June 12, 2025 • 38 mins
Millions of tourist flock to Paris every year to visit the Louvre or see the Eiffel Tower up close.
While tourists take photos on the city streets, under their feet, lining the walls of nearly two hundred miles of tunnels lie the skeletons of 6 MILLION people. Joseph Scott Morgan recounts his recent visit to the tunnels under the "City of Light" and explains how the area became the final resting place for millions of people.
And in a shocking turn, the Professor finds a skull that appears to have a gunshot wound to the head!
Transcribe Highlights
00:01.76 Introduction
02:26.06 Handrail phobia
05:00.55 Church and alter made from bones
09:48.76 Touring Notre Dame
15:19.56 A mantel made of stone
19:30.53 Bones stacked according to type
25:11.72 WW2 - Nazi's in one place, French resistance in another
30:08.31 Looking for trauma on the bones
35:44.67 Skull showed trauma
38:17.26 Conclusion
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Quality Dais, But Joseph's gotten more in my own arrogance.
I think I've seen a thing or two along the way.
But as soon as you do that in life's journey,
I believe life has a funny way of humbling you.
That's why I go back to the old adage, particularly
(00:23):
as it applies to forensic science. Anyone that says that
they have seen and done everything, or that they have
all of the answers, well they're lying, because you never
see everything and you never have all of the answers. Recently,
(00:43):
I've returned from a trip to Europe, and as part
of that trip, and as part of a fulfilling a
demand on the part of my wife, Kimmy, who said
that I need to do this, we visited the Catacomb Paris,
and my lord, my lord, what an eye opener. I
(01:07):
want to talk a little bit about that today and
give you some of my thoughts and some of the
insights into what I saw, felt and even smelled in
that environment. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Bodybacks, Dave.
(01:29):
I've gotten to a point in my life now where
I am very keen to be careful where I step,
using handrails, and I hate handrails. I'm not a germophobe,
but Kim is always, you know, getting after me about
using handrails when of going down. And the only thing
I can think about touching handrails is the idea that
(01:54):
somebody is out there that has not that's not as
hygienic as I would prefer for them to have been,
and they're kind of inoculating those surfaces with whatever it
is that they have. It's kind of like going to
a drive through again another disgusting, and somebody's got these
really long fingernails and they hand your food out to
(02:16):
you through the little window, and it's like, how exactly
do you clean your hands and clean other parts of
your body if you have these. So it's just one
of these things that kind of translates into my mind
because you know, I've seen the world microscopically. I think
it as a forensic scientist, and it just you know,
(02:40):
it's just those little things. But Dave, I got to
tell you, this descent that we took, it was a
you enter on the street of this place and you
have to go. It adds a whole another level of creepiness.
You descend down a spiral staircase that's cut into rock,
(03:00):
and it's ancient, and I don't remember how many steps
it was, but I think we descended roughly five to
six stories beneath the surface.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
Okay, to be clear with everyone, we're actually talking about
the catacombs of France, right under Paris. Yeah, okay, so
under the city of Paris. They're for those of us
who are not as worldly and educated as Joe and others.
(03:32):
I pretty much get my history information from movies, you know,
and I'm thinking Indiana Jones, the one with his dad,
you know, Sean Connery and one by the way.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
Oh and.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
When you sent me information about these six million bones,
I thought it was you know, this is like out
of a movie. This is not something you would normally see.
But then you took it a step further. And so
today as we start talking about six million bones that
are it's not a movie, it's not made up. It's
(04:06):
an actual, real thing, and you actually went and saw
it up close and personal. All I can say is
why who thought of this and thought it was a
good idea to take bones that we usually put in
a cemetery or very reverent or they end up in
a you know, depending on who you are, a coffee
can ab of the you know, fireplace, and how much
(04:28):
you cared about the person. But you know what I mean,
we don't normally use bones of the dead as decorations.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
Yeah, and these are not okay, just so you understand.
There are catacombs all over the world. There's a huge
concentration of them in Europe. There's one, I think I
mentioned this to you. There's one famous one in Portugal
where there's actually a chapel that's made out of bones,
(04:56):
where they have a huge high altar and a chandelier
and all these.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
Sorts of things all made from bones, all.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
Made from human bones. Yeah. And even you know, there
are cultures that have and I've actually seen these before,
that make eating and drinking vessels out of human bones.
I knew one of the forensic pathologists that I used
to work with had acquired a human skull that was
(05:23):
inlaid with sterling silver. And when you take the what
we call the calvarium, which is the skull cap itself,
take it off, the interior of the skull was plated
in sterling silver so it could be drink from. Essentially,
(05:43):
there's other stories of people using human bones as cutlery
or I don't know if cutlery is the right word,
but using it as utensils for things. So, look, you
got to do what you got to do. But the
practicality of the Paris Paris Catacombs, it's by the time
(06:07):
the catacombs were actually established, truly established, which was back
in the seventeen hundreds, it was a necessity because the
bodies in Paris. Paris had just exploded from a population standpoint,
and of course, as all cities do, you have a
concentric area and then it kind of expands out. Well. Paris,
(06:31):
unlike other cities, they decided to bury their dead in
the center of the city. If you go back to
like you look in the Middle East, many times they
would bury their dead outside the city walls. The occupants
of France, because they weren't necessarily French at the time,
began doing it within the walls. And the problem is
(06:55):
this Paris sits on limestone, and so the Romans, even
when they arrived, they began to quarry limestone from beneath
what is now Paris, and over the years and the
Parisians continued to do it. The French continue to do
it because they're trying to create stone monuments. They're trying
to actually create buildings out of stone. You have access
(07:17):
to limestone, so as you imagine, if you take the
limestone away, guess what happens. It becomes markedly unstable. So
you've got these collapses that are happening. There was a
cemetery in the center of town, and this is when
King Louis the fifteenth was on throne. He's the son
(07:40):
of the son King Louis the fourteenth who established Versai.
He was a bit more practical than his dad because
there was actually actually a house where people were living,
and the wall of the house collapsed and collapsed under
(08:01):
the weight of these burials that had taken place, these
kind of just subsurface burials, and the people have been
complaining about it for a while. And that the cemetery
was actually called the Innocence and it was consecrated ground,
it was on church property. And here's another thing. I
teach this in my Clandestine Graves class at jack State.
(08:22):
There's a difference between a graveyard and a cemetery, so
they're two completely different things. So a cemetery is I
think cemetery it comes from, if I'm not mistaken, the Greek,
and it means like it's a public place of burial.
That's what it comes down to. If you hear the
term graveyard, graveyard is consecrated ground. It's like part of
(08:46):
the church. And still today, you know, you can ride
around the countryside here in Alabama where we live, and
you'll see there's one that kind of gives Kim and
I the creeps. A graveyard at the church goes all
the way up to the front steps of the church.
And you're sitting there and you're thinking, oh, my lord.
So you're you're walking passes, and you know most of
(09:07):
them are kind of to the side, but not in
the case of this particular place. It goes right up
to the front steps of the church, so you're walking
past the dead. It's something I think that we've always done.
I think church wanted to do it that way because
in one sense, it's a reminder of how finite life is.
