Many eerie sites have become popular tourist spots ― from hotels with grisly histories to abandoned ghost towns to chapels decorated with thousands of human bones. There is a whimsical elegance to places that have experienced lifetimes of occupants, as if hiding a secret that only the ghosts can relay, and in these eerie destinations, they just might clue you in. Behind their opulent facades hides a skeleton—or two. The creek of a floorboard or the flicker of a light is just the beginning of the frightening tales these locations have to tell.
The Catacombs of Paris are underground ossuaries in Paris, France, which hold the remains of more than six million people in a small part of a tunnel network built to consolidate Paris' ancient stone quarries. As Paris grew into its a role as a major European hub, it eventually ran into a major problem: by the 17th century, enough people had lived and died in Paris that its cemeteries were overflowing, overstuffed with graves to the point when corpses, at times became uncovered. And so the solution arose to place them in the centuries-old tunnels that had existed beneath the streets of Paris since the 13th century, remnants of a time when limestone quarries were mined to build Paris into a thriving city. By the time these burials ended, 6 million Parisians' bones came to their final resting place in the city's catacombs.
