Original subtitles

A castle - like building saved from destruction

by a remarkable Hollywood connection.

The same day that the wrecking balls came to tear this place down,

was the same day that the filming company showed up.

Vast monolithic structures

that dominate a tiny island with a dark past.

What are these things doing in this otherwise pristine landscape?

A mysterious island on the edge of the baltic sea,

where strange things happen.

All the structures that exist

are riddled with bullet holes and signs of explosions,

it's like you are walking through a war zone.

Weird battered constructions in a dangerous place

on the coast of england.

Pretty much all the works that were carried out here were secret.

Ultimately top secret.

Once they were some of the most advanced structures on the planet,

at the cutting edge of design and construction.

Today they stand abandoned, contaminated and sometimes deadly.

But who built them and how and why were they abandoned?

In the middle of the state of Ohio in the usa,

just to the north of the city of Mansfield,

stands an ornate impressive building.

From the outside it looks like some kind of palace

or even a castle.

It appears to be the kind of structure that you would create

that would have a lasting impression on anyone who set eyes on it.

When you see this building,

you know it was built for something important.

And clearly whoever built it meant it to last.

The building is vast and grand

with very detailed and fancy architecture,

it's definitely a statement piece.

It's built with this massive, massive stone,

so clearly it's not a very inviting place.

It kind of gives you the shivers,

it's sort of like a haunted house

and it definitely gives you the impression

that something bad may have happened here.

Yet its forbidding appearance is the only real clue

about what actually went on inside the building.

That is a dark, brutal and controversial story.

What it originally set out to do and what it ended up -

those bookends couldn't be further apart.

This was to be a place of spiritual regeneration and rebirth,

it's about salvation, this is a righteous building.

You have to imagine that those who conceived it,

had no idea what a horror story of a legacy they had spawned.

So why go to such lengths to build such a dramatic - looking structure?

What was it used for?

And why was it abandoned?

The origin of the building's story

stretch back as far as the late 19th century.

It was built in the mid-1880s,

and it was intended to be a beacon of hope for the state.

This site at Mansfield was chosen in 1885,

for a very special reason and a very particular project.

It was one that was going to be liberal and progressive,

they wanted to take young offenders and rehabilitate

and re-educate them in the most positive way possible.

It was a reformatory, so the notion was -

you weren't just punishing people,

you were helping them learn

and then you would release them out in the world

and they would commit crimes no more.

This is the Ohio state reformatory.

Although construction began in 1886, it wasn't until September 1896,

that the first 150 young offenders were brought here

to begin their rehabilitation.

They started housing prisoners in the complex

before it was even finished,

and the prisoners themselves did a lot of the work

to complete the building,

including building the sewer system.

Funding delays

meant that the reformatory was not finally completed until 1910.

While the facility at first had a progressive agenda,

the reformist zeal was soon replaced

by a more brutal approach to life inside.

The place had taken a completely different direction.

This was now a place not of rehabilitation,

but a place of incarceration,

where you would lock up the baddies and throw away the key.

This wing is proof

of the very different direction the reformatory eventually took.

As expert Ron puff explains.

We are currently in the west cell block.

The west cell block was a housing unit for your inmates.

This is five tiers, originally 350 cells,

meant for one inmate to a cell,

ended up from the very beginning with two inmates,

so we housed 700 inmates here.

It wasn't so bad early on living here,

now in later years they could be in their cells 20, 22 hours a day.

Can you imagine being there,

walking through those corridors into your caged cell

and hearing the sound of the door slammed and locked behind you?

Then the riotous sounds of other inmates.

It must have been a terrifying existence.

But the rising crime rate meant that more and more prisoners

were arriving at the Ohio state reformatory.

Soon, juvenile inmates were being kept apart from adult prisoners.

The prison's aims and purpose were changing fast.

So fast, the juveniles were forced to leave.

So they keep this as an adult facility

and all those juveniles have to go to another facility altogether.

Now you have got a prison full of space, what do you do with it?

