Case file · Haunting
The Phantom of the Opera
On 20 May 1896, a counterweight of the great chandelier of the Paris Opera fell into the audience and killed a woman; with the building's underground lake, it inspired Gaston Leroux's 1910 novel.
1896 CE · 48.87, 2.33 · status: legend
The account
Staff legends of a ghost in Box 5, which is still sometimes kept empty, grew out of the novel and its film versions.
The sceptical view
The accident and the water cistern are real; the ghost is fiction.