Original subtitles

Tom ward (narrates): A strange ruined landscape littered

with signs of a deadly past life.

It feels like someone was kept down here not by choice

but against their will.

A place in West Virginia that held some of america's worst criminals.

Things are just getting worse and worse and worse,

it had to reach a breaking point eventually.

A unique construction that flew the flag

for Cuba following the revolution.

Claire: This was fidel's bright idea,

this was the future and he wanted it done very quickly

but outside the political climate is definitely changing.

And a colliery that was once the most productive in the UK.

Rob: This was obviously once a booming site.

But something went wrong here and fast.

Decaying relics and ruins of lost worlds,

they were forged by years of toil and are now haunted by the past.

Their secrets waiting to be revealed.

(Theme music)

In West Virginia in the usa

there's a vast building that looks like a fortress.

Approaching the building and gazing upon these 24ft high walls

it's an immensely imposing experience.

There's a distinct feeling that you are going to be unwelcome here.

Jim: This building looks kind of like a European castle or palace

but with a very gloomy and highly fortified aspect.

But those expecting to find a kind of fairytale place

are likely to be very disappointed.

Dominic: Inside, it's really not clear what this place is.

There's a canteen with paintings

and upstairs there's even medical and dental equipment,

there's something rather dark and sinister about it all.

In fact, this building has connections

with one of america's most notorious criminals.

And some believe that the halls are haunted by the spirits

of those who were once here.

You get deeper inside you notice the graffiti,

the rusting iron bars, the peeling paint

and the feeling that terrible things happened here.

Clearly this was never designed to be a happy place,

it's all now falling apart and decaying,

that just adds to the overall air of despair.

So, how did this place become infamous?

Local historian Ryan zacherl knows all about the building's dark past.

This was one of the most horrific places in the world

and still to this day it's notorious

for the atrocities that occurred here.

The building dates back to the birth of West Virginia in 1863

when a series of escapes from county jails

saw the new state looking to improve the prison system.

The inmates completely up and left and were never found,

and it was at that point that they realised

they needed something higher security,

they needed something more permanent to contain the criminals.

The solution was this.

The West Virginia penitentiary.

This was no ordinary prison.

From the very beginning

it was designed to hold the worst of the worst.

This place was supposed to be a fortress

for which escape was impossible.

But in the 20th century

a frightening social trend began to put pressure on the penitentiary.

In wider society ever more people were being convicted

and of increasingly violent crimes.

The prison was designed to house only a few hundred people,

yet it ended up with over 2,000,

the result was uncontrollable violence.

To combat the danger areas of the prison were sectioned off.

The premeditated slaughtering's of their fellow inmates

made this the most dangerous cell block

in the West Virginia penitentiary.

They called this cell block the "alamo"

because they genuinely believed that

they wouldn't make it out of here alive,

they had to spend at least 22 hours out of every day

locked inside these 5x7 cells

and they are absolutely tiny.

But locking up the prisoners didn't stop the violence.

It was all about survival inside this cell block

and survival meant arming themselves,

they would cut pieces of metal off the doors or the bunks

and once they had that piece of metal off

on the inside of their cell

they could bend down and actually sharpen that knife on the concrete

which you can see scratch marks right here

where an inmate turned that from a dull piece of steel

into a deadly knife.

And the inmates here weren't only prepared to kill each other.

Chuck gent was a guard at the facility

for nine brutal years.

What happened was they was doing a survey

to find out how hard it got in here

and they stuck thermometers up everywhere.

The inmates stole and broke it open and stole all the Mercury

then they tried to poison me with it in a cup of coffee.

I got fortunate

when I happened to glance down into the cup and found it.

There wasn't a day you didn't come in here,

you wasn't in fear of your life.

The horrors of this place have stayed with Chuck ever since.

You have flashbacks when you see a guy

with a 25 pound weight plate buried in his forehead

or a 12 piece of steel which runs up to his eye

and up in to his brain and out the back of his head,

a guy set on fire and he's burning,

his skin's boiling and stuff like this,

you end up having a hard side to you to survive this.

Despite all that went on inside,

the prison somehow became something of a public attraction.

94 men convicted of some of the most violent crimes

were executed in a building called the death house

that once stood out here on the north yard.

