The Catacombs of Paris

The Catacombs contain the bones of an estimated 6 to 7 million people. Their history is really two interconnected stories of mines and human remains, because in the 18th century, Paris was dealing with two huge problems simultaneously.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry.
Back when we were planning our trip to Paris earlier
this year, one of the things that we specifically asked

(00:22):
to include on the itinerary was a trip to the Catacombs.
Those are in the southern part of the city there
on the left bank of the sin and the catacombs
are an ossuary that contains the bones of an estimated
six to seven million people. They are stacked in their
floor to ceiling. Of course, that was an ideal topic

(00:42):
for an October episode, but that ossuary is just one
part of a huge network of tunnels and minds that
are under the city. Their history goes back centuries before
the bones were even part of it. And really this
is two interconnected stories of minds and human panes, because
in the eighteenth century Paris was dealing with two really

(01:03):
big problems simultaneously. It had way too many dead bodies
to deal with and a lot of the city was
at great risk of collapsing into those mines. I mean,
who hasn't had those two problems happening at the same time.
You know, when we were on our Catacombs tour, the

(01:23):
collapsing of the city was a hundred percent news to me,
and I was like, that is as to meet dramatic
as these bones we are surrounded by. Yeah, and the
city of Paris has a distinctive look. I love it
so deeply. Many of its historic buildings are made from limestone,
including famous landmarks like the Louver and Notre Dame Cathedral.

(01:46):
Limestone is a rock made from marine sediments, and it's
abundant in the region thanks to the warm sea that
covered the area roughly forty five million years ago, and
it gives these buildings a consistent, creamy facade, often under
a gray zinc roof. Yeah, when you look at like
wide sweeping shots of Paris in movies, if you've never
personally been there, that's what's behind that just sort of dreamy,

(02:11):
consistently colored look. Yeah, we should point out that that's
in part also because the city has had a lot
of regulation in place about what can be built and
how it can be built, and that things need to
look like they belong together, right right. This is especially
like in this the central historic part of the city.
If you get out into the suburbs, it doesn't so

(02:32):
much look like that anymore. Some of this limestone came
from other parts of France, but a lot of it
came from under the city of Paris itself. This type
of limestone is so closely associated with the city that
it's often called Paris stone, but it's more formal name
is Lutitian limestone. Geologists in the nineteenth century named it

(02:54):
after Lutitia, which was the Roman name for the city
that we now know as Paris. People were corey limestone,
gypsum and other materials and what's now Paris all the
way back to antiquity. When this started around the first century,
the city was much smaller, mostly occupying the area just
to the south of the Seine and the islands in
the river itself. The earliest quarries were open pits to

(03:17):
the south of the city proper, but by the fourteenth
century people were mining limestone underground rather than using these
open quarries, and as the mines and the city both
got bigger, they eventually overlapped. Mines were primarily dug under
what's now and fourteenth but they also extended under a

(03:39):
lot of other parts of the city as well. Although
abandoned galleries within the mines were supposed to be filled in,
in a lot of cases, this didn't always happen. When
it did happen, naturally, the film material that was used
was never as strong or as stable as the limestone
that had been taken out. Basically, people were digging limestone
out from under Paris, bringing it above ground, and making

(04:01):
buildings out of it without necessarily reinforcing or bracing the
space they left behind. This sounds sort of like the
start of a sci fi movie on how to do
it wrong. Of Unsurprisingly, this led to some problems. Yet,
even under the best possible circumstances, it would be challenging
to simultaneously keep up with centuries of expansion in both

(04:25):
the city above and the minds below. But this expansion,
like I said, it just took place over hundreds of years.
There was not a master plan for the city of
Paris that was maintained consistently for all of that time,
and then when it came to what was happening underground,
a lot of the time nobody was keeping track of
the big picture with that at all. By the seventeen hundreds,

