Original subtitles

Narrator: In Argentina, a fantasy world built by a desperate man...

Some kind of very obsessive

and very unusual mind dreamed this place up.

..A sin city locked in a skyscraper...

This looming tower went from an opulent apartment building

to a vertical slum.

..An American town whose story beggars belief...

From watching these movies we see the 'wild wild west'

but this was really the kind of place where it actually happened.

..And an ancient German castle, the birthplace of a monster.

The superstitious population saw him as a sorcerer

who'd made a pact with the devil.

Decaying relics.

Shadows of lost worlds.

Ruins haunted by the past.

Their secrets waiting to be revealed.

Near the hillbrow region of Johannesburg, South Africa,

is a dystopian ruin with a chequered past.

We're at the centre

of one of the city's most notorious neighbourhoods

that are known for crime, for violence and that are blighted.

This looming tower that dominates

the skyline of Johannesburg.

Looks like it's sprung out of the pages

of a science fiction novel.

It's this massive grey concrete tube with this bizarre open centre

that descends right through the middle of the building.

Travelling deeper into the dark abyss

reveals an apocalyptic wasteland.

The floor of the central core is uneven,

there's still huge slabs of bedrock, there,

it's as if they never quite finished removing them.

When you go inside the building

has a desolate and dangerous feeling to it,

there are broken windows,

walls that are blackened with smoke.

You can see from the flats and the abandoned facilities

that this was once a luxurious residence

but something terrible happened, here.

Some of my best moments were actually lying down

in the middle of this core, here,

and watching the clouds flow over the top of the building.

It was a bit like a kaleidoscope,

some days it would rain, as well

and make it really truly special and unique experience.

Journalist, nickolaus Bauer,

moved into this brutalist concrete construction in 2012

and lived here for five years.

This is a truly unique building,

something that you won't find anywhere else in South Africa,

some people say it's got to do with the fact that

the architects took too many hallucinogenics in the '70s

when they put this building together

but it's actually a municipal bylaw

that stated you needed two sources of light and air

going into each apartment.

This was the most bang for buck

that they could get in terms of designing and building

with as much living space as possible.

Yet, this trip down memory Lane also serves as a reminder

of the terrifying period

that plagued this building and it's occupants.

The core makes me ask what would the story be

that these walls could tell if they talked.

But then I often wonder

about all the different things that have happened in this building

and I'm really happy that they don't talk.

The origins of this ambitious structure reveal a dark side.

It's creation dates to a time

when the country operated under the shameful apartheid regime.

Apartheid-era South Africa, is a society

in which there are rigid, rigid boundaries between racial groups

in terms of where one can live, who one can marry what one can do.

And access to the inner part of the city

for South Africa's black residents

was restricted to those who had work in that area.

At this time the only legal black inhabitants

for miles around were live-in domestic workers.

Called the ponte city apartments,

this was an exclusive residential complex

built for the city's white elite.

If you lived in ponte in the 1970s

this was the creme de la creme of lifestyles.

If you had this address you were part of the in-crowd.

The three-storey penthouses

that crowned the tower boasted jacuzzies,

saunas and patios with a breath-taking view

across Johannesburg central business district.

Johannesburg was considered akin to New York

as a sort of a Cosmopolitan mecca

and ponte city was supposed to be the crown Jewel.

Conceived as a modern utopia within the city,

it had a shopping mall, a movie theatre and a bowling alley.

The luxury facilities meant the 3,500 wealthy inhabitants

never had to leave.

But these highs didn't last for long.

Instead, this tower started a long journey into infamy and decay.

Although ponte was designated, officially, as a whites-only area,

the politics of it were a little bit more progressive

and it wasn't unknown for different racial groups to mix in the region.

Throughout the '70s and into the '80s

there were nightclubs and dance halls

which had licences to allow people of different races

to mix and socialise.