They used to perform these executions

by hanging publicly.

People would literally travel miles to come and watch these executions,

they would sell tickets to these

and people would bring their whole family,

the kids would come,

they'd have a picnic during the execution.

While the prison provided

ghoulish entertainment for the public,

it was also popular with some members

of the criminal fraternity and here's why.

There's this room called the sugar shack

where prisoners could go, there was no supervision,

the guards never went down there, they were afraid to go down there

and all kinds of terrible things happened,

some prisoners liked this set up,

some of them actually asked to be transferred to this prison

because they knew they'd have more freedom

to engage in drugs, violence, gangs.

Amongst those hoping to find themselves in the prison

was one of the most infamous criminals

in American history.

A man who also had a very personal link to it.

In the late 1930s a woman named Kathleen Maddox

she was sentenced to serve time here,

she had a young son named Charlie Maddox,

this little boy came to visit his mother

inside this penitentiary.

This little boy eventually went on

to become the infamous Charles manson.

In march 1983,

the prison warden was handed a letter.

After serving 12 years of a life sentence for the murders

that had shocked america,

Charles manson was requesting a transfer here.

There was no way the authorities were gonna allow that

and the warden at the prison at the time wrote back, he said,

it would quote, "be a cold day in hell

"before Charles manson moved to West Virginia."

Even without the evil manson West Virginia penitentiary

was struggling to do the very thing it was designed for.

West Virginia state prison was supposed to be a fortress

from the very beginning.

Just 'cause they built it as an inescapable fortress,

didn't mean it was actually inescapable.

In November of 1979

we had the largest mass escape from this penitentiary,

15 inmates created a plan to smuggle in a firearm,

take an officer hostage,

get to the control panel

and eventually let themselves out of the front door of this prison.

The city of moundsville was absolutely terrified.

Outside an exchange of gun fire killed a trooper and an inmate,

the other 14 escapees were eventually recaptured.

This was just one of more than 200 escapes

from the penitentiary.

Prisoners even joked openly about how easy it was to escape.

The idea of an impregnable fortress had failed spectacularly.

Eventually, all the inmates managed to get out of the prison

because the supreme court ruled that the site was unfit for purpose

and closed it down.

In 1995, it doors shut for the final time.

Today, decades after it was abandoned

the penitentiary has become a mecca

for those interested in the super natural.

This penitentiary is thought to be one of the most haunted places

in the United States of America

and one of the most common forms of supernatural phenomena

is a shadow figure called the shadow man.

In 2004, a lady named Paula

actually captured it in a photograph.

She saw the figure walking towards her

so she took one picture down this hallway

and right in front of this door

the figure was standing looking at her.

Even with the sites worst days long gone

perhaps the horrors here are still not quite over.

On the outskirts of the Cuban capital of Havana

are the eerie remains

of the Caribbean island's turbulent past.

Claire: In amongst this lush green tropical landscape

suddenly there are pops of orange and red terracotta

coming through the palm trees.

But they're not rectangular, they're not identikit,

they're kind of moving with the landscape,

they're organic, they're flowing, there's no clear entrance to...

To any of them.

These buildings are so fantastical,

something really ignited someone's imagination

and let it run free in these shapes and these designs.

There's one very noticeable thing about their distinctive appearance.

Whoever built this put a lot of thought

into how people walking through it would experience it.

So, within the landscape, one thing that you really notice

is that there's hardly a right angle in the entire place,

it's all about exploring round corners,

it's all about wondering what lies around the bend.

What was this strange and unusual place built for

and how did it become involved in the Cuban revolution?

It's clear that there is decay in places

that clearly nature's been allowed to take over in a small way

but then there were some areas that they look like foundations

that have never been completed.

There's a sense of whatever stopped that process

happening very abruptly.

You have to wonder

why did suddenly construction just stop?

It looked like it was going so well.

The origins of this striking site date back to the early 1960s.

A time when Cuba was going through a period of extraordinary upheaval.

Although they were intended as a place of calm and tranquillity

to inspire young minds,

the grand structures here were born of revolution and conflict.

James: In the 1950s,

Cuba had been under the dictatorship of fulgencio Batista,

it was an incredibly corrupt country.