You know, you've got the spiritual life and you've got
(09:27):
the physical world that you live in. And and so anyway,
the bones.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
Bones right up there to the entrance to a church,
right you're getting there and walk in there to hear
how fire and damnation and here you go and then
bones of the Dead right.
Speaker 1 (09:41):
Here right, and so it's illustrative. It's really illustrative when
you walk out, it's kind of like you go into
you know, people see like you walk into like we
went to Notre Dame while we were there to see
these beautiful stained glass windows, and they're in all churches
no matter where you go, it doesn't matter what denomination
it is.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
Did they shod where the fire took place in?
Speaker 1 (10:03):
Yeah, yeah, you could see it. They were still working
on the outside place and it was it was packed
when we were there because it was it's one of
the really high holy days of the Catholic Church. It
was Ascension Day and it's the day that on the
calendar that's marked when when Christ descended. So there was
a huge line to get in and we didn't have
any choice, you know, we had to go on that
(10:23):
day because we once see what it looked like. And
they still have cranes on the outside of it. There's
armed troops everywhere, you know, patrolling the area. You know,
it's I'm not going to say, you know tensions were high,
but yeah, you kind of got that feeling because it's
a high holy day, so you're thinking, hmm, you know,
if somebody's going to do something, it could be today. Anyway,
(10:44):
we came in without, without a scratch on us.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
When you're meeting in the thieves den talking about ways
to terrorize the world. Okay, do you really want to
go after a church?
Speaker 1 (10:54):
Yeah? I know, I know. It's yeah, you know.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
What, Being on the bus to Hell is not enough.
I want to be on the Can you put me
between Charlie Mansin and Oj Simpson. I just want to
sit right there between those two guys, right in front
of Ted Bundy kind Scott Peterson, if you'll just put
me there.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
What do I have to do? Oh?
Speaker 2 (11:11):
Burn Notre Dame.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
Okay, yeah, yeah, and you get that. But listen, it
was one of the most peaceful, beautiful places that I've
been in in some time. My mother is an organist,
taught piano for I don't know, probably forty years and
played organ and we got to hear that beautiful I'm
sorry what you say I can play a church organ? Well,
(11:33):
I know that you can. And it's when you see
those huge pipes and you feel that, you know, kind
of resonate through your skull. It rattles everything. But back
to the idea of a graveyard being adjacent to a church,
and I was talking about stained glass windows. You know,
if you look at at the purpose of stained glass windows,
(11:55):
most of them were created to tell Bible stories. You
look at them and they're fascinating from that perspective. And
you know, the flood, Crucifixion, I mean, anything you want.
You want to talk about, the prodigal Sun, which is
probably my favorite story in all of the Bible. And
then you have the graveyard when you walk out of
the church, and it's kind of like, here's the exclamation point,
(12:17):
all right, this is the point to all of this.
And back during the seventeen hundreds, they began to have
these major problems in Paris because the bones had been
stacking up and they were like popping up out of
the ground. You know, you'd be walking along with your kids.
Can you imagine you're going to go to the local
baker or the fruit stand or whatever, and there's human
(12:38):
remains just lying about. And of course back then they
still have the specter of the plague that's hanging around.
You've got fetid water that's everywhere, human waste, animal waste,
and King Louis the fifteenth, the son of the son king,
said okay, all right, this is enough. We're not going
to do this anymore. The people are rising up, they're
(12:59):
coming about this. This is a problem and we should
be better than this. And they had had kind of
an epiphantal moment I think, during that period of time
about the health standards. Even though they wouldn't be the
standers would not be healthy by our standers today, they
had come a long way. And so he said, we're
going to start taking all of these remains, Dave, and
(13:20):
take them subterranean. We've got all of these kind of
shafts that are beneath the surface, and we're gonna start
putting them down there. And good lord, what an accumulation,
because I got to tell you, brother Dave, I saw
things down there I never would have imagined in my
wildest dreams. We make it into the catacombs and we're
(14:00):
you're not when you first enter the place. It's not
like you're going directly into the oshuary and oshwary is
kind of this fancy schmancy term for uh where bones
are collected. You walk through these tunnels and the tunnels
(14:20):
actually marry up with the streets above them, so you'll
have like these stone markers in the wall that'll say
you're on Rue. You know, you're beneath Rue, I don't
know what whatever, you know, Rue Charles, that's directly above
your head. And you have to take these twists and turns.
And you know, my son Noah was, you know, he
was with us, and he's a geographer, you know, that's
(14:43):
what he's got his degree in GIS. And he was
he was kind of, you know, leading us through this
area and he was talking about these kind of you
know how this would have had to have been plotted.
For instance, if you're you know, you're running underneath ground
and it there were various areas where there had been
collapses over a period of time. Those were marked on
(15:05):
the walls. And it takes you some time to actually
make it through the twist and turns the little avenues
down there before you actually get to the spot where
there is this day, I can't tell you. It probably
weighs I don't know. I'd have to say the thing
weighs at least a ton, and it's a mantle over
(15:28):
this opening and the door is kind of square, okay,
and it's made out of stone and inscribed, inscribed, you
know above above your head is a saying that actually
that you know where you're about to step into the
(15:49):
area where the bones are. And I'm not going to
make any attempt to pronounce it in French, but it
roughly translates into stop, this is the Empire of the dead.
And it's you know, again going back to the idea
that this is serious business, that they wanted everyone to understand,
(16:15):
the let's see the nature of the environment they were
about to inhabit, that this is not something to be
taken lightly, that it's a place of respect, that it's
a place that I think is maybe put up, you know,
as a monument to human frailty, because you know all
(16:38):
of these people. When you begin to kind of march
down this little walkway and you're getting into the primary osuary,
the first thing you see are just like a couple
of skulls, right and they're stacked. That's what I remember
the most.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
I'm trying to Okay, where do you enter? I mean,
is there like a neon sign, is a line up
here and go down?
Speaker 1 (17:01):
Or I mean there's yet so above ground there's there's
actually a place where you go in. You have to
Kimmy had bought us tickets way in advance. We were
in the last group of the day and there were
like eighty. The que was like a queue is a
line over there. So the queue was like for two hundred.
There were only eighty of us, and we were literally
(17:22):
at the tail end. So we did that on purpose
so we could take our time. Let me tell you something, brother,
if if it was not for if it was not
for the lights that the government had installed down there,
you you could not see your hand in front of
(17:44):
your face. And what's kind of fascinating is that there
was actually a story of this one. He's kind of
like a caretaker that was down there. In the seventeen hundreds,
there's only been one death that has occurred in the catacombs,
and it's this one guy. And let me tell I said,
this is one guy who had died down in that area,
(18:05):
and he had a torch of some kind, you know,
some kind of lantern. Lantern goes out and he's fumbled
around in the darkness for maybe days trying to find
his way out, and his body, his decomposed body, which
they the only way they could identify him. He had
a specific marker, like a tag on what was left
(18:26):
of his clothing. He was ten feet away from the staircase. Yeah,
and he just he collapsed right there and died, died
of starvation. There's no there's no outside light. And I've heard,
you know, I've talked to friends of mine over the
years that have worked in minds and those sorts of
things which I could I could never do, I'd lose
my mind. And they've talked about, you know, total darkness,
(18:51):
and can you imagine you're walking along and you've got
bones that are stacked to the ceiling. You're feeling your
way along the walls, and you keep touching these things
along the walls that the wall literally undulates, you know,
with you know that kind of curved, curved feeling of
(19:12):
a skull. Or maybe you've got long bones where you're
actually running your hands along the terminal ends of say
a femur, because all of these bones are stacked according
to their anatomical orientation.
