My Friend Insisted We Explore The Illegal Paris Catacombs — Now We Are Trapped

Part 1

I never should have listened to Craig.

We were in Paris for a week to see the normal sights.

The plan was to visit museums and eat good food and just relax.

He had other ideas from the very beginning.

My friend spent his nights scrolling through obscure forums.

A guy was found online willing to take us into the restricted zones of the Catacombs.

The public tour covers a tiny fraction of the tunnels.

Those remaining sections are a massive maze of illegal and unmapped darkness.

I told him it was a terrible idea and that we could get arrested.

Craig just laughed it off and called me a coward.

He claimed it would be the adventure of a lifetime.

We met our guide Paul near an old train track at midnight.

Paul barely spoke English and kept looking over his shoulder.

He handed us headlamps and gestured to a rusted manhole cover.

We climbed down into the damp and cold earth one by one.

The smell of ancient dust and decay hit me immediately.

Walking for hours through narrow limestone corridors exhausted us quickly.

The ceilings were so low I had to crouch most of the way.

Sometimes we waded through knee-deep freezing water.

Paul kept checking a small hand-drawn map.

He seemed nervous every time we reached an intersection.

Craig was having the time of his life filming everything on his camcorder.

I just wanted to go back to the hotel.

The walls were lined with thousands of bones.

Skulls stared at us from the darkness in every direction.

We stopped in a small cavern to rest our legs.

Paul signaled that he needed to check the path ahead.

He walked around a corner and disappeared from sight.

We waited for ten minutes in total silence.

Then twenty minutes passed with no sign of him.

The silence down there was heavy and almost physical.

Craig called out for him repeatedly.

No answer came back.

Just the echo of his voice fading into the abyss.

We decided to retrace our steps and leave.

Every tunnel looked exactly the same as the last.

We walked for what felt like days without finding a landmark.

My watch had stopped ticking entirely.

We were completely lost in the dark.

Then my headlamp flickered.

I smacked the side of it hard.

It came back on but dimmer than before.

Craig’s light was already dead and useless.

We had one failing light source left between us.

I felt a cold sweat break out on my neck.

The battery was dying fast.

The shadows around us seemed to grow longer.

I could hear my own heartbeat in my ears.

Craig started pacing back and forth in the narrow space.

He kept muttering that Paul would come back.

I knew Paul was never coming back.

We were completely alone under millions of tons of rock.

I checked my pockets for anything useful.

Just a lighter and a half-empty bottle of water.

The walls felt like they were closing in on us.

I tried to keep my breathing steady.

Panic down here would be a death sentence.

We sat against the cold stone wall to conserve energy.

Hours bled into what felt like days.

Every sound amplified into a deafening roar.

A drop of water sounded like a gunshot.

Craig stopped talking entirely after a while.

He just stared blankly into the pitch black.

I tried to shine the fading light on his face.

He looked pale and utterly defeated.

I wanted to scream for help.

Deep down, I knew no one would hear us anyway.

We were too deep underground for anyone to care.

The air was stale and tasted like copper.

I closed my eyes and prayed for a miracle.

When I opened them the light was even weaker.

It was just a tiny orange glow now.

We had to keep moving before it died completely.

Finally, we stood up and picked a tunnel at random.

Both of us walked with our hands sliding along the rough stone.

The bones scraped against my knuckles.

I tried not to think about whose remains they were.

We were joining them soon if we did not find a way out.

My legs felt like lead weights.

Every step required a massive amount of effort.

Craig stumbled and fell hard on his knees.

He did not even try to get back up.

I had to pull him to his feet.

Desperately, I made it clear to him that we could not stop here.

He just nodded slowly.

The headlamp flickered again.

It stayed off for three full seconds this time.

When it came back on it was barely visible.

The beam flickered once, twice, and then the darkness swallowed us whole.