And a small group of revolutionaries

started a war against the government.

Those revolutionaries were the infamous fidel Castro

and his loyal lieutenant Ernesto Che Guevara.

Together, they would transform Cuba and these buildings forever.

In late 1959, they defeated the army,

Castro nationalises all the...

The foreign industries, all the larger industries,

even the small stores and shops will be taken over by Castro.

He institutes a through going communist ideological state.

Cuban's initially saw Castro as a revolutionary,

as a romantic figure

and they didn't realise his true nature.

In time, that true nature

would bring misery to the Cuban people

and threaten the peace of the wider world.

But in the immediate aftermath of the bloody revolution,

a wave of optimism swept the war torn country.

In 1961, fidel Castro and Che Guevara

they decide to go and play golf one day in the elite club,

a place that they previously never been allowed anywhere near.

They say what a shame it is that this has been shut off

for most of the Cuban people

and shouldn't they experience it as well

and they hatch a plan, a very ambitious plan

to change this golf course into something else entirely.

So, what did these two revolutionaries

have in mind for this place?

And why did its architect end up fleeing for his life?

Castro asked a young Cuban architect Ricardo porro

to design the site

and he was going to produce five separate buildings

each with a separate purpose.

This is Cuba's national school of art.

A series of ambitious structures designed to nurture excellence

in ballet, modern dance, visual arts, music and drama.

This is the birth of an idea and remember

for your real communist,

real revolutionaries art is very important,

art is there to serve the revolution.

Local man Jose villa soberon came here to study sculpture.

I started studying in the year 1966 when I was 16 years old.

To a young boy who wanted to study art

it was like discovering a brand new world.

Given just two months to come up with the plans

porro recruited two friends to help him.

They were vittorio garatti and Roberto gottardi.

The young architects poured their heart and soul into the project

taking their inspiration from the changing times

in which they were living.

You walk along the corridors and you lose sense

of where you're coming from and where you're going

and that was intentional,

the message that he was trying to communicate

is that Cuba had moved on from it's history

and was forging a new future.

Each school was unique

but they all shared one clever piece of engineering

that helped speed up construction

and which encouraged those flowing shapes,

the catalan arch.

The catalan arch or a dome you start off with a brick,

a very thin brick and then you use a very quick drying cement

and you butt up one against it and then another one

and then another one and because it's all held into place

quite quickly you don't need a false work to support it.

After a construction period of just one year

and with building work still going on,

the doors of the school were opened.

The students arrived while the whole place was a building site

and had lessons in the club house and around in the grounds,

it was a real family feel,

there was a real buzz about the place.

Students would play music to help the workers in their task

and there was a real atmosphere

of hope and excitement about the future.

It's like a huge stimulus for imagination,

it creates a magical environment for work.

But the campus modelled on the idealistic dreams

of the revolution would soon turn into a nightmare.

Soviet influence in the country was growing

and a deadly storm was brewing.

The Americans see in Castro's friendliness to the Soviet union

a direct threat to the United States.

In 1962 the world will come close to nuclear war

with the Cuban missile crisis.

After the Cuban missile crisis

the country was forced to start prioritising defence

over other considerations

and suddenly this grand project faced a cash flow problem.

And as the Cuban leadership strengthened its ties to the ussr

the country began to see

more utilitarian Soviet styled architecture.

There's a lot of criticism from the Russians

about this art school

and there's criticism again from some of the Cubans,

who see that this is a regression.

What was earlier seen as this grand experiment

in creativity and artistic freedom

now starts to look like

it's a bit bourgeois, it's a bit indulgent.

Before long construction was stopped and the school closed down.

Builders pulled off site, the architects are let go

and the schools are just left as they stand on that day.

The ballet school still hasn't even got its flooring in.

But for the people that designed the school of arts

there was a more worrying prospect.

Cast as bourgeois enemies of the state,

the ministry of construction began a campaign

to destroy their reputations.

So, the lead architect porro,

he lived and breathed these projects for a couple of years

and he was absolutely devastated and he left Cuba

and ended up working in Europe and the rest of the world.

Vittorio garatti is accused of espionage,

he's jailed and eventually he's expelled from Cuba.

While the closure of the school was devastating for students,

today it's going through something of a rebirth.