(04:46):
no one really had a sense of just how much
stone had been removed from under Paris, or exactly where
the tunnels and galleries had been dug. And on top
of that, in places the mines had been dug in layers,
with one crew digging under a gallery that an earlier
crew had previously hollowed out. So in the late eighteenth century,
parts of Paris started collapsing into the mines underneath. This

(05:10):
crisis really peaked between seventeen seventy four and seventeen seventy eight,
and during that time as many as twenty people were killed.
That might sound like a pretty low death toll compared
to most of the disasters that we have talked about
on this show, but these collapses were so unpredictable and
frequent and dramatic that they were just terrifying. I don't

(05:31):
know about anybody else, but the idea that my house
might suddenly fall into a sinkhole with that warning is
way scarier to me than anything else we're talking about
in the show. Today. People even blame these collapses on
the work of the devil. That makes sense, right. The
devil is below you trying to set your house down.
The first major collapse took place on December seventeen, seventeen

(05:53):
seventy four, when a stretch of Rude d'on fare the
Street of Hell, collapsed into a mine. Roughly three hundred
meters of road and adjacent buildings collapsed into a hole
that was at least twenty five meters deep. Other collapses
followed that one. On September fifteen, seventeen seventy six, King
Louis the sixteenth signed a decree closing the mines and

(06:15):
prohibiting digging under public roads. People who owned private land
that was situated over a mine were required to have
that mine inspected and reinforced. The king also dispatched an
architect named Antoine DuPont to inspect the damage from this
collapse and to try to map the mind system, as
well as determined whether the private property owners were in

(06:37):
compliance with this requirement. On April fourth of the following year,
Louis the sixteenth issued another decree which established a Department
of General Corey Inspection. Award winning Royal architect Charles Axel
Guillamo was appointed as its first inspector. General du Paul
stayed on as an engineer although it's clear that he
and Guillamo did not really get along terribly well. Gamo

(07:01):
was given the task of mapping the mines and making
them safe, and he had the skills and experienced to
do this. At the same time, though this situation was dire,
another major collapse occurred near the city center on April,
which was the day that he started work. And this
project was also massive. There were about eight hundred hectares

(07:22):
of mines under the city of Paris, that's about three
square miles or eight square kilometers. Giamo needed to map
that entire system, including figuring out what public roads and
buildings were situated on the land above and marking those
landmarks with signs below. The king was not quite so
worried about what was under private land. Gmo needed to

(07:44):
reinforce embrace areas that were in danger of collapsing, and
he developed a code for marking support columns that would
note when the column was placed and who had done it.
You can still see lots of those down there today.
Gmo had hundreds of men working on this project, including
laborers and cartographers, but there was really no way to

(08:04):
do all of this work quickly enough to immediately prevent
all future collapses. They kept happening regularly over the next
few years. In seventy eight, a collapse in the neighborhood
of Minimal killed seven people and it took weeks to
find all of their bodies. In addition to all of
this mapping and stabilization work, Guiamo also took on another task,

(08:29):
preparing the old minds to receive human remains, and we're
going to talk about that after we first paused for
a little sponsor break. As the city of Paris was
dealing with all these collapsing roads and buildings, it was
also dealing with another major problem, and that was an

(08:51):
overabundance of dead bodies. As the city was expanding over
what was essentially hollowed out limestone, it had also really outgrown.
It's a very able burial space. In the centuries before
the French Revolution, most people in Paris were buried in
cemeteries that were adjacent to their parish churches. The city
had thirty two such cemeteries, and in most cases people

(09:13):
were buried in mass graves rather than individual plots. It
was not unusual for these graves to be dug as
trenches and then left open until they were full. It
also was not unusual for the same piece of land
to be reused as time passed, with a new mass
grave being dug where an older group of bodies had decomposed.
As the city got bigger and more crowded, though this

(09:35):
method of burial became less and less workable homes and
other buildings encroached on the cemeteries. There were more bodies
packed into the mass graves more tightly, with less time
passing before the same piece of ground was needed to
bury more people. In an overcrowded graveyard, there just wasn't
enough organic material and oxygen available for micro organisms to

