In the year 2000, a special on ABC brought to light perhaps what is the most horrifying piece of found footage ever uncovered. For decades afterwards, people assume the tape to be all too real… except the truth is a lot more complicated.

(Content Warning: Minor scares, though nothing too crazy. Sit this out if you are greatly averse to horror media, otherwise read on.)

If you’ve been on the internet long enough, particularly in horror circles, you’ve seen at least a snippet of this footage before. This is a minute and a half long cut taken from a longer ABC special called “Scariest Places on Earth“. If one thing is for sure, the video is certainly frightening: it depicts a man getting lost inside the infamous Paris Catacombs, an underground maze of dead bodies built in an earlier era of French society. As the video goes on, he begins to go into a panic and runs through the Catacombs — either due to a psychological breakdown, or perhaps something more sinister. As the story goes, the man was never seen or heard from again.

Of course, the footage that you see on video — and the story behind it — is all made up. Let me explain.

But First, The Tape

Before I bring in any sort of background information into this case, I want to analyze the tape as it stands. How legitimate is it just from this 1 minute and 37 second long snippet?

The first thing we notice is the voice over by Francis Freedland, the man who claims to have found the tape and a person we’ll be learning a lot more about later. This voiceover, depending on who you are, either makes the tape appear more legitimate or less so. The video skips around — probably past flavor commentary by the production team — and we hear Freedland explain that the man appears to be very deep inside the Catacombs. Freedland is a self-titled Catacombs Expert, and I know pretty much jack shit about the Catacombs outside of this video, so I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume everything he says is true.

The man picks up footage of strange maze paintings, though these are very likely modern-day graffiti done by fellow spelunkers. Shortly after this, the man begins to run, as Freedland claims, “deeper and deeper into the Catacombs”. Freedland also makes an interesting assertion: that ‘something’ is scaring the man, though Freedland quickly backs up and corrects himself to just say the man is frightened. At the end, the man drops the camera while its still rolling, and we hear him continue to run. Freedland’s speech cuts off at the end, but it is assumed nothing else happens in the tape beyond that.

It COULD Be Real, Right?

Sure it could. For those who are part of the hoax debate on this tape, the ones who believe it to be real claim that the man suffered from a delusional episode caused by some combination of hypothermia and hypoxia — lack of warmth and lack of air respectively — caused by being down in the catacombs. The effects took awhile to set in, hence why the man acts normal in the beginning then slowly falls apart in sanity as the tape goes on.

The reason the Catacombs footage is so believable is precisely because nothing crazy happens in it. There’s no ghosts, no aliens, no Bigfoot, nothing to make a somewhat skeptical person immediately shake their head and dismiss the whole thing as false. To put it plainly, it doesn’t feel wacky enough to be fake.

There’s also an argument to be made that the Catacombs really are that big. Sometimes we can get the idea that things that sound big are not so sizable in reality — manmade structures like Mt. Rushmore or the Statue of Liberty are classic examples — but the Catacombs do consist of a total of 150 miles of pathways. Just the authorized section — a small part of the total — takes a full hour to walk through!

Of course, if we really want to know whether or not this video is real, a 1:37 clip isn’t gonna do. It’s time to dive deeper.

Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Freedland!

All roads on the Paris Catacomb highway lead to Francis Freedland.

Francis Freedland is not exactly a widespread celebrity. He claims to be a Catacombs expert, sure, but Paris Catacombs knowledge is not something that is too much in demand. His only claim to fame is this footage, which he himself admits he was not the first to find. Freedland claims that the tape was created sometime in the 90s, but only discovered by Catacombs explorers (”cataphiles”, as they call themselves) sometime later, and then from there given to Freedland. Freedland analyzed the clip independently, presumably with his cataphile pals, before giving a small segment of the full tape to ABC for their Scariest Places on Earth television series.

From the start, there’s quite a few holes in this story. The first is how the tape could’ve survived in its rather remarkable state despite being in a dank, cold tunnel for so long before anyone had found it. But even if these explorers had found the camera rather recently after its owner left it, it also raises the question as to why the footage went straight to Freedland rather than to the French police. There has never been a police investigation involved with the uncovering of the Paris Catacombs tape — nor has there been any police investigation at all in the Catacombs during this time period! It seems as though if there really was a case, the French police would at least be curious.

