The Paris Opera House is one of the extraordinary buildings in the world. It contains levels beyond levels of cellars, fountains, chandeliers and even its own ghost! The history of this performance hall is dark and interesting, and its mysterious quality is perfectly    1    in architecture, literature and music.

The House seats two thousand and has seventeen stories, taking up three acres of land. Seven of these are    2    the ground, and two contain pieces of the famous lake later pictured in Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera. Part of the    3    of the opera house is the levels that it inhabits underground. There are chorus rooms, green rooms, ball rooms, set rooms, cellars for waste props, closets, dressing rooms, and many more kinds of rooms making up the building. The underground levels contain all sorts of unpleasant and horrible objects from various operas that have been produced. Their    4    effect sparked the idea behind Gaston Leroux's The Phantom of the Opera. The lake on the last floor was accidentally sprung when a worker knocked against a pipe underground.

The Phantom of the Opera, later    5    into an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, was a book based upon the opera house. It portrays a young singer, Christine, and the Phantom who    6    in love with her, Erik. Other characters include Meg, a young dancer, and Raoul, the lover that goes to Christine's    7    and eventually wins her heart. In Leroux's tale, the Phantom, a mysterious    8    underground, kills, injures and frightens members of the cast before the audience and the cast in turn chase him down and drive him away from the theater. In the    9    story, the Phantom commits suicide by    10    himself because he fails to win Christine's love.

Work on this House began in 1861 and ended, fifteen years later. , It cost over forty-seven million francs, and gave its creator and workers a big headache.