Original subtitles

Mysteries can be buried anywhere.

Under the earth.

Beneath the sea,

or even right under our own feet.

And when we stumble upon them,

sometimes what we find can change history.

Tonight, mysterious structures

from a strange relic beneath the streets of Manhattan.

This wood matches the wood

from another high profile construction project.

To an underwater wonder.

We've all heard of Atlantis,

but there is another mythical lost city.

To a long lost society unearthed by Mother Nature.

It's the most well-preserved neolithic site

in the entire United Kingdom.

Join us now because nothing stays hidden forever.

In the 1980s, Bruno Kowalsczewki

and his father are hiking outside Bruniquel, France

when they notice a breeze coming out

of what looks like some kind of animal hole.

Bruno kind of becomes obsessed

with figuring out what is the source of the air

that is coming out of this hole.

On weekends and vacations,

he rides his bike 12 miles to the site and he digs.

The tunnel was really small.

It was just the size of his body,

and he had to dig and dig

and then turn around to dump the dirt behind him.

After several months,

he's able to tunnel into this thing about 40 feet.

And then what does he find?

A giant rock blocking his further progress.

Now look, he'd love to go at this boulder

with a giant sledgehammer,

but there's no room.

So instead, he pecks away at this with a hammer for weeks.

Eventually, Bruno breaks through

to a small void where he can at least kneel,

but he's far from finished

and continues digging from months.

Eventually he breaks into a corridor

and a space that's big enough

that he can finally stand up.

There's stalactites and stalagmites.

It's really like this alien world.

In the center of this cavernous room,

deep in the earth,

Bruno sees something that absolutely should not be there.

What he's come upon is some kind of ruins.

There are two circles made up of 400 stalagmites

deliberately placed on ground

and is shaped very similar to that of the infinity symbol.

On further inspection,

it looked like the stalagmites were broken,

and some of them were even glazed with fire first

before they were set into their positions.

There were support stones added.

Other stalagmites were piled up for future use.

So it's incredibly clear that this was manmade.

He doesn't know how old the place is,

but he knows he's the first person

to be in there for a very, very long time.

For more information about

his incredible find,

Bruno calls an archaeologist, Francois Rouzaud.

When Rouzaud enters the cave

and he looks at this rock structure, he is blown away.

He agrees. This is not natural.

It's human made.

Scattered among the stalagmites

are animal bones,

so Rouzaud decides to carbon date them.

Tests indicate that the bones

are roughly 50,000 years old.

Work in Buniquel Cave goes quiet

for the next 15 years,

but in 2014, a Belgian geologist named Sophie Verheyden

decides to do more testing.

Something keeps bugging her.

We know the age of the animal bones,

but how old are the stalagmites?

So she takes samples from the stalagmites

to determine when it was they were broken off

to create this double circle configuration.

When the results come back, she is stunned.

These rocks were broken off about 176,000 years ago.

That makes Bruniquel Cave

the oldest manmade structure ever discovered.

That also means that these were built 130,000 years

before people like us, Homo Sapiens, were in the area.

So they couldn't have been the creators of these sites.

Incredibly,

scientists think they were built by the Neanderthals.

The Neanderthals, along with another Asian ancient people

called the Denisovans,

are our closest ancient human relatives.

This changes everything we thought

we knew about the Neanderthals,

but leaves us with more questions than answers.

Researchers still have no idea

why were the rocks placed in this particular shape,

this thing that looks like an infinity symbol.

So there's still a lot

that we don't know about Neanderthal culture

and how they were thinking.

Today, Bruniquel Cave is mostly quiet.

The French government has never opened it to tourists,

and the boy who discovered it all,

Bruno Kowalsczewki, is now in his fifties.

He continued caving and he's continued to work

in tight confined spaces

because today he's a chimney sweep.

Figuring out why something was built

thousands of years ago is hard enough.

Now imagine trying to do that deep underwater.

In 2007, underwater archaeologist,

Dr. Mark Holley is on a mission

in Lake Michigan's Grand Traverse Bay.

He's using sonar to scan the lake bed,

looking for a ship that sunk years ago,

but has yet to be found.

But as Dr. Holley looks at the sonar readings,

he sees something huge,

something that's definitely not a shipwreck.

So Dr. Holley puts on his scuba gear,

he dives down to the bottom,

and what he finds is incredibly strange.

