Original subtitles

Narrator: Dark tunnels filled with the remains of millions of bodies.

It's like a place of satanic worship.

A site of sacrifice maybe or somewhere to contact the dead.

A heavily fortified building that's been ripped apart.

We're used to seeing engineering imposed on the land,

but here we see a natural revenge of nature against engineering.

An empty town that's been frozen in time.

It almost has a surreal feel to it.

It feels like it's sort of a haunted ghost town.

And alien looking structures on the open ocean.

There's no road access, there's nothing else around.

And that might be a clue

as to why it was built here in the first place.

Sometimes they are engineering marvels now abandoned

or ruins shrouded in mystery.

But within these decaying structures are the echoes of history.

While some are associated with dark times,

they all remind us of human ingenuity and endeavour.

Each haunting shell is now ready to be unmasked

to tell it's own unique story.

Near the border between California and Nevada usa,

are the ghostly remains of a once dangerous town

built on greed.

It's like you've just walked on to the set of west world.

You're expecting to see outlaws and gun slingers

coming around the corner.

There's something spooky about seeing a town that looks

like the buildings are intact, but there's nobody around.

The wind just blows through.

And you can just see this big layer of dust over the tables and chairs

that have been left there for years.

It almost has a surreal feel to it.

I mean there's buildings there just abandoned,

but completely how they were back then.

Other things are just rusting and deteriorating.

Some parts are buildings just falling down

or shacks that have kind of collapsed.

Other sections like, you could move in to some of these buildings.

On the edge of town,

you've got what looks like the guts of some kind of industry

and I think that that is the clue to what happened in this town.

But for everything that is here, it feels like something is missing.

What's interesting about this place is you come to this point

which seems like it should be the start of the main street,

but there's no buildings on it.

You get this sense that the structures that do remain,

were part of a much larger community.

So that begs the question, what happened to the rest of it?

Where did it go?

Despite it's eerie emptiness today,

in the late 19th century, these streets were awash

with the hopes and dreams of prospectors.

Exploring the open lands of the west.

You're really in the middle of nowhere, even today,

you are miles and miles away from anything.

The motivation for coming to such a remote and desolate location

clearly it was money.

It was all about finding something precious and then selling it.

The dusty remains of this town suggests that something

was clearly worth sticking around for.

But this could be a deadly place to set up shop.

The west was unchartered territory.

There was no law enforcement, this was the wild west.

Everyone for themselves.

Preserved for decades by the dry climate,

the remaining structures offer only a glimpse of the town's true scale,

as park ranger, Catherine Jones, explains.

What we see today, is only 5% or so of what was here.

So there are many homes left,

but there would have been many, many more as far as you can see.

Especially down to main street which would have been virtually,

wall-to-wall buildings for over a mile.

What transformed this empty wilderness was gold.

This is the ghost town of bodie.

It was once home to around 10,000 inhabitants

who filled the streets with feverish activity.

What's really interesting is not what's left,

but what's missing.

Clearly a lot is gone but where did it go and why?

After bodie's initial discovery, there wasn't much activity.

Probably wasn't a whole lot of hope of discovering a lot of gold here.

They were mining up on the hillside.

You can see the rock piles upon the hill indicate where mines were.

But these early mines offered up little gold.

Then in 1875, a dangerous collapse changed everything.

They went to investigate and found that a collapse

had exposed a very rich vein of ore.

And that's what started the boom here in this area

and formed the town of bodie.

All of a sudden, bodie was on the map.

Everybody heard about bodie.

Everyone wanted to get there and be part of this exciting operation.

Processing plants like this one began running non stop.

That building on the edge of town, that is what really gives you a clue

as to the scale of the operation that was happening in bodie.

This is the main processing room of the stamp mill.

The gold and silver ore makes it way into these boxes

that contain the 1000 pound stamps.

Each of these stamps is lifting and dropping 90 times a minute.

It was a very, very loud process.

If you can imagine metal crushing rock

24 hours a day, six days a week.

Apparently you could hear bodie from 3 miles away.

Operating 24 hours a day, six days a week,

money and profits rained down on bodie.

It was rumoured that the boom years earned the mining companies

around $100 million.

