Latest / History Dark / I Explored the Paris Catacombs. I Wish I Hadn_t _ Creepypasta

Transcript

I Explored the Paris Catacombs. I Wish I Hadn_t _ Creepypasta · History Dark

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Before we begin tonight's story, I just want to say
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: thank you for listening to Macabre Horror. If you enjoy
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: my horror narrations, you can also follow the Macabre Horror
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: podcast on Spotify, where I upload new stories regularly. And
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: if you'd like to help support the channel and keep
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: the stories going, you can also join the Patreon. Even
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: following as a free member helps a lot, and there
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: will also be bonus stories and extras for supporters. This
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: will help you stay connected to the channel, regardless of
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: what happens. Now, turn down the lights, get comfortable, and
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: let's begin tonight's story. The last thing Mathieu said to
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: me before we went underground was that the bones down
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: there weren't the scary part. I thought that was a
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: funny thing to say, a reassurance that somehow wasn't one.
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: I laughed, he smiled, and we climbed down through the
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: manhole at about quarter past nine on a Thursday evening.
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: That was, I'm going to be honest with you, I
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: genuinely don't know how long ago that was. My phone
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: died somewhere in the middle of all this. I'm recording
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: this on my GoPro, and I've got maybe 40 minutes
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: of battery left on it, which is how I know
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: I need to start talking now. So, from the beginning.
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: My name is Tom Kelly. I run an urban exploration channel.
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: Nothing huge, about 60,000 subscribers. Mostly people who like watching
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: me crawl through derelict factories and abandoned hospitals in the UK.
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: The Paris catacombs have been on my list since I
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: started the channel. The real catacombs, not the tourist section.
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: The cataphile routes. The actual labyrinth underneath the city that
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: most people don't know exists. and that you can absolutely
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: get arrested for entering. Which, look, I knew the risks.
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: I did my research. I've read the accounts. I knew
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: people got lost down there for days. I'm not an idiot.
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: Finding Mathieu took about three weeks. There are forums, if
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: you know where to look. Not Reddit, though. Something more obscure.
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: French language, members only. The kind of place where people
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: are careful, about who they talked to. I posted asking
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: if anyone would be willing to guide a British YouTuber
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: through a basic route. I got mostly ignored. A few
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: hostile replies in French that I ran through Google Translate
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: and wished I hadn't. And then, eventually, a message from Mathieu.
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: He was thorough. That's the first thing I'd say about him.
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: He sent me a list of required equipment before he'd
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: even agreed to meet. Waterproof boots, at least two torches
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: per person, a chalk marker, water for six hours minimum.
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: He was precise about the water. He also told me,
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: up front, that he didn't want to be on camera,
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: which I respected. A lot of experienced cataphiles are like that.
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: He said I could film the environment, the tunnels, the walls...
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: but he'd be staying out of frame as much as possible. Fine,
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: whatever you need. We met at a cafe near the
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: station two hours before we went in. He was maybe
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: late thirties, shorter than I expected from the authoritative tone
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: of his messages. He wore a jacket that had been
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: clearly underground many times, that particular kind of grey that
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: isn't grey by design. He ordered an espresso and didn't
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: make small talk. He just went straight into logistics, which
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: I found deeply reassuring. He spread a hand-drawn map on
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: the table and traced the route with his finger while
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: he talked. He knew exactly where we were going, how
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: long each section would take, where the ceiling dropped, where
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: the water pooled. If we get separated, he said, and
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: his English was very good, but with an odd formality
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: to it, like he'd learned it from books rather than people.
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: You follow the whistling. I will always be whistling. You
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: hear it. You walk towards it. Okay? I said okay.
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: The tunnels echo strangely, he added. Do not trust distance.