It's a perfectly straight line of boulders

and it looks manmade.

It's just this long, almost ominous formation

in otherwise flat sand.

So he decides he's gonna follow the line,

see where it leads him.

And eventually it leads to another feature

that's a circle of stones.

And there's a big steep drop off

right at the end of that circle.

The circular stone pattern

is a lot like another famous rock structure.

When you look at pictures of this,

it almost looks like mini Stonehenge.

But the rocks are about two feet high.

News of what comes to be known

as Lake Michigan Stonehenge

makes a splash around the world.

The mini Stonehenge might be 10,000 years old,

just 5,000 years older than Stonehenge in England.

It's, of course, possible

that these structures did have some kind of religious

or spiritual significance,

not unlike what many people propose for Stonehenge.

Holley, on the other hand,

thinks that the media has this all wrong

because the main feature here is not the stone circles,

but this mile long line of stones.

While Holley continues to rack his brain

on what this could be for,

another discovery in a different Great Lake

sheds new light on this mystery.

In 2009, a University of Michigan anthropologist

named John O'Shea publishes a paper

about some of the research

he's been conducting in Lake Huron.

It turns out that he has discovered there

similar structures to those found in Lake Michigan.

O'Shea's conclusion was

that these features are prehistoric hunting structures

that are known as drivelines.

Drivelines were rock formations created

by native caribou hunters in North America,

thousands of years ago.

Caribou have a unusual trait.

They instinctively follow linear formations or structures.

Caribou would be herded toward the drivelines

and brought all the way to the circular formation.

There hunters would hide behind the boulders.

Having a steep drop off at the end

also would help hunters to channel the animals

into a certain area

where then humans could hunt them really effectively.

Holley is confident

that this structure is, in fact, a driveline,

but there's still a lot to be learned from the site.

Maybe there are many more of these sites out there

just sitting under the water

waiting for us to discover them.

Sometimes the most surprising thing about a structure

isn't what it is, but where it's found.

Take the strange discovery

made by some construction workers in New York City.

It's July of 2010

and work is going full steam ahead on the construction

of the new World Trade Center in lower Manhattan.

It's 6:15 AM

and Molly McDonald is just starting her shift.

She and a team of archaeologists have been hired

to act as consultants on this construction project.

She's there watching workers

level the bottom of this deep pit,

but as she looks down into the pit,

she sees something strange.

It looks like two long pieces

of curved timber are sticking out of the dirt.

Molly tells the backhoes to stop working

so she and her crew of archaeologists

can carefully dig by hand,

and what they dig out are more of these curved timbers

and other pieces that let them know that all of this wood,

it's actually pieces of a ship.

But what is a ship doing on dry land

in one of the biggest cities in the world?

They were given three days to recover as much

of the material as they could.

There were 14 people

working 16-hour shifts around the clock.

So they end up recovering about 200 pieces

of this 60-foot ship.

The old ship has been well preserved

underground, but now that it's exposed

to the sun and air,

it will quickly begin to decay.

The pieces of the ship are rushed

to the Maryland Archaeological Conservation Laboratory

and now comes the hard work.

Molly and her crew have to figure out

what is the story of this ship

and why was it found in the foundations of a building?

They start by calling in Neil Pederson

from Columbia University's Tree Ring Lab.

He's an expert in what is known as dendro-provenancing.

This is the science of looking at the rings in wood

and figuring out where and when it was cut down.

So Pederson has to compare the wood from the ship

with dated ring samples

specific to certain regions of the country.

After months of comparing the wood rings

from the ship to thousands of known samples,

Pederson gets a hit.

This wood matches the wood

from another high-profile construction project,

Independence Hall in the city of Philadelphia.

Now using the data as a guide,

Pederson estimates that the ship was built

around 1773 in Philadelphia.

Researchers wonder if this ship

could have been used in the Revolutionary War

and how it ended up buried in lower Manhattan.

In the late 1700s,

Manhattan was actually a lot smaller than it is today.

The population was growing fast,

so the city civic leaders knew

that they had to expand the territory

for people to live in.

So in the 1790s,

they formulated a plan to start

to expand the island.

They'd use sand and whatever material they could

to fill in and grow the island.

Historians believe the ship was wrecked

near the shore and used as part of the fill.