Many landlords found it to their advantage

to look the other way when it came to who they rented to

since illegal tenants would have little ground

to complain about rent increases or maintenance issues.

The white-led apartheid government

was appalled by the brazen racial mixing

and acted quickly to stamp it out.

What the apartheid government decided to do

was to redline hillbrow.

Now, redlining basically means

that the economic taps get switched off to an area

and what you had very quickly from about the mid-'80s, onwards,

was this rapid urban degradation of all buildings like ponte.

So, there's no running water, there's no electricity

and then when the rubbish collection stops

what happens is the core starts to fill up with garbage.

It was 15 storeys of rubbish

piled up high in the core, itself,

all of the residents decided to throw all of their rubbish

and their refuse into the middle of the building

rather than trudge it down,

however, many flights of stairs from their home down to the ground floor.

But rubbish was the least of the buildings problems.

What ends up happening is what would be referred to,

in the United States, as white flight,

the white residents leave and crime moves in.

Ruthless drug lords hijack the building

and a deadly new era began.

The 14th floor was ruled by gangsters

and the floor above became an informal sinister marketplace.

Whatever it is you were looking for,

guns, drugs, prostitutes you could find it all there.

It was so bad that when someone was shot at ponte

or when there was a crime that was called into authorities,

paramedics and the police would stay away from the building.

By the mid-1990s it had become the world's tallest urban slum.

10,000 people were crammed into a space

originally designed for a third of that number.

It was years before anybody really wanted to touch it.

Ponte, the region around it,

it had some of the worst rates of murder and rape in the world.

Even after the end of apartheid, ponte remained out of control

and it remained a symbol of lawlessness in Johannesburg.

But ponte city's fate was not yet sealed.

In 2001 its owners decided to restore the neglected building,

a task not for the faint-hearted.

When they decided to clear this building out

there was no machine that could come and do it,

there was no suction, industrial-style suction

that could just suck all of the rubbish out,

it was all done by hand.

And there were things, here, far more gruesome than just waste.

The absolutely horrific things

that people pulled out of the rubble when they were clearing it up,

really, is something that leaves you

absolutely shivering with the chills.

And reportedly there were 23 corpses found.

Now, most of those were rumoured to be gang murders

and the others were suicides.

But there was still life remaining in the tower.

Every single drug dealer,

every single criminal, every single sex worker

was moved out of the building

as the owners of the building tried to turn it around

and make it a decent place to stay for inner-city residents.

So, it was around that time that the owners of ponte, kempston,

decided to enter into an agreement with the developers

and turn ponte into its original incarnation.

Today, the ponte city apartments are, once again,

providing a home to the people of Johannesburg

but transforming its fortunes didn't happen overnight.

The years of neglect meant lengthy restorations

which still continue to this day.

No longer is it the den of iniquity,

it's become a safe and clean place for people to live

and really be safe from a lot of the unsavoury aspects

of inner-city Johannesburg.

And ponte's post-apocalyptic appeal

has also attracted a very different kind of occupant.

It's likeness to a Sci-Fi scene

has not gone unnoticed by Hollywood

and several major films have involved ponte,

among them, 'district 9', 'chappie' and 'resident evil'.

But ponte's real legacy is simple, it's a symbol of hope.

We continue to see migrants

coming from, not only all parts of the country,

but, indeed, all parts of Africa, as well,

as they search for a better tomorrow in Johannesburg

and ponte remains that symbol dotted on the Johannesburg skyline

that's synonymous with trying to envisage a better tomorrow.

In the mountains of Idaho is the scene of a deadly love triangle.

So, you've got this really quite spectacular valley

at around about 6,000 feet which is kind of surrounded by peaks,

some of which are over 9,000 feet

and a kind of icy river running through it all,

it's beautiful but also quite a stark place.

While the summer and spring might be beautiful,

you can tell that the winters, here, are harsh

and you could probably be trapped here for a very long time.

Scattered over 390 square miles are remnants of a community.

