The one about the Paris Opera House disaster and the inspiration for the novel...
https://www.nineteenthcenturydisability.org/items/show/39
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phantom_of_the_Opera_(1986_musical)
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-water-tank-beneath-palais-garnier-paris-france
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdGhGX6z8BA&ab_channel=HistoryMatters
https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k283653v.image.langFR
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Commune
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaston_Leroux
http://blog.feinviolins.com/2012/05/phantoms-inspiration-chaos-in-paris.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palais_Garnier
Hi everybody and welcome back to another episode of nightmare now the show where we put fright at the forefront and face our fears forever. This is episode nine and I’m not showing any signs of stopping, slowing down, losing sleep, sure but stopping never. Holy hell what a week it’s been, working backwards I had a lovely triple mothers day, with meal and flowers and the whole shebang, So big shout out to all the moms out there this one goes out to all of you, most people have a mother or at least know one so tell them you love em!
Further back we celebrated my future brother in law’s college graduation so that was awesome, man those commencement speakers don’t know when to shut up! Start a podcast like the rest of us, and for the love of god work on your mic technique! I have never been more sensitive to mouth sounds and lip smacks in my whole life than I have the last few months. I guess that comes with the territory of editing yourself talking for a few hours a week, I still don’t know if I’ll ever get over hearing how my voice reverberates differently in the world than in my own skull but we’ve got plenty of time to figure it out, Either way big ups to all my homies graduating these few weeks. We’re all proud of you. I guess.
Ok turning back the clock a little further, we get to my lovely family trip to New York City, to see The Phantom of the Opera, Which incidentally starts just like this podcast does, an explosive jump back through time. There’s only so many ways I can apply pyrotechnics in an audio medium like this so I’ll begrudgingly say that they did it better. Just this once. Wait till you see how many explosions I’ll have when I start doing live shows. Naturally, all this driving and sitting and being present with my family on both sides was not conducive to doing a whole lot of research and development on my reclusive horror comedy podcast, I really should have made QR stickers for NYC, I was thinking to myself wouldn’t it be f**king awesome if this broadway show was based on a real deformed man with a melodious voice murdering people in a theater? I did some research and it isn’t. Well it was a good try.
Andrew Lloyd Webber's phantom of the opera, which came out in 1986 was not in fact based on any kind of true story whatsoever. It was based on a book, a French mystery novel Le Fantôme de l'Opéra. By Gaston LEroux. The book however, BAHHHHH BUMMM BUMMM BUMMM BUMMM BAHHHHH was in fact based on a true story. I wish I could just throw the clip in there. But I gotta remix it just a lil bit so I don’t get executed by Broadway lawyers. Gotta love the Wahwah. That’s right there really was a tragedy resulting in death and grievous injury in an old timey opera theater. Please remain in your seats everyone, it was only an accident, an accident huahuaahauhauha!
I’m inclined to sympathize with the phantom because his name is Erik and he grew up as the weird kid but my fiance says he’s creepy when he writes a horny play and murders several people to get close to an actress. How does she think we met?
So If you’re unfamiliar with the Phantom of the Opera, go see it if you ever get the chance, I can’t get over how awesome the show was and how great it is to see a little bit of live theater again. But the spoiler free plot is that a man, twisted by deformity from birth, lives in a lake under an opera theater, collects a protection racket from the owners and works a side gig as a music tutor. Really a community man. He eventually falls in love with a chorus girl and pulls some strings, well, more pulls some nooses to make sure she’s the star of the opera they’re putting on, beyond that you get into some major spoilers but I think that’s all the info you need to enjoy this episode. Obviously the phans with a ph might get a little more out of it but oh well, it’s stuck in my head. Ask anyone I work with.
So what did happen to inspire this story? Let's start from the author, Gaston leroux. No idea if I’m saying that right, I never took any French in school. I think my high school French teacher actually got fired because she brought a nalgene full of vodka every day. I really don’t know if that’s true but I remember hearing it and laughing at the time. At this point I don’t f**king blame her. I don’t know how teachers deal with high schoolers without a literal liter of vodka. Anyway, Gaston leroux had a shotgun blast career, originally studying law, graduating as a lawyer and then immediately receiving a massive inheritance of a few million francs in 1889 and subsequently gambling and spending it away lavishly until 1890. Holy s**t that must have been a hell of a year. So after his year long project X debacle he decided he didn’t want to be a lawyer and became a journalist and theater critic. This’ll come up later. obviously. He also covered the Russian revolution in 1905 which is a whole can of worms. We'll get into some crazy Russian history eventually but not in today’s episode. After that he retired from journalism and settled into a comfy life of writing detective fiction. He was basically the french analog to arthur conan doyle and sherlock holmes.
