Original subtitles

Voice over: Mysterious places that have sometimes been destroyed

or left contaminated

or simply abandoned

in the furthest reaches of the planet.

Some of the buildings look as though they're clinging on to the rock

for dear life

if you walk out of the front door it's just a sheer drop.

You've got bath tubs full of sand,

the only thing that this is home to now is the desert.

Casualties of war, natural disasters or events far more surprising.

What was left behind was so strange and eerie,

this town was now covered in a layer of something really mysterious.

It's the victim of something that most of us couldn't believe

could happen.

These are the worlds five strangest ghost towns.

They are places now abandoned.

Their ruins shrouded in mystery.

But within their decaying structures are the echoes of history

while many are associated with dark times

they are also reminders of human ingenuity and endeavour.

Now each haunted shell

is ready to be unmasked to tell it's own unique story.

In the heartlands of Argentina in South America

there is a strange and eerie sight.

It looks like a post apocalyptic landscape.

The only access is down this potholed track.

It really gives you this feeling of you know, this place is creepy.

Everything is dusted with white,

the remnants of trees look like something fossilised.

You really can't tell what created this strange ruin.

Walking down the main arteries of the town

is a surreal experience,

it's as though someone just snapped their fingers

and everything's gone only slightly distorted.

It has this really eerie ghostly feel to it,

staircases that lead to nowhere

or kind of corroded structures.

The parched barren landscape

gives us no real hints about the town's history.

But the first real clues are provided by the white substance

that clings to every surface.

You know it looks like it could be ash,

you have to wonder was it bombed?

If so why? By who?

Did anyone survive?

What happened to it?

There's swimming pools

and you can see the remnants of cafes.

There's children's play grounds with swings and slides

that are just almost frozen in time

and look as though it's some kind of a haunted film set.

So clearly this was not a you know, a military site

or something like that

it was apparently a lovely place in it's day.

It appears that this place could have been burnt to the ground

or could that strange white substance reveal a far more curious story?

Today the streets have a haunted desolate almost forsaken feel

but incredibly there is still one man who calls this ghost town home.

Translation: "I am Pablo novak

"the only resident left in the ruins.

"I was born here, my two brothers also.

"On the 25th of January I turned 88 years old."

For the last ten years

Pablo has been living here on his own.

The only resident who refused to accept defeat.

Translation: "I stayed

"and I was sure someone would come back eventually.

"It used to be so famous, so many people used to come from all over."

Although it's a little hard to imagine today

for more than half a century this was a luxurious retreat

that catered for the elite of Buenos Aires.

During that time many thousands came for a break from life in the city.

A railway line was built from there to Buenos Aires.

By the mid 20th century it had grown into a lovely little resort

that you'd have as many as 25,000 people a year coming to visit.

What they all came in search of is still visible today.

They were the supposedly healing waters of a nearby lake and spring.

Those waters have since crept into the heart of the settlement.

This is all that remains of the town of villa epecuen.

Throughout history

humans have gravitated towards hot Springs,

waters with a lot of minerals in them,

with the idea that this is good for your health.

Legend has it that the lake was formed

from the tears of a great chief

who was crying over the loss of his true love.

The therapeutic powers of the lake had been famous for centuries

and it is said that these spring could cure all sorts of things

from depression to rheumatism.

It started off as a sleepy village

but then grew to this bustling tourist resort.

But those who flocked to the town to take advantage of the waters

probably had no idea that they also held hidden dangers.

So the town just kept on growing,

hotels for the visitors were built,

there was even a slaughter house to provide meat for everyone,

it had all kinds of attractions.

Translation: "This was started as the recro armasa.

"A dance hall.

"And because the room was small and lots of people came

"they also used it for a theatre

"with theatre companies coming from Buenos Aires."

So the town flourished

and it's future seemed bright but then disaster struck.

In November 1985 it started to rain and the thing is it never stopped.

The rainfall was reaching record levels

and the lake was threatening to burst it's banks.