When you come upon these settlements

you see all different states of buildings.

You see these, obviously, handmade

wood structures in various states of disrepair,

you can see these cabins that have started to fall in upon themselves.

As you walk around the towns

you can see that some buildings are really quite simple

but others have a lot more to them

so there must have been money

to be made in this particular part of the world

and clearly, some people had it and some people didn't.

Deep in the wilderness are clues to what drew so many people, here.

There are remains of machines and tools

littered around everywhere so you can clearly tell

that this was part of some kind of mechanical processing project.

Something industrial, something was being processed here

but it's not exactly clear what.

People came here seeking fame and fortune

but for some, it would be their final resting place.

The real mystery of this place lies in its overgrown cemetery

and the vestiges of three specific graves.

150 years ago this region was empty.

But in 1877 one man arrived.

And founded the town of bonanza.

The first buildings were really simple log structures

that people constructed by hand

but it wasn't long before there was a saloon

and soon, people from all over started to descend on this area.

By the mid-1880s bonanza had over 600 people

which is a fairly large community.

They have several businesses in the areas,

they have a dance hall and a marketplace.

It also has its own cemetery.

Park ranger, Larry Gary has been trying to figure out

the mystery of bonanza for decades.

So, we're going up to what's called a boot hill cemetery.

Back in the 1800s all three of these people in this cemetery were shot.

But nobody knows who did the killing.

Inside are the headstones of a couple

killed on the same day in 1880,

the number one suspect was bonanza's founder.

Many in the community thought he was probably guilty,

we don't know,

people in the community certainly suspected him.

I mean, we all know from watching these movies,

we see the 'wild wild west', I mean,

but this was really the kind of place where it actually happened.

And we're seeing the remnants of it.

Bonanza is located in a region called the yankee fork.

Its story begins in the era of the cowboy.

Around 1866 a group of prospectors came to this area

and they were looking for mining opportunities.

The one thing that they did leave

was the name of this place, yankee fork.

Yankee, because that's what they were

and fork, because this place lies at the fork of the salmon river.

It was in the mountains of yankee fork

that a discovery was made.

What they actually found in the mountain was a kind of vein,

a two to three-inch line or vein of material

and that was the actual direct source of the gold.

The discovery of gold caught the attention of an entrepreneur.

His name was Charles Franklin.

In 1877 Charles Franklin decides to go to this place

called yankee fork

he's going to found this town or city of bonanza

which, of course, grabs on to all that romance,

all that idea of hope and opportunity

to be in a town called bonanza.

First, he built a few houses,

hotels popped up in these small communities,

they had to repair tools, we had blacksmith shops.

There was other little dress shops

and general stores, butcher shops.

By 1878 hundreds of people had moved into yankee fork

but that summer a new couple arrived,

their names were Richard and Lizzie king.

They moved from england to the states or to this nation

and eventually made their way into the yankee fork valley.

They started out as very sophisticated people

and very well-to-do.

A home like this more upper class, if you will,

was something that Richard and Lizzie king built and lived in

and across the street they built a saloon and a large dance hall

where they held dances quite frequently.

The kings helped build the town of bonanza

but its founder, Charles Franklin, had eyes for Lizzie.

Lizzie was described as this golden-haired beauty

and it was rumoured

that she spent lots of time with Franklin

even when her husband wasn't around

and in those days that meant trouble.

On 14 July, 1879, Lizzie's husband was killed

during a fight with a business associate.

Lizzie had a real hard time with the death of her husband

but their friend, Charles Franklin became even closer to Lizzie

and everybody in bonanza thought that

Charles Franklin and Lizzie king would soon be married.

Franklin had a really interesting way of showing his affection

because shortly after Lizzie purchased Richard's grave,

Franklin decided to buy two more plots, nearby.

One for him and one for Lizzie.

But Franklin's amorous advances didn't work.

Lizzie was smitten with another man.

