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
Erik (The Phantom of the Opera) strangles the publisher and tries to retrieve his music, only to be disfigured when the publisher's assistant throws etching acid in his face. In the musical horror film "Phantom of the Paradise" (1974), Winslow (the Phantom character) gets his head caught in a record-press, while Robert Englund's horror-version has him selling his soul to Satan and having his face mutilated as a result. This version also has a gruesome variation on the mask, in which Erik is sewing flesh to his face. In Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical adaptation, only half of Erik's face is deformed (thus the famous half-mask often