Speaker 2 (19:28):
They're not stacked as one body after another, just skeleton skeleton, skeleton.
They're actually okay, we need all of the femurs right here,
all of the skulls right here, all the fingers.
Speaker 1 (19:43):
Yeah, and the lesser. Let me just kind of break
this down for you. I'm so excited to talk about this.
I'm kind of disordered today. But it varied depended upon
the age in time, because they started doing this back
in the seventeen hundred stay it went all the way
up through the end of the eighteen hundreds, where they're
still stacking bones in this place. So depended upon you
(20:08):
would have like stacks of skulls that would be like
the foundation. And these these areas where these entumbements are,
they're like carved out spaces in these limestone walls where
mining had taken place previously, you know, where they're like
knocking out chunks of limestone. They're bringing out big blocks
of it. And again, like I said, the Romans were
(20:28):
the first people to do this. So this is how
old these you know, these this place is. And the
Romans began to take these blocks out. And as time
went by and other you know, and other civilizations rose,
they saw the utility in here. But they would they
would knock out these huge spaces in the wall. And
(20:50):
what King Louis the fifteenth people started to do they
would utilize these areas, these kind of carved out areas
in the stone and make the bones fit. Now, there
is no effort, and let me tell you this, there
is no effort I don't think, at least in our
(21:10):
modern sensibilities to try to keep bodies intact relative to
their individual identity. All you have are human remains. And
I saw, you know, female skulls, I saw male skulls.
I saw the skulls of children, and you can you know,
there's certain things that you look for in forensic anthropology,
(21:32):
where you know, we do things based upon the size
of the skull. Male skulls will be kind of robust,
female skulls will be grassisle and fine. We've actually talked
about that term before on body bags. And then you have,
you know, of course, the more diminutive skulls of children,
and they're harder to sex. You can't tell, you know,
male from female many times, and so they create these
(21:55):
foundations and it's kind of stratified, like you might have
five rows of skulls. Then you're going to get to
the femurs, which are very robust. They're the largest long
bone in the body. It's your you know where you're
from your hip to your knee, and those are stacked
like cordwood, and you're looking down the long axis of
(22:17):
these bones and they form another layer. Then you'll go
to like tip FIBs, which are the smaller bones and
the lower leg. Then you'll have the humorous h You'll
have them stacked on top of that with you know,
the smaller bones of the arm, and then everything else
like the odd bones. This is what was really weird,
(22:38):
the odd shaped bones like ribs, anything from the feet,
the hands. They're kind of tucked on top of everything.
So you have this big pile of commingled remains on
top of them, and they can be from any number
of bodies that are there. And it was the only
(23:00):
marker that you have is every now and then you
will see a stone marker that has been chiseled in
and stuck, and it's like, okay, these remains came from
this particular parish church and that's really all you'll see.
But you're not going to say, you know, here lost fred. Okay,
it's not set up that way.
Speaker 2 (23:21):
Okay, So when they're doing all of this, it's because
I mean, it actually started because they had a problem
to solve, yes, and did it. Do you think when
they first started putting the bones in there that in
the back of their head, hey man, we're going to
open this up to the public so people can come
(23:41):
down here in tour and see if they can find
Uncle Fred and they'll come through. And I mean, I
cannot imagine that this long play here was about selling
tickets for people to wait in line, no, you know,
to go see.
Speaker 1 (23:53):
But did they have tours? Know, they didn't. As a
matter of fact, at the very end of it was
monitored very closely. You have to understand it, like when
they would do internments, priests would go down and bless
this area and it was consecrated at that point time
it was held and it was very reverential, so famously
(24:18):
And okay, I gotta see this. Going back to my
son he was talking about, Dad, you realize we're only
going to see like just under a mile of this, right,
he said, these catacombs go on for like two hundred
miles all under Paris, this network. And look, there's not
bones in the whole area, but there's these you know,
these tunnels that run all over the place, and a
(24:39):
lot of nefarious stuff has gone on in the other areas.
You know, you've got graffiti, You've got actually people subterranean
dwellers that will go down there and live in that space. Yeah,
and during World War Two, the French resistance, this is
how extensive it is. The French Resistance actually had they
were headquartered in one space down there, and and you
(25:00):
had the Nazis that were headquartered in one space down
there as they occupied Paris, which blew my mind. That's
how that's how intricate all of the stuff is. And
if you don't know where you're going, man, it's you're
you're a lost cause if you don't have a light
and I would think that even if you do have
a light source, it would be very difficult to kind
(25:22):
of make your way through through this area without knowing
where do I turn next. But the mazes is remarkable.
You know, this underground you see when you go down there,
it's very it should be treated very reverentially, you know,
because this is a place of the dead. And there's
(25:43):
a warning that you're given. They didn't put that sign
up there for for no reason, and it says you're
entering the realm of the dead. Now, you know, you
go into this place, and what was kind of amazing
to me is that there was no barrier between my
hands and the bones, the skeletal remains. I could reach
(26:06):
out and touch anything that's in there. And I have
to tell you, you know, there were a few few
spots along the way where I saw like cigarette butts
that have been thumped in there. I saw candy wrappers,
you know, the people had put in. I didn't see
any writing that was on anything, but you know, I
I did what did I do? I remember distinctly because me,
(26:29):
I'm a tactile person. I want to touch things. That's
kind of the investigator in me. I purposed to either
keep my hands in my pockets or hold my hands
behind my back and just lean in and try to look.
And of course I took photos just to make sure
that I didn't reach out and actually touch anything that
was in there, because you know, that scientific being within me,
(26:53):
you know, wants to. I want to. I want to see,
you know what the texture of it's like, you know,
kind of kind of how it sits. I'm just amazed
that still to this day you can walk down there
and there's not like a plexiglass wall. It's like if
you go to the go to the alleged side of
where Lee Harvey Oswell fired that weapon and the school
(27:14):
book depository. You can see what they call the sniper's nest,
but there is plexiglass in between you and that area.
You're not going to get in there. These go back
hundreds of years and in one estimation they believe that
these probably have been buried in for at least a
thousand years. So, you know me, Dave, my thing was,
(27:54):
I knew that there were two people of in my
American mind that I knew that were famous that were
buried down there, and they were both part of the
Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. These were like
some of the leaders Robespierre, who was one of the
(28:16):
big philosophers during the time of the Reign of Terror,
and as a matter of fact, he got so out
of sorts with this, you know, this congress that they
had that they wound up sticking him on the guillotine
and lopping his head off. Well, he's buried down there,
and of course, you know me, I'm thinking, hmm, I
(28:37):
wonder where his body is. I want to see if
I want to see if there's any evidence on the
base of the skull, and of course you can't find it.