She actually ended up falling in love

with a card dealer at the saloon that she operated, Robert hawthorne,

and the two were married shortly thereafter

but it only lasted six days.

So, they got married and six days after their wedding day

they had a freight wagon

come in with new furniture for the house,

a few seconds later there was two gunshots.

The surrounding townspeople showed up,

went into Lizzie king's and Robert hawthorne's house

to find them deceased.

The rumour that went around the town, of course,

was that Charles Franklin, in a fit of jealous rage,

had killed them, both.

We have no evidence of this,

we don't know what happened, they were obviously murdered.

But one clue suggests that Franklin was involved.

When Charles Franklin

had Lizzie and her new husband's headstones made,

instead of putting their death date on those headstones,

he, instead, put the date of their wedding

which had been six days earlier.

After Lizzie and her second husband were buried,

Charles Franklin left the town he had founded.

Obviously, people were suspicious

that Franklin had murdered Lizzie and her husband

in a fit of jealous rage.

But it couldn't be proven.

Bonanza continued without its founders for nine more years

until in 1889 it was struck by another violent event.

But this time, it was a natural force that rocked the town.

Unfortunately, fires strike bonanza

just too much of the town is destroyed

and many of those business owners

just move two miles down the road

to custer and bonanza quickly falls into disrepair.

Shortly after, the yankee fork's gold dried up,

everyone abandoned the town

and the buildings were reclaimed by nature.

(Dramatic music)

Ten years after Lizzie king's murder

in a town 15 miles from bonanza

there was one final twist in the tale.

Two prospectors were wandering around

looking for places to make claims,

they came upon this cabin,

they find Charles Franklin

still in his bed but very much dead.

They pulled the blankets back

and they'd seen in Charles Franklin hand, a locket,

they opened up the locket

and in that locket was a picture of Lizzie king.

Today yankee fork is silent

except for curious folk

who come to hear the story of the mysterious murders.

Everybody suspects it,

possibly Charles Franklin may have done it

but then again, Charles Franklin was so in love with Lizzie king,

why would he kill her too?

Why not just kill Robert?

Makes you wonder.

In a suburb of Buenos Aires,

a peculiar-looking town

appears to belong in a fairy tale world.

(Instrumental music)

It looks like it's some kind of medieval village

and then as you get closer

these strange details start to emerge.

There are these strange steam punk houses

with towers coming out in odd places.

It looks like something

that maybe Willy wonka would have dreamed up.

At ground level, the mystery deepens.

Walking through the many passages,

nooks, crannies and secreted places,

there's a really intriguing atmosphere.

It feels kind of like a film set,

in that everything is sort of artificial

but it's built to last, I mean it's built of stone and wood.

It seems so welcoming

but apart from a few stray dogs there is no one around.

Obviously it's not a place where people really live,

they're just big empty spaces, there's no furniture,

this is an imaginary idea of a town.

In many ways, it's like a cartoon come to life.

It doesn't quite feel like it's the real world.

Campanopolis was the life project of one man

and it was built in a race against time.

The man behind this enchanting place is Antonio campana,

a self-made supermarket millionaire.

His son Oscar, now looks after the peculiar village

and has kept his father's office just as it was.

The story began when campana decided to try his hand at farming.

But his dreams of a pastureland were soon ended.

The year campana buys the land

coincides with the start

of the argentinian civil military dictatorship.

It was a very dark period in the country,

it's known as the 'dirty war.'

many people were 'disappeared' as they say,

they were just taken off the streets,

never to be seen again

and the powers that be appropriated his land

and used it as a dump.

For years Antonio stood by

unable to reclaim what was his,

as the fields were used as landfill.

But some terrible personal news inspired him to fight back.

Diagnosed with tonsil cancer,

he was given just a few years to live.

So, Antonio campana took on the fight

and even though it took years,

he eventually won his battle against the government.

He now had to clear 70 million cubic feet of rubbish.

Campana realised that the land was no longer suitable

for cattle grazing.