What was once the lifeblood of villa epecuen

was about to become the cause of it's downfall.

A particular problem where you have big water bodies

that are bound by land

is that it's a phenomenon called the sache

and it's very much like when you're in a bath you know,

you're sort of playing around and occasionally poof! Up in your face

you get this freak wave

and that's because you've got all of these different waves interacting

and eventually they all come together

and make a much larger wave.

That's thought to be what caused the demised of the flood defences

in this particular town

and once the flooding started

then essentially the sort of, the flood gates were open.

The residents of villa epucuen had no choice but to flee to higher ground.

Fortunately for the residents the water Rose slowly enough

they had time to get out but not a lot of time.

So 1,500 people just had to pack up and move in a matter of days.

The flood waters gradually slowly consumed the entire town

and by 1993 it was submerged under 30 feet of water,

effectively becoming a modern day Atlantis.

Translation: "Everything that you can see now

"hadn't been seen for 20 years."

As the years passed the waters slowly began to recede.

But the waters that were once restorative and healing

have left a lasting scar upon the landscape.

When the town was exposed again

of course a lot of the buildings had collapsed

but everything was covered with this eerie coating of white.

And the twist is this highly saline water

left the town covered in a thick layer of salt

giving it this unique appearance as though it's been bombed

and covered in ash.

The same minerals that had drawn people to the hot Springs

to soak their aches and pains away

now coated all the buildings of the village.

Now although the remains of villa epecuen

are standing above water once more

the town can never regain it's former glory.

But Pablo novak is still determined to remain here.

Translation: "When I turned 70 my daughters gave me money

"'cause they thought I couldn't live here alone any more.

"But I'm 88 now and still here.

"And as long as I can walk, talk and have a good memory

"I will stay here."

In the southern mediterranean,

in the arch of the famous boot of Italy

is a truly extraordinary sight that overlooks an almost lunar landscape.

This rock sits in the middle of an area known as the 'badlands'.

It's an unpopulated area empty as far as the eye can see.

Yet built on an imposing mountain

some 1,300 feet above the surrounding plains there's a remarkable town.

It's a stunning sight

you can hardly tell where the cliff face ends and the masonry begins.

It's almost as if they've organically integrated their town

with the rock itself.

Some of the buildings

look as though they're clinging on to the rock for dear life

and at one instance if you walk out of the front door

it's just a sheer drop.

Engineering involved must have been fairly impressive

particularly moving a stone and rock around cliff edges and so on,

how the hell would you build something up there?

As you get closer

there's another layer to this mysterious dramatic looking sight.

When you look closer you can see the buildings have been battered

and light is streaming in through the missing church dome.

The whole thing is virtually flattened

and it makes you wonder what happened here?

Was it bombed?

Did anyone survive?

The abandoned, weather beaten buildings

suggest that this settlement was occupied for many centuries.

From the top of the town's imposing tower

local guide saverio grippo explains what makes this place so special.

As you can see we are on the top of the tower

and you can understand how important was this location

to have a wide view and dominate all the territories.

In fact from here we have about a 360% panoramic view.

This is craco.

Built in the middle ages high on a steep mountain

craco was built here for a very specific purpose.

When you look closer you can see that the part of the town

that is in the best shape

is actually the oldest section.

It was built on solid rock

and built to withstand military attack

and that's still standing today.

The heaving tower with it's arrow slits and fortifications

gives a hint when this village was built

because it was at a time

when islamic pirates rode the mediterranean

and frequently raided in land.

This was a defensive village.

But a closer look reveals that this is not simply a ruined medieval town.

A modern community lived here,

it was something that was destroyed recently,

the question is how and why?

Ironically,

the seeds of the towns downfall were sown by it's own economic success.

By the 15th century,

wealthy local landowners were moving in to the town

as craco mayor pino lacicerchia explains.

Translation: "The economic and commercial growth

"developed the urban centre.

"That grew and expanded around the tower.

"Which was surrounded itself by the houses

"that belonged to the land owners."