And that everyday,

ten new people would arrive here seeking their fortune.

This was a part of what was to become known

as the California gold rush.

The third major gold rush in america during the 19th century.

At the time California was not even a territory of the United States.

But after gold was discovered here in 1849,

workers poured in from Georgia and north Carolina to strike it rich.

Soon to follow, came dozens of private companies

hoping to capitalise on the enormous riches buried in the land.

As a direct result of the California gold rush,

the territory was soon made into a state of the usa.

Bodie had become the sort of Las Vegas of it's day.

Anything you could sell, anything that you want to buy,

you'd find it here.

Outlaws, they looked at bodie and said,

"here's an opportunity to make a lot of money very fast."

In bodie, over 2,000 new buildings were built by 1879

to accommodate this huge new influx of people.

But the quest for had a nasty habit of bringing out the worst in people.

It was so wild that one year the newspapers reported

the amazing news that no-one had been killed

in the entire previous week, apparently that was a first.

In bodie there was a mix of both hard work

and maybe not so hard work.

Gambling was one of the biggest pass times.

There were over 60 saloons in town,

and people liked to celebrate holidays here.

They had many dances and masquerade balls.

In the northern end of town was the red light district,

filled with brothels and opium dens.

This lawless settlement appeared to be on a path to destruction.

And in 1892, a devastating fire broke out.

Somehow fire started and it spread quickly.

These are wooden buildings.

And as one began to burn, the one next to it began to burn.

And before long, there wasn't much left of that part of bodie.

But the fire wasn't caused by the kind of debauchery

that bodie was famous for.

Times were changing.

With these boom towns,

they are literally erected overnight.

But as soon as somewhere where gold is easier to find is found,

people go.

So what you're left with are abandoned wooden buildings

in an extremely dry climate, that's a recipe for disaster.

By 1881, thousands of people were leaving.

So when the fire happened in 1892,

a lot of abandoned buildings burnt down and were never rebuilt.

The fire was the first disaster, but there was more to come

that would eventually wipe most of bodie off the map.

The gradual decline continued until 1932,

when yet another huge fire broke out.

Ripping out the heart of this struggling wild west settlement.

That fire just travelled down main street

and wiped out almost everything.

A Hardy few continued living in bodie until the 1940s

and the remaining structures still bare the marks of those final days.

This is only a small portion of what was here.

It's just a small glimpse,

but it's like their lives were frozen in time.

Bodie is in effect a microcosm of a boom town.

Wildly successful, then fades into oblivion.

And that happened all across the wild west.

In the beating heart of Paris,

lies a dark secret buried deep beneath the streets.

This has got to be one of the spookiest places in the world.

It's a bit of a labyrinth.

It's like you're disappearing into an underworld.

There are no other places you've been that are like this.

Decorated tunnels snake endlessly through the damp rock.

It's only when you look in detail

at what's making up those ornate designs,

that you start realising this is something completely different.

The walls around you begin to change.

At first it's not clear what's happening,

but then you begin to see that around you is no longer rock,

but human bones.

You have human skulls and big bones

stacked up in ways which look nice and artistic,

but by their very nature, they're human bones.

It's this confusing mix of death and art.

You want to feel horrified by what you see,

but somehow at the same time you're drawn into it.

These bones weren't simply thrown in a pile,

nor were they simply being stored.

What a horror story to me, that's a crazy kind of place to be.

It has to have been a reason for doing this,

a reason that involved the whole city.

'Cause there's just no way that you could keep something this big quiet.

Why are there this many bodies buried just meters below

one of the world's greatest cities?

The long stacks of human bones lining the tunnels

have been here for around 200 years.

But for the majority,

this wasn't their first resting place.

During the 18th century, Paris was the second largest city in Europe.

The capital was the centre of an explosion in science and philosophy,

that became known as the age of enlightenment.

Between 1720 and 1760,

books published on science and art doubled,

while religious works became rarer.

These new ideas were spread from Paris to the rest of Europe

and intellectuals started to pour into the city

from around the continent.

But this new popularity put a huge strain on the cemeteries.

There were a number of cemeteries around the city

but they were swelling under the weight

of the huge number of bodies they contained.

