In 1864, a wildly popular new type of theater opened in Paris. It was free and open seven days a week. Street vendors sold fruit and nuts to the long line of curious tourists and passersby who waited outside to see the show. Once inside the darkened and hushed exhibition hall, attendants drew back the curtains to display a remarkable display of corpses. This was just another day at the Paris morgue. As macabre and downright creepy as it sounds, the morgue was one of the most popular sights in Paris in the late 19th century. As many as 40,000 people a day would file through the morgue to gawk at the decaying corpses — many of them freshly fished from the nearby river Seine — laid out on marble slabs behind a plate glass viewing window. The official purpose of the exhibition was to recruit the public to perform the somber task of identifying the city’s unclaimed and unnamed dead. In essence, it was a real-life wax museum, and the public couldn’t get enough of it.
