Social media users claim a video shows human remains, coffins and a candlelit pyramid in an illegal tunnel discovered under a New York City synagogue. This is false; the images come from footage taken in 2021 or earlier in the vast subterranean catacombs of Paris.
“In the tunnel of Children’s bones under NY city,” says text over a video shared January 14, 2024 on Facebook.
Overlaid with Bosnian text, the same clip has circulated on TikTok in multiple languages.
The posts are the latest misinformation stemming from the discovery of a tunnel under the Chabad Lubavitch world headquarters in Brooklyn, which includes a synagogue of the ultra-orthodox Hasidic group.
Police were called January 8 to the Chabad, where they found a group of men breaking through a wall to a tunnel. Officers took 12 people into custody after a fight.
News outlets reported the passage was built by a breakaway group seeking to expand the synagogue to honor their deceased leader, Menachem Mendel Schneerson.
Despite numerous claims about the tunnel’s extent and usage, New York City authorities told AFP it was just 60 feet in length and contained nothing but dirt and tools.
Footage from Paris
A reverse image search surfaced similar photos posted in August 2022 by a French urban exploration Instagram account (archived here and here). One shows the pyramid in the footage circulating online, with the location listed as the “catacombs of Paris” (archived here).
The same account published an identical video showing bones and coffins in a 2021 Instagram story.
A similar video spread in 2022 TikTok posts also identifying the location as the Catacombs of Paris (archived here).
The footage is from the ossuaries in limestone quarries under the French capital —Â but not the location open to tourists, according to Paris underground historian and author Gilles Thomas.
He told AFP on January 18, 2024 that the full network of underground galleries extends for more than 200 miles — much wider than the one-mile circuit open to the public. It contains millions of human remains, some more than 1,200 years old. Â
Thomas said the coffins and the pyramid seen in the videos are props installed by “cataphiles.” The community of urban explorers frequents the tunnels beneath Paris, even though they are technically off-limits to the public.
The coffins were positioned approximately a decade ago, Thomas said, and the “structures built with bones were also made by cataphiles.”
He shared pages from Casus Belli, a French magazine focused on role-playing games whose 36th issue in 2021 featured an article about the Paris galleries with a picture of the small pyramid being built (archived here).
On a web page dedicated to the Paris catacombs, a French photographer features a photo of a pyramid resembling the one in the misrepresented video (archived here). Similar images appear elsewhere on the website (archived here).
AFP has also captured such pictures and videos for reports on the catacombs’ restoration, which is ongoing.
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JULIEN DE ROSAAFP
The catacombs originated as a solution to the city’s major health problems linked to cemeteries (archived here).
The site was consecrated as the Paris Municipal Ossuary in April 1786. Between 1787 and 1814, authorities transferred the remains of millions of Parisians from cemeteries to abandoned limestone quarries beneath the city.
The last bone deposits took place in 1860. Starting in 1809, the catacombs — which house the remains of some six to seven million people — were opened to the public by appointment.
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