During the following centuries,

craco's infrastructure continued to spread.

And buildings began to spring up on the surrounding slopes.

Yet today they have vanished.

A striking feature is that

large parts of the new town have completely disappeared

but the old town remains largely intact

which begs the question

why then does so much of it resemble an area from a war zone?

There's a line where the old medieval settlements

meet the new town

and in that new town square it's actually sunk about ten feet

from where it used to be.

The whole place has been decimated.

The explanation for this odd situation can be found underground.

While the medieval site is built on solid rock

the new town sits on less stable ground.

Which is actually formed of different types of Clay.

Put simply

the new building works put ever greater pressure

on this unstable ground.

The result was landslides.

A landslide is a, a mass movement of rock and debris

that usually forms on some sort of weakness

that might be a weak bed

or a join between two different types of rocks really.

Landslides are lubricated by water.

Translation: "The community here always co-existed with landslides.

"Fixing buildings that were damaged and carrying on."

By the early 1960s

craco was experiencing frequent landslides so powerful

that retaining walls were constructed to keep the new town safe.

But the earth continued to move.

By 1963

the landslides had caused untold damage,

the entire new part of the village had slipped away down the hill,

the football pitch had disappeared

and even the retaining wall that was meant to guard against landslides

had gone.

Ironically, the worsening landslides were largely self inflicted.

Translation: "They reinforced the area with concrete.

"Which was extremely heavy and required drilling.

"This added weight then sped up the landslide."

They found that it was actually leaking pipes and sewers and so on

that were contributing to the water that was fluxing

and feeding the landslide.

So it's actually a man made problem that caused the landslides

that caused the evacuation of the town.

But while landslides may have wiped out the new town,

what caused such extensive damage to the medieval parts of craco?

The other problem you have in this part of the world are earthquakes

and you can imagine a solid building attached to solid rock

when that shakes it's going to start falling apart.

And there was a big earthquake in 1980

and that caused major destruction in the town

and eventually really kind of tipped it right over the edge

to make it almost uninhabitable.

And this is the last abandoned house of craco.

The last family lived here until the beginning of 90s.

Inside you can still have signs of life,

an oven, some chair on the floor, and even bottles on the fireplace.

After standing nearly 1,000 years

craco finally got hit with a series of calamities

that it really couldn't survive.

Today craco is an empty shell,

a slightly spooky destination for curious tourists.

One of the ironies of the town being abandoned for so long

is that it never got rebuilt.

That's made it a magnet for tourists today

who want to see what a medieval village was like

without a lot of modern infrastructure on top of it.

It's even been used for a number of movies

if you want to recreate what the streets of Jerusalem were like

2,000 years ago,

this is a pretty good place to do it.

However the town's tribulations have not all been in vain.

Given all of the things that have happened to this village

it's become a bit of a mecca for scientists to try and understand

exactly how you can mitigate against such problems,

how you can go from a perfectly working town

to a destroyed town

and hopefully we'll learn something from this,

from the science into the future.

In a remote forest in northern Ukraine

lie the remains of a once modern and technological advanced town

that was formerly part of the Soviet union.

Overgrown and slowly being reclaimed by nature

it's a haunting sight with over 150 buildings

spread across 15 square miles.

This smart rich Metropolis seemed to have everything it needed

to thrive and prosper.

Yet the area became linked to one of the most infamous disasters

in living memory.

In the 1970s it was built as a showpiece city,

that would help power the future of the Soviet union.

Places like this were built to attract the brightest minds

and the most devoted workers.

It was a purpose built town able to cater for up to 50,000 people.

And one of those who hoped to live here

was sergey Chernov.

Translation: "It was very well planned

"with a beautiful environment and technological services.

"It was a city of young people,

"the average age of those living here was just 26 years old."

All around the town are clues that tell why this place

was so important to the Soviets.

And that also reveal the catastrophe that caused it's destruction.

Translation: "Right now we're in the central square

"and this building right in front

"was the so called cultural building which was called energetic.

