Haunted places to visit in Paris
Paris, France, a city of legend, a city that, for six thousand years, has been settled by ancient Celts and Romans, Franks and the Merovingian, Carolingian and Capetian dynasties and by the houses of Valois and Bourbon and Napoleon. Paris has survived medieval plagues, wars of territory, religion and revolution and has been the birthplace of brilliant art, music and industry. No wonder it is France's capitol. No wonder it is one of the most haunted cities in the world.
At the top of the Eiffel Tower, if you hear laughter mingled with screams then you are participating in the intimate torment of a young girl who was pushed to her death by an enraged lover whom she refused to marry.
Many powerful and famous people have passed through the Notre Dame Cathedral whose stories have finished badly: Henry VI lived a troubled life and violent death; Louis XVI finished on the guillotine; Mary Queen of Scots ended up on a scaffold; Marie Antoinette, guillotined; Empress Josephine, dishonored; and Napoleon had Waterloo. There is also the story of the locksmith, Biscornet, who, overwhelmed with his commission to build the locks on the portal of Saint Anne, made a pact with the devil. Mysteriously the locks were finished in the night and the body of the locksmith found dead a few days later. Cameras and video have caught a plethora of paranormal activity inside Notre Dame.
During WWII, a French woman married to a man in the Resistance was having a daytime relationship with a Nazi officer to gain information. At night she would meet her husband on the Pont Marie bridge. One night he never came and she died from the cold. She waits for him still, and some nights you can see her shadowy form and hear her sobbing.
In the Louvre museum, there are traces of spirits attached to numerous famous works, but the most easily discerned hauntings are found in the medieval section, at the base of the original donjon built in the 13th century. Many orbs and shadows have been captured in photographs taken near the donjon.
In the Cimetière du Père-Lachaise, you will find the graves of scores of famous people like Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde, Sarah Bernhardt, Edith Piaf, Proust and Delacroix. With 300,000 people buried there, many ghosts haunt Père-Lachaise Cemetery. Chopin has been seen strolling the paths and the ghosts of 147 communards who were shot at dawn against the east wall in 1871 haunt their final resting place.
It is said there are secret tunnels leading from the Cimetière du Père-Lachaise to the Catacombs of Paris—conduits for black magic worshipers who wish to mingle in the underground with the dead. Carved by the Romans as a quarry, in 1786, the remains of roughly six million people along with remnants of their tombstones were placed in an artistic fashion along the grisly and gloomy corridors of these underground tunnels. Some people have reported the wispy feel of long-dead fingers brushing their upper backs, arms and hair, other have seen orbs and cloudy forms. Many have had to leave the tunnels, feeling a profound sense of being watched and closed in.
If you take a stroll through the Jardin des Tuileries, keep an eye out for The Man In Red. Queen Catherine de Medici had a passion for the occult. Jean l'Ecorcheur was the man who connected her with mages and warlocks. There came a time when Catherine de Medici felt he knew too much and had him murdered. Just before he died, he declared, "I shall return!" Since then, he appears covered in blood prior to a person's death.
The Gallows of Montfaucon. 53 rue de la Grange-aux-Belles, Paris. In 1325 an enormous gallows was constructed. A plinth six meters high held sixteen stone pillars each ten meters high. People were hung in clusters and left to disintegrate. Then there bodies, along with bodies from other parts of Paris, were dumped into a huge pit beneath the gallows. The spot in Paris that has seen the most deaths, at night you can sometimes here the rattling of chains and groans.
The headless ghost of Isauré de Montsouris regulalry haunts the parc Montsouris where he was murdered by bandits in 831. The park was also home to the château de Val-Vert, which housed the legendary devil Vauvert as well as the testing site for the Guillotine. Indeed a sinister environment!
Heavy traffic in these places doesn't always make for good ghost hunting. Keep yourselves open and look beyond the obvious.
Gros bisous hantés Parisian!
Love,
Charley