For students like Jose villa soberon

the closure of the school of arts in Cuba had a lasting impact.

I really regret not having been able to continue that moment

in Cuban culture during the 1960s.

It was an era full of romance, dreams and with such high hopes.

Today, the school is experiencing an unexpected renaissance

with the ambitious architecture

finally being given the plaudits it deserved.

In the 1990s, architects from outside Cuba

started to take a closer look at these buildings

and recognise the creativity that had gone into them.

The future does look optimistic and although never finished

it looks finally like funding might be available

from Europe to complete the job.

Lost in the quiet countryside 50 miles north of Paris,

a strange dwellings carved into rock.

Some parts of this place seem almost fantastical

but this is only one element in a truly intriguing site.

They hide a surprising secret.

You're out in the bright sunlight in the summer

and then you go through an entrance

and you're down in the underground world.

It just draws you in into this maze of rock and paths and tunnels.

And occasionally you've got trees

growing up escaping out of this tunnel.

In the depths of the site are cold silent hollows.

You have a feeling of wonder when you go underground

and you see these large stone columns and chambers

and then tunnels in dark places going off in every direction.

Lining the walls are signs of a former life.

There are clues scattered all over this place,

there are markings of names and dates,

drawings of figures.

It feels like it could have been some kind of prison,

keeping people hidden out of sight, underground.

But there's one carving near the entrance

that seems to offer the biggest clue.

Here you have a carving

of the goddess Athena in military gear.

You have an inscription "never pass"

and this is a clue to what this place really is.

So, what was this site designed to stop?

It was during the 19th century that this place came to prominence

when a decision was made to rebuild the capital city.

Paris in the 19th century was a mess,

it was dirty diseased and crime ridden

and effectively sunk into a den of sin and vice.

They wanted to build Paris into a city

that was fit to be France's capital.

The plan was to build these new wide boulevards

and avenues but to redesign a city in this way

you need building materials

and that is where this place came in.

These are the quarries of montigny.

It was already an established lime stone quarry

and suddenly it gained a new importance.

For local resident Eric bouchenez

it's clear to see how the large heavy blocks

were carved out one by one.

(Speaks French)

Translation: "From the stone cutting

"you can distinguished the tool that was used.

"Here you can see the efforts of those men

"identified by the rounded marks left by their picks."

This was not easy work,

it was all done by hand and you start at the top,

you chisel away, you keep going,

you keep going and your hole just gets bigger and bigger and bigger.

Translation: "No mechanical equipment was used,

"everything was down to hard physical labour."

But these are not the only things

of interest hidden down here in the darkness.

Other walls give clues to a very different use

during one of the most brutal periods of the 20th century.

With all the evidence of chlorine here,

you now see all kinds of marks

from 1914 to 1918 all over the walls.

This is clearly a world war I site.

By September 1914,

German forces had advanced in to northern France,

at the battle of la marne

they were driven back to this location.

What happened next helped shape the nature of the war

for the next four years.

The Germans were heading straight for Paris

but the British and French managed to intercept them

and halt their progress.

What followed was the defining experience

of 1914 to 1918, trench warfare.

There were to be very many dangers for those soldiers

stuck on the front lines.

But one in particular struck terror into the troops on both sides.

Artillery is the big killer of the war.

If you want to avoid the artillery shells,

the only solution is deep underground

and by happen-stance the front came to a stop

in 1914 very close to here.

This was world war I, artillery was the key,

it was all about bomb power

and so you've got these bombs going off above you,

you've got your gun fire but what makes this place special

is obviously you're protected, you've got that stone above you.

The underground lair that had once helped to rebuild Paris

eventually became a place that was vital to the defence

of the very same city.

Translation: "So, these huge spaces were occupied by the French army.

"They took over the whole quarry,

"you need to imagine how gigantic it is.

"At its peak you had between 200 and 500 soldiers

"living here in the quarry and the surrounding area."

Underground facilities

became a very, very important part of world war I

and you would have in some cases headquarters,

hospitals and depots and rear areas, it's a safe place for the soldiers.

It was the last place the men

would have gone before going on to the front line

and it was the first place they would have gone

to after coming off the front line.

There would have just been such a mixed bag

of emotions going on there.

