Morbid - The Paris Morgue Mini Morbid

Episode Date: February 14, 2019

Alaina's Mini Morbid takes a walk through the old Paris Morgue where dead bodies were put on display for the public to identify. This wasn't always about the macabre task of identifying the recently deceased though. It became theater. It became a place to see and be seen. Dress in your finest duds and gander at some bloated corpses because this place was happening. Sources: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/paris-morgue-public-viewing https://hauntedpalaceblog.wordpress.com/2018/12/07/the-paris-morgue-dark-tourism-in-the-19th-century/ https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1885/2/25/a-description-of-the-paris-morgue/ Cowritten by Alaina Urquhart, Ash Kelley & Dave White (Since 10/2022)Produced & Edited by Mikie Sirois (Since 2023)Research by Dave White (Since 10/2022), Alaina Urquhart & Ash KelleyListener Correspondence & Collaboration by Debra LallyListener Tale Video Edited by Aidan McElman (Since 6/2025) Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hey weirdos, I'm Elena. I'm Ash. And this is a mini morbid. Mini, mini, mini, mini, mini, mini, mini, mini, mini, mini morbid. Mini morbid, mini morbid, mini morbid. Mini morbid. We've had so many comments about the morbid theme song. Thank you. I read it myself.

Ash wrote that completely herself and performed it completely herself. It took hours. and hours to write. I rewrote the lyrics at least four times. The harmonies were a little off at first, so I fired the backup singer, and I just decided to do it solo. Acapele.

And honestly, it was the best decision you ever made in your career. Thank you so much. It's touched a lot of people. Honestly, I'll sign autographs if you guys want. Just let me know. Just let her know. I'm so glad that everybody loves this. though. I love it. I'm totally kidding. I'm so happy that you guys love it. So welcome to

Elena's mini morbid episode. What's it gonna be this week? I love that we never know each others. This has become a fun thing. It's fun. It's really fun. So this week, I'm gonna be doing the Paris Morg. Kind of... Is it in Paris? No. It's in Kentucky. Really? No, it's actually in Paris, France. And it's actually not there anymore, but it was. Bummer. There's a Paris main, I think, so I didn't know. Well, this is the Paris Morgan, France, okay? I want to go to Paris so bad. Same. There's a lot of cool dark tourism stuff there.

I just want to go in the catacombs. I want to go in the catacombs. I just want to go and eat croissants and wear my beret. Same. And go in the catacombs. And wear stripes. And just, I need to wear stripes. It's important. It's very important. It is. Do we have any Paris listeners? Any French listeners up in India?

Specifically Paris. Yeah. Not the rest of France. Just kidding. We must have French listeners. I know we do, in fact. I can see it on our little stats. So, hi French listeners.

I'd like to apologize way in advance for butchering your language. Because Mama took Spanish in high school, and I didn't even do well at that. So I love the French language. I think it's beautiful. And that's why I feel like such a turd right now for what I'm about to do to it. So I apologize. Feel free to yell at me. I'm going to do my family story. Do you remember when I was little and I was like, oh, yeah, how do you say your name in Spanish? And you said like, you said it fancy. And then I was like, how do you say your name in this language? And you said it fancy. And I was like, how do you say your name in this language? And you said it fancy. And I was like, and I. I was like, how do you say your name in French? And you were like, a little ha-ha-ha-ha. I do remember that. I tell that story all the time.

Just a ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. Well, you have to understand. I take all my French cues from Lumiere from Beauty. So I have a really solid foundation for my French. It's pretty casual if you ask me. Yeah, super casual. So, again, we're going to do this. We're going to do this. I'm sorry, totally yell at me, French listeners.

And people who aren't French, go ahead and yell at me. Everybody yells at us anyway. Exactly. We get yelled at a lot anyway. So go ahead. So this is kind of a look into some of the original dark tourism. So the Paris Morg first opened its doors to the public in 1804 on, ready? I'll de la Cite. That was good. No French accent to be seen anywhere, but I'm giving it a try.