And then there's Marat, who there's a famous portrait if
any of you guys have ever seen it, that he's
a famous French philosopher during this period of time, and
he had a horrible skin disorder and he would sit
(28:58):
in his bathtub all the time. He had a writing
a writing board that was placed across the bathroom, and
it's a famous portrait of him laying in there with
his arm extended out, and he's dead in that image.
And what had happened. There was a young girl that
had come in to bring information to him, kind of
(29:18):
like a spy network thing, and she talks to him
about fifteen minutes. Murrat's wife had let him in to
let her into this area, and at the end she
reaches into her boussier and pulls out a dagger and
drives it into his a order and kills him right there.
(29:41):
So you know, for me, I think that one of
the things I was looking at was not so much
the morphology of the skulls and the bones himself. I'm
trying to spot any kind of trauma that I can
down there to say, you know, because you've got you've
got things that have happened that people die, you'll have
(30:02):
grave collapses and that damage of skeletons. But you know,
I'm kind of, you know, looking and I don't have
enough time. That's the downside of it. I'm going through
there and I'm looking in to see if I see
any kind of trauma all day, all.
Speaker 2 (30:18):
Right, But what can you see? Because I'm going to
assume that the area that's open for the public to
go look in is a lot different than the area
that they would keep you out of. Like there is
nearly two hundred miles of tunnels and you're only allowed
to see a very very small portion of that. So
(30:41):
I guess I thought that bones would have that they
would have disintegrated by now. I mean, just is it
because they're very so deep. I mean we are talking
what two hundred feet below?
Speaker 1 (30:53):
Yeah, I would, Yeah, it would, I don't know take
what yeah, give or take. And of course the elevation
is going to vary, the depths will bury because the
ground actually undulates. You can feel yourself walking downward, and
you can feel yourself kind of egressing upward at any
number of times. And that was what I was thinking too.
I'm thinking, Holy smokes, what do they have to sing
(31:14):
reinforced with right? You know, because I can tell you
if there's like a weight collapse in their bones, are
not going to provide any kind I mean, it'll just
turn them to dust at that point of time. But
and like you, I was amazed at the resiliency of
the moon. And of course here's another thing. In some
instances I saw teeth, and the teeth are just beautiful,
(31:38):
pearly white. You know, teeth are so resilient, you know,
compared to skeletal remain you know, they'll hang around for
a long long time, whereas you know, but you know
where what I guess in some instant, well, there's one
area that claimed that barrels have been taken place in
perhaps for a thousand years, and that actually kind of
(31:59):
pre dates the French as we know them. It's like
during the Frankish Kingdom. But you know, to say that
that those bones are there among that, I can't imagine,
because this looks like the repatriation area. Like when when
the church's graveyards, not cemeteries, but graveyards began to collapse,
(32:22):
they felt that we wanted to keep all of the individuals.
Just imagine if you you know, you've got the First
Methodist Church and Calvary Baptist Church and Saint Luke Lutheran Church.
You've got they have a designated area where they would
evacuate their dead to or remove the bodies to in
(32:45):
those cases. Actually, yeah, yeah, it kind of does. And
so anything that would have happened before then is not
necessarily in an area you're going to have access to.
And it's dangerous, man, I mean you, let's face it.
You know, if you have some kids that gets down
in these areas, it you know, tragedy is going to ensue.
(33:05):
And there's always there are always those curiosity seekers you know,
that are down there that you're thinking, well what can
I find? You know, if I'm down here, can I
steal something and take it away? Or am I going
to commune with the other world while I'm down here? Uh?
And so you've got all of all of these kinds
of things that are going on. Or maybe somebody's playing
(33:27):
a prank on somebody and they just walk somebody down
there and abandon them down there. Can you mention how
horrible that would be? Well, yeah, you were.
Speaker 2 (33:34):
Talking about the guy that was found near the stairs.
Right back in the day we have caverns. There's this
cavern in Alabama. It was called Desetto Caverns, and it
was used for a long time for different things and
they've renamed it now. But there's a part of when
(33:56):
you go on the tour where they actually cut the lighting,
you know, the artificial lights, and you're actually inside the
cave and it is complete darkness where you're sitting there
and you cannot see your hand directly in front of
your face, you know, right there, you're touching your nose.
You can't see it. It's that dark. And that's what
I'm thinking. It's one thing to be confused as to
(34:20):
where you are because everything looks the same. It's bones, bones,
and more bones, but another to add in the idea
of darkness and that you cannot find your way. You
can't get acclimated of this. You're not seeing anything, and
even with your eyes open and artificial lighting, you can
be lost. I just can't imagine the sick feeling this
(34:42):
would be to an individual.
Speaker 1 (34:44):
You know, Yeah, there's no way you can bathe it
with artificial lighting, you know where because even these and
again they do it for atmosphere. They've got these kind
of amber amber looking lights that are down there, and
I think part of it has to do with Preserva
the bone. I think that and someone smarter than I
could come up with this. But you don't want like
(35:05):
harsh intense light on these things for any period of time.
And even those but even those little amber lights, you
can't see to the rear all the way to the
rear of these oshwaries that are these individual ashwaries that
are there. I did come across something kind of interesting
while I was down there, though. There was a and
I think that they had probably done this on purpose.
(35:26):
There was actually a skull that I found that I
observed and I was just walking by it and I
noticed something. Because it's supposed it's the skull is turned
so that you have the posterior review. You can't see
the face at all. There's no way. I tried to
get an angle on it so that I could try
to see the orbits, the eye sockets all that I
(35:48):
couldn't There's no way I could do it. But I
could fully appreciate, like the left parietal, which is the
large bony complex behind your ear and up and the
right prodetal and then the occipital, which is where the
you know, your big occiput or the big knot on
the back of your head is. And Dave, on the
(36:10):
left side of this thing, there is a defect that
measured probably let's see, probably in the horizontal plane it
was about maybe three inches wide, and in the vertical
plane it may have been about four. And Dude, I'm
looking at this thing, and I'm thinking, is this as
(36:30):
a result of the of the skull like falling apart?
Is it you know, some kind of grave trauma, you know,
where something has like collapsed on it. It wasn't. It wasn't.
This looked to me, all right, as if this was
the result of an exit one from a gunfire. And
(36:52):
I'm sitting I'm staring at this, and I'm thinking, I
can't believe I'm seeing this. And one of the ways
that on bone in particular, if you're trying to assess
like firem's trauma to a human skull, is that you'll
have what's referred to with the exit wound, You'll have
what's referred to as external beveling, which means that as
(37:15):
a bullet let's, say, a bullet comes in through somebody's
forehead and a bullet is exiting out that bone is
blown out, okay, And as it is blown out, it
leaves an appreciable curved area that is referred to as
external beveling, which gives you direction of the projectile that's
(37:35):
passing through the head. If it was internal beveling, that's
the entrance. So you wouldn't see the beveled area because
it's inside the skull. This is outside of the skull.