The carvings and etchings here are haunting reflections

of the troops unsettling environment.

Translation: "So, those men stationed here

"for days and weeks on end,

"they had to keep busy, the front was not far off.

"And death was all around,

"so to kill time, they began sculpting."

But one area seems to be something more

than the work of idle hands whiling away the time.

"So, here you find the old chapel,

"built by a soldier named Leopold Michelle

"he built this in December 1914.

"This chapel was built to provide hope

"to the men stationed here.

"Don't forget, during the war there were a lot of deaths

"and many were not sure that they would come back the next day.

"So, they needed a place to pray and to lift their spirits."

For the men living here danger was never far away.

The trenches were right on their doorstep

and they knew that sooner or later an attack would come.

The Germans on the other side had their quarries

and their underground facilities and they bought in engineers

and they would try to tunnel under the enemy lines

and plant explosives.

They had to be alert

to the German's appearing out of the woods

or through a secret tunnel that they'd dug.

These were fears from which they could never escape.

After four years of stalemate in 1918 a breakthrough came

when both sides developed new strategies

that would end the static war of the trenches.

What would be the fate of the men in the quarries of montigny?

In 1918, the German army began

its last major offensive of world war I

and it would shatter the silence in the deep caverns

of montigny in France.

It's all about the technology coming together

with new tactics and applications that can break the trench lines.

You initiate a massive opening bombardment

just a few hours before the infantry attack.

The Germans were looking for a point of entry

and when they found one,

they would have funnelled down in to the base

bringing the fight to the heart of the complex.

Clues to what happened here are found in the darkness.

Here you can see that there's obviously been some type of hit

but that hit didn't come from externally,

that actually came from internally.

Translation: "Here you can see large blocks that fell,

"there isn't another place that looks like this

"in the entire quarry.

"So, there was probably a large explosion

"detonated to stop the enemy."

But it was all to no avail,

nothing could be done to halt the German attack.

The French soldiers had little choice but to fall back.

Essentially an underground facility like this

is not built to be defended,

it's a refuge and if the enemy breaks

through then you evacuate.

"So, there was a surge of men here,

"we had to retreat because they used gas

"and lots of heavy artillery fell on to our quarry."

While the situation may have looked desperate the allied forces

had their own plans to strike back.

And within months the war would be over.

The Germans are becoming exhausted, it's a limited breakthrough,

it's a limited advance before it stops and Peters out.

So, the allied forces retook the quarry site

and the surrounding land

and eventually it was transformed from a war-zone to a place of peace.

Just over six miles from this base is where the armistice was signed.

The blood loss and horror that had been witnessed

along this line was finally brought to an end.

At last the fighting days were over for the quarries of montigny,

now it began a new life that recalled its original purpose.

After the war the quarrying returned

and so people returned and this place became homes again.

The houses you see here speak of a long tradition

going back to the start of quarrying 300 years ago.

The last people to leave only left in the 1970s

and that's their home that you can still see here today.

Deep in the British countryside there's a sleeping giant.

Rob: This complex completely dominates the landscape,

got beautiful brick buildings,

you can spot the ruins of old pipelines,

you've got massive towers and pumps and these piles of broken up rock

and concrete everywhere.

Dominic: The site is highly impressive,

there's a vast array of buildings

and it's clear a great deal of money was clearly spent on them,

it was once a booming site

but something must have gone wrong here and quite fast.

Inside the buildings lurk other hidden features

that hint at what this site once was.

This was clearly a quasi industrial set up of some sort,

a large scale operation at one point employing hundreds

maybe thousands of people all bent towards one crucial task.

But now it's a sad odd place, it's abandoned,

it's slowly succumbing to nature.

There are railway carriages just left abandoned

and then this huge chimney,

this must be a clue as to what this site was.

Clearly there was something valuable here

that made building all this worthwhile

but what was it and where is it now?

This sprawling work site was originally intended to transform

the area of north staffordshire

but it was no easy task.

When this site was built

the resources of the land around here

were ready and waiting to be tapped into and exploited.

So, there's great wealth to be had,

it's there for the taking but it's not going to come easy,

people are gonna have to put their lives

on the line to get to it.

The source of that wealth remains hidden from view even today.