"Over there on that five storey building

"there's an emotive slogan that says,

"let the atom be a worker rather than a soldier."

"It didn't manage to follow through on that idea as you know."

This is pripyat

the town built to service the infamous nuclear power plant

of chernobyl.

Reactor number four exploded

spewing radiation over much of Europe.

Radiation levels were expected to rise over the ensuing weeks.

The entire population was quickly evacuated.

As many as 8,000 people have died

as a result of the worlds worst nuclear accident.

The whole area was isolated.

It signalled the end for the town,

all that remains is this ghostly deserted wasteland.

Translation: "It was dangerous as you know

"to build a town in the vicinity of a nuclear plant

"but that was common practice,

"the case of pripyat proved how disastrous this practice was."

On the west coast of Namibia in Africa

a mysterious settlement is preserved in arid wasteland.

In the middle of the baron landscape

a cluster of buildings unexpectedly emerge from the drifting sands.

This place it's just super strange.

You're clearly in a desert

and you turn round then there's this strange cowboy type town.

But if you look a bit more in detail it's,

it's a bit more sophisticated than that.

Some of the architecture is really quite interesting

so it makes you wonder

where did the money come from to build these lavish structures?

It's definitely a place where people wanted to be at the time but why?

The money and people have vanished

and mother nature is reclaiming the town.

You've got bath tubs full of sand,

you've got piles of sand as you walk in to the houses,

the only thing that this is home to now is the desert.

And the only signs of life are snakes and scorpions,

it makes you wonder who would ever want to have built here?

Despite the brutal sand storms and the lake of water,

a community not only thrived here

but flourished living in apparent luxury.

Certainly it was a place that was very affluent.

They created an ice factory on site

so they could actually make their own ice.

They had a butchers,

they had everything that you'd kind of want for a town.

What drew them here in the first place

and why has it become such a haunted ghost town?

But who would go to such extraordinary lengths

to create a luxury town in such hostile conditions.

In the early 1900s

Namibia was part of German south west Africa.

This area lay more than 500 miles from the busy British port

of Cape Town

with nothing but a solitary railway track passing through

to the German harbour town of luderitz.

These areas were remote areas under exploration

so you know to, to make an area that's remote and a desert

somewhere that's a place where people can live

you need a commodity.

Soon that commodity was unearthed.

In 1908 a local railway worker made a discovery,

he found diamonds in the sand and that changed everything.

The birth and growth of this now abandoned settlement

was driven by that extraordinary discovery.

This is Namibia's ghost town, kolmanskop.

Despite it's remote location local expert William thomson,

reveals the wide range of luxuries enjoyed by residents here.

This is where the shop keeper used to stay

and she was also the richest lady here in kolmanskop.

On this table is a list of all the stuff

that she imported from Germany, you will be amazed at everything

she ordered from camembert cheese to the finest of champagnes.

It was not just the imported goods

that powered the towns growing wealth.

What I like about the buildings

is that they were ingeniously designed.

They'd put pieces of wood in between the bricks

and they acted a little bit like natural aircon

so they would counteract

the vastly fluctuating desert temperatures.

So what caused this vibrant oasis to simply disappear?

At first it couldn't have been easier for German prospectors

who flocked here to make their fortune.

We think of diamond mines being complex structures

but that wasn't how they started,

I mean really you had men crawling on their hands

and knees under the moonlight

looking for that glistening precious stone in the sand.

And they found them.

There's tales actually from the time where they would dig trenches

and the diamonds were so proliferous on the ground

that you could sweep them into the trenches,

you'd sweep the dust into the trenches

and then have people move along the trenches

picking out the diamonds.

By 1912

the area was home to one of the richest

diamond deposits in the world.

Kolmanskop rapidly developed into a thriving diamond mining town,

you know at it's peak

12% of the world's diamonds were mined here.

With this explosion of wealth, a town grew to support the industry.

Despite that the harsh climate

and the very isolated setting

the town actually had many European luxuries.