The only thing that can generate that is some type
of projectile perhaps passing through the head. And again you
start to think about, well, would any of these bodies
have been subject to gunfire? It's like, hell yeah, because
(38:00):
a lot of these people that were buried down there
were buried down there during the French Revolution, and there
was a lot of gunplay during the French Revolution, you know,
the you know, French citizens killing French citizens, and so,
you know, it really gave me pause, and it gave
me pause from the perspective of though that person was
long gone and inhabited the space where I was just
(38:23):
kind of a guest. I guess you could say for
that period of time, not much has changed. There's a
level of violence that we think that we know in
modern America and around the world. But just like death,
evil has always existed. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this
(38:48):
is BODYB.
Quality Dais, But Joseph's gotten more in my own arrogance.
I think I've seen a thing or two along the way.
But as soon as you do that in life's journey,
I believe life has a funny way of humbling you.
That's why I go back to the old adage, particularly
(00:23):
as it applies to forensic science. Anyone that says that
they have seen and done everything, or that they have
all of the answers, well they're lying, because you never
see everything and you never have all of the answers. Recently,
(00:43):
I've returned from a trip to Europe, and as part
of that trip, and as part of a fulfilling a
demand on the part of my wife, Kimmy, who said
that I need to do this, we visited the Catacomb Paris,
and my lord, my lord, what an eye opener. I
(01:07):
want to talk a little bit about that today and
give you some of my thoughts and some of the
insights into what I saw, felt and even smelled in
that environment. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Bodybacks, Dave.
(01:29):
I've gotten to a point in my life now where
I am very keen to be careful where I step,
using handrails, and I hate handrails. I'm not a germophobe,
but Kim is always, you know, getting after me about
using handrails when of going down. And the only thing
I can think about touching handrails is the idea that
(01:54):
somebody is out there that has not that's not as
hygienic as I would prefer for them to have been,
and they're kind of inoculating those surfaces with whatever it
is that they have. It's kind of like going to
a drive through again another disgusting, and somebody's got these
really long fingernails and they hand your food out to
(02:16):
you through the little window, and it's like, how exactly
do you clean your hands and clean other parts of
your body if you have these. So it's just one
of these things that kind of translates into my mind
because you know, I've seen the world microscopically. I think
it as a forensic scientist, and it just you know,
(02:40):
it's just those little things. But Dave, I got to
tell you, this descent that we took, it was a
you enter on the street of this place and you
have to go. It adds a whole another level of creepiness.
You descend down a spiral staircase that's cut into rock,
(03:00):
and it's ancient, and I don't remember how many steps
it was, but I think we descended roughly five to
six stories beneath the surface.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
Okay, to be clear with everyone, we're actually talking about
the catacombs of France, right under Paris. Yeah, okay, so
under the city of Paris. They're for those of us
who are not as worldly and educated as Joe and others.
(03:32):
I pretty much get my history information from movies, you know,
and I'm thinking Indiana Jones, the one with his dad,
you know, Sean Connery and one by the way.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
Oh and.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
When you sent me information about these six million bones,
I thought it was you know, this is like out
of a movie. This is not something you would normally see.
But then you took it a step further. And so
today as we start talking about six million bones that
are it's not a movie, it's not made up. It's
(04:06):
an actual, real thing, and you actually went and saw
it up close and personal. All I can say is
why who thought of this and thought it was a
good idea to take bones that we usually put in
a cemetery or very reverent or they end up in
a you know, depending on who you are, a coffee
can ab of the you know, fireplace, and how much
(04:28):
you cared about the person. But you know what I mean,
we don't normally use bones of the dead as decorations.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
Yeah, and these are not okay, just so you understand.
There are catacombs all over the world. There's a huge
concentration of them in Europe. There's one, I think I
mentioned this to you. There's one famous one in Portugal
where there's actually a chapel that's made out of bones,
(04:56):
where they have a huge high altar and a chandelier
and all these.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
Sorts of things all made from bones, all.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
Made from human bones. Yeah. And even you know, there
are cultures that have and I've actually seen these before,
that make eating and drinking vessels out of human bones.
I knew one of the forensic pathologists that I used
to work with had acquired a human skull that was
(05:23):
inlaid with sterling silver. And when you take the what
we call the calvarium, which is the skull cap itself,
take it off, the interior of the skull was plated
in sterling silver so it could be drink from. Essentially,
(05:43):
there's other stories of people using human bones as cutlery
or I don't know if cutlery is the right word,
but using it as utensils for things. So, look, you
got to do what you got to do. But the
practicality of the Paris Paris Catacombs, it's by the time
(06:07):
the catacombs were actually established, truly established, which was back
in the seventeen hundreds, it was a necessity because the
bodies in Paris. Paris had just exploded from a population standpoint,
and of course, as all cities do, you have a
concentric area and then it kind of expands out. Well. Paris,
(06:31):
unlike other cities, they decided to bury their dead in
the center of the city. If you go back to
like you look in the Middle East, many times they
would bury their dead outside the city walls. The occupants
of France, because they weren't necessarily French at the time,
began doing it within the walls. And the problem is
(06:55):
this Paris sits on limestone, and so the Romans, even
when they arrived, they began to quarry limestone from beneath
what is now Paris, and over the years and the
Parisians continued to do it. The French continue to do
it because they're trying to create stone monuments. They're trying
to actually create buildings out of stone. You have access
(07:17):
to limestone, so as you imagine, if you take the
limestone away, guess what happens. It becomes markedly unstable. So
you've got these collapses that are happening. There was a
cemetery in the center of town, and this is when
King Louis the fifteenth was on throne. He's the son
(07:40):
of the son King Louis the fourteenth who established Versai.
He was a bit more practical than his dad because
there was actually actually a house where people were living,
and the wall of the house collapsed and collapsed under
(08:01):
the weight of these burials that had taken place, these
kind of just subsurface burials, and the people have been
complaining about it for a while. And that the cemetery
was actually called the Innocence and it was consecrated ground,
it was on church property. And here's another thing. I
teach this in my Clandestine Graves class at jack State.
(08:22):
There's a difference between a graveyard and a cemetery, so
they're two completely different things. So a cemetery is I
think cemetery it comes from, if I'm not mistaken, the Greek,
and it means like it's a public place of burial.
That's what it comes down to. If you hear the
term graveyard, graveyard is consecrated ground. It's like part of
(08:46):
the church. And still today, you know, you can ride
around the countryside here in Alabama where we live, and
you'll see there's one that kind of gives Kim and
I the creeps. A graveyard at the church goes all
the way up to the front steps of the church.
And you're sitting there and you're thinking, oh, my lord.
So you're you're walking passes, and you know most of
(09:07):
them are kind of to the side, but not in
the case of this particular place. It goes right up
to the front steps of the church, so you're walking
past the dead. It's something I think that we've always done.
I think church wanted to do it that way because
in one sense, it's a reminder of how finite life is.
You know, you've got the spiritual life and you've got
(09:27):
the physical world that you live in. And and so anyway,
the bones.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
Bones right up there to the entrance to a church,
right you're getting there and walk in there to hear
how fire and damnation and here you go and then
bones of the Dead right.
Speaker 1 (09:41):
Here right, and so it's illustrative. It's really illustrative when
you walk out, it's kind of like you go into
you know, people see like you walk into like we
went to Notre Dame while we were there to see
these beautiful stained glass windows, and they're in all churches
no matter where you go, it doesn't matter what denomination
it is.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
Did they shod where the fire took place in?