Lastly, I find it a bit bizarre how little of the original tape was uncovered. Freedland seems to suggest that there was much more to the tape than what was shown on ABC, and even if ABC only showed the juicy bits it doesn’t stand to reason why you wouldn’t just go ahead and show the tape in full, unedited.

Now, the defender argument for Freedland’s case primarily revolves around the fact that no one —particularly, Freedland — has ever admitted to faking the whole thing. But I find this to be a weak argument. The first reason is that Freedland does not need to be the hoaxer link — it could be that, for whatever reason, Freedland truly does believe the tape that he’s been given, and that it was the cataphiles who gave it to him that actually orchestrated the hoax. The second is that no one really needs to admit anything. The Paris Catacombs footage is known about, particularly with an Internet audience, but it is not famous. It’s not as high stakes as something like the Patterson Film, something that had a lot of pressure on its validity from the get-go and even then did not get proven false until decades later! If a couple of guys with a modified gorilla suit could hold out that long, no doubt could the same be said for the creators of the Catacombs footage.

Outside of this ABC show, Freedland has had only one other television appearance: on Ghost Adventures, for the same subject. Of course, Ghost Adventures is a show that’s mired in controversy, well-known for outright faking large segments of its show. Hey, that reminds me…

The Golden Age Of Making Shit Up

Let me tell you an analogous story, from around the same time, of something we know the full truth on:

In 1995, news blew up about a supposed alien autopsy video that had been uncovered some years prior. Related to the infamous Roswell event, the film would now be shown to the world for the first time.

Of course, it was all fake. The creator of itself admitted as much only 10 years later. Yet the truth about Alien Autopsy was that it was not just the work of its director Ray Santilli, but also of its publisher: Fox Television.

The concept of the mysterious horror found footage ARG seems like a relatively recent invention, but the truth is that individuals and television companies has been doing it for decades prior. Sometimes the individual fools television (such as the Bob Lazar case) while other times its the television company and the hoaxer working together in tandem. For the most part, these forgeries are innocent: made in the realms of aliens and ghosts, things most knowledgeable people would recognize as TV eccentricism.

The truth is that the late 90s and early 2000s were the golden age of making shit up.

To end off this section, I want to copy in a Reddit comment I found about the case by user “thekeffa”. To be honest he explains the entire debunk way better than me, almost to the point where I didn’t even need to write all this to begin with. Here’s how he describes it:

“British cataphile here. Have been many, many times in my youth as a avid urban explorer and returned for another visit 2 years ago. And I don’t mean the approved tourist visits and sections, I am talking real cataphiles who make their own maps and make their own way in using their own access points and routes into the non public tour areas.

The footage is well known in the community and is often discussed during layovers (Yes inside the catacombs, it’s the best way to keep exploring them) with a carbide lamp and a sleeping bag.

It’s bullshit. It’s a hoax and nobody believes it to be real. There are a multitude of reasons for this.

1. The catacombs are actually quite well travelled. There are lots of urban explorers who traverse them. It’s not exactly a underground metro by any means, but it’s rare to traverse them without seeing anyone else.
2. The police patrol the catacombs. They are mandated to, including the off limits areas to the general public where the cataphiles like to roam. Being caught is an interesting experience.
3. There’s just no way a body would have been missed down there, between the cataphiles and the police. It does get waterlogged in places but someone would have kicked it even if it was under water.
4. There are some older Parisian cataphiles who believe they know who the individual was that made the video.
5. Nobody is abducting and removing someone against their will from one of the many hidden entrances around Paris. It’s impractical carrying a body, it’s impossible doing it with someone against their will.

There is a core of people who believe the video is real but the person was suffering from either hypoxia from lack of air or delusional panic that can sometimes occur if someone genuinely believes (Even if erroneously) that something bad is happening to them or they are stuck. While no theories are offered about what happened to the guy, it would explain the actions seen on camera. This is generally seen as rubbish as well, because the catacombs are actually fed with fresh air quite well due to their slight negative pressure, and even if he was suffering from delusional panic, he would have been found eventually, dead or alive.