(09:58):
do the work required for decompo positions, so there were
too many bodies and it was taking longer for them
to break down. Complicating all of this was the fact
that some of these same churchyards were also used as
communal green space, or they were next door to those
types of spaces. So, for example, if a market was
next door to or overlapping with a graveyard, that graveyard

(10:19):
might be littered with blood and awful from butchered animals
or rotting produce that had not been sold, Foul air,
and the smell of decay became persistent problems on top
of the inherent grossness of that situation and the fact
that decaying bodies really can spread disease. At this point
in history, people blamed myasthmas or bad air for a

(10:42):
range of illnesses. There was a lot of talk about quote,
cadaverous exhalations in these graveyards and the health problems that
they were causing. By the seventeen sixties, officials in Paris
were issuing reports detailing all kinds of problems that were
associated with the cemeteries, including thick and foul smelling air
and a range of mysterious illnesses. In seventeen sixty five,

(11:06):
and ordinance was passed outlawing burials in church cemeteries, instead
requiring new cemeteries to be built outside of the city itself,
But this ordinance was never enforced. People understandably were upset
by the idea that they could not be buried in
the same place that their loved ones had been. In
some cases, families had been buried in the same church

(11:26):
cemetery for generations. The Catholic Church also objected to the
plan because it meant that burials were going to become secularized.
Even though people generally objected to the idea of moving
the cemeteries outside the city, they continued to be concerned
about their unhealthful effects in the city. It was kind
of like a weird turnabout of the not in my

(11:48):
backyard problem. In addition to blaming illnesses on bad cemetery air,
people claimed that it was causing milk, meat, and other
food to spoil within hours. People also reported wine turning
into vinegar almost as soon as it was open because
of all this cemetery funk. It's not clear how much
of this was real and how much was an urban legend,

(12:11):
but it's clear that people were really fearful about whether
these cemeteries were hurting them. In spite of that, though,
nothing really changed until seventeen eighty, and that is when
the situation at Cymothier Descent Annoscent, or the Cemetery of
Holy Innocence, became completely unmanageable. This was the largest cemetery
in Paris and also one of the oldest. Burials had

(12:33):
started there in antiquity, and its use as a cemetery
was ongoing by the twelfth century. In eighty six, King
Philippe the Second August had a wall built around it
as a mark of respect for the dead, but then
also with the hope of discouraging people from using it
as a public commons and market space. At first, the
wall worked pretty well for this second purpose, but as

(12:55):
the city grew, it was treated more and more like
a common green space, and the neighboring build things got
closer to it, some of them right up against that wall.
Although it was technically owned by the adjacent Holy Innocence Church,
this cemetery was operated more like a public cemetery. Residents
of eighteen different parishes had burial rights there. Two hospitals

(13:17):
and a morgue also sent their bodies to Holy Innocence.
By the eighteenth century, about ten percent of the people
who died in Paris were being buried in that one place,
and that was far more than the space could handle.
In seventeen eighty, people started reporting extremely foul odors around
the cemetery of the Holy Innocence, and they started filing
official complaints. Then, one night, a restaurant owner went into

(13:40):
his cellar for some wine and described himself as being
totally overcome by the smell. It turned out that the
cemetery wall had collapsed, filling the sellers of several homes
with human remains. Newly appointed celebrity inspector Antoine Alexecade de
Vaux investigated the situation and filed a reports dating that

(14:00):
at least three houses had been affected by poisonous gases
seeping in from the cemetery. Residents were reporting all kinds
of health effects, including delirium, respiratory issues, and vomiting. The
inspector recommended that they not only seal off the basements
and disinfect the homes, but also that the cemetery be
closed entirely. Not long after, Louis the sixteenth government issued

(14:23):
an ordinance calling the Cemetery of Holy Innocence quote an
intolerable and illegal threat to the city. Burials stopped there
that year seventeen eighty, although the bodies that were already
there stayed where they were for the time being. People
just didn't know what to do with them. In two though,
someone writing under the name Villadieu published an essay proposing

(14:46):
that the bodies be moved down into the minds that
were under the city, which conveniently had just been undergoing
this whole mapping and reinforcement process. This is where the
mind story and the body story intersect. So before we
get to that, we will take another quick sponsor break.