Speaker 1 (10:03):
Yeah, yeah, you could see it. They were still working
on the outside place and it was it was packed
when we were there because it was it's one of
the really high holy days of the Catholic Church. It
was Ascension Day and it's the day that on the
calendar that's marked when when Christ descended. So there was
a huge line to get in and we didn't have
any choice, you know, we had to go on that
(10:23):
day because we once see what it looked like. And
they still have cranes on the outside of it. There's
armed troops everywhere, you know, patrolling the area. You know,
it's I'm not going to say, you know tensions were high,
but yeah, you kind of got that feeling because it's
a high holy day, so you're thinking, hmm, you know,
if somebody's going to do something, it could be today. Anyway,
(10:44):
we came in without, without a scratch on us.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
When you're meeting in the thieves den talking about ways
to terrorize the world. Okay, do you really want to
go after a church?
Speaker 1 (10:54):
Yeah? I know, I know. It's yeah, you know.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
What, Being on the bus to Hell is not enough.
I want to be on the Can you put me
between Charlie Mansin and Oj Simpson. I just want to
sit right there between those two guys, right in front
of Ted Bundy kind Scott Peterson, if you'll just put
me there.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
What do I have to do? Oh?
Speaker 2 (11:11):
Burn Notre Dame.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
Okay, yeah, yeah, and you get that. But listen, it
was one of the most peaceful, beautiful places that I've
been in in some time. My mother is an organist,
taught piano for I don't know, probably forty years and
played organ and we got to hear that beautiful I'm
sorry what you say I can play a church organ? Well,
(11:33):
I know that you can. And it's when you see
those huge pipes and you feel that, you know, kind
of resonate through your skull. It rattles everything. But back
to the idea of a graveyard being adjacent to a church,
and I was talking about stained glass windows. You know,
if you look at at the purpose of stained glass windows,
(11:55):
most of them were created to tell Bible stories. You
look at them and they're fascinating from that perspective. And
you know, the flood, Crucifixion, I mean, anything you want.
You want to talk about, the prodigal Sun, which is
probably my favorite story in all of the Bible. And
then you have the graveyard when you walk out of
the church, and it's kind of like, here's the exclamation point,
(12:17):
all right, this is the point to all of this.
And back during the seventeen hundreds, they began to have
these major problems in Paris because the bones had been
stacking up and they were like popping up out of
the ground. You know, you'd be walking along with your kids.
Can you imagine you're going to go to the local
baker or the fruit stand or whatever, and there's human
(12:38):
remains just lying about. And of course back then they
still have the specter of the plague that's hanging around.
You've got fetid water that's everywhere, human waste, animal waste,
and King Louis the fifteenth, the son of the son king,
said okay, all right, this is enough. We're not going
to do this anymore. The people are rising up, they're
(12:59):
coming about this. This is a problem and we should
be better than this. And they had had kind of
an epiphantal moment I think, during that period of time
about the health standards. Even though they wouldn't be the
standers would not be healthy by our standers today, they
had come a long way. And so he said, we're
going to start taking all of these remains, Dave, and
(13:20):
take them subterranean. We've got all of these kind of
shafts that are beneath the surface, and we're gonna start
putting them down there. And good lord, what an accumulation,
because I got to tell you, brother Dave, I saw
things down there I never would have imagined in my
wildest dreams. We make it into the catacombs and we're
(14:00):
you're not when you first enter the place. It's not
like you're going directly into the oshuary and oshwary is
kind of this fancy schmancy term for uh where bones
are collected. You walk through these tunnels and the tunnels
(14:20):
actually marry up with the streets above them, so you'll
have like these stone markers in the wall that'll say
you're on Rue. You know, you're beneath Rue, I don't
know what whatever, you know, Rue Charles, that's directly above
your head. And you have to take these twists and turns.
And you know, my son Noah was, you know, he
was with us, and he's a geographer, you know, that's
(14:43):
what he's got his degree in GIS. And he was
he was kind of, you know, leading us through this
area and he was talking about these kind of you
know how this would have had to have been plotted.
For instance, if you're you know, you're running underneath ground
and it there were various areas where there had been
collapses over a period of time. Those were marked on
(15:05):
the walls. And it takes you some time to actually
make it through the twist and turns the little avenues
down there before you actually get to the spot where
there is this day, I can't tell you. It probably
weighs I don't know. I'd have to say the thing
weighs at least a ton, and it's a mantle over
(15:28):
this opening and the door is kind of square, okay,
and it's made out of stone and inscribed, inscribed, you
know above above your head is a saying that actually
that you know where you're about to step into the
(15:49):
area where the bones are. And I'm not going to
make any attempt to pronounce it in French, but it
roughly translates into stop, this is the Empire of the dead.
And it's you know, again going back to the idea
that this is serious business, that they wanted everyone to understand,
(16:15):
the let's see the nature of the environment they were
about to inhabit, that this is not something to be
taken lightly, that it's a place of respect, that it's
a place that I think is maybe put up, you know,
as a monument to human frailty, because you know all
(16:38):
of these people. When you begin to kind of march
down this little walkway and you're getting into the primary osuary,
the first thing you see are just like a couple
of skulls, right and they're stacked. That's what I remember
the most.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
I'm trying to Okay, where do you enter? I mean,
is there like a neon sign, is a line up
here and go down?
Speaker 1 (17:01):
Or I mean there's yet so above ground there's there's
actually a place where you go in. You have to
Kimmy had bought us tickets way in advance. We were
in the last group of the day and there were
like eighty. The que was like a queue is a
line over there. So the queue was like for two hundred.
There were only eighty of us, and we were literally
(17:22):
at the tail end. So we did that on purpose
so we could take our time. Let me tell you something, brother,
if if it was not for if it was not
for the lights that the government had installed down there,
you you could not see your hand in front of
(17:44):
your face. And what's kind of fascinating is that there
was actually a story of this one. He's kind of
like a caretaker that was down there. In the seventeen hundreds,
there's only been one death that has occurred in the catacombs,
and it's this one guy. And let me tell I said,
this is one guy who had died down in that area,
(18:05):
and he had a torch of some kind, you know,
some kind of lantern. Lantern goes out and he's fumbled
around in the darkness for maybe days trying to find
his way out, and his body, his decomposed body, which
they the only way they could identify him. He had
a specific marker, like a tag on what was left
(18:26):
of his clothing. He was ten feet away from the staircase. Yeah,
and he just he collapsed right there and died, died
of starvation. There's no there's no outside light. And I've heard,
you know, I've talked to friends of mine over the
years that have worked in minds and those sorts of
things which I could I could never do, I'd lose
my mind. And they've talked about, you know, total darkness,
(18:51):
and can you imagine you're walking along and you've got
bones that are stacked to the ceiling. You're feeling your
way along the walls, and you keep touching these things
along the walls that the wall literally undulates, you know,
with you know that kind of curved, curved feeling of
(19:12):
a skull. Or maybe you've got long bones where you're
actually running your hands along the terminal ends of say
a femur, because all of these bones are stacked according
to their anatomical orientation.