You can imagine the stench of death

that was sweeping through the streets being utterly unbearable.

Although it's paved over today,

in the 18th century, les innocents was the largest cemetery in Paris.

It was a dumping ground for dead bodies for more than 800 years.

An estimated two million people had been buried here.

Even the biggest cemetery eventually gets full.

But the parisians continued to stuff ever more bodies in to them.

They'd run out of space in the ground,

so they were digging up old bones and packing them into the roofs

and walls of the buildings surrounding the cemetery.

And it was only a matter of time

before this would come back to haunt them.

In the spring of 1780,

unusually heavy rains began to put even greater pressure

on the cemetery walls that were already buckling

under the sheer weight of the bones.

These rains soaked into the ground expanding everything,

but the terrible consequence that the cemetery walls burst

causing a mixture.

A slurry of sodden earth and decomposing bodies

to slide out into the streets and into the neighbouring properties.

Archaeologist sylvie, Robin,

explains how the French authorities reacted to this grizzly event.

Translation: "A doctor was sent on location

"to perform a health and safety assessment.

"And a decision was made to evacuate the entire area

"for public safety."

News of this gruesome and filthy sight seemed to be the final straw.

A solution had to be found and fast.

This dark subterranean place provided the answer.

The Paris catacombs.

Some of the best loved attractions like the louvre,

are built out of parisian limestone.

This came from quarries that originally,

were on the outskirts of Paris.

But as the city expanded, came to be under Paris.

Rumours are that it's around about 170 miles of tunnels.

And man made excavations of the rocks

which were now beneath the feet of parisians,

they didn't really know they were there.

Mapping of the mines, showed a vast network of tunnels

and access shafts across the city.

Eventually, nearly a mile of these passages were linked together

and allocated as the new catacombs space.

And in December 1785, the work of moving the bodies there began.

It was a gruesome, but a very sophisticated operation.

Bodies had been buried in Paris for centuries.

All of these had to be dug up, placed into carts at night

and taken to the catacombs.

Where an estimated two or four million bodies were placed.

Translation: "We are stood at the bottom of the original shoot

"used for disposing of the bones.

"It is through this well,

"which was initially used to extract the stone,

"that all the bones were disposed of.

"You can imagine the 20m drop that they experienced.

"Once they piled up on the ground,

"they were then distributed throughout the quarry."

The process had to almost be on an industrial scale.

Every night for night after night, moving many, many bones

through the system and down in to the underground.

Really quite a bizarre undertaking.

It took decades to move all of the rotting corpses

from les innocents and the other cemeteries around Paris.

But the bones down here don't look like they were just thrown in

or simply stacked to save space.

So was there a strange secret behind the design of the site?

Translation: "We are currently 20m beneath the parisian streets

"in the district of denfert-rochereau on the left bank.

"We can see here a decoration which is cross shaped

"inserted into the wall of bones.

"We can also see a repetition of femurs and skulls,

"some of which are presented facing outwards,

"and others showing the back of the skull.

"And just behind there, behind this wall is a build up of bones."

The extraordinary attention to detail,

seemed to go far beyond merely solving a space problem.

It appears to have a symbolism and meaning to it.

Translation: "This decoration was the idea of an inspector

"for the general quarry inspections called aurica duchere.

"He imagined this whole underground walkway

"with a slightly morbid display,

"destined to make us think about death and to welcome visitors."

What he did was to change it from just being a collection of bones,

into an experience that had soul.

He gave these people back a life that modern visitors can reflect on.

In 1860 the last bones were placed inside the catacombs.

And ever since, the only bodies to enter

have been the very much alive members of the public,

hoping to explore the dark depths beneath the city streets.

Today, the catacombs still draw visitors

into it's spooky quiet interior, sometimes with surprising effects.

The catacombs have succeeded

in doing something truly extraordinary.

Which is that most visitors leave with a sense of sereneness

and having been uplifted.

There is something deeply soulful and powerful

about what they've achieved in the catacombs.

Makes for a strange contrast of experience and emotions.

Death, art, worship, history and remembrance.

On the outskirts of liege in Belgium,

not far from the border it shares with Germany

are the shattered remains of a vast structure.