(15:10):
About five years passed between the closing of the Cemetery
of the Holy Innocence, meaning when people stopped burying new
bodies there, and the removal of those bodies to the
minds under the city of Paris. The process started in
December of seventeen eighty five, with bodies being removed from
the cemetery at night to try to avoid upsetting people

(15:30):
and the Catholic Church. In April seventh, seventeen eighty six,
a portion of the mind system was consecrated as the
Paris Municipal Ossuary. At some point in this process of
body relocation, people started calling the area the Catacombs, after
the Catacombs of Rome. A lot of folks refer to
this whole system of minds as the Catacombs, even though

(15:51):
the Ossuary is only one small part of it. Yeah,
when we were there, it was an interesting thing and
that they talked about how huge it is. But what
you walk through is a fairly short little section of it. Um.
I think, I think there's the perception, and I know
I had it that you would just kind of be
turned loose in this huge place. That is not the case.

(16:12):
The process of removing the bodies from the Cemetery of
the Holy Innocence took months, and it involved the remains
of more than twenty thousand people. The cemetery had been
so overcrowded that many of the bodies had suppontified. That
means the fats in the body turned into a soapy
substance rather than decomposing. Scientists Antoine fair Quoix and Michel

(16:34):
studied these bodies and coined the term adapasser to describe
what they were seeing. Once the bodies were all gone
out of the Cemetery of the Holy Innocence, that Charlote
houses that were associated with the cemetery were torn down,
The ground was disinfected with lime, and concrete was poured
over the entire area. Fountain was installed in the middle

(16:56):
of this, and today the former Cemetery of the Holy
Innocence is a Fountain of Innocence, which is a public plaza.
Soon people living near other cemeteries started petitioning for those
bodies to be removed as well. One by one, the
cemeteries within the city were closed and emptied these remains
weren't artfully arranged the way they are in the catacombs today.

(17:18):
For the most part, the bodies were just put into
it in piles. And then in the midst of all
this extremation and body relocating, the French Revolution started in
seventeen eighty nine. Charles Axel Gillmon was briefly imprisoned during
the revolution, in part because his position had been a
royal appointments and in part because Antoine DuPont was campaigning

(17:40):
against him. Like we said earlier, they did not seem
to get along. I don't have all the detail about
exactly what went on there. There seems to have been
an ongoing power struggle. Though all the church property was
nationalized in the fall of seventeen nine, including the cemeteries.
But for the most part, this long term effort of
cemetery closed rs and body removals was put on hold,

(18:02):
especially as the French Revolution morphed into the Reign of Terror. However,
this was also one of the few times when the
recently dead were taken to the catacombs rather than bodies
that had already been interred in a cemetery. A mass
killing of prisoners was carried out between September two and
sixth of seventeen ninety two out of fears that they

(18:22):
might band together into counter revolutionary uprising. More than one
thousand prisoners were killed in what came to be known
as the September massacres. Although some were buried in cemeteries,
most were placed in the catacombs, and the ones that
were buried in cemeteries were moved to the catacombs when
those cemeteries were emptied. Later, Napoleon came to power in

(18:44):
France and seventeen ninety nine, and the cemeteries of Paris
became part of the question of how the French in
general and Parisians specifically imagined theirselves and their new society
post revolution. There were still a lot of public health
concerns that surround unto the cemeteries that had been there
before the revolution, and then on top of that, the

(19:04):
violence and the recent horror of the Reign of Terror
made the subject of these overcrowded burial spaces and the
bodies in them a particularly sensitive one. People proposed sweeping
reforms in multiple areas of society, including what the city
should look like and how bodies should be treated. After death,
people started to imagine public cemeteries as places that could