Speaker 2 (19:28):
They're not stacked as one body after another, just skeleton skeleton, skeleton.
They're actually okay, we need all of the femurs right here,
all of the skulls right here, all the fingers.
Speaker 1 (19:43):
Yeah, and the lesser. Let me just kind of break
this down for you. I'm so excited to talk about this.
I'm kind of disordered today. But it varied depended upon
the age in time, because they started doing this back
in the seventeen hundred stay it went all the way
up through the end of the eighteen hundreds, where they're
still stacking bones in this place. So depended upon you
(20:08):
would have like stacks of skulls that would be like
the foundation. And these these areas where these entumbements are,
they're like carved out spaces in these limestone walls where
mining had taken place previously, you know, where they're like
knocking out chunks of limestone. They're bringing out big blocks
of it. And again, like I said, the Romans were
(20:28):
the first people to do this. So this is how
old these you know, these this place is. And the
Romans began to take these blocks out. And as time
went by and other you know, and other civilizations rose,
they saw the utility in here. But they would they
would knock out these huge spaces in the wall. And
(20:50):
what King Louis the fifteenth people started to do they
would utilize these areas, these kind of carved out areas
in the stone and make the bones fit. Now, there
is no effort, and let me tell you this, there
is no effort I don't think, at least in our
(21:10):
modern sensibilities to try to keep bodies intact relative to
their individual identity. All you have are human remains. And
I saw, you know, female skulls, I saw male skulls.
I saw the skulls of children, and you can you know,
there's certain things that you look for in forensic anthropology,
(21:32):
where you know, we do things based upon the size
of the skull. Male skulls will be kind of robust,
female skulls will be grassisle and fine. We've actually talked
about that term before on body bags. And then you have,
you know, of course, the more diminutive skulls of children,
and they're harder to sex. You can't tell, you know,
male from female many times, and so they create these
(21:55):
foundations and it's kind of stratified, like you might have
five rows of skulls. Then you're going to get to
the femurs, which are very robust. They're the largest long
bone in the body. It's your you know where you're
from your hip to your knee, and those are stacked
like cordwood, and you're looking down the long axis of
(22:17):
these bones and they form another layer. Then you'll go
to like tip FIBs, which are the smaller bones and
the lower leg. Then you'll have the humorous h You'll
have them stacked on top of that with you know,
the smaller bones of the arm, and then everything else
like the odd bones. This is what was really weird,
(22:38):
the odd shaped bones like ribs, anything from the feet,
the hands. They're kind of tucked on top of everything.
So you have this big pile of commingled remains on
top of them, and they can be from any number
of bodies that are there. And it was the only
(23:00):
marker that you have is every now and then you
will see a stone marker that has been chiseled in
and stuck, and it's like, okay, these remains came from
this particular parish church and that's really all you'll see.
But you're not going to say, you know, here lost fred. Okay,
it's not set up that way.
Speaker 2 (23:21):
Okay, So when they're doing all of this, it's because
I mean, it actually started because they had a problem
to solve, yes, and did it. Do you think when
they first started putting the bones in there that in
the back of their head, hey man, we're going to
open this up to the public so people can come
(23:41):
down here in tour and see if they can find
Uncle Fred and they'll come through. And I mean, I
cannot imagine that this long play here was about selling
tickets for people to wait in line, no, you know,
to go see.
Speaker 1 (23:53):
But did they have tours? Know, they didn't. As a
matter of fact, at the very end of it was
monitored very closely. You have to understand it, like when
they would do internments, priests would go down and bless
this area and it was consecrated at that point time
it was held and it was very reverential, so famously
(24:18):
And okay, I gotta see this. Going back to my
son he was talking about, Dad, you realize we're only
going to see like just under a mile of this, right,
he said, these catacombs go on for like two hundred
miles all under Paris, this network. And look, there's not
bones in the whole area, but there's these you know,
these tunnels that run all over the place, and a
(24:39):
lot of nefarious stuff has gone on in the other areas.
You know, you've got graffiti, You've got actually people subterranean
dwellers that will go down there and live in that space. Yeah,
and during World War Two, the French resistance, this is
how extensive it is. The French Resistance actually had they
were headquartered in one space down there, and and you
(25:00):
had the Nazis that were headquartered in one space down
there as they occupied Paris, which blew my mind. That's
how that's how intricate all of the stuff is. And
if you don't know where you're going, man, it's you're
you're a lost cause if you don't have a light
and I would think that even if you do have
a light source, it would be very difficult to kind
(25:22):
of make your way through through this area without knowing
where do I turn next. But the mazes is remarkable.
You know, this underground you see when you go down there,
it's very it should be treated very reverentially, you know,
because this is a place of the dead. And there's
(25:43):
a warning that you're given. They didn't put that sign
up there for for no reason, and it says you're
entering the realm of the dead. Now, you know, you
go into this place, and what was kind of amazing
to me is that there was no barrier between my
hands and the bones, the skeletal remains. I could reach
(26:06):
out and touch anything that's in there. And I have
to tell you, you know, there were a few few
spots along the way where I saw like cigarette butts
that have been thumped in there. I saw candy wrappers,
you know, the people had put in. I didn't see
any writing that was on anything, but you know, I
I did what did I do? I remember distinctly because me,
(26:29):
I'm a tactile person. I want to touch things. That's
kind of the investigator in me. I purposed to either
keep my hands in my pockets or hold my hands
behind my back and just lean in and try to look.
And of course I took photos just to make sure
that I didn't reach out and actually touch anything that
was in there, because you know, that scientific being within me,
(26:53):
you know, wants to. I want to. I want to see,
you know what the texture of it's like, you know,
kind of kind of how it sits. I'm just amazed
that still to this day you can walk down there
and there's not like a plexiglass wall. It's like if
you go to the go to the alleged side of
where Lee Harvey Oswell fired that weapon and the school
(27:14):
book depository. You can see what they call the sniper's nest,
but there is plexiglass in between you and that area.
You're not going to get in there. These go back
hundreds of years and in one estimation they believe that
these probably have been buried in for at least a
thousand years. So, you know me, Dave, my thing was,
(27:54):
I knew that there were two people of in my
American mind that I knew that were famous that were
buried down there, and they were both part of the
Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. These were like
some of the leaders Robespierre, who was one of the
(28:16):
big philosophers during the time of the Reign of Terror,
and as a matter of fact, he got so out
of sorts with this, you know, this congress that they
had that they wound up sticking him on the guillotine
and lopping his head off. Well, he's buried down there,
and of course, you know me, I'm thinking, hmm, I
(28:37):
wonder where his body is. I want to see if
I want to see if there's any evidence on the
base of the skull, and of course you can't find it.
And then there's Marat, who there's a famous portrait if
any of you guys have ever seen it, that he's
a famous French philosopher during this period of time, and
he had a horrible skin disorder and he would sit
(28:58):
in his bathtub all the time. He had a writing
a writing board that was placed across the bathroom, and
it's a famous portrait of him laying in there with
his arm extended out, and he's dead in that image.
