Under the golden splendor and red velvet of the Palais Garnier in Paris, one of the most romantic and gothic legends in history hides: the Phantom of the Opera. Although immortalized by Gaston Leroux's novel in 1910, the story is fueled by real events, impossible architecture, and rumors that circulated among the dancers and stagehands of the 19th century.
The legend tells of Erik, a musical genius born with a horrible facial deformity that forced him to live hidden from society. Erik made the opera's basements his kingdom. And this is fascinating: the basements of the Palais Garnier are real and strange. Due to the marshy terrain on which the theater was built, architect Charles Garnier had to create a huge artificial underground concrete lake to stabilize the foundations. This dark and silent lake, which still exists beneath the stage today, is the perfect home for the myth.
It is said that the Phantom demanded the exclusive use of box 5 and collected a monthly salary from the directors to prevent 'accidents'. The most famous incident in the novel — the fall of the grand chandelier on the audience — is based on a real event that occurred in 1896, when a counterweight from the chandelier fell and killed a woman, an incident many attributed to the Phantom's anger. Erik represents the archetype of the tortured artist and social outcast. His obsessive love for the young soprano Christine Daaé is the core of the tragedy: the beauty of music contrasted with the horror of the monster's face and loneliness.
Beyond fiction, theater workers have reported strange noises, shadows, and unexplained disappearances in the labyrinth of corridors for decades, keeping alive the rumor that the Phantom, in some way, never left his box.