In my opinion, the guy was one of these early forms of “Artists” who like to make “Edgy” YouTube channels featuring videos that are creepy to look at and make no sense.”

So, there you have it — an early ARG, made by either ABC, Freedland, or some other third party who decided to bring them all along for the ride. I suppose one could make the argument that thekeffa is lying here, but I would counter with 1) everything he says is believable, and 2) unlike Freedland, everything he says is backed up easily. There is indeed a community of people who break into the forbidden areas of the Catacombs — something suggested even in the footage itself with the walls of modern graffiti. There are indeed regular police patrols in these forbidden areas, whom have added light fixtures and markers both for their own benefit as well as anyone rebellious enough to cross over onto that side. There is indeed, as I have mentioned before, no missing persons cases related to the Catacombs. And lastly, looking up his claims even successfully thwarts the popular believer arguments about hypothermia and hypoxia [1] — the Catacombs are indeed well ventilated, mostly thanks to modern modifications, and conditions in the forbidden zones are for the most part fine.

In the entire history of the Paris Catacombs, there has been only one confirmed death. This death did not occur in the 1990s, but rather in… drumroll please… 1793. And once more, just as thekeffa says, it is pretty damn hard for a body to stay hidden for a considerable amount of time.

But what really catches my attention in thekeffa’s debunk is point 4. Freedland is, of course, a man who claims to be a Catacombs Expert. There is no doubt in my mind that the cataphiles know of him, and may have certain opinions about his character. The person which these cataphiles suggest may be Freedland, or it may even be a person associated with him. And while we may never know the specific details of who did it, I think we have enough here to consider this case closed.

I Saw It On The Internet

The reason why the Paris Catacombs Footage is interesting to me has nothing to do with how hard it is to debunk. Indeed, its the exact opposite: how its so easy to debunk, yet so many people still believe in it.

Years ago, I was going to write a very similar post about the infamous “Glitter Conspiracy” — the question of who is the largest purchaser of glitter in the world, an answer that is apparently classified and covered in red tape. I had scoured the threads discussing this topic, and came across a rather sexy answer: the US military, as they had (allegedly) used glitter to create chaff flares that interfered with enemy radar and missile homing. It all made sense to me — doesn’t that stuff sort of sparkle when you use it in Ace Combat? — and so I assumed it must be real.

Then, the BarelySociable video came out.

In about two or three hours worth of research, BarelySociable debunked the entire thing. In fact, the number one purchaser of glitter was NEVER actually classified! It was easily and publicly available with a single well-put question to the chief financial officer of Glitterex. Boat paint. Who would have thought? Turns out the flare thing was all made up too — it would be public knowledge that the flares use a substance similar to glitter, and it turns out the flares are made of something not even remotely the same. All of this, in reality, was started because the PR representative for Glitterex just really didn’t want to talk to the New York Times, and on a whim said that the whole thing was secret. And the NYT reporter never bothered looking any deeper into it.

This reality is… not-so-sexy. One might even call BarelySociable a party-pooper for this, as many did. I think a big reason why many of us didn’t bother to Google anything deeper or do the proper research was not that we were lazy, but that we loved the mystery. We loved the idea that anything could be true, and while we claimed we wanted to know the truth what we really wanted was to speculate on the truth. It’s like when your girlfriend asks you “Do I look good in this?” more as a rhetorical exercise and less as a real question.

And I’d say the same thing is the case with the Catacombs footage. All in all this article took me maybe an hour to research and debunk this entire thing, after having the most mild of skepticism and interest in Googling. And, unlike the Glitter case, this one didn’t hold my attention as much when it came to the mystery. I just wanted to know what it was all about.

Turns out people love to make shit up, and people also love to eat shit.

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[1] – To be fair, there is at least one case of a person in the Catacombs suffering from hypothermia, and a missing persons case at that. But this person was found, and it happened almost 20 years after the events of the Catacomb footage!