Some wonder if it sunk due to a deadly storm

or foul play during the war.

But Pederson has a different theory.

Pederson continues analyzing the wood,

and he finds there were major flaws in it,

namely holes, lots and lots of them.

So he thinks that maybe this ship was docked nearby

undergoing repairs, but then they realized

that this ship had to be junked.

Maybe that's why this ship found itself buried underground

only to see the light of day hundreds of years later.

If finding a revolutionary warship

buried in New York City sounds incredible,

check out this next story of another mysterious structure.

It is 2023 and a British company called Energean

is scanning the sea floor of the Mediterranean

looking for new oil and gas fields.

The ship is 55 miles off the coast of Israel.

They're using a robotic vehicle

to search a mile below the sea.

The robot sends back photos of the ocean floor,

which are pretty mundane,

but then suddenly engineers spot something

very strange and intriguing.

They see a large mound on the sea floor

that appears to be full of smaller objects.

Sticking out of the mound are what look

almost like urns, each a couple of feet tall.

They are piled on top of each other covered with sand.

They call the Israeli Antiquities Authority

to come check out what they find.

Experts from the IAA look at the images

and they conclude that there are hundreds of these urns

and they must have been part of the cargo from a shipwreck.

As they do more analysis,

it does look like there's a ship

below this cargo and

it's about 40 feet long.

They quickly try to find a way to recover some of the urns

and find out how old they are,

so maybe they could understand

what the ship is and where it's from.

So the IAA works with the company

to send down a robotic vehicle

that is skilled in handling fragile objects.

They successfully bring up a couple of these urns

and there's some material

that's inside of them that's still preserved.

Researchers suspect the urns contained oil,

agricultural products or wine.

Unfortunately, the tests are inconclusive,

But they're able to quickly date the urns themselves

and they conclude that they are 3,300 years old.

That makes this the world's oldest shipwreck

ever discovered in deep water

and suggests ancient mariners

had more advanced navigation technology

than we ever believed.

Whoever was sailing it,

they were not using land to navigate.

They had to probably use the sun and the stars.

Plus this ship was sailing

in the middle of the Mediterranean.

It's one million square miles

and the ocean can get extremely rough.

It's incredible to think

that 3,000 years ago a ship could be constructed

that could handle these rough seas.

If they're able to successfully explore the site,

it could revolutionize our understanding of navigation

it could revolutionize our understanding of navigation

thousands of years ago.

Most of us know this famous movie scene,

Indiana Jones running from a giant boulder.

What's not so well known is that it was inspired

by some real rocks.

Back in the 1930s,

the United Fruit Company is the world's

largest banana producer.

The president of the United Fruit Company

is a man named Sam Zemurray.

He's known as Sam the Banana Man,

but the Banana Man has some big troubles in Costa Rica.

Union unrest is disrupting production,

and Panama disease, which is a fungal infection,

is also devastating his crops.

Zemurray decides to move production.

In 1939, he finds the perfect place a rainforest

in the Diquis Delta.

One day, one of the company's earth movers

is plowing through the jungle

when it smashes into a massive boulder.

It's huge, but also perfectly unnaturally round.

Workers find hundreds of these stone spheres

ranging in size from a few inches

to over eight feet in diameter.

On Sam's orders, the United Fruit workers

start moving the spheres,

at least the ones they can.

Some of them weigh as much as 16 tons.

The Banana Man plans to have them destroyed

and to move on with his farming.

But Sam Zemurray's 30-year-old daughter, Doris,

has a different idea.

Doris Zemurray Stone is an anthropologist

who has recently moved to Costa Rica,

so she doesn't want to see these stones destroyed.

She wants to see them studied.

And after some back and forth,

she's able to prevail upon her father

to let her do just that.

Measuring the stones, most are within a few inches

of being perfect spheres

and carbon dating of the organic materials

dug up around them

suggests the rocks were constructed

somewhere between 600 and 1500 AD.

Why were these spheres carved

in the first place?

She suspects the key to this mystery

lies in their original positioning

before workers moved them.

She is able to establish

that some of the spheres were placed in lines,

some curved, some straight,

but it's not really explained

as to why they were placed in such a fashion.

Eventually, the stones are forgotten

until a curious architect named Ivar Zapp

decides to visit the site.