So they had a bowling alley here,

opera singers from Europe and Germany came to perform here,

they had a sea water swimming pool in the middle of the desert.

It had a theatre, a performance hall,

it quickly developed into a lively little haven of German culture.

But there was one very pressing problem.

Water.

Kolmanskop and luderitz had no fresh water,

look they had some underground water

but it wasn't sufficient for everyone,

it wasn't enough for everyone it was very blackish and very salty.

That's a main reservoir

on top of that was for the fresh water here at kolmanskop.

What they did was they imported

all their fresh water all the way from Cape Town.

1,000 tonnes of fresh water per month.

As kolmanskop grew rich thanks in part to this British supply

it was able to buy it's way out of water shortages.

But with the dark clouds of war hanging over Europe

how long would this arrangement last?

And would a lack of water finally spell disaster?

While the money flowed,

kolmanskop became a centre for cutting edge technology.

A window in to what was the most important thing in this town

is highlighted by the fact that it was the first place ever

in Southern Africa to have an X-ray machine.

But that wasn't just to check for broken bones

it was to check to see if somebody had swallowed a diamond

and was taking it home after work.

The beginning of the end came with the cataclysmic events of 1914.

With the outbreak of world war I in 1914,

a lot of the Germans were interned, sent back to Germany and everything.

But the final straw came in 1927 when extensive diamond deposits

were found in the north of the orange river mouth

and the diamonds they found there

were six times bigger than the diamonds they found here

at kolmanskop

and I think that was where kolmanskop meet it's end.

The inhabitants of this town on,

on hearing that they could have something bigger and better

just literally dropped their tools,

left all their possessions and joined the rush south.

Kolmanskop struggled on,

but in 1956 with a supply of diamonds exhausted

the final resident left

and the town was abandoned to the desert.

Today kolmanskop is ghostly silent

and preserved by the arid climate

yet discoveries in the region are still being made.

Diamonds are still being mined in Namibia and,

and interestingly not so far from here

they're actually finding diamonds on the sea floor.

In Colombia county, Pennsylvania usa

is a town that has been virtually wiped from the face of the earth.

It's clear that there's been some kind of massive time break here,

you know something's gone on.

It's the victim of something

that most of us couldn't believe could happen.

There are no people there, it's eerie.

Roads neatly laid out in a grid like system

suggest that this was once a typical American town.

Most of the buildings themselves are gone,

you can see the gridwork of streets, you can see people lived here,

a lot of stuff is covered with graffiti,

it's very hard to figure out what actually happened here.

In a way it's a ghost town without the town.

Foundations yet no houses.

A police station but no police force.

A settlement that seems to have vanished.

Are there clues that hint at some kind of natural disaster?

It's almost as though that the tarmac's all cracked up,

there's you know there's the ground heaves,

was there an earthquake? Is that the reason nobody's there?

It's really rather strange.

A person visiting for the first time might think that

the town was a victim of some kind of volcanic activity,

there's cracks visible,

there's steam coming up out of the ground,

it's like it seems like some kind of a volcanic wasteland.

So why has this town been wiped from history?

It's hard to believe now but this now desolate site

had been a thriving part of the rich history of American industry

since the 1850s.

Well served by road and rail

this was once a bustling town of some 1,400 people.

It was called centralia.

Local author David dekok,

remembers it as a very different place.

This shot was taken in October of 1983

looking up toward the top of town you can see there was a,

an entire town there that's now gone

so it really er,

drives home I think how much was lost here.

How the town vanished is a tale that's stranger than fiction.

In 1979 they began to notice something very odd

at the local gas station.

John coddington's gas station had to shut down

because the gasoline

and the underground tanks was vey hot.

So the state police said you know, sorry John,

you've got to close and he didn't fight it.

I mean, his family lived above the station

so you know he had a lot of skin in the game there.

Coddington wasn't the only centralia resident

experiencing strange happenings.

A local kid by the name of Todd dombolski

was walking in the back yard

when suddenly a sinkhole opened up and he fell in.