It's a zone of destruction.

Clearly something very violent happened here.

There's a sense that once there was an immense tragedy.

And we're used to seeing engineering imposed on the land,

but here it's as though the earth has tried

to suck this piece of architecture back inside.

There are sections of triangular installations

with circular elements.

I's an incomprehensible, ugly and rather distressing sight.

Vast area of mangled concrete and metal.

All around the city are other strange,

twisted concrete forms damaged and abandoned for decades.

But this one seems to have suffered worst of all.

The area is so vast, and the destruction is so complete

that you're left with the feeling that these ruins

have a big story to tell.

What turned something so mighty into something so pathetic.

After seemingly endless European wars during the 19th century,

the decision to strengthen Belgium's defences,

saw the creation of this fort in 1888.

It was built in the late 19th century.

It was the last word on fortification technology.

Was poured concrete,

quick fire artillery and disappearing mounts.

It was the absolutely alchemy of Europe's military technology.

The fort lay untested for 25 years.

But storm clouds were gathering over Europe

in the build up to the world war I.

In the power vacuum left by the decline of the ottoman empire,

Germany was eager to assert control over the continent.

France already had a deep mistrust of Germany

from recent wars in the 19th century.

So when Germany agreed an alliance with Austria Hungary,

France became deeply worried.

In retaliation France, Russia and britain

strengthened their own ties

and became an allied force known as the triple entente.

Belgium is invented to be a buffer between Germany and France.

This means that Belgium has got to be prepared for attack

from the east.

Suddenly Germany found itself encircled by potential enemies.

Europe was dangerously divided and tensions soon reached boiling point.

The small section of the Belgium border

where the Germans have the terrain to advance

and where the rail lines run through is liege.

If you want to protect your country against a German invasion

this is the obvious point.

The defences at liege were vital, and this once state of the art fort

would soon face the full might of a modern army.

This is fort loncin.

When these forts are designed they are essentially invulnerable.

There is no weapon of the 1880s that can breach the walls

or destroy the armour of this fort.

Victor vanderperre is a local expert on the fort.

People were very safe in their minds,

because there were no other forts in the world made in concrete.

No other forts where the artillery was under steel components.

In their mind, they could not be taken.

It was designed with a low profile

to make it harder to target from distance.

And across it's surface, were an array of retractable

and rotating artillery turrets.

And if an enemy did somehow manage to get close enough to attack,

it would be faced not with high walls to climb,

but deadly ditches to traverse.

These were effectively, kill zones.

The ditch that you see here is the outer defence of the fort.

If ever an enemy could come into this breaking through,

it would be taking care of by our close range artillery.

You have two guns there in the corner shooting shells,

they broke open and 196 lead bullets were flying away and sprayed out.

These guns were placed behind armoured walls

with clear lines of sight.

And at the far end were curved columns

designed to send the ricocheting lead bullets around the corners.

There was simply no place to hide.

The Belgians meanwhile, would be safely tucked away

inside the underground network of rooms and tunnels.

Here we had a rapid fire gun, 5.7mm,

which took care of everybody that come into the ditch.

There was no chance to survive.

In 1914, the first shots were fired in the great war.

The war to end all wars.

Liege immediately found itself in the firing line.

But fort loncin alone was never enough to protect the whole city.

It was just one part of a much larger fortified position.

If you can stop the Germans getting across the river mose at liege,

then you can stop the Germans invading France.

Because of the strategic significance of liege

you couldn't defend it with just one fort.

Liege was encircled by a pattern of 12 forts.

Together, the outward facing ring of forts was a formidable defence.

But the invading German army had close to four million troops,

Belgium had just 200,000.

Germany had no respect for Belgium as a military power.

They thought the Belgians had a paper army and cardboard fortresses.

The Germans attacked quickly, the Belgians send them away quickly.

That shows that for a day or two,

the Belgian fortifications around liege are pretty effective.

But when a heavier attack followed,

that defence ring was pierced

and the Germans marched straight to the heart of the city.

Bringing with them a weapon

for which the Belgians were completely unprepared.

The big Bertha was the largest gun in the world at the time.

It was a howitzer with a shell size of 42cm.