In 1907 he published his seminal work, and I had to double check that that word didn’t mean relating to semen, and that it more meant the artist's most important and influential work, but apparently it’s both. Go figure. Maybe my best episode and my seminal work will literally just be about cum, we’ll see. So his seminal work though, was the phantom of the opera based on current, at the time, events and also his investigative journalism on the palais garnier (Pal-eye garn-e-ay) which from now on in the show will be referred to as the paris opera house because I don’t speak french. People say it’s a romantic language, but Americans sound awful speaking french. According to my listener info, france and india are tied for my number #2 countries so I don’t know if it’s a couple of french folks tuning in or 1 dedicated listener that’s listened to every single episode so far, but either way that’s awesome and another reason I decided to do this episode. Thanks for listening, wherever you are! Sorry for putting your shoutout directly after the semen talk but that’s just how the dice roll ami!
Anyway Gaston wrote his novel after he was inspired by the events of May 20th 1896, at the Paris Opera house. Wherein a performance was taking place. I got all this information from French newspaper articles from may 21st and 22nd 1896, the day after the event, run through google translate a few different ways. That’s right baby we getting contemporary sources. To my French listener, if you have a better translation of the archived article, found in the show notes, hit me up and I can run corrections next week.
Picture if you will the end of the first act of an opera, helle, which I’m not familiar with, a woman singing an impossibly high, extended note, her heaving breasts barely contained in her corset, adorned with a viking hat and braids, the note ends and the audience rises to clap and applaud. All is going well, as the show has the last few nights and then there is a flash from above and a horrible rending noise of snapping steel cable. Screams cut through the applause and with a crash it seemed like the ceiling was coming down into the crowd. A whole new meaning to bringing down the house!
What exactly happened though? SUPPOSEDLY, if you believe The quote OFFICIAL NARRITIVE, electrical cables wrapped around the steel cables became stripped, heated up and melted from the current. This caused a cascading collapse of several of the counterweights holding up the SEVEN f**kING TON CHANDELIER. That’s like dropping a T REX on someone. My chandelier is like 10 pounds. Luckily that’s literally what the counterweights were for. Each section was a set of discs weighing seven hundred and ninety two pounds. People rejoiced quickly that they just got hit and bruised by pieces of drywall and stuff but it was soon discovered, unfortunately, seven hundred and ninety two pounds is a lot of f**king weight to drop on somebody. So even though only one of these counterweights fell, instead of the whole chandelier like in the novel, the nearly eight hundred pounds slammed through the ceiling and the fifth floor and fell directly on seats eleven through thirteen on the fourth floor mezzanine.
Although people were initially relieved that there wasn’t any major injuries, just contusions and shock, they eventually were proven wrong when people combed through the rubble on the fourth floor and found a 12 year old girl covered with blood, crying for her mother who was trapped. Rescuers set to work clearing the rubble from the fourth floor where the counterweight had come down. Much to their horror they found the mutilated body of a madame chomette, the young girl's mother. Her skull and right side of her body had been completely crushed under the weight of the falling iron and she had died almost instantly. Man that’s f**king sad.
Someone in the next seat over had been struck by a live wire and been electrocuted unconscious but survived. The young girl survived but was left without a mother and presumably severe psychological trauma and ptsd, one of the wrought iron discs continued through the fourth floor down to the third and hit another woman’s leg. It just clipped her but a weight that size still ripped all the flesh down to the bone in her lower leg. Ugh. Pretty much everyone else escaped with concussions or contusions and the psychological trauma inherent in all that carnage.
An electrical short circuit caused by the snapping cables flailing around caused a fire to break out on the roof but firemen were able to get up there fairly quickly before any devastating structural damage was done.
Now we gotta take a second to go back to Leroux’s investigative journalism. He uncovered that underneath the paris opera house was a set of prison cells used to imprison objectors to the Paris Commune, which as far as I can tell was a sort of socialist takeover of paris that lasted two or three months, they were losing wars at the border, the armies were spread thin, so a volunteer national guard was left to defend Paris, and much to their chagrin they weren’t really getting jack s**t for it.