In wider society,

ever more people were being convicted

of increasingly violent crimes.

Prisons across the country were becoming overfilled with inmates,

so Mansfield became just another prison,

in fact, it became one of the hardest prisons,

the worst of the worst,

with some of the most violent offenders from around the country

being kept there.

Ohio state reformatory certainly had its share of notorious inmates.

One was the infamous George 'bugs' moran,

who was part of the John Dillinger crime gang.

Others included William Sidney Porter,

better known as o. Henry,

the short story writer,

and Sam Shepherd, whose conviction in 1954,

for murdering his wife, attracted national media coverage.

As inmate numbers continued to rise,

life in the prison became even more harsh and fraught with danger.

Living day - to - day was a perilous business

as prison discipline broke down.

Ohio state eventually became a maximum security facility.

Violence was part of everyday life.

You could be beat up in a fight, you could be stabbed,

you could be mugged, you could be thrown off a high walkway.

I mean the place was such,

that you were in fear of your life each and every day.

Inmates were told when you came here, make yourself a weapon

and hide it in the bed, so if everything goes crazy,

you at least know where your shank, or your rock

or whatever it is, you placed it,

so you can be safe.

And they feared coming in the gates here.

One of the most frightening places in which to find yourself,

was at the end of these dark corridors.

It was somewhere no-one wanted to be.

For the worst offenders

there was solitary confinement here for the reformatory.

When you came in there was punishment,

so the whole time you were in here, you weren't supposed to talk.

They might keep the lights on 24 hours a day,

they might keep the lights off 24 hours a day,

there was no reading.

Your meal schedule would be moved around,

so you never knew what time it was,

and so early on they came in here with no clothes,

they were naked, they had a bucket that was their commode,

they slept on the cement floor.

In a crowded prison, blighted by almost daily violence and rioting,

it was no surprise that 'the hole', as it was known,

was always crammed with inmates.

In one case they had a riot

and they wound up putting in 120 prisoners down in the hole

at the same time for 30 days.

In this instance they actually found a body

that had been murdered and stuffed into a mattress for several days

before anyone realised he was dead.

The terrible violence continued

until the inmates themselves finally took action.

Inmates finally took matters into their own hands

and they filed a lawsuit

that the facility was violating their constitutional rights

by dehumanising them.

In the end the problems of the site were so widespread

that it was all too much, and the facility was abandoned.

That was in 1990.

During its 96 - year history,

some 150,000 inmates had walked

through Ohio state reformatory's doors,

more than 200 of them had died while they were inside.

These days there are many accounts of it being haunted,

of there being paranormal activity at the site,

but that is hardly surprising

when you think of the degree of violence

that the building had seen for so many decades.

Is the Ohio state reformatory haunted?

And if you ask a number of our staff members they will say yes,

they will snap their finger just like that, many things happen here.

Why? I will let you figure it out.

Today this grand facility has become a major tourist attraction,

thanks in no small part to a strange twist of fate.

It was scheduled for demolition,

but just before that,

a film crew came to shoot a movie

that of course has become world-famous,

'the Shawshank redemption'.

The same day that the wrecking balls came to tear this place down,

was the same day that the filming company showed up.

The 'Shawshank redemption' was the redemption of this prison.

Just off the coast of normandy in France,

is the small island of Guernsey.

Along its coastline are bizarre - looking constructions.

In the otherwise quiet and picturesque surroundings,

you start to discover

a huge amount of these concrete imposing structures.

The way that these concrete monoliths are stepped,

they look a bit like the heads off of easter island.

It's like star wars has been filmed there.

These really strange monolithic type constructions,

poking out of the ground.

Further inland, a cavernous concrete bowl lies sunken into the ground.

Its huge, it's like an amphitheatre.

I don't think the locals would have ever envisaged structures like this

being built on the island.

Beneath this great mass of concrete lurk other hidden features.

There is a railway track that starts to lead you into a tunnel

and you follow that tunnel inside you start going underground.