It's better that you don't. And it was there for the purpose of having the public identified bodies that they couldn't identify. Okay. That was the purpose of the Paris More. Because, I mean, especially back in the day, I mean, even now they have trouble with unidentified bodies. But way back in the day, it's not like they could, they had all these computer systems and stuff that would find people's fingerprints and all that. It's like they had a body. That was it. So they didn't know

who there's no ID. They have no idea who this person is. They need people to come in and look. So right away, this became some kind of weird tourist attraction where people would come just to look. Just looky-lose. There was no private entrance for the delivery of the corpses in this original Paris morgue.

So it was just like, they just brought them in the front door. Wow. Like just boom. And it also had a really bad chemical smell and there was a huge population of the large gray rats that hung out in the area. So it wasn't super awesome, this original one. I just hate rats. So much. And just think about, like, being at this, like, decaying old morgue with, like, no refrigeration

and a terrible chemical smell and there's just a bunch of fat gray rats running around. I saw a rat in Boston one time, and it ran across my path. Luckily, it didn't touch me. I thought it was a fucking cat at first. they are so big oh I can't I can't go on I can't they're no joke they're no joke it's like that scary stories to tell them the dark story about the kid who brings home like a new puppy and it actually ends up being some kind of like weird mutated rat yeah I like oh bye it's the same thing I'm busy that day

so in the 1850s bringing a little history in this Napoleon's prefect of the Sen Baron George Hosman decided he was going to redevelop the crowded medieval Ilde La Cite to build a more spacious boulevard Sebastopol. Yeah. So basically he was going to redevelop this area where the Paris morgue was in, and he was going to make it more of like a cool downtowny kind of area. Okay.

So the old morgue in the heart of medieval Paris was demolished. So in 1864, a new and improved. morgue was built and it wasn't built in the same area it was built behind Notre Dame Cathedral on the K de larche vichet not sure if I said that right I know it's like larsch like it's supposed to be super like French but I don't have any kind of ability to make any kind of accent work besides a really bad Australian one so I apologize okay in that area now the parish morgue is not still there but there's like a World War II Memoir

at this location now. A little fun fact. But the location of the morgue to be put here, right behind the Norda Dam Cathedral, was not an accident. It wasn't like they just picked that place. It was kind of the epicenter of Paris, and it was right next to the sun, the river sun. So it was kind of in a good position because all the elements it needed to run were kind of surrounding it because there was the river. And the river sun was where they pulled a lot of bodies back then. The public was, I mean, it was in a very crowded area, so it was people to come and identify the bodies. The police station was close to solve the crime. And then there were the courts close to bring the suspects.

So it was kind of like exactly where it needed to be. Now this new morgue was way bigger. It had a large sale de public, which is an exhibition room. That was good when you said public? Publique. Uh-huh. You have to kind of, public. he yeah you have to make it really it's just pretty it's pretty it's prettier than my voice knows how to go it's like a certain genocetetetre

jeniceiqui i don't really even know what that means oh my god you just literally said the line for beauty and the beast without meaning to really gaston says she has a certain jena sequa or uh la fu says that and gaston says i don't know what that means i didn't even need to you didn't even mean to you didn't even mean to so it's pretty so it had to It's the long, you know, the big sale de public, the exhibition room. And it had, you know, it was starting to get more advanced stuff in it. Like, it had actual rooms for autopsies, which is pretty rad. Where you'd be hanging out, biotch. Where I would be hanging all the live long day.

All the live long day. It also had offices for the staff. It had a laundry room, which is where they wash the clothes of the dead. Oh, in the laundry. before they were just hanging dirty clothes up to identify these people. But now they would wash them and be like, look, that's what it's supposed to look like without all the gore. That's nice of them.

Yeah, that's nice of them. It also, this is one of the biggest things I think, it also had a more discreet rear entrance to bring the corpses in. So they weren't just bringing corpses into the front door anymore. I feel like that's better. Yeah, I just feel like that's a good way to do things. Now, remember, the whole thing,

that they were making this and when you hear how it was all set up, you'll see that they were making this to really draw the public in so that they could have more eyes on these corpses to hopefully identify most of them. So in Paris, during the medieval period, the Order of St. Catherine

was the one who fulfilled the task of identifying the dead. But later, when Louis XIV took reign, the practice of displaying the dead to identify them started to become the norm. Oh. So before someone else was taken care of it, but once Louis XIV came in, they were like, why don't we just display dead people and have people try to identify them?