(19:26):
be beautiful while also inspiring a sense of morality and
community ties. So during these years a lot of things
happened that were connected to this idea of how to
make spaces for the dead, and what those spaces should
mean to the living, and how all of that connected
to the greater idea of French society. Before the revolution ended,

(19:47):
the Church of Senta Genevieve had been reimagined as the Pantheon,
which was to house bodies of some of France's most
notable citizens, including Voltaire, Victor Hugo, Emil Zola, Alexander dumat Pere,
and Marie Curie. There had been a few burials in
what is now Pearl Chase Cemetery before this point, but
the cemetery as it exists today was opened in eighteen

(20:11):
o four. It was designed by architect Alexandle Teodor Bloignan
and urban planner Nicolas Rochon. It was France's first garden cemetery,
which was a cemetery style that became popular in North
America and parts of Europe in the nineteenth century. Gardens
cemeteries were also called rural cemeteries, and they were meant
to provide a sanitary way to bury the dead, but

(20:34):
also to serve as a public park land and to
reinforce romantic ideals that were connected to nature and hygiene.
The bodies of a number of notable people were moved
to pearl ches, including abal Ard and Helloy's, and today
it's one of the city's most popular tourist attractions. I
went there on our trip to Paris, and it is
beautiful and it does all the things that those types

(20:55):
of cemeteries were supposed to inspire, which is like walking
through nature and intemplating mortality in a peaceful, serene environment.
Other similar cemeteries followed, both in France and elsewhere underground,
though the bodies that have been placed in the catacombs
were mostly left unattended from the start of the French
Revolution through the early eighteen hundreds. By then, in spite

(21:19):
of the earlier work that Gimmo had done, the catacombs
were once again unsafe. Collapses and sinkholes continued, although on
a smaller scale than they had at the end of
the eighteenth century. Plus part of the system was now
full of remains in various states of decay. The minds
stayed cool year round, but they're also very damp, so

(21:40):
the remains had been affected by moisture and rot. But
in March of eighteen o nine, Louis Etienne de Toi
was appointed to the Underground Department of Mines and Quarries,
and he undertook a project to turn what had basically
just been an underground body dump into a monument that
was suitable for public admission. And this is when the

(22:01):
bones were arranged in the way that they are today,
with the long bones and the skulls backed up floor
ceiling where you can see them, and smaller bones and
bone pieces tucked away behind. There are some spots if
you go down there, where you can get a peek
at the smaller bones and these fragments as well. There
are placards around that note in a general way which

(22:22):
cemetery of the bones came from and when they were
placed in the catacombs. The catacombs open to the public
just four months after Richard dri took on this project.
Visitors pass under a carving that reads arette say de
la more or stop this is the Empire of death.
There are also placards carved with quotations about death, which RICALD.

(22:44):
DRIs decided to add in eighteen ten. Other than that
the decorations are really minimal. Little has changed about the
catacombs themselves since the early nineteenth century, and the last
deposit of bones happened in eighteen sixty. The biggest addition
and since then is the electric lighting, which it now has.
Even though this ossuary was created because people were afraid

(23:07):
of the negative effects that dead bodies were having in
their neighborhoods, the catacombs with the bodies in them quickly
became a tourist attraction. Dera card Tori placed a guestbook
at the exit in between July of eighteen o nine
in August of eighteen thirteen. Visitors left their impressions of
the catacombs in it as they left. General reactions in
this guest book were all over the place, although a

(23:29):
lot of people made notes along the lines of here
one can learn how to live, or some variation of
Memento mori or remember that you will die, which is
also the name of a gift shop in Magic Kingdom
is Yes, I love it. Guests also observed how the
placement of the anonymous indistinguishable bones illustrated that all people

