an end for this massive playground for Typhoid, Cholera, and god knows what else, with a programme of everything, or everyone I suppose, being removed to elsewhere – along with quite a few of the other graveyards from Paris’ Centre Ville.

So a decision was made, and under Police Lieutenant-General Alexandre Lenoir massive dissemination of human bone began. It took place at night using carts, took two years and was initially haphazard, although the bones were kept in distinct parishes and still are even in their new home. Once Louis-Étienne Héricart de Thury, the head of the Paris Mines took control he started really organising the process – bones were arranged – femurs and skulls for solidity, backfill formed from humerus, radius, ulna, metatarsals, ribs and vertabrae and indeed anything else bone shaped. These developed into patterns with mortality-busting signs added by the state, workers or just wags; bits of poems, signs, graffiti and bible-verse dotted about. Over time some of the more obvious skulls have developed a varnish-like gloss from many hands touching them or people brushing past.

Down in one of the catacombs a security guard sat fast asleep in a plastic chair iPod plugged in, that’s how normalised it is I suppose – a little bit of me hopes he was listening to death metal, Bauhaus or Birthday Party. You can  as is standard in every tourist destination go to the handily placed ‘Mort’ gift shops near the exit, perhaps buy some overpriced over-proofed Absinthe in a skull bottle to hasten your entry into the catacombs of the future, maybe a clockwork skull or bottle opener, or all manner of other proto-goth tat. We succumbed, being in the company of various teenage family members with more Euro spending money than sense.

The public part of this is a bit dreamlike, the tunnels down are accompanied by the faint sounds of running water and strange sculptures built by 18th century miners, then there is the bones, just an unimaginable number of bones. There is also miles and miles of other tunnels which are the domain city of the living; exploited Urbexers and Cataphiles who haunt the unmarked and censured areas that most of us will never see, utterly, utterly fascinating, you may die of old age in the queue or have to murder a loud American tourist with zombie make-up on while you’re there, I did a bit of both at least verbally. Should you want to take photos you are not allowed Le flashguns, I relied on sniper breathing and Hi ISO, which sort of worked. There are of course catacombs and tunnels under a lot of cities.

This may raise a question, what did London do? a city of comparable size, density and overcrowding. Well it led to The Magnificent Seven, London’s Great Victorian Cemeteries. One of which; Highgate is somewhere I vaguely remember from my very early childhood. Actually I remember Karl Marx and his big scary head on a plinth, my mum says I used to talk gibberish to him from my pram, a formative moment possibly, right there.

Norwich too had it’s own answer to the problem of insanitary cemeteries in the city which was the fabulous Rosary cemetery.

You can find more info about the Paris Catacombs here on the official website.