Happening across the strange pyramid in the woods of La Boulaye in the Saône-et-Loire Department of France, one wonders what it could be. As you get closer things only get stranger, as a large mausoleum, old tombstones, and an old gate appear. They are the ruins of the old village of La Boulaye.

La Boulaye was not always located where it is today. In 1894, Henri Adolphe-Eugène Schneider, the iron master of Le Creuset, bought the old castle of La Boulaye and transformed it into his hunting lodge. He did not want to share the area around his castle with the local people, so he suggested the small village of 320 people move some distance to the north. As reward for agreeing to move, he offered to build the village a school, town hall, train station, new church and a new cemetery. He even offered to move the corpses of the people in the graves if the families desired.

Mr. Schneider died in 1898. It was his son, Charles-Prosper-Eugène Schneider, who went through with the plan. At the beginning of the 20th century the villagers left their homes, the church and the graveyard to move to the new La Boulaye. The whole process was finished in 1905 and the hunting lodge of the Schneider Family owned all the land around the castle.

Many buildings from the old village have been demolished, though a few vestiges remain if you look closely. But the old cemetery is still there, now abandoned in the woods and overgrown in most places. A few ruins of the old wall still surround the place, the old gate still hangs spooky and crooked in it’s hinges, and the occasional fallen tombstone can be found.

A strange alleyway leads to a large underground mausoleum with a strange domed ceiling. On top of the domed part of the mausoleum sits the pyramid, it’s heavy iron doors secured with concrete. The inscription of one of the doors says: “Sepulture de M. et M. Montmort.” The Montmort family were the original Seigneurs (Dukes) of La Boulaye for many centuries.