Yeah, sounds like a pretty solid idea. Now, interestingly enough, the word morgue actually comes from the verb morger, which means to stare or have a fixed and questioning gaze. Oh, okay. In 1718, the Dictionaire de la Académy. Yeah, you have to end it like... Like a little inflection at the end. It defined the Paris morgue as, quote,

a place at the Chalet, which is a prison. Wee, we. Where dead bodies that have been found are open to the public to view an order that they can be recognized. And they also said that it had, quote, dead bodies found in the street and also found drowned, which drowning victims made up way, like the huge majority of victims in the morgue. Why do you think?

The sen was like just this apparently like death trap that just people either intentionally jumped in there to drown or I think bodies were just dumped in there. Yikes. It was just an easy place to do. Did it have like a strong current? I don't really know. Yeah. Hey, French people. Tell us. What's the sun like?

Tell us. What's it like now? So, around the time of the 1800s, Paris began to change a little bit. It was kind of becoming a more social city. They were less divided politically. Sigmund Freud actually described it in 1885 as a place where, quote,

I don't think they know the meaning of shame or fear. The women, no less than the men, crowd round nudities, as much as they do round corpses in the morgue. Sounds like us. So basically Paris was just becoming like super uninhibited and just things were going good. Yeah. Like socially. Sounds like a party.

It does. It sounds like a French party. So obviously people were socializing more in the streets. People were out. And local tourist attractions were starting to gain a lot of steam because people wanted to be out and about and wanted to be mingling and seen and heard. So the morgue became one of those places. where you went to be seen. Oh.

Like that was, it was like that kind of place. And because it was open seven days a week from dawn to 6 p.m., a lot of people became like regulars. Like they would go, like it was like a bar. People would go at certain times and it's like you were a regular. So just to give a little idea of what happened when bodies were brought to the morgue, the bodies were first stripped when they arrived there. They were inspected.

they were frozen for a short period of time, and then they will wield out on black marble slabs for public display. Now, because refrigeration was still touchy at this time, and it really didn't arrive until after this morgue was built, cold water would drip from the ceiling constantly onto the dead body, which would give the skin like a bloated and puffy and slimy appearance. Ew. Yeah.

And it was just like this dead person, laying in front of you in this drip of water just on the metal taps. It's like that's so creepy. Yeah, that's weird. The victim's clothing and belongings hung on pegs behind them. So anything that they were found with would hang on a peg behind them.

They said up to 50 visitors at a time would crowd around one dead body. And they said that these bodies were behind huge windows that were like very theatrical windows. It sounds like a museum. It does. And you'll

see it. They were really making it into this kind of thing. And they would usually have to be removed after three days of being displayed because they would start decomposing. Yeah. But by the 1870s, photography became a thing and photographs or a wax cast would take

the place of the actual body. So you could still look and hopefully identify them. Now, the Paris Morg ended up being listed as in many of the top travel guidebooks for Paris. Paris. So if you traveled to Paris back then, this would be in

the guidebook, so somewhere to go. What the fuck? Yeah. Charles Dickens was known to be a frequent visitor. And in several of his old journals, he described it as, quote, an old acquaintance, and quote, a strange site which I have

contemplated many a time during the last dozen years. Makes sense. Which I believe. Once you see that, you're definitely going to contemplate it for a few dozen years. Just, you know, for a bit. Emil Zola, who is a French novelist, playwright, and journalist, said about the morgue, quote, the morgue is a spectacle within the reach of all pockets, free for all, the poor and the rich. The door is open, anyone who wishes enters. There are fans who make detours so as

not to miss a single representation of death. When the slabs are empty, people leave disappointed, robbed, mumbling under their breath. When the slabs are well furnished, when there is a good display of human flesh. The visitors crowd each other. They provide cheap emotions. They scare one another. They chat, applaud, or sniffle as at the theater. And then they leave satisfied, declaring that the morgue was a success that day. So that's the, that's like a perfect description of what it was. It sounds like a carnival now. Right? It's like, it's theater. It's literally theater. That's what it is. Now, the popularity and absurdity of this tourist attraction became fodder for the media at the time as well. Like, this was huge in the media.