They're able to turn up with effectively,

a 16 inch naval gun on wheels,

and they're able to fire armour piercing shells

right into the walls of the Belgian fortifications.

With a range of 9 miles,

big Bertha was now able to reach the forts at the rear,

fort loncin the new command centre for the defence

was soon in the cross hairs.

Was it big Bertha alone that caused the complete devastation

we see today?

Or did something else cause the carnage?

The Belgian forts around liege

were built to defend against the very best artillery

of the late 19th century, but time has moved on.

After being shot for about two days by the German artillery,

the fort received a 25th shot of the big Bertha.

It touches the powder room that was down below

and everything went up in the air, flames, blocks of concrete,

pieces of bodies.

It must have been an inferno.

That final shot had pierced the 2,5m thick concrete roof

and ignited 12 tonnes of explosives.

It trapped and killed 350 men below

and caused an enormous shock wave that tore through the fort.

The forts went up in the air.

The concrete blocks were smashed all over the place,

filling the ditch, it was like a hell.

It was like a volcano here, and it took only 15 to 20 seconds

and it was over.

The key vulnerability, and it was a fatal one,

was that the concrete in the 1880s that they used

did not have metal reinforcing rods.

The concrete was simply poured in, and this was in no way capable

of withstanding 20th century artillery.

So the Belgians were defeated.

Despite a courageous fight, they were overwhelmed by an enemy

with far superior power and far heavier weaponry.

But it was not all in vain.

Fortresses are created to delay an enemy,

to slow them down, the Belgians did a pretty heroic job.

The horrible, physical failure of the fort

was a strategic success for Belgium, France, britain and the allies.

Liege was able to slow the German advance into France

for long enough for the French and British forces

to reorganise and stop the Germans achieving their aims

at the beginning of world war I.

Had it not been for fierce Belgian resistance round liege,

the Germans might have won world war I in a matter of weeks.

The bodies of those who valiantly gave their lives in defiance

of the invading German army, still lie beneath the ruins.

We try not to forget those boys.

And doing our best to keep this place what it is,

a monument, a graveyard, but also part of memory.

Standing near the coastline of Florida,

is a strange row of structures that appear to be lost at sea.

From a distance you see these sculpted organic forms.

They're incredible, they're from a different planet.

Such a spooky sight, was it some kind of military installation?

Some research centre?

Maybe it looks like something some crazy monks

would have built you know, in the Greek isles.

There's something timeless about it.

The unique design suggests

that this was intended to be something revolutionary.

It feels like an ambitious plan however you look at it.

Whatever someone was trying to achieve here,

it was certainly pushing the boundaries.

You've got to realise this is really far away from civilisation,

there's nothing else around here, you're out in the middle of nowhere.

Whoever built this had a lot of confidence

in their ability to engineer a structure in this wild place.

So what were the strange dome shaped structures for?

And what unforeseen event left them stranded out here?

Right now we're heading down towards cape Romano,

it sits in the ten thousand islands.

The average depth here is about 3.5 feet,

so very tricky to navigate.

A lot of boats run aground on a daily basis.

Makes a little more difficult to get down there.

Captain Chris Reilly has been navigating these waters for 20 years

and knows well the dangers that lie hidden beneath the waves.

However, the waters aren't the real concern down here.

One of the things about this area is constantly,

we're getting hit by hurricanes.

It's just constant high wind and rough seas to deal with.

Coastal Florida is not an easy place to build anything.

If you're going to build something here you have to really want it.

There's nothing between you and a potential hurricane

or storm racing it's way across that water.

This is a dangerous place to be.

To choose such an exposed location may look like asking for trouble,

but for Bob Lee a retired oil man with big ideas,

this thing needed to be built at all costs.

When Bob Lee discovered this area on the coast of Florida,

he fell in love with it as many people do.

But for him it wasn't enough to just live on some golf course

or in some condo, he really imagined getting closer to nature.

Anyone who lives or sails in that area

knows what a harsh environment it is.

But for Bob to actually build there on the edge of the earth,

I think everyone must have thought he was crazy.

But these weren't just any old structures, this was Bob's dream.

The cape Romano dome home.