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: Do not trust direction. Trust the whistling. I said okay
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: again and finished my coffee and we went. The first
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: thing that hits you is the smell. Not rot. That's
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: what people always say, and it's not quite right. It's
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: more like cold clay and something older underneath it. Mineral
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: and still. The smell of a place that's been sealed
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: away from weather for two centuries. The second thing is
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: how quickly the entrance disappears behind you. We went maybe
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: 30 metres along the first corridor, and I looked back
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: and couldn't see the ladder anymore. That's when something in
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: my chest quietly noted that this was actually happening, and
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: perhaps I should pay attention. Mathieu moved confidently. He'd clearly
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: walked these routes enough times that his body knew them,
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: and he narrated as we went in that same book-learned English.
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: He told me about the quarriers who dug the limestone
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: in the 1100s, how the ground beneath Paris had been
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: slowly honeycombed over centuries until the streets above started sinking,
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: how they'd begun moving the bodies from the overflowing cemeteries
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: into the tunnels in 1786, over a period of years,
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: men carrying bones down by torchlight and stacking them into walls.
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: Six million, or thereabouts. He said thereabouts with a small smile.
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: like the imprecision amused him. The bones are not the
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: scary part, he said again, almost to himself. I was
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: filming everything. The walls, the low ceiling, the floor that
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: was sometimes dry, and sometimes had a shallow film of
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: water across it that caught my headlamp, and made the
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: passage look like it went on forever in both directions.
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: I was filming because that's what I do. and because
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: having something to point the camera at made the whole
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: thing feel manageable. You have a job to do. You're
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: not just a person standing in the dark under eight
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: million people's feet. You're working. We'd been down there maybe
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: forty minutes, when I noticed the skull. To be clear,
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: there are skulls everywhere down there. That's not the thing
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: I mean. The walls in certain sections... are literally constructed
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: from femurs and skulls arranged in patterns. Decorative borders of bone.
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: And at first, it almost feels aesthetically pleasing. You almost
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: tell yourself it's architecture. Until your brain quietly insists that
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: those are heads, and they were once people. And there
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: are six million of them, and you're very small. But
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: what caught my eye this time wasn't a wall. It
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: was a skull sitting on the floor of the tunnel,
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: maybe half a metre off to the right, partially behind
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: a ridge in the stone. Not part of any arrangement,
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: just sitting there. I crouched down and picked it up,
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: which in retrospect was probably not something I should have done.
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: It was lighter than I expected. Most of the jaw
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: was gone. There was a crack running from somewhere above
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: the left eye socket, down through the cheekbone. An old break,
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: long healed. Healed while the person was alive, I mean.
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: Someone had broken their face badly enough that it showed
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: in the bone, and had recovered, and eventually died and
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: ended up in a tunnel under Paris. I found myself
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: wondering for a stupid moment what the story was. Whether
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: they'd been a fighter, or whether they'd fallen off something,
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: I don't know how long I was looking at it.
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: Long enough that when I stood up and turned around,
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: Mathieu was gone. This happened. I knew this could happen.
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: The tunnels branched constantly, and he'd been moving ahead of
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: me while I'd stopped. And the thing to do right
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: now was not panic. The thing to do was listen.
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: I listened. It took a few seconds, And then I
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: heard it. The whistling. It was echoing and distant, and
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: I genuinely couldn't tell which direction it was coming from.
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: Mathieu had warned me about this. But it was there.
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: A slow, meandering melody. Nothing I recognised. Just something improvised
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: and tuneless and steady. I put the skull down carefully
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: and started walking towards it. This is the part I
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: keep going over in my head. I followed the whistling for,
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: I want to say, 10 minutes, maybe 15. Through two branches,
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: down a slope where the ceiling had dropped and I
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: had to bend at the waist. Through a section where
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: the walls closed in enough that my shoulders brushed stone
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: on both sides. The whistling was always there, always just
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: ahead of me. And I kept expecting to turn a corner,
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: and find Mathieu standing there looking faintly exasperated. The way
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: a guide looks when their charge has fallen behind to
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: take photos of something. The trouble is, I never found him.