He was able to grab hold of a tree root

and keep hold of it until a friend could come

and rescue him and pull him out.

Saves his life you know,

there was a deadly amount of carbon monoxide in that hole,

chaos results, phone calls to the governor

and things were never quite the same after that.

But this bought national attention to this town's bizarre plight.

And soon things got worse.

The earth began to erupt.

When they first saw these cracks people just wondered

what could possibly cause this you know,

it's maybe three feet wide, two and a half feet deep

and maybe as much as 20 to 30 feet long.

What was responsible for making these gaping holes and wide cracks?

Speculation was rife.

For a while at least for several years

you would see steam coming out of this gigantic highway crack.

People wondered what was causing this,

they may have thought it was some kind of volcano down there maybe.

The cause of the steam

was actually something that no-one could have guessed.

What's actually happening

is something that sounds impossible

which is a fire burning underground

and it's been burning for more than 50 years.

It's venting gases through any cracks and seams in the ground,

imagine if you had cellars in the houses

they could be potentially targets for escaping gases.

And those gases can be poisonous

and you can imagine that fire is moving in different parts.

The fire moved under the highway there was voluminous clouds of steam

that would come out of the ground either side of the highway.

The highway closed in 1983 but the fire still burns today.

So this is a borehole and if we unscrew this cap

we are going to see what the fire is like underneath.

Ooh nice and hot.

That's heat coming up to the surface,

I can smell the distinctive kind of sulphurish smell of the fire.

You see these little beads of water

just jumping and, and floating in the air.

When I talked to one of the state officials recently

he said that when they last tested it,

it was about 140 degrees er, you know maybe down 25, 30 feet.

So what caused the fires that spread beneath centralia?

So this may look like just a clearing in the forest but er,

back in 1962 there was a huge pit here that,

that centralia used as it's landfill.

And they wanted to clean up the dump

and the way they did that was to have some guys

from the fire department come and set it on fire,

burn up the stuff that could be burned,

wash it down with water from a tanker or truck

and then go away and everything was supposed to be fine but it wasn't.

Something really odd actually happened

which is a phenomenon called a coal seam fire.

There's a coal mine underground

and what happened is somehow the fire got into that coal area

and all of a sudden it sparked a whole new problem.

The fire would quietly burn below centralia for the next 20 years.

What you don't see on the surface is that underneath this town

and extending far and wide is a giant labyrinth of coal mines

and it's these coal mines that are on fire.

Centralia sits right on top

of one of the richest coal mining areas in the world

so it's very difficult to figure out how to put the fire out

because the underground environment is so complex.

Coal seam fires themselves are a big problem in coal areas

and obviously as you burn away bits of the coal and you destabilise the,

the subterranean network of tunnels and coal seams and so on

you can actually cause there to be a,

instabilities on the surface.

A sink hole that developed probably due to this undermining

of the stability of the surface.

With no way of extinguishing the fire

the news spread and the eyes of the world

were suddenly on centralia

meaning the federal government could not ignore the problem.

After (inaudible) Incident and it got all this attention

and there were citizen groups in centralia saying

hey you've got to get us out of here

and but they still took almost two years to,

to come up with a solution.

Eventually in 1984 the entire population of centralia

was given the go ahead to relocate.

With the help of 42 million federal dollars.

Now, all but a determined few of the towns inhabitants

have moved on.

And today there is little evidence

that the community of centralia ever existed.

You see how quickly nature reclaims man made space

even streets and driveways,

all of that gradually starts reverting to forest.

Back when I first came here there were a few trees,

not many now it's, it's like a state park.

But when will the fires beneath centralia's

empty streets stop burning?

So how long could it burn?

I've heard figures like 200 years, 250 years,

but in the end nobody really knows,

it'll go on till it stops burning runs out of fuel runs out of air,

neither of those are likely to happen any time soon.

Now they lie abandoned

but once they were the cutting edge of engineering.

There are echoes of history within these decaying structures,

they remind us of terror and war

but also of great innovation and human endeavour.

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