What's fascinating about these structures is,

you can see that they're futuristic,

but they're kind of an old idea of the future.

You can see echoes of the 60s and the 70s here.

This was all about escaping the modern world

with a design that was intended to utilise nature's resources.

He had a gutter system that went around the base of the domes,

so that when it rained,

it would trickle down all sides and get sent to a 23,000 gallon cistern.

If you look at the bottom of this dome right here,

you'll see the concrete.

That's actually where that 23,000 gallon cistern was held.

It would filter the water,

and that's how he got his drinking and bathing water.

Bob Lee must have just been such a fascinating guy,

he was so imaginative.

He wanted to build these houses off the grid

and he knew he had to bring in all these supplies by barge.

But he also wanted to use local materials,

so he worked to develop a kind of concrete

that would take advantage of the local sand and sea shells.

Today we talk a lot about carbon footprint

and using natural environments but back in 1981,

Bob is really at the forefront of that.

He went for it, and these experimental buildings,

that's where our inspiration for the future comes.

But there was more to the domed shape than just water collecting

and futuristic design.

The dome home was built to withstand the brute force of coastal storms.

Being this shape,

there was no sharp corners for the wind to catch on

and it would actually roll right around the structure.

As well as the shape, he also built it on stilts

so that if there was a hurricane and a major storm surge,

it would actually flow right under the property

and not affect the living space.

Despite all the storm proofing and innovative features,

mother nature had something unexpected up her sleeve.

Taking on a construction project down here,

you'd be foolish not to consider the impact from storms,

and hurricanes and waves.

But looking at it today,

it's clear that something happened that wasn't planned for.

Four of the original six domes remain above water.

But it wasn't just the strong winds that knocked the other two over.

Here, change was happening underfoot.

When he completed the property in 1981 and moved in,

it was a three bedroom, three bath house,

2,500 square foot that sat a quarter mile inland.

So all of this was beach,

including a quarter mile out in front of the property.

Built upon a deserted island,

the domes were never meant to be completely surrounded by water.

So what happened to the land?

Reporter: The water rises in a storm surge,

a wind driven tide of rapid flooding.

In 1992, after ten years of use, a category 5 hurricane hit Florida.

And a problem that had been slowly brewing beneath the waves

began to surface.

Hurricane Andrew reached winds of 175 miles per hour,

weaving it's way through The Bahamas before making landfall in Florida.

It killed 65 people and caused damage

estimated at more than $27 billion.

Which at the time, made it the costliest ever us hurricane.

The high winds created havoc throughout Florida.

In one county alone, 117,000 homes were either destroyed

or badly damaged.

At cape Romano,

Bob Lee's dome home felt the full force of the hurricane.

Buildings were flooded, the beach started to wash away.

This beautiful dream of this off the grid,

sustainable concrete home turned into a bit of a nightmare.

A year later Bob Lee's family abandoned the domes,

but the elements weren't finished with them just yet.

Bob thought about the storms,

and he thought about the severe climate in the area.

But what he didn't take into account

was the shifting nature of the ground beneath.

It was now becoming clear the real problem was erosion.

The Gulf of Mexico has a natural north to south current.

Now you have all this water constantly every single day

pushing back and forth.

The inevitable storm surges we get from the hurricanes

did erode a little bit of the beach and changed the coast line here,

which caused more current to flow north to south,

which has made the sand shift a lot quicker.

The result was an island that was quickly

being swallowed up by the ocean.

With each passing storm, the problem became worse.

In the Bible, Jesus says,

"the wise man builds his house on stone,

"and the foolish man builds his house on sand."

Well, Bob Lee with all of his great vision and creative ideas,

he choose to build his house on sand.

You know, humans have short life spans compared to geology.

So we look at a beach and we say,

"great, what a nice place to build a home."

We don't realise if you could see a time lapse of that same beach

over the course of 100, 200, 300 years,

you'd realise it's more like a sand bar.

Something that washes in and out, that changes with time.

But now they appear to be marooned at sea,

but who knows maybe one day the tides will shift again

and the island will end up back underneath these domes.

Now they lie abandoned.

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

There are echoes from history in these decaying structures.

Some remind us of dark times,

but also of great innovation and human endeavour.

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