(dramatic music)
The French capital of Paris
has far more dead than living.
Deep in its bowels lie millions of corpses;
the source of many mysterious stories and events.
From the catacombs to the city's most famous cemeteries,
an investigation into the secrets of post-mortem Paris.
The great question at the time was
what happens to people's souls when they die?
What part have the dead played
in the history of Paris?
Have the lost souls revealed all of their secrets?
To find out, we must investigate here, in Paris.
I'm Jean-Marc Leri.
I've devoted my life to understanding Paris's history,
studying its secrets, and wandering its maze of streets.
The city holds many centuries-old mysteries.
Often these cases are dismissed as occult phenomena,
myths, legends, or popular beliefs.
Things have happened here, though.
There are facts, consistencies, and bonafide witnesses.
Historians, scientists and investigators of all sorts
have been unable to solve them.
It is time to reveal the most plausible theories
and to get as close as possible to the truth.
Here's Paris, as you've never seen it before.
(eerie music)
Post-mortem means "after death".
throughout its 2,000-year-old history,
Paris has buried millions of dead,
way more than the capital's cemeteries could ever hold.
The city's dead resurface from time to time,
causing fright and consternation.
They're here, everywhere, beneath our feet.
Under Paris, another city is reserved for them.
The catacombs are the bowels of the city of light,
its dark side.
The capital's cemeteries are busting
with strange stories too.
The vast cemeteries of the Holy Innocents,
Pere Lachaise and Montparnasse.
Stories abound about strange night owls,
secret ceremonies performed by believers in vampires.
To sort truth from falsehood, myth from reality,
we must investigate another Paris,
the Paris of its dead and their secrets,
a Paris beyond the grave.
(emotional music)
Unraveling the mysteries of Paris's dead
involves a full in-depth investigation.
There are so many places and countless intrigues.
Behind every fact, every element,
lies an often disturbing or unsettling enigma.
Even if this case requires us to look back
over the centuries, the starting point is now.
Some of the city's dead are brought here,
to the Paris Forensics Institute:
deaths on public roads, criminal or suspicious deaths,
unidentified bodies.
Standing on the Quai de la Rapee,
this building is the penultimate resting place
for lifeless bodies that meet these criteria,
be they famous or unknown.
But it hasn't always been so in Paris's morgue.
In the early 18th century, bodies found on the city streets
were dumped in the basement of the prison of Chatalet,
known as the "lower jail".
After several moves, a new morgue was constructed
in the mid-19th century on the Ile de la Cite,
on a site now occupied by the Square de l'Ile de France.
This morgue quickly became an attraction.
The naked corpses with water dripping on them
to slow down decay were displayed for several days,
drawing hundreds of Parisians and foreign visitors daily.
The bourgeoisie, common people
and even children flocked here.
All were fascinated and appalled by these corpses
decomposing on tilted black marble slabs,
separated from the living by a simple viewing window.
Some onlookers held handkerchiefs to their noses,
so nauseating was the stench.
Sometimes people came to try to pick out a neighbor,
friend, or relative and identify then.
The police seized the opportunity to look out for
and arrest criminals who visited their victims.
Naturally, the morgue became the target of criticism,
and was closed at the beginning of the 20th century,
not for reasons of hygiene but of public morality.
For centuries, Paris has lived on top of millions
of famous and anonymous dead.
Some of the capital's cemeteries feature on old maps.
Others have not been unearthed.
With houses and apartment blocks built since,
excavation is hardly conceivable.
Its disturbing to think that
beneath the streets we tread every day
lie thousands of souls and the city's history.
There are cemeteries everywhere under our feet.
The Place Joachim-du-Bellay in Les Halles district
was once the site of the Holy Innocents' Cemetery,
the main burial ground of central Medieval Paris.
The cemetery's origins are mysterious.
The first mention of this cemetery
dates from the 12th century,
but it's probably far older than that.
For centuries, Les Halles was the city's beating heart,
a place where the dead and the living met,
a bustling neighborhood with its markets,
scribes, prostitutes and beggars.
The capital's wealthiest citizens had individual sepulchers.
Its poorest were thrown into mass graves.
In 1424, one of the city's strangest murals
appeared on the wall of charnel house here:
the Danse Macabre, or dance of the dead.
The first known painting of this type in Europe,
it no longer exists.
Only a reproduction published in 1485
has survived to this day.
(foreign language)
Danse Macabre iconography
actually has fairly ancient roots.
This form of iconography first appeared in antiquity,
with the meeting of the dead and the living.
It's a rather fascinating scene.
In my view, it is part of the specific magical aspect
of the Middle Ages, through the way it looks at society.
You have the figure of death, the skeleton, leading a dance.
And the first people death takes by the hand
are the most high-ranking members of society.
The first person to follow death is the Pope,
followed by the emperor, then the king.