Parisian newspapers would speculate about the identities of different dead bodies. Like, kind of, it was almost like tabloid things. Like, ooh, what's this one? Did they ever, like, actually identify them? Oh, yeah, they would identify people. Like, correctly? Oh, yeah. People would be like, oh, shit, that's my cousin.

Like, you know what I mean? Like, they'd be like, oh, I know that person. Do you think they said that so nonchalantly? Like, oh, fuck. Yeah, they just like, oh, shit, that's my cousin. And they were like, cool. And then they would just take them down and put another one. That's exactly what.

Next. And again, like I said, every guidebook directed people to the morgue. Some of the bodies became kind of famous. Like, they would be like the famous ones. And they would draw up to 40,000 people in a day just to see these bodies. Do you know what I'm getting reminded of right now? Remember, I don't know. why I thought of this, but in American Horror Story Hotel, when she goes to visit the body of, Gaga

goes to visit the body of, you did a project on him, didn't you? Oh, Rudolf Valentino. Yes. Yes. I'm just picturing like the place where she went to go visit him, like as this place. Like all theatrical and dramatic and like. Yeah, because she got like super dressed to go there and such. And that's what this was. Like people would get legit dressed up to go to this like they would the theater. Like, yeah, I can totally picture. Yeah. That. That's exactly it. I love it. And sometimes police would even stage public confrontations between, like, a suspected murderer

and a corpse. Like, they actually did this. They would bring a suspect there and had them face their victim, their supposed victim, and try to elicit a response. Did it work sometimes? Because they thought if they brought them in front of the people that they suspected they killed, that they would have to have an emotional response. And on at least one occasion, it worked, and the dude broke down and confessed.

Damn. So people would go there too to see if that was going to happen. Like if the police were going to bring in suspects to... Smart tactic. Like it literally was theater. Was it free to get in? Yeah, totally free. Wow.

So you just show up, get to see all this stuff. And again, if the body on display was like one of the celebrity ones, people would have to wait for hours just to get into the morgue. And they would. And in a single day, tens of thousands of people would come to see these celebrity ones. Like, and by celebrity, I mean like not celebrity. but ones that gained a ton of attention. Like there were cases, like one was called La Faire Bilois in 1876, and another one called

the Mr. de la Rue Verquebois. Yes. And that was in 1886. The first case, La Faire Bilois, was a man who dismembered his lover, and her body was fished out of the sen in two packages. So she was one that was on display. That was a big deal. I mean, yeah.

And the second one was an 18-month-old little girl found at the foot of a staircase. Oh, I don't like that. Both, no, I hate that something awful. I wouldn't want to go see that. You know, you have to say it. I would not want to go see that. No. It's not.

Dead babies are not something you want to go see. Yeah, that's fucked it. But both cases were like huge media sensations. So people just, I mean, that first one, I get it. That would I get. The second one, no, I don't want to see a dead 18-month-old. Like, who was going to see that? I don't understand that.

And fucked up individuals. There were billboards and posters that advertises the corpses in the morning. Oh, my God. Yes, no joke. They were displayed between, and so they were behind, like I said, like huge glass windows. And these glass windows were draped with long green curtains, like a theater. Green. So it's like these green curtains would shut and then they would open to reveal the corpse.

Wow. So it was like this big theatrical experience. Was this place big? It was. It was really big. Was it one body on display at a time or multiple? No. Bodies were laid out in two rows of six. Oh, okay.

They were all naked, but they would put a cloth covering their bits and pieces. In items, you know, all their other items, like I said, would be on pegs behind them. There were two other cases, or there was one other case called the Mystery de Suren, which was two young girls that had been taken out of the sun, and people thought that they might be sisters. Those two, and I think the 18-month-olds, were actually propped up, like, posed on chairs instead of just on a slab. That's weird. Like, it was kind of, it was like a tableau. Like, you know, like a scene. Yeah.