He had to find a new use for the land.

Campanopolis is a hoarder's paradise

and it feels like a window into campana's unfathomable mind.

But exploring the town

it is still possible to piece together the Jigsaw

and find clues to the method behind the apparent madness.

At the time they were ripping up a lot of railroads

so he was able to get a lot of railroad equipment

and other materials from that process.

But campana was thinking big

and it would take more than railroad equipment

to fulfil his new ambition.

Maybe going through this ordeal made campana acutely aware

of all the waste we accumulate as humans,

maybe he just found lots of treasures

as he was clearing up the site.

Either way, his plans changed from farming

to creating a town made from upcycled and recycled materials.

He scoured the nearby capital

and found a treasure trove of materials.

Much of it with origins from further afield.

Campana was lucky,

at the time Buenos Aires was going through a big boom

of renovation

and many of the older buildings were being knocked down.

People were selling off a lot of the old features,

architectural mouldings, gates, doorways, posts, fence,

so campana went around auctions,

his motto was 'recycling and optimisation.'

but for a dying campana, the clock was ticking.

By the time he began constructing his town in the early '80s

he was already years into his terminal illness.

But he powered on undeterred,

determined to see his vision become a reality.

Campana didn't have any background as an architect or a builder

but he did have really big ideas and enormous enthusiasm

and lots of money.

The plan was not to have a plan

and to allow the place to grow organically.

And this is sometimes reflected in the architectural style

or perhaps more accurately the lack of it.

Overall, it feels very harmonious

but then as you start to pick out a few details, nothing makes sense,

no two elements are the same.

Year after year campana continued to defy the odds

and his prognosis.

Fortunately for campana his doctors were wrong

and that gave him years

to keep adding on to his fantasy town,

kind of making it up as he went along,

he would come up with all kinds of crazy ideas

and send his builders to work on it

but over time he patched together

this really remarkable, little fantasy land.

The 500 acre site evolved into a beacon of sustainability.

Campana planted 100,000 trees to accompany the structures.

Creating a thriving ecosystem on land that was destined for waste.

Campana was a visionary,

not only for his own times but also for our times,

we are fighting battles of waste and renewability in the world

but even back in the '70s

he was able to conceive of an entire village

built really only out of recycled materials.

Amazingly there's almost no plastic in his village,

he was a real pioneer of sustainability.

In one of those beautiful symmetries,

campana didn't only give life to the village

but the village gave life to him,

he was expecting to die very soon but in fact lived another 25 years.

(Dramatic music)

Today Oscar looks after campanopolis

and still feels a deep connection between the place,

his father and human kind.

And the story of campanopolis is far from over.

(Dramatic music)

In central Germany at the top of a hill

is a castle with a famous name.

(Dramatic music)

You see this ruined castle looming over the hills

and it's hard not to imagine ancient stories that come to mind

once you hear the name of the place.

The castle really uses it's surroundings to it's advantage.

The solid granite it's built on acts as a protective barrier.

Beyond the walls are signs that visitors are not welcome.

Once you're inside the castle your imagination takes over

because you can see staircases, towers, a ruined old chapel,

this clearly was a very formidable castle.

In the centre of the castles grounds

is a structure that can be seen for miles around.

The thing that stands out most dramatically

is this watchtower that was clearly part of some kind of fortification.

A hilltop castle, high above a dark forest,

a setting for any good fairy-tale.

There really can't be many people in the world

who don't know the name of this place.

Because it's the name of a notorious fictional character.

This is castle Frankenstein.

(Instrumental music)

Approaching this place is a journey of the senses

because to get to it

you have to hike through a dense atmospheric forest.

Ralph eberhardt has heard all the stories of this castle.

Inside the castle's chapel is a statue

but some say it's not a member of the Frankenstein family.

It is believed that the five foot 11 statue

is of a former resident of the castle

who went by the name Johann konrad dippel.

