In the May 21st, 1896 issue of Le Matin, a newspaper where Gaston Leroux was moonlighting as the senior courtroom reporter, a headline read: “Five hundred kilos on a concierge’s head!” – Gaston Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera “The chandelier had crashed upon the head of a poor woman who had come to the opera that evening for the very first time in her life, and killed her instantly. While it looks nothing like the famous romantic lagoon in the musical, the Opera staff enjoys feeding the resident fish and the Paris Fire Department goes diving there from time to time. Rather than move location entirely, Garnier adjusted his drafts to control the water in cisterns, creating a sort of “artificial lake.”

They had hit an arm of the Seine hidden below ground and no matter how hard they tried to pump out the water it kept rushing back.

Clue No 1: The LakeĬharles Garnier, architect of the eponymous Opera House, ran into a slight problem while digging its foundation. The Phantom and Christine from the 1926 silent film. She confirmed that Leroux’s descriptions of the Palais Garnier and what transpired within its walls are so in-depth and accurate, it’s no wonder that people still question if the phantom was real a century later. So I decided to get in touch with Mireille Ribiere, the woman who researched and re-translated every corner of the legend for Penguin Classics, feeling that other versions didn’t do justice to the author’s relationship with the Opera House. Few are aware of the fact behind the fiction the book isn’t even considered one of Leroux’s great works in France.

The novel is saturated with people that really lived, events that actually happened and places you can still visit today. Originally published in installments for the newspaper Le Gaulois in 1909, the story begins: “The Phantom of the Opera did exist.” You see, The Phantom of the Opera was written by Gaston Leroux, a French journalist and opera critic. I had no idea of the revelations I was in for… The place was so riddled with remnants of the ghost that I had a feeling a little research would pull up some interesting surprises. Our guide pointed out the very chandelier that, in the story, drops into the audience and led us into lodge number 5, the phantom’s private balcony hideout.

The paris opera house lake