And I think the two sisters, the ones they thought were sisters, at least, I'm not sure if they ever discovered whether they were. They were young, too. So it's like these three little kids just propped up on chairs. You know, like, that's weird. Now, in the case of the two girls, they actually were misidentified first. Somebody thought they knew who they were. So they were taken off display. But then they figured out that it was a misidentification.

and they were put back on display, but they had already significantly decayed. Oh. So people were going in here and we're seeing these two little girls that how, which already should mess you up beyond measure, but now it's far past the time when you should be identifying them. Oh. Which just added to just like spectacle. Like, you know what I mean?

Like it was just another sensation. I can't believe I've never heard of this. I know. It's crazy. It's really interesting. Now, the most famous corpse to come out of the Paris morgue, you might have heard of. I'm not sure. Leancano du la Sen.

Leanne conno de la Cine. Exactly. She was a woman who was taken out of the Sen in the 1880s after she successfully completed suicide. When she got to the morgue, she was so beautiful and at peace. She had this, like, Mona Lisa smile on her face when they took her out. that an assistant at the morgue was like so taken with it that he took a cast, like a death mask of her face. Wow. And everyone, you know, you would think that would just be like something that happened and nobody really hear about it.

But the cast has been like a fascination. Like still is. And between the 1920s and 1930s, many households actually hung up the death mask of this woman. Like it became a thing that people had in their homes. Like replicas? And people said many literary works were inspired by her story as well. Wow. Like she became a sensation.

And if you look it up, I'll post it on the Instagram. It really is like an unbelievable. When you look at the mask, she is so at peace. It's like, it really is like a weirdly beautiful mask. And another thing with her is in the 1960s, they used her face as the first CPR dummy, resuscitation nanny wow so if you've ever taken a CPR class then you have come face to face with lan canoe de la sen see you just had to say it like you believed it I did I really did and I didn't even look down at the thing for that I just like I felt it in my soul you just let it out felt it from the

rooftops Lumiere just took over my body let me say it correctly but what's interesting to is Obviously, it was a public spectacle. It obviously was like this crazy thing, the morgue. But Alan Mitchell in an article called the Paris morgue as a social institution in the 19th century, actually said it also had some positive things associated with besides identifying bodies. He said it helped to revolutionize forensic medicine and policing. And it introduced refrigeration for dead bodies, pioneering forensic photography. And the Paris morgue focused.

on autopsies. So it was also like a force of pushing autopsies forward. So it really did have a lot of positive things. Where would you be without that Paris Morg? I'm saying I can thank the Paris Morg. And it finally closed to the public in 1907 over moral concerns. What moral concern? Because all of a sudden people suddenly were like, whoa, whoa, whoa. This is, this is kind of weird. My name's Karen and I want to talk to you. I'm in. And I want to talk to the manager. And they were like, you're not from France. You're not from France.

I guess local businesses and like people were like, yeah, I'm not really into this anymore. Like this is starting to freak me out. So newspapers kind of suffered a little bit when this closed because they kind of heavily relied on their columns that focused on these like, who could it be? This body's crazy. Go look at it. So one journalist said, quote, the morgue has been the first this year. among theaters to announce its closings.

As for the spectators, they have no right to say anything because they didn't pay. There were no subscribers, only regulars, because the show was always free. It was the first free theater for the people, and they tell us it's being canceled. People, the hour of social justice has not yet arrived. I mean, I think I'm just going to say it. I would definitely, definitely be one of the visitors to the Paris Fork if it was around now. 100% and you would definitely drag me with you. 100%.

And I feel like a lot of people listening would also feel the same way. Oh, I would probably go. And that's okay. Like, we don't have to feel like weird monsters because we're interested in this stuff. And I decided to give a little, just a quick little tidbit to make us feel better about that. Tell me. Carl Young was a Swiss psychiatrist who founded the idea of analytical. psychological psychology. If you've taken a psychology class, you've definitely heard of this dude.