When you get closer,

you see that there is actually a lot more to them.

There are networks and you start to see old paraphernalia.

In the maze of dark rooms,

mysterious symbols and writings can still be seen.

But the words are not in English, they are written in German.

And these are the first hints

of the terrible fate that befell those who once occupied the rooms.

Things started to get really tough.

In fact, many of them began to starve.

Who was it that built these gigantic structures?

And why were they finally abandoned?

The roots of the mystery can be found

in the early years of world war 2.

By June 1940, Hitler's forces had defeated France

and were turning their attention to their next target, Great Britain.

A mere 20 miles away, across the English channel,

the prize was tantalisingly close,

but a small piece of British territory lay even closer -

the channel islands.

Although the channel islands are British territory,

they are actually much closer to the coast of France

and Hitler viewed them as strategically important.

If you want to go from britain and invade France,

the channel islands are a great first step.

They get you most of the way there,

and the Nazis could not allow the British

to continue to control those islands right on the edge of France.

On the 28th of June 1940,

luftwaffe bombers came swooping in over the islands.

A tragedy within the war,

was the fact that the Germans

essentially bombed the channel islands

expecting there to be quite a lot of resistance

and they killed about 44 people and they didn't need to do that.

It was only a few days later when the Germans actually arrived,

they discovered that the islands had been undefended the whole time.

(Bell tolls)

In 1940, britain was standing alone

against the power of the third reich

and Churchill was not sure he could defend the island of Great Britain,

never mind Guernsey and Jersey, sark and alderney.

As the German army stormed through France during the summer of 1940,

about a third of channel islanders, some 30,000 people, were evacuated.

The rest chose to remain,

preferring to take their chances when the inevitable invasion came.

In late June, the German flag was raised on Guernsey.

On July 1st, Jersey surrendered.

The German order for islands to fly white flags over their houses

was just a small taste of what was to come.

While Churchill decided to leave the islands undefended,

Hitler had other ideas.

He desperately wanted them fortified with the most impressive defences

the third reich could create.

Here on Guernsey, this was part of the plan.

The mighty mp3 tower.

Local expert and preservationist Paul bourgaize,

explains how the tower fitted into the Nazi plans.

It was basically a range-finding tower.

It was one of five,

and each level had range-finding capabilities

to obviously find and observe the targets

and send the data back to the gun batteries inland.

The Germans spent over a year building their extensive network

of defences on Guernsey.

Located a few miles inland from the mp3 range tower,

this immense concrete bowl was to be one of its most important features.

But what was it to be used for?

There is a clue in the rail tracks that snake underground.

This railway track was used to bring the ammunition

from the storage bunkers

and they would be stored in this large room here

and these would be loaded through this flush boot hatch

and then stored in that room.

More than 61,000 cubic yards of concrete were used

to build the bunker systems that contained troop quarters,

ammunition storage

and electrical generators -

all constructed to withstand concerted sustained firepower.

Deep in the darkness,

the slogans on the walls provide chilling proof

of the German army's intentions.

And of its supreme confidence.

You can see on one side we have got a nice German eagle

painted on the wall,

and over on this side the emblem of the naval engineers

and this cog,

and they are marching towards england, that was the motto.

"Wir fahren nach england."

We are going to england,

the Germans intended to invade england.

Why would they be painting that on a bunker?

The Germans great confidence

may have been helped by what was housed in this huge concrete bowl.

Formidable guns,

in a bunker complex that was called battery miras.

They consisted of four gunning placements

with huge great big guns disguised as houses.

You can start to imagine the size and the scale of these guns.

Here we are.

We can see one of the four huge emplacements for the 30.5 cm gun.

Mounted down that central position where those studs are sticking up.

Underneath the mount is a naval depth charge

and that could have been detonated

in the event that the emplacement was captured

and blow the gun off its mountings.

With a range of over 30 miles,

the four guns were able to protect the channel islands

and reach almost all the way to the normandy coast.

The German fire power on Guernsey was extraordinary.