(23:52):
are equal in death. This was particularly true since the
cemeteries that had been emptied included the bodies of famous
and influential people, including Maximiliere Robespierre. Throughout their existence, the
minds under Paris have been used for a range of
purposes that really have nothing to do with getting limestone
or dealing with excess bodies. Researchers started working in the

(24:14):
catacombs of the nineteenth century, studying everything from the anatomy
and pathology of the bones to whether anything could or
did live down there. Photographer Gaspar Felix Tornatial known as
Felix Nada, studied the use of artificial light in photography
down there. He patented the light source that he used
to photograph the catacombs in eighteen sixty one. People also

(24:37):
hid in them during the Revolution and the World Wars
and other times of strife, and the minds, of course,
have been put to all kinds of criminal use, including
being used by smugglers and people just hiding out from
the law. Even though so much work was done to
map and stabilize the minds, they are still prone to
collapse and flooding, and it is easy to get lost.

(24:57):
For these reasons, entry into them was out laud on
November two. Visitors to the catacombs are allowed to walk
only through a designated section. As we mentioned before, it's
it's brief, which is fenced off from the rest of
the Minds and parts of the ossuary that are off
limits to visitors. It is basically a one way tour.

(25:19):
You go down the steps to get in there, you
walk in a linear fashion through it and then go out,
and there's just a massive system beyond that that people
are not allowed into. Even so, today there is a
whole subculture of catacomb aficionados who are known as cataphiles,
who have their own slang and their own rules of

(25:39):
behavior and etiquette. They've used some of this space, uh,
the space that folks are not supposed to access, to
create artwork, including graffiti and carvings. Catophiles access the minds
through little known entrances, through things like sewers and sellers
and other openings. There's a whole police department that is
tasked with trying to find those and close them off

(26:02):
because it can be very dangerous down there. As I
was researching this, I found a news story about a
couple of teenagers who were lost down there for days. Um,
and that was just within the last couple of years.
That is apparently a lot of people who hang out
down there all the time, fortunately with no injuries or
deaths involved, but they are still still a dangerous place

(26:25):
to go, especially without knowing your way around or how
to deal with stuff down there. Yeah. I mean even
you know, as you're walking through the area that you
are allowed into, you can see they are fenced off,
as we mentioned, but you can see down some of
those other areas and it goes to pitch blackness in

(26:47):
a hurry. Yeuh. I can't imagine being lost down there,
particularly if you have maybe lost power on your phone
or something. I would be terrified, not because I am
afraid of the bones, but just because I am trying
up in a place where I can't see and no
one knows. Right. Yeah, and you have no cell phone signal.
There's there's really no way to get a signal down there. Um.

(27:09):
You can find on the internet and they will be
in the show notes. Various like magazine features by folks
who have gained the trust of some cataphiles to be
able to like be guided down there, and several of
them have harrowing moments where they're like, I have to
crawl through this little tunnel that I can barely fit through,

(27:30):
and rubble is raining down on me, and I can
tell that the metro is directly above my head. What
if something happens like there's just nope, any time you're
crawling through a tunnel you barely fit through, I'm out. Yeah. Well,
it reminds me in a lot of ways of caving.
I know a lot of people go caving like an

(27:52):
adventure sport um, and that can also be very dangerous.
I don't understand why you would choose that over having
a delicious meal. I just don't understand. I know it's
very thrilling for some people. I have a friend who's
an adrenaline junkie. I never understand why she wants to
do the things she does. She must think I'm the
dullest human on the planet. I'm like, yes, but bacon, um,

(28:15):
there's happiness to be gained in other places. Um yeah,
but the catacombs. I mean, it goes without saying it
is a huge tourist attraction, but I really do highly
recommend visiting if you're in Paris. The thing that struck
me when we were there this time, I'm a little
older and theoretically wiser, and it really was more than anything.