Dippel was born there in 1673,

he came from a long line of lutheran clergyman

and his father very much wanted young Conrad

to follow in the family footsteps

so he undertook the boys education here in the castle.

Dippel grew up in the ways of the church

but he also had an aptitude for science.

Like many thinkers in that era he was fascinated by alchemy,

the idea that you could somehow

chemically transform a base metal like lead into gold

or transform other things,

alchemy wasn't just about making gold,

it was about this idea of altering things

from a lower state to a higher state.

An accident in his lab produced a strange result,

a chemical with a blue pigment.

He actually shared a workshop with a painter,

now the two tools mixed and this rich blue dye was created.

Blue had only been available before then at massive cost,

so the sudden availability of blue that was scalable

meant it exploded.

The prussian army used it for their uniforms

hence it's name 'prussian blue.'

prussian blue was great for dippel's profile

but his fame soon turned to notoriety.

Dippel though wasn't interested in pigments and paints,

his real focus lay in the search for immortality.

His quest for eternal life

and the strange tests it involved were not to everyone's liking.

It seems like dippel was someone who often kind of freaked out

the people around him.

There's a lot of stories about people being warned

about his experiments and what he was doing.

Dippel's methods combined science with the supernatural.

He searched for a way to prevent death

by experimenting on the living.

Dippel was fixated with ideas about the human soul and its meaning

and in order to experiment with this,

he engaged in soul transference,

in other words finding animals

and trying to swap one soul from one to another.

He also had this idea

that if he could boil down animal bones

and extract some kind of essence from them,

he would have an elixir that would be extremely powerful.

After years of work, dippel made a breakthrough,

he produced a substance which he called 'dippel's oil.'

he developed this disgusting

greasy liquid from this process

that he believed was a secret to very long life

and thought it was something of immense value.

Dippel's oil may not have been an elixir of life

but as an insecticide and a weapon of war it had its uses.

At one point he actually tried to buy the castle

by trading it for his formula for his elixir,

he also claimed that his elixir

would help him live to be 130 years old.

But rumours began to circulate that dippel was experimenting

on the corpses of dead people.

It's said that he had a particular like

for exhuming dead bodies after dark

and he'd try and dig out the fresher bodies

because he believed

it still contained some of their soul within them.

Suspicions still surround dippel's research

and of course he never won his battle for immortality.

Dippel died of a stroke in 1734.

But some claimed that he was poisoned

because he was so unpopular with the locals.

After dippel's death,

castle Frankenstein faded into obscurity

but in 1814,

a young woman was travelling with her fiance

through central prussia,

her name was Mary shelley.

On that journey, they stopped at gernsheim

which is only ten miles away from Frankenstein's castle

and you can see the castle from there.

It's entirely possible that she heard tales from locals

and people in the party of the castle

and even possibly of some of its most notorious inhabitants.

Four years later,

Mary shelley published her debut novel,

'Frankenstein' or the modern 'prometheus.'

Mary shelley's Frankenstein

became one of the most iconic horror novels of all time,

it has been in reprint all over the world.

It was incredibly visionary piece of work,

especially amazing,

the woman who wrote it was only 18 years old.

Shelley's story about a scientist who made life out of death

echoed the legend of Johann konrad dippel.

For many dippel was the original doctor Frankenstein.

It's certainly plausible that some thread of this story

was something she'd picked up along the way,

the fact that she used the name Frankenstein for her doctor

is one hint.

We'll probably never know

but it's certainly fun to think about that connection.

(Dramatic music)

Today, castle Frankenstein and it's haunting legends

make it a real tourist hotspot.

It's certainly been good for the people in this region

they get thousands of visitors who love to visit the castle

and apparently Halloween night in this castle

is really something to see.

Inevitably there are local legends that dippel still haunts this site.

Supposedly, he can be seen sitting on the chapel roof

with his bones clanking,

hunting for the lost entranceway to his laboratory.

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