In total 17 coasted artillery batteries

and 175 anti-air craft guns were placed on the island.

But all of this came at a huge cost in resources.

This was part of the Atlantic wall,

which stretched all the way from Norway down to Spain

and it is estimated that some 8% of all of the concrete

along all of those constructions

was just housed in the channel islands.

In fact, they fortified the channel islands so much

that there were more guns installed here

than there were on the neighbouring 600 miles of normandy coast line.

German officers who were sceptical about the strategic

and operational value of the channel islands,

referred to the dense resource - intensive fortification,

as 'Hitler's island madness.'

with so much effort,

time and resources committed to building it,

and with its frequent appearance in German propaganda,

what finally became of battery miras?

The beginning of the end came on June 6th, 1944.

The famous date of the allied invasion of France.

After the d-day landings,

the German soldiers based in the channel islands became cut off

and had no access to supplies.

There were red cross packages delivered onto the islands,

but they were for the locals only, for the British,

the Germans had to go without.

The troops themselves that weren't allowed those rations,

were really starving.

They were trying to catch birds, you know,

eating limpets off the beach,

anything, you know, seaweed and some things, you know,

even made themselves sick,

eating things that they really shouldn't have been eating,

just to stay alive.

After almost a year of near - starvation,

the German Garrison on Guernsey finally surrendered

on may 9th, 1945.

Battery miras fell silent.

And its colossal guns were sold off for scrap.

Today these eerie concrete symbols of the third reich

still dominate the Guernsey skyline.

A reminder of a time when these islands became

one of the most fortified places on earth.

Looking at these massive concrete fortifications,

it reminds us that even tiny corners of Europe

that we barely even heard of,

are really important to some people,

and to their lives as they lived through the second world war.

It's a part of history that is easily forgotten,

that part of britain was occupied, but important to remember.

In southern Finland,

on the edge of the baltic sea,

is what's known locally as the mysterious island.

From a distance it looks like other islands in the region.

When you get closer,

you can see there is something different about it.

The island itself has a kind of darkness,

everything is a little bit spooky,

you wouldn't necessarily want to find yourself on the island alone.

Mysteriously, ships compasses don't operate properly here.

The beaches are stained black,

and the more you look, the stranger things get.

You can spot what looks like bunkers hidden along the shoreline,

ruins of old pipelines, piles of broken up rock and concrete.

This isn't an ordinary island.

The island itself is also riddled

with some ancient history about tales of,

you know, compasses not working quite correctly.

There has been a whole history of shipwrecks.

The wreckage and debris are not confined to the waters.

On land too, there are strange ruins.

All the structures that exist are riddled with bullet holes

and signs of explosions, it's like you are walking through a war zone.

What is the problem with this place, why is it so odd?

The answers to this peculiar puzzle

can be found in the early 19th century.

By 1809, Finland had been incorporated into the Russian empire

and this was a strategically vital site.

Jussaro island.

The southern part of Finland is very important to Russia,

because that is the gate to the capital at st Petersburg

and so,

controlling the Gulf of Finland

is an absolute defence requirement for Russia.

It sits in such a strategic location in the baltic sea,

anybody trying to head to Helsinki

or the port of st Petersburg in Russia,

has to sail right by that island.

That makes it very valuable from a military perspective.

Vital it may have been, but it was also extremely dangerous.

In the glacial periods it was covered under kilometres of ice,

it was pushed down.

Since the ice has gone,

the area is actually slowly lifting, about 4mm a year.

So you might sail past a place that 50 years ago was free sailing

and now there is a rocky island emerging right in your path.

Under Russian rule,

a pilot station was set up here

to help ships navigate these precarious waters

through to st Petersburg.

But why did the remnants of an extensive complex

litter this remote outpost?

It was an underground discovery that first interested the Russian state.

It turns out to have been an amazing find,

because it was the largest undersea iron ore reserve in Finland.

That solved a centuries-old mystery.

It's why ships compasses work so badly here.