(28:35):
It made me think about the equalizing nature of death
in a way that was very reassuring and not upsetting
at all. It was really really lovely and I'm grateful
that I had a chance to return. Yeah, especially in
the post French Revolution, with the you know, the the
ideals of the French Revolution, especially at the beginning, being
about equality and and fraternity. That like that presentation of

(29:00):
the bones as being this sort of universal equalizing I
think was intentional. I was more struck by just how
many there are, because Paris as a city has been
you know, a large depending on how you know large

(29:24):
in quotation marks, depending on what period of time, but
it has been inhabited as a city for so long,
and what do you do with the remains of your
dead when you run out of room? And so like
my fascination with it, I think was like a lot
more with just the more pragmatic idea of like, oh,
what do we do with all of our bodies? Do

(29:46):
you have a listener mail? This is from nicole Um
and Nicole has has had a little trip that involved
going to Niagara Falls and sent us a story from there.
So Nicole says, Hi, Tracy and Holly, I'm a longtime
listener of stuff you myths in history. I love the unique,
untold stories from history. I just returned from a family
road trip to Ontario, Canada, and I couldn't wait to

(30:07):
email this great stuff you missed in history story. I
came across in Niagara Falls. My husband and I were
driving back from a ride. We're gonna skip ahead. They
got to Horseshoe Falls and the upper Rapids, and then
to continue on. We wandered up to this beautiful spot
that was almost completely empty. We saw a total of
three other people the entire time we were there. As

(30:29):
we reached the water, we came upon an information sign.
We both read through the story of a scowl that
disconnected from its larger boat in nineteen eighteen. With two
individuals aboard, the scal floated down river rapidly toward the falls.
Some quick thinking, the two were able to open the
bottom dumping doors, flooding the compartment, slowing the boat's progress

(30:49):
until it grounded on some rocks. The scow was stuck
approximately two d from the shore and six hundred meters
from the falls. The informational sign went on to describe
the harrowing to a rescue attempt. Long story short, the
two crew were successfully rescued. I continued to read to
the end as my husband, who is a faster reader
than me, waited eagerly for me to look up when

(31:11):
I reached the final paragraph quote, A salvage operation to
recover the scow was not considered feasible, and so although
considerable deterioration has taken place, the scow still clings to
its rocky perch. I looked away, looked back at the sentence,
and then finally looked to the left of the sign.
That is when I saw the rusty boat. I didn't
notice when I walked up. Seeing how close the scow

(31:32):
was going over the falls was amazing and terrifying to see.
I have attached some pictures where you can see the
boat on the right and the spray of the falls
on the left. I can't imagine how terrified all involved
in the event must have built. I thought this was
such a great piece of history that I've never heard before.
I was so glad that my husband and I happen
to stumble across this spot immediately said that I couldn't

(31:53):
wait to get home and email this to stuff you
miss in history. I hope you enjoyed the story as
much as I did. There must be some great stories
around now Aagara Falls that would be perfect for the podcast.
I would love to hear you cover this story or
others about this magnificent natural wonder. Thanks for being the
best part of my day, Nicole. Thank you so much,
Nicole for this email. I wanted to share at number
one because that is a harrowing and fascinating story. Um.

(32:15):
But also uh, not too terribly long ago, we did
a podcast that was about going over Niagara in a barrel,
and that was what immediately came to mind when I
was reading uh this note because of the similarly harrowing
nature of that whole experience. UM. So, if you would

(32:35):
like to hear some more Niagara false stuff, we have
one on any Edison Taylor going over Niagara Falls in
a barrel. I'm sure there are others too. I will
maybe look stick a thing about them in the show notes.
UM if you would like to write to us about
this or any other podcast where at history podcast that
how Stuff Works dot com. And then we are all
over social media at missed in History and that's where

(32:58):
you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. You can
come to our website which is missing history dot com
and find the show notes for the episodes that Holly
and I have worked on together and the archive of
all the episodes previously. And you can subscribe to our
show on Apple, podcast, the I heart radio app, and
wherever else to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in

(33:23):
History Class is a production of I Heart Radio's How
Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit
the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.