The parisian government at the time, when war cooled down at the border didn’t want these uppity national militia hanging around bellyaching so they asked them politely to turn their guns in. This kind of thing usually only goes one way unless you’re Australia in the 1990s so of course fighting breaks out and the national guard takes over the city, forcing the old government to flee. This left the national guard and parisans to elect a new left wing government while the old government and ruling class kinda regrouped in versailles.
They weren’t exactly thrilled with the shenanigans in paris and were gonna march in and kill the revolutionaries. Seeing that trying to hold paris with a tiny outgunned force wasn’t really a winning proposition, the commune marched on versaille hoping to pick up peasant support on the way over. There wasn’t that much. They got their a*s kicked and ran back to Paris. Then the actual french army went and marched on paris and pretty much wiped the revolutionaries out because they really hadn’t gotten farther than the planning stages of a new government and couldn’t agree on anything. I found a nice little mini doc on that I’ll link in the notes.
Anyway the short lived commune of paris locked dissenters and undesirables in cells beneath the opera, just twenty or thirty years before the disaster with the chandelier’s counterweights. Almost an exact timeline for one of those prisoners to escape and haunt the theater from a young age, lining up almost exactly with the novel and the play’s timeline of events. Now everything up to this point is one hundred percent true history. After this things start to become hazy.
This next section is actually true as well though now that I think about it. So when the dude designing and constructing the paris opera house, garnier, broke ground on the place in 1862 water bubbled up from beneath. Keep in mind that in the novel and play the Phantom’s lair lies on the shore of an underground lake beneath the opera house. The level of groundwater in the foundation was overwhelming even with contemporary pumps running 24/7 in the hollowed out foundation; they couldn’t keep the water out. In fact they had to redesign the whole f**king thing! The whole foundation needed to rebuilt to accommodate a massive new concrete cistern to divert the water. A cistern that still exists to this very day. I’ll throw some pictures of it in the show notes for the curious. A series of catacombs and tunnels that nobody knows quite the whole plan for. Conveniently, the plans for the tunnels underneath were lost, or were they stolen? Cue it again jamie!
There is a legend that persists to this day that the whole structure was built above an underground lake. It’s starting to add up isn’t it? Lose yourself to the music of the night and accept that the phantom of the opera could very easily be a real historical figure. That’s not necessarily the claim I’m making but it all lines up, the timelines, the setting, the events, and even a plucky investigative crime journalist slash theater critic to tie the whole thing together. I’m sitting here with my playbill from the show and 17th century newspaper clippings up on a cork board like I’m looking for pepe silva.
Of course though, we’re lacking a motive, Or are we? I found this primary source from 1846 which included a number of lectures on the societal treatment of people with deformities and birth defects from 1846, and if those words aren’t the current accepted nomenclature, let me know I’m not trying to offend anybody here. Anyway here’s the quote:
“the deformed have been regarded as loathsome in body, and depraved in mind; they have often isolated themselves from their fellow creatures; persecution of them has ever been sanctioned by the Mosaic ceremonial, which admitted the unblemished alone to the dignity of priesthood… still is the deformed man exposed to the derision of the heartless, and is shut out from the world simply because nature has played some freak by which he differs from his fellow mortals.”
Regarded as freaks and subhumans, someone who was, say, locked up, forced to wear a mask and take up residence in an underground lake, hearing nothing but the peals of the opera above him for years, subsiding on I don't even know, hot dogs, pretzels and popcorn? Watching from the shadows, learning the intricacies of theater rigging, music and performance? I’m just saying it isn’t the most unrealistic story ever told. We’ve gone now past the point of no return, and with any luck, the phantom of the opera is truly there. Inside your mind.
I had a lot of fun putting this one together, I hope you enjoyed it, as always I hope your thrilled to be here like everyone in the playbill I got. It truly means a lot to me that you take the time to check out my show and I only hope that I make it worth your time. If you’ve got a topic you want me to check out or any other feedback you can reach me at nightmarenow.com that’s got all the social media links, I should hopefully have my facebook page up by next week but for now you can get me on instagram, twitter or by email, and all that is available on the website.
Lastly, all I ask of you, is that you think of me fondly, and maybe voice that in a review or rating somewhere, it helps out a lot! As always I’d wish you all sweet dreams, but we all know it’s only gonna be the music of the night--mares now! Catch ya next week!