Compasses work

by being drawn to the magnetic field of the north pole,

but the iron ore in this particular region

had its own magnetic field

and compasses were more drawn to that than the north pole.

In the 1840s, Russian prisoners were sent to the islands mine

and forced to excavate the valuable metal ore.

The miners were down there with long metal drills and sledge hammers,

banging away, dislodging the rock face bit by bit.

And the conditions were so hellish,

some of the prisoners reported they would rather be sent

to labour camps in Siberia.

By the time Finland declared independence from Russia in 1917,

mining on the island had stopped.

During the following decades,

the young nation's relationship with its communist neighbour

was marked by tension and war.

In 1939, the infamous winter war broke out.

A conflict that was fought in temperatures

as low as minus 43 celsius.

The better - equipped fins were able to inflict huge casualties

on the Soviet troops,

using the deep snow, dense forests and long hours of darkness

to maximum advantage.

The war was ended by the signing of the Moscow peace treaty

in march 1940,

and although the Finns were forced to cede territory to the Soviets,

the red army's reputation was badly damaged.

Its poor performance is said to have convinced Hitler

to invade Russia the following year.

By the 1950s, however,

Finland had settled into its uneasy existence

between the west and the Soviet union.

In those tense political times, mining at jussaro began again.

Finland reopened the mines,

and now they had modern equipment

and they could mine on a much greater, more industrial scale.

When mining started back up again,

they had to put in a whole new infrastructure

which included crushing plants,

underwater railway lines, pipe networks on land, deep tunnels...

I mean, it became a productive mining machine.

Former resident Goran wikstrom arrived in 1956

as preparations for modern mining operations

were getting underway.

The tunnelling went straight out from here to the stone island.

The tunnel went straight out from there

from the shaft above at a depth of 550 ft, out there.

There were mining tunnels -

in total 1.8 miles of tunnels all at a depth of nearly 600 ft.

However, mining on the island once again became unsustainable.

Global iron prices plummeted and so did profits.

The operation was shut down and the workers were simply sent packing.

It was at Christmas in 1967,

when the final decision was made that everyone was to leave here.

It was over, in other words.

We just moved out and then the destruction set in.

But the debris and destruction here is clear to see.

Surely the damage was not caused solely by nature and the elements?

After the miners moved out, the Finnish army moved in.

The government realised this location was just too strategic

to leave unoccupied.

The 60s, 70s and 80s, yes,

there was a very genuine threat from the Soviet union.

They were pretty careful,

pretty conciliatory to Russia during that period,

but a lot of the use of the island was really for training

and military exercises.

It was a place where they could fire weapons and drop bombs

without any danger of injuring the civilian population,

because there was no civilian population.

The Russian invasion never came.

In 2002, the armed forces held their final shooting drill

and the island was abandoned once again.

Today, the battered site serves as a national park,

with half the island open to the public.

It's a smorgasbord of mining and militarisation.

There are bullet holes everywhere. It's actually seen a lot of action,

this small, little island in the middle of nowhere.

In eastern england, on the Suffolk coastline,

are a string of abandoned buildings,

strange mounts and intriguing pagoda - like structures.

It's incredibly isolated.

It's bleak. It's cut off from the mainland by a river,

but yet there are these strange mounds and structures on it.

The interiors of the dilapidated buildings are equally mystifying.

Inside, the buildings have an abandoned quasi - industrial feel.

There are elements of metal and machinery still there,

but long disused.

Pretty well all the work that was carried out here was secret,

ultimately top secret.

You are still warned to this day,

that you mustn't tread incorrectly or you could be blown sky-high.

What was the purpose of these battered buildings

and strange Asian-style pagodas?

And why is this area still filled with danger?

If you look at all these solidly - built buildings

and you look at the terrible destruction

that has clearly been wreaked on them,

you have to ask, "what happened to these buildings?"

The reasons can be found back in the tense years

leading up to the start of world war I.

In 1913, the British war department acquired this large area of land,

near a small village in Suffolk,

in order to develop the latest technology in warfare.

