Have you ever been to the catacombs in Paris? Back in the late 1700s, the city of Paris faced an unprecedented disaster. People were dying faster than they could find cemetery space, and a building that had the misfortune to be next to a cemetery even had its basement wall collapse under the weight of the mass grave behind it. As a result, Parisian officials decided to use the old limestone quarries under the city itself to bury people. All skeletal remains were dug up and interred in the catacombs, and massive walls of bones and skulls were created.
Although I had never been there, the pictures I had found on the Internet had had a powerful effect. The history project on rituals around death had been over nearly a decade ago back when I had been in high school, but the images had stayed
