Hundreds of Dead Bodies Found Chilling Beneath French Supermarket

Construction workers renovating a French supermarket in January were probably a little bit surprised (possibly pleasantly so?) when they dug into the store’s foundation and found not gold or oil, but hundreds of neatly placed skeletons rotting away beneath the ground in a mass grave.

CNN reports that the discovery (which must have been terrifying because isn’t that how half of horror movies start?) consists of several mass graves, some with 15 bodies, some with ten, and one with a whopping 150 dead interred. The bodies belong to an abandoned cemetery (which operated between the 12th and 17th centuries and was attached to Hospital of The Trinity) and were supposed to have been moved to the catacombs when the cemetery was shut down. According to CNN, the job was not done well and so hundreds of former people remained lost and forgotten beneath the same place where Parisians purchased cabbages and cereal. Until January. (That sounds ominous, doesn’t it?) (Expect a horror movie about this exact subject in 2016.)

What’s most interesting about the bodies, according to the archaeologists doing the carbon dating is that the men, women and children buried under the supermarket must have all died around the same time considering how they were placed. Each grave held as many people as possible and it’s likely that were families were buried at the same time. This suggests that the skeletons may belong to victims of a plague outbreak. The cause of their deaths, however, is not known at this time.