30 skeletons converse with 30 living figures
in 15 pictures, under which eight-line stanzas
express the vanity of our world.
In the Middle Ages, death was considered
a period of sleep before eternal life.
(dramatic music)
In the Holy Innocents' Cemetery
the dead piled up over the centuries
as Paris spread and grew.
The city began to be choked by its charnel houses.
Here in the late 18th century,
one of the most peculiar episodes
in the history of Paris's dead occurred.
On May the 30th, 1780,
a basement wall in the Rue de la Lingerie
on the cemetery's edge gave way under the pressure
of the thousands of bones behind it.
The ground could not swallow up any more corpses.
The air around the Holy Innocents' cemetery
was the unhealthiest in Paris.
In 1785, the authorities decided to close the cemetery
and move the bones elsewhere, beneath the Montsouris plain
in the city's 14th arrondissement.
From April the 7th, 1786, over a period of 15 months,
the bones of two million skeletons were transferred
to their new resting place, the Paris catacombs.
At nightfall, so as not to scare the Parisians,
funeral groups made their way across the city,
accompanied by torch bearers and priests
chanting the office of the dead.
The bones were then tipped into the municipal ossuary
through a shaft at the end of the Rue de la Tombe-Issoir.
(eerie music)
The catacombs are a whole other world,
a place of shadows and eerie presences.
They're artfully arranged like an opera set.
Time stands still here.
The ossuary would later become the haunt of Paris's weirdos.
Cardinals, princes, ministers, beggars, prostitutes,
La Fontaine, Rabelais, Colbert, Danton, Luli,
and Racine are here, together for eternity.
(foreign language)
Visitors of the catacombs
have a different profile than visitors of museums.
They come in search of thrills,
and above all to see a truly unique sight,
because there's nothing like it in the world.
It's a mine, it's dark, it's underground.
So it's this rather exceptional character,
I think, that attracts them.
Several scientific experiments have been conducted
in the catacombs, in the ossuary of Paris,
because this underground, unlit environment
has aroused people's curiosity.
For instance, botanists and experts on fauna
have been allowed to conduct experiments here,
in particular to see if cave fauna, fauna that lives
underground, without daylight, could survive.
Goldfish were put in a spot
known as the Fountain de la Samaritan,
which is actually a sort of well, but they didn't survive.
(spooky music)
There's a confusion in people's minds
between the catacombs of Paris, the municipal ossuary,
which is in fact a city of Paris museum,
and the vast 300-kilometer network
of subterranean mines under the city.
These mines are a dream for enthusiasts
mistakenly known as cataphiles,
when in fact they're just cavernophiles.
They have inspired many stories and anecdotes
passed on from one generation to the next,
like this headstone mentioning the disappearance
of a mysterious Philibert Aspairt.
(foreign language)
There are numerous legends about the mines,
because this hidden, subterranean world
has given rise to all sorts of fantasies.
The legend of Philibert Aspairt has some truth to it.
He was the gate keeper at Val-de-Grace Hospital.
The story goes that at the time of revolution
he wanted to filter a few good bottles.
He went down into the mines and got lost.
He was found 11 years later,
still holding his bunch of keys.
Another terrifying legend
did the rounds too, about the ghost of a green man
roaming the subterranean maze of galleries.
(foreign language)
In the days of the Ancien Regime,
to bring goods into Paris you had to go through customs.
Smugglers thought the best way to avoid them
would be to go through the network of mines,
and so they could go about their business undisturbed.
They spread a rumor about the green man
to dissuade people from coming to see
what was really going on down there.
(dramatic music)
On the other side of the capital,
in east Paris, lies one of the world's
most famous cemeteries, Pere Lachaise.
Pere Lachaise's symmetry has spawned
all sorts of legends and mysteries.
It was opened in 1804.
Funerary monuments in a variety of styles
reflected the tastes of the time:
Egyptian, Greek, Roman,
gothic, and esoteric.
Sanitary measures were put in place too.
Bodies had to be interred in a coffin,
wrapped in a shroud, or placed side-by-side
and no longer on top of each other.
Pere Lachaise would not only be
the first modern and multi-faith cemetery,
but the city's largest green space too.
The idea was to stroll there without fear of death.
Adelaide Paillard de Villeneuve
was the first person to be interred in Pere Lachaise,
according to the register of 1804.
Little is known about this five-year-old girl.
Her grave has disappeared.
Legend has it she was buried in section 42.
And since 2004, a cenotaph has marked the spot
where it was thought to be.
This is the resting place of Countess Elizabeth Demidoff
nee Baroness Stroganoff.
She and her husband possessed one of the largest fortunes
in Russia, until the last Tsar fell from power.
From here, where she dominates the cemetery,
she's sure to be admired by every visitor.
Legend has it that she lies in a crystal coffin
and there are rooms under the mausoleum.
She also apparently stated in her will
that she would leave her vast fortune
to anyone who spent a year beside her corpse.