This is a corner of england

where the experimenters came to find out what happened

when you dropped a bomb from a plane.

In a lot of ways, this beach is where military aviation started.

In short, the race was on to develop new areas of military science

and this pioneering site was leading the way.

It was called orford ness.

In world war I, aerial warfare was completely new.

People had to invent a new military science

and to start with, it was very crude.

It was simply a question of dropping bombs out of windows.

We didn't know what happened to a bomb dropped from a plane,

until the guys at orford ness watched it

and measured it with their instruments.

Over the years,

orford ness established itself as a prime testing site,

critical to britain's air forces.

One of its greatest successes was achieved

by one of its most illustrious names, Robert Watson watt,

the brilliant Scottish pioneer in radio direction - finding

and radar technology.

It was at orford ness in the late 30s,

that Watson watt carried out his ground - breaking work on radar -

the system that served the country so well during the dark days

of the battle of britain.

After world war ii, however,

a new era of World-Wide mistrust and paranoia began.

During the second world war

the UK and us had collaborated very closely on weapons development,

but as the cold war emerged after 1945, the two parted company,

fairly spectacularly,

and britain was left alone to develop its own weapons,

including nuclear weapons.

The west goes into overdrive in developing nuclear weapons

and 1949 - this is the height of the cold war.

Britain was now engaged in a nuclear arms race

and orford ness was transformed

into the atomic weapons research establishment.

You don't want an atomic bomb to go off

between the factory and the air field.

You don't want the atomic bomb to go off on the plane

on the way to the target

and you don't want the atomic bomb to go off

at the wrong time after you drop it.

All of those problems needed to be worked out with experimentation

and that required an experimentation site.

So what experiments took place here?

The site's manager Grant lahorr, explains.

The first test carried out here was on vibration,

so they were trying to replicate the vibration in an aircraft

or in a lorry on the road,

or they were subjecting them to shock,

or g-forces, or humidity, or temperature.

Each laboratory was designed to test different components

of nuclear bombs.

So this is what was called the hard target or the high impact facility

and this essentially is where they were

rocket - propelling atomic bomb cases and nuclear bomb cases

into very hard concrete wall,

which was effectively replicating the impact of the weapon

when it was dropped.

Yet the two most intriguing facilities

are at the furthest point.

They are the distinctive pagodas.

It's these highly unusual buildings

that remain the area's most famous landmarks today.

This looks like an ancient temple,

it's got columns holding up a pyramid,

it's got arcane markings on the walls,

these strange cruciform brackets.

The work carried out here during the cold war era

was shrouded in secrecy.

During that period from the late 50s into the 1960s,

the most paranoid period, probably, of the cold war.

Everything really was extremely secret

and it appears as if the site was constantly being monitored

and surveyed and photographed by the Soviet union

and so, everything around it was cloaked in secrecy.

The architecture of the buildings is highly unusual,

but very specific.

They were created explicitly for the purpose of understanding

the behaviour of weaponry and explosions.

This is a place designed so that if the pillars are blown up,

the roof drops down

and clamps all of the explosion and debris down into the ground.

The research conducted at orford ness

remains largely secret to this day.

Ironically,

it was the success of the site that contributed to its downfall.

The us were so impressed by its work,

it re-established its old relationship with britain

to help advance both nations' weapons programmes.

This facility that concentrates

on britain's separate nuclear development,

is really no longer needed because, essentially,

the British work together with the Americans on nuclear weapons,

which is how it works today.

Orford ness was finally abandoned in 1987.

Today, the site is maintained by the British national trust

as a peaceful nature reserve.

But its past has left a dangerous legacy.

After so many decades of weapons testing at that site,

it's simply not possibly to guarantee

that all devices have been found.

It is essentially impossible to ever clean it out.

Now they lie abandoned,

but once, they were at the cutting edge of engineering.

There are echoes from history in these decaying structures.

They remind us of terror and war,

but also of great innovation and human endeavour.

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