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