The Phantom of the Opera still used for training firefighters. The mysteries that Leroux uses in his novel about the Phantom are still mysteries. "The Phantom of the Opera"'s origins came from Leroux's curiosity with the Phantom being real. In the prologue he tells the readers about the Phantom and the research that he did to prove the truth of the ghost. His findings connected the corpse from the opera house to the Persian phantom himself. The claims from the prologue of his novel were ones that Leroux held onto even up until his death in 1927. In Paris in the 1880s, the Palais Garnier
The Phantom of the Opera (1986 musical) financially successful entertainment event until "The Lion King" surpassed it in 2014. By 2011, it had been seen by over 130 million people in 145 cities across 27 countries, and continues to play in London and New York. In 1984, Lloyd Webber contacted Cameron Mackintosh, the co-producer of "Cats" and "Song and Dance", to propose a new musical. He was aiming for a romantic piece, and suggested Gaston Leroux's book "The Phantom of the Opera" as a basis. They screened both the 1925 Lon Chaney and the 1943 Claude Rains motion picture versions, but neither saw any effective way to