Phantom: Fact or Faked?

The Inception

The Search

After taking to the internet I found that Gaston Leroux was a journalist. This led me to believe that the book may be factual, but there are some holes in his story.

For example, a singer was supposedly abducted from the opera house, but there is no record of that ever occurring. There was however a soprano named Christine Nilsson who bares extreme resemblance to the Christine Daaé of Leroux’s book. She was even suppose to perform at the opera house, but cancelled last minute.

Digging a little further I also found that the lake beneath The Garnier Opera House where Erik, the phantom, takes Christine is actually real. It may lack the ambiance of the film version, but it does exist and accessible to this day. There is also a complex underground network which it would have been easy to hide away in.

The Facts

There was a fire which burned down La Salle Favart which was the home to the Paris Opera before the Garnier Opera House which matches up with the end of Phantom when the opera house is burned to the ground.

This chandelier, though seemingly harmless, killed a woman who sat in the audience in 1896. She was hit in the head by the falling light fixture and died upon impact. The only difference from the book is that the event was blamed on electricity, not a ghost.

There is also the commune which Leroux references several times in the book. For those of you who are not experts in French history, the commune was a socialist government which took power for two months during one of their many revolutions. There were battles fought throughout Paris and many men died fighting. The Opera House was also used when Prussia invaded Paris directly prior to the creation of the commune.

My Conclusions

When put together, all that I have found points to the Phantom of the Opera being at least partially true. There is just one small problem: the timeline. Erik is supposed to have kidnapped Christine before the chandelier crash which kills a woman. In reality the chandelier crash happened before Christine Nilsson was born.

This paired with other stretches of the truth, such as a body being found buried in the opera house with a ring. Although, it would not be surprising for a corpse to be hidden away in the intricate passageways below the opera house, one has yet to be found.

Sadly, this means that the opera ghost did not exist. Gaston Leroux did a great job of mixing fact with fiction and making a believable story. Many at the time even believed the tale to be true.