Analytical psych basically focuses on the importance of the individual psyche in one's personal quest to feel and become whole as a person. That's basically what that's all about. So he was super influential in his time. It's so influential that Freud's, Freud, Freud saw him as kind of, Freud saw him as kind of the air to his way of thinking. about psychoanalysis. So he was a big deal. Now, one of his biggest ideas was the idea of the shadow self. Oh, yeah, yeah. I learned about that in, in a psychology. I just got really excited. Yeah, and it's, he believes it's basically a portion of our personalities that throughout our lives becomes pushed in the shadows of our unconscious. He said, quote, unfortunately, there can be no doubt that man is on the whole less good than he imagines himself

or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow. And the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. At all counts, it forms an unconscious snag, thwarting our most well-meant intentions. So he believes that we as a species carry products of our evolutionary growth with us. So we're animals. Yeah. Like we just, we still are. And as such, we have innate instincts for things like protecting, you know, sex becomes an evolutionary instinct. Aggression becomes an evolutionary instinct. And he thinks that we still, we carry those things still from way back. And he says, but in order to conform to societal norms, we just repress those instincts

and we make them more manageable for society. I like that. But they're there. That's true. Yeah. So, of course, these can also be nourished by unconvinced. upbringings as well. So nurture definitely can help quell or ignite these things, but it doesn't create the shadow self because we all have it hidden somewhere.

It's always right. That's what he believes. So he wouldn't believe in total nurture. He would believe in a combo of both. Yeah. And mostly nature, but he would believe that nurture can help it, help nurture it, basically. In fact, people actually complained about the invention of the guillotine in France when it was invented because they believed it was too quick and lacked the drama that they had come to expect from public executions. So think about it. Recently, in real life, I remember seeing that there was a story recently that a couple of young girls, I can't remember if they were Dutch or not, or Norwegian, they were beheaded by

extremist groups while they were just, they were hiking. The men filmed it. And it made its way onto the internet, as most of these things do, like beheadings from extremist groups. I myself had zero interest in watching this. I do not search for that stuff. But I looked at the Twitter reactions because I wanted to see other people who had watched it. I just wanted to see what the reactions were. I couldn't watch that, I feel.

Most of them were people who were asking themselves out loud why the fuck they watched it and why they felt compelled to. didn't see anyone that was like oh yeah that was crazy onto my next life most people were literally like I hate myself for watching that like why did I do that and they were all questioning it like what the hell made me want to do that and it just we're all all like an odd species that just that's there we want to see that well we all watched public execution it's like the same thing as like why do you turn around and like look at a car accident exactly like why do we why are we rubber necking a car accident because we want to see the drama the gore right and once you see the gore you might be like shit why did I look at that like that just messed me up but like you wanted to see it's

true something in you was like quick look at that so I get why you know these people lined up at this morgue and that was it's the same thing as public executions it's the same thing as all this stuff and I wanted to go a little further into it but I kind of want to do a minisode on this phenomenon like the whole public execution thing. So I'm going to stop here. I liked that one. That's the Paris Morg. That is interesting.

Right? I wish it was still there, man. I would love to visit France and go see the Paris Morg. Yeah. It's not there. The site is there. We'll just have to go and eat baguettes. Exactly.

And go to the catacombs. Yeah. I'll drink some wine. So, yeah, that was my minisode on the Paris Morg. I hope you guys dug it. I did. And again, French listeners, come at me, bro. It's fine.

Like, I welcome it because I know I butchered a few of those, but I want to let you know that I think your language is beautiful, and I try my very best. Come at me, monsieur. Come at me, monsieur. See, I can't even say that, monsieur. I'm like, monsieur, monsoir. I'm so grossly American right now.

Come at me, si you'll play. I'm like grossly Bostonian right now. I think C-Bel plays, if you please. I think it is. So, yeah, so hope you guys enjoyed that. Let us know what you think, and we will see you next week for an Ash-centric minisode. Whoop-whoop. And, uh, Patrions, you have a bonus episode coming your way very shortly.

Boop-whoop. So, thanks for listening. How do we end these? I don't really remember. Let's just say bye. Yeah. All right. And we hope you.

keep it weird. But that's so weird that you open a catacomb try to identify dead bodies and like, you know, I don't know, this isn't really that weird of an episode. Bye. Ovoa. O'vois. Chabella.

Was it that Italian? Maybe. That was for sure Italian. You know what? I'm all inclusive. Killing it. Koo-k-k-k-k-k. Bye.