People have tried.
Some lost their minds.
The record is supposed to be eight days and nights.
But is it true?
(spooky music)
It's been said her tomb features vampire symbols,
like these wolves' heads.
The wolf has always been associated with vampirism.
(thundering)
The Countess passes away on April the 8th, 1818.
This date includes three eights, and in vampire symbolism,
888 is the number of vampires,
just as 666 is the number of the beast and the devil.
(foreign language)
A vampire is an undead being,
an individual in search of a proper burial,
a proper funeral, so their soul can depart from their body.
(eerie music)
Paris and vampirism,
this is one of the most surprising elements
of the investigation.
Bram Stoker, author of "Dracula",
apparently visited Pere Lachaise in 1874.
His Dracula was partially inspired
by the Prince of Wallachia, Vlad the Impaler,
or Vlad Tepes in Romania, who in the 15th century
became notorious in southern Romania for his cruelty
and the bloody and terrifying acts
he perpetrated in the country.
(foreign language)
Vlad the Impaler was not a vampire,
but he lived in a country where people were firmly convinced
and in fact still are that vampires exist.
Vlad is said to have had a descendant,
Gheorghe Bibescu, who was prince of Wallachia too.
His tomb is down here in section 28.
(foreign language)
People thought his tomb
featured vampiric symbols too,
since it is topped by an eagle
clutching a staff of authority
that has been identified as a stake.
And well, since he was a Bibescu, it was thought,
as he was Wallachian, he had to be related to Dracula.
But the Bibescus were a far more recent dynasty.
There were only two princes of this dynasty
in the 19th century in Wallachia,
and there are no family ties with Dracula.
(eerie music)
Very recently, the director of the Museum
of Vampires and Legendary Creatures,
which is a stone's throw from the cemetery,
announced on a French TV show
that a stranger had told him a satanic cult
had brought the body of Dracula himself to the cemetery
and placed it in a tomb without a cross.
At least we know, or someone knows,
that Dracula is buried in Pere Lachaise.
What more proof do you need?
(dramatic music)
Some individuals would attempt to play
with death, to transgress it in the most macabre fashion.
It was not only in Pere Lachaise, with Countess Demidoff
that supposed vampires lurked in Paris,
but in Montparnasse Cemetery too.
On July 30th, 1848, the caretakers of Montparnasse Cemetery
found the bodies of women discarded on its quite paths.
They had been dug up and mutilated.
Other acts of desecration had occurred a short while
previously in Pere Lachaise and Yvres Cemetery.
Who was the madman the press dubbed
"The Vampire of Montparnasse"?
The authorities decided to ensnare this monster.
Near Montparnasse Cemetery's outer wall,
where there were clear signs of an intrusion,
they set up a booby trap.
If touched, its trip wire would fire a number of rifles.
On the night of March 15th, 1849 ...
(distant gunshots)
a volley of shots rang out.
An individual had been caught.
He soon confessed.
Paris's vampire turned out to be a young
French army Sergeant called Francois Bertrand.
Sargeant Bertrand only received a one-year prison sentence
for desecrating graves.
At the time, necrophilia was not punishable by law.
Raping a dead body was not admissible evidence,
because rape could only be carried out
against a living person, without that person's consent.
(melancholy music)
Our journey into postmortem Paris continues.
Another incident in this investigation
of the city's murky depths occurred recently.
Paris's dead are still getting themselves talked about.
In early 2015, renovation work
here on the Boulevard Sebastopol
to the basement of a Monoprix supermarket
revealed hundreds of human remains.
Nine burial pits with around 200 bodies
laid out in neat rows in five layers.
This was the former site of the cemetery
of La Trinite Hospital, which was founded
in the 12th century and demolished in the late 1700s.
Why so many dead?
They were probably victims of an epidemic.
Archeologists will determine the facts.
Another mystery linked to Paris's dead.
We haven't seen the last of them.
(foreign language)
The great question at the time was,
what happens to peoples' souls when they die?
Where do souls go after death?
Being Christian, we believe in the Last Judgment.
No one knows when it will take place;
not the angels, the seraphs, or the cherubs.
Only God or Jesus knows the date.
So what do souls do?
Where do the souls of the deceased go after death?
There's no answer to that.
(emotional music)
In Paris, history is written
in every step we take.
We walk through the city of light's streets,
absorbed in our daily lives,
forgetting a historic event occurred on this spot,
or that a particular intersection, square or street corner
is the site of a tragic incident
whose repercussions are still felt.
Paris is full of unsolved mysteries,
strange goings-on, and historical cold cases.
The clues and keys to these enigmas are to be found
in old books lost in the capital's libraries,
in the city's streets or beneath its buildings,
by the light of a candle or in the dead of night,
by crosschecking documents, archives and records.
Paris has not yet revealed all of its secrets.
(dramatic music)