And what had happened. There was a young girl that
had come in to bring information to him, kind of
(29:18):
like a spy network thing, and she talks to him
about fifteen minutes. Murrat's wife had let him in to
let her into this area, and at the end she
reaches into her boussier and pulls out a dagger and
drives it into his a order and kills him right there.
(29:41):
So you know, for me, I think that one of
the things I was looking at was not so much
the morphology of the skulls and the bones himself. I'm
trying to spot any kind of trauma that I can
down there to say, you know, because you've got you've
got things that have happened that people die, you'll have
(30:02):
grave collapses and that damage of skeletons. But you know,
I'm kind of, you know, looking and I don't have
enough time. That's the downside of it. I'm going through
there and I'm looking in to see if I see
any kind of trauma all day, all.
Speaker 2 (30:18):
Right, But what can you see? Because I'm going to
assume that the area that's open for the public to
go look in is a lot different than the area
that they would keep you out of. Like there is
nearly two hundred miles of tunnels and you're only allowed
to see a very very small portion of that. So
(30:41):
I guess I thought that bones would have that they
would have disintegrated by now. I mean, just is it
because they're very so deep. I mean we are talking
what two hundred feet below?
Speaker 1 (30:53):
Yeah, I would, Yeah, it would, I don't know take
what yeah, give or take. And of course the elevation
is going to vary, the depths will bury because the
ground actually undulates. You can feel yourself walking downward, and
you can feel yourself kind of egressing upward at any
number of times. And that was what I was thinking too.
I'm thinking, Holy smokes, what do they have to sing
(31:14):
reinforced with right? You know, because I can tell you
if there's like a weight collapse in their bones, are
not going to provide any kind I mean, it'll just
turn them to dust at that point of time. But
and like you, I was amazed at the resiliency of
the moon. And of course here's another thing. In some
instances I saw teeth, and the teeth are just beautiful,
(31:38):
pearly white. You know, teeth are so resilient, you know,
compared to skeletal remain you know, they'll hang around for
a long long time, whereas you know, but you know
where what I guess in some instant, well, there's one
area that claimed that barrels have been taken place in
perhaps for a thousand years, and that actually kind of
(31:59):
pre dates the French as we know them. It's like
during the Frankish Kingdom. But you know, to say that
that those bones are there among that, I can't imagine,
because this looks like the repatriation area. Like when when
the church's graveyards, not cemeteries, but graveyards began to collapse,
(32:22):
they felt that we wanted to keep all of the individuals.
Just imagine if you you know, you've got the First
Methodist Church and Calvary Baptist Church and Saint Luke Lutheran Church.
You've got they have a designated area where they would
evacuate their dead to or remove the bodies to in
(32:45):
those cases. Actually, yeah, yeah, it kind of does. And
so anything that would have happened before then is not
necessarily in an area you're going to have access to.
And it's dangerous, man, I mean you, let's face it.
You know, if you have some kids that gets down
in these areas, it you know, tragedy is going to ensue.
(33:05):
And there's always there are always those curiosity seekers you know,
that are down there that you're thinking, well what can
I find? You know, if I'm down here, can I
steal something and take it away? Or am I going
to commune with the other world while I'm down here? Uh?
And so you've got all of all of these kinds
of things that are going on. Or maybe somebody's playing
(33:27):
a prank on somebody and they just walk somebody down
there and abandon them down there. Can you mention how
horrible that would be? Well, yeah, you were.
Speaker 2 (33:34):
Talking about the guy that was found near the stairs.
Right back in the day we have caverns. There's this
cavern in Alabama. It was called Desetto Caverns, and it
was used for a long time for different things and
they've renamed it now. But there's a part of when
(33:56):
you go on the tour where they actually cut the lighting,
you know, the artificial lights, and you're actually inside the
cave and it is complete darkness where you're sitting there
and you cannot see your hand directly in front of
your face, you know, right there, you're touching your nose.
You can't see it. It's that dark. And that's what
I'm thinking. It's one thing to be confused as to
(34:20):
where you are because everything looks the same. It's bones, bones,
and more bones, but another to add in the idea
of darkness and that you cannot find your way. You
can't get acclimated of this. You're not seeing anything, and
even with your eyes open and artificial lighting, you can
be lost. I just can't imagine the sick feeling this
(34:42):
would be to an individual.
Speaker 1 (34:44):
You know, Yeah, there's no way you can bathe it
with artificial lighting, you know where because even these and
again they do it for atmosphere. They've got these kind
of amber amber looking lights that are down there, and
I think part of it has to do with Preserva
the bone. I think that and someone smarter than I
could come up with this. But you don't want like
(35:05):
harsh intense light on these things for any period of time.
And even those but even those little amber lights, you
can't see to the rear all the way to the
rear of these oshwaries that are these individual ashwaries that
are there. I did come across something kind of interesting
while I was down there, though. There was a and
I think that they had probably done this on purpose.
(35:26):
There was actually a skull that I found that I
observed and I was just walking by it and I
noticed something. Because it's supposed it's the skull is turned
so that you have the posterior review. You can't see
the face at all. There's no way. I tried to
get an angle on it so that I could try
to see the orbits, the eye sockets all that I
(35:48):
couldn't There's no way I could do it. But I
could fully appreciate, like the left parietal, which is the
large bony complex behind your ear and up and the
right prodetal and then the occipital, which is where the
you know, your big occiput or the big knot on
the back of your head is. And Dave, on the
(36:10):
left side of this thing, there is a defect that
measured probably let's see, probably in the horizontal plane it
was about maybe three inches wide, and in the vertical
plane it may have been about four. And Dude, I'm
looking at this thing, and I'm thinking, is this as
(36:30):
a result of the of the skull like falling apart?
Is it you know, some kind of grave trauma, you know,
where something has like collapsed on it. It wasn't. It wasn't.
This looked to me, all right, as if this was
the result of an exit one from a gunfire. And
(36:52):
I'm sitting I'm staring at this, and I'm thinking, I
can't believe I'm seeing this. And one of the ways
that on bone in particular, if you're trying to assess
like firem's trauma to a human skull, is that you'll
have what's referred to with the exit wound, You'll have
what's referred to as external beveling, which means that as
(37:15):
a bullet let's, say, a bullet comes in through somebody's
forehead and a bullet is exiting out that bone is
blown out, okay, And as it is blown out, it
leaves an appreciable curved area that is referred to as
external beveling, which gives you direction of the projectile that's
(37:35):
passing through the head. If it was internal beveling, that's
the entrance. So you wouldn't see the beveled area because
it's inside the skull. This is outside of the skull.
The only thing that can generate that is some type
of projectile perhaps passing through the head. And again you
start to think about, well, would any of these bodies
have been subject to gunfire? It's like, hell yeah, because
(38:00):
a lot of these people that were buried down there
were buried down there during the French Revolution, and there
was a lot of gunplay during the French Revolution, you know,
the you know, French citizens killing French citizens, and so,
you know, it really gave me pause, and it gave
me pause from the perspective of though that person was
long gone and inhabited the space where I was just
(38:23):
kind of a guest. I guess you could say for
that period of time, not much has changed. There's a
level of violence that we think that we know in
modern America and around the world. But just like death,
evil has always existed. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this
(38:48):
is BODYB.
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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