Nigel Smith is a local historian.

This is chatterley Whitfield,

the site that used to produce material that powered a nation.

Coal powered everything,

people's homes, businesses, industry,

with coal you had an economy

and with an economy you had wealth.

A coal steams of north staffordshire

are some of the richest in the world.

Of the coal mines in the region this was the Jewel in the crown,

it had the greatest man power

and the highest production rate of any mine.

At one time it was employing 5,000 people

and 4,000 of those worked underground.

But working here often came at a deadly price.

In 1937, one area of the mine wrote it's name in history.

There were several shafts on site but this is the hesketh,

the hesketh is the first shaft anywhere in the UK

to be responsible for producing one million tonnes of saleable coal.

In today's money that would be worth over 50 million pounds.

It was a hugely profitable business

but to bring coal out of the seams

required specialist machinery and some very brave miners.

Roy neate was only 17 when he was first sent down the pit.

I felt terrified at first.

It's like the darkness, and then the noises,

as soon as you hear a noise you're looking round.

Where's that? You know?

If you hear a creak you think the roof is going to come in.

Throughout much of the 19th and 20th centuries

the miners faced many deadly situations.

I saw a bloke killed.

We were salvaging the face,

getting all the material off the face.

They were pumping cement in the sides,

to build a big wall and they put too much cement in

and we just got past and it exploded out.

The blocks hit him and killed him instantly

and then we had to carry him out.

It's very dangerous.

Despite the risks

the wheels of production had to keep on turning.

Coal was absolutely essential to the running of the country.

The biggest accident happened in 1881,

from records the accident itself seemed to have stemmed

from an underground fire that got out of hand

and obviously that ignited the methane gas

that was below ground and there was a huge explosion.

24 men and boys lost their lives

and to this day there are still bodies actually underground.

Over two centuries,

the north staffordshire coal seam saw more than 4,500 fatalities.

And in the late 1930s,

a terrifying new threat came to add to the dangers.

When world war ii broke out,

the demand for coal in britain sky rocketed,

it was needed to fuel the armaments industry,

the munitions industry,

to fuel soldiers homes and their families homes,

they were going to need to produce more coal

faster than they had ever done before.

This place had to become

an even more productive mining machine,

a constant inferno of activity.

They had to put in place a whole new infrastructure

which included crushing plants, underground railway lines,

networks of pipes on land and deep tunnels.

The whole British economy was dependant on coal

and the Germans knew it.

Hitler knew how vital the coal industry

was to the entire British economy

and particularly its ability to produce munitions,

to keep fighting, he wanted to stop

the British coal industry at any price.

Stoke on Trent was a strategic high priority target

for the Nazis,

the Germans knew what a productive town it was...

And they wanted to destroy the industry at the city.

German bombing raids on stoke on Trent

had a devastating impact,

bringing some of the industry here to a near standstill.

Fortunately, the luftwaffe never succeeded in destroying the mines.

But eventually cheaper alternative fuels

came to threaten the supremacy of king coal.

For the men that worked here the writing was on the wall.

Oil became a highly strategic product

and the United Kingdom depended on its colonial empire

and its dominance of the middle east for its supply.

In 1946, 90% of the UK's electricity

was produced from coal.

By the mid 1970s that figure had dropped by nearly 30%.

Coal it seemed was out.

The mine couldn't compete and its gates closed in 1977.

But the mining industry wasn't prepared

to go down without a fight.

And what happened shortly afterwards

changed the landscape of British politics forever.

It was without doubt

the most bitter industrial dispute in British history

and its long term impact is still being felt today.

The strike in '85, that was terrible.

One or two went to work,

there were hundreds and hundreds of pickets trying to stop them.

Violent confrontations between the picketers

and police were common

and the strike ended with a decisive victory

for the conservative government,

the collieries were closed

and that was largely the end of coal mining in britain.

Today, the collieries huge winding engines

lie silent and abandoned

but for the men that worked here

the world that once was will never be forgotten.

It was just brilliant, the camaraderie and...

That's what we want to try and do now.

We got a lot of memories.

Now, they're abandoned crumbling ruins,

many remind us of dark times

but some were once beacons of hope and progress.

Lasting testimonies to human imagination,

enterprise and spirit.

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