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: At some point, I stopped and called out. I said
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: his name. My voice did something ugly in that space.
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: It multiplied and flattened at the same time. And the
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: echo came back to me, in pieces. In pieces. that
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: didn't quite sound like what I'd said. The whistling stopped.
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: Not gradually, not fading like someone moving away. It just stopped,
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: between one note and the next. And the silence it
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: left was the specific silence of something that has heard you.
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: I stood there for a moment. Then I called out again, louder.
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: I said I was lost, I said I needed to
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: find the way out. I said any version of the
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: words that might help. Nothing came back, except the echo.
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: And eventually, not even that. I've been walking since then.
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: I've been marking the walls with the chalk like Mathieu
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: told me to, so I can tell if I'm going
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: in circles. And I've been going in circles. But the
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: marks are telling me the circles aren't consistent. There are
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: different branching points, different shapes, which either means I'm misreading
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: the tunnels, or the tunnels are doing something that tunnels
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: can't do. I'm choosing to believe I'm misreading them. That's
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: the interpretation I can work with. I found another skull
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: about an hour ago. I almost didn't look at it.
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: And then I did. Because something about it snagged at me.
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: and I saw that it had a crack running from
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: above the left eye socket, down through the cheekbone. Old break.
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: Long healed. I've been trying to work out a rational
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: explanation for that. Maybe these breaks are common. Maybe it's
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: a type of fracture that happens frequently, and I'm only
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: noticing it now because I'm looking. Maybe the first skull
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: somehow got moved, but that requires someone to have moved it.
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: and the only other person down here is Mathieu. And
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: Mathieu hasn't answered me in, I don't know, a long time.
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: My GoPro's telling me I have about nine minutes of
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: battery left. I don't think I'm getting out of here tonight.
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: I'm going to keep trying, obviously. I'm going to keep walking.
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: But I want to get this recorded while I still
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: have the light. Here's what I think happened, or the
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: version of it I can bring myself to say out
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: loud Mathieu told me to follow the whistling. He said
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: he'd always be whistling and that if I got lost,
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: the whistling would lead me back. He said to trust him.
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: He was very specific and very deliberate. And I've been
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: thinking about whether that was the advice of someone who
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: wanted to keep me safe or the advice of someone
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: who knew exactly what I'd do when I heard a
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: sound in the dark. I don't know what's down here
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: I don't know if Mathieu does. Maybe he's lost too.
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: Maybe he's been sitting in some tunnel this whole time,
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: waiting to hear me call out. And the part where
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: the whistling stopped was just coincidence, and I've been catastrophizing
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: in the dark for hours with no reason. That's possible.
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: That's a thing that could be true. But I've been
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: down here long enough that I'm not certain of much anymore.
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: And I think before the battery goes, I should say
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: this clearly, while I'm still thinking clearly. If anyone finds
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: this recording, and someone will find it eventually, because the
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: GoPro's waterproof and these things last, please don't come down
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: here to look for me. I know that's the thing
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: people say, and I know it never stops anyone, but
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: I'm saying it anyway. Don't come down here. Don't follow
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: sounds you didn't put there. And please, please tell my
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: parents that I love them. Their number's in my phone,
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: but that's dead now. But my channel is Tom Kelly Vlogs,
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: and they'll find me from there. Tell them I wasn't scared.
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: That's not exactly true. But it'll be better for them. Okay,
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: the battery's almost gone. I'm going to key. walking. Thank
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: you for listening to tonight's story. If you enjoyed it
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: and would like to hear more horror narrations, you can
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: follow Macabre Horror on Spotify, where I post new stories regularly.
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: And if you'd like to help support the channel and
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: keep these stories coming, you can join the Patreon. Free
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: memberships are also available, and paid supporters also get access
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: to bonus stories and other extras. All the links are
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: in the Until next time, keep the lights low and
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: the doors locked.