VISITING PARANORMAL PLACES

I love the paranormal/supernatural in my writing, reading and personal life.  Cue the family vacation.

I'm always dragging, er, surprising them with tours of somewhere 'haunted' where ever we happen to visit.

We've been to Alacatraz twice. When the kids were small we did the day tour. Our second trip to San Fran, they were older so a night tour was in order. The fog and creep factor were high and it was one of the spookiest places we've ever been. Such an interesting history, too.

We've been to the Winchester Mystery House, in San Jose, California. The haunted cemetery tour of New Orleans, a haunted castle in Ireland from the  year 800 AD and rode in the back of hearse for a Spooky Austin, TX Tour.

Our spooky travels are adventurous and we've had plenty. Our most recent excursion was this past November when my husband and I went to London and Paris for our anniversary.

In Paris we went deep underground to the Catacombs and there was something extraordinary about spending time deep under the city with millions of human bones and remains.

Long story, short.
Les Innocents, Paris' oldest and largest cemetery became overcrowded leading to improper burials and corpses rising up from the graves. The citizens complained about the stench and disease spreading.

In 1780, a wall around Les Innocents collapsed after an unusually rainy spring, spilling the rotten corpses all over. It was then action was finally taken.

The church blessed and consecrated all the bones and transferred them to a network of tunnels already under the city. It took two years to move all the remains and for the next few decades other cemeteries had their remains removed and relocated to the Catacombs.

These are my personal pictures so I apologize for the darkness.

             Staircase:

You have to walk down 83 small, steep and narrow spiral steps to enter and up 138 of the same to leave.

There are miles and miles of tunnels, it's dark and damp. There's no way out but up the exiting staircase, there are no restrooms and only so many people are allowed down there at one time. You're literally trapped until you can make
it to the exiting staircase.

A picture of the tunnel that gets you to the final resting place of many Parisians, including those who lost their lives in the French  Revolution.

Most of the bones are stacked along the walls with the skulls on top. The workers seemed to take care in stacking them, some even got a little creative.

My husband wasn't as excited to be down there as I was!

Some people thought it creepy and morbid and couldn't wait to leave. I thought it was quite peaceful and wished I could stay longer. I felt these poor souls finally had a home, visitors,
some one to care for them (the Catacombs is considered a Paris Museum) and will no longer be disturbed.

They keep you on a certain path of tunnels, although it would be easy to wonder off and search on your own, and people have. Many of them have gotten lost and died.

It's said to be haunted. With that many remains and history, I would imagine there would be a ghost or two roaming around with us, but I didn't see any.

It's by far one the coolest places I've been.

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Debbie Christiana writes paranormal romance, dark romantic fiction and dark short fiction

www.debbiechristiana.com
Twitter: @DebChristiana
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