Zapp begins to analyze maps of stones

that are believed to be in their original locations.

On a hunch, Zapp decides to draw directional lines

suggested by the configuration of the stones,

and he's amazed at where they point to.

One grouping leads to Easter Island.

Another grouping leads to the Great Pyramids in Giza,

and another leads to Stonehenge.

Zapp theorizes that the arrangement

of the spheres indicate lines of sight

used for ancient navigation.

To many other experts,

Zapp's conclusions are a bit too outlandish.

They maintain the most likely purpose was a practical

or ceremonial one specific to the indigenous people there.

Regardless of their purpose,

the spheres have gained global attention

leading to their 2014 designation

as a UNESCO World Heritage site.

This is a remarkable find,

but what's almost as remarkable as the fact

that it could have been easily lost

had the Banana Man's daughter,

Doris Zemurray Stone, not stepped in

to convince her father that you know,

there might be something worth looking at here.

Next up, an underwater mystery

that's right out of a sci-fi movie.

Yonaguni Island is the western-most island of Japan,

and scuba divers flock there

because it's one of the few places

where you can regularly see hammerhead sharks.

In 1986, a local diver named Kihachiro Aratake

is out one day diving along the coast

when he sees something incredible.

Aratake is about 15 feet underwater

when he encounters a rock structure.

And when he looks closer,

it looks like this is part of a much larger formation

that stretches all the way down to the sea floor.

He follows it down

and he really can't believe what he's seeing.

Spread out before Aratake

is a whole group of formations.

The largest structure is almost 80 feet tall

and the size of a football field.

This particular structure seems to have a form

that looks very much like a stepped pyramid,

similar to what we see with the civilizations

like the Maya, the Aztec, and the Inca.

Aratake shares his discovery

with a marine geologist named Masaaki Kimura.

When Kimura dives the site,

he is also struck.

It looks manmade, the geometric formations,

the clean lines, the flat surfaces, the right angles.

Kimura calls the structure

the Yonaguni Monument

and thinks it could be the remnants of a lost civilization.

We've, of course, all heard of Atlantis,

but there is another mythical lost city.

This one in the Pacific,

the Kingdom of Mu.

The whole city supposedly sank into the ocean

following a natural disaster,

but nobody knows exactly where it was.

There's a lot of earthquakes in the area,

so it's not that hard to think of an earthquake

sinking an ancient city.

In fact, in April of 1771,

an earthquake triggered one

of the largest tsunamis in history,

which struck the coast of Yonaguni.

This makes Kimura think

that maybe these ruins are the result

from some other similar catastrophe.

Others in the scientific community

challenge Kimura's ideas.

They point out that sandstone,

which is common in this area,

tends to break off on its own into straight lines

and right angles, especially in areas like this

with a lot of tectonic activity.

Then in 2024,

a controversial new theory is proposed,

centering on something called cryptoterrestrials.

A group of researchers suggests

that structures like the one off of the coast

of Yonaguni could have been built

by intelligent non-human beings

that are hiding here on earth,

what are called cryptoterrestrials.

Despite this theory, Masaaki Kimura isn't buying it.

But until excavations are done

and evidence is offered,

speculation about Yonaguni

and similar structures is likely to continue.

and similar structures is likely to continue.

Imagine finding out that the house of your dreams

hides a 2,000-year-old secret.

That's just what happened to Luke Irwin

and his family in 2015.

So this house that they're looking at is perfect for them.

It's full of charm.

It's got a lovely old barn attached to it,

and in the backyard there's an old stone tub

that they're using as a planter for geraniums.

They just need to make a few tweaks,

just a few renovations,

and this place will be perfect for them.

But his kids have a special request.

They really want a rec room

and somewhere that they can play ping pong.

The barn is a perfect place for it,

but there's no electricity to it.

So he hires a contractor to dig underground

to lay cables that lead from the main house to the barn.

The workers are digging a trench in the barn

and they hit something solid about 18 inches

under the surface of the ground,

and they realize they've hit a mosaic

of red, white, and blue tiles.

Luke happens to walk in right at the moment

they were about to smash through it with pickaxes

and tells them, "Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop."

Remember, he's a designer,

so he's got an eye for these things.

Mosaic floors were used quite widely

in 19th century England.

Irwin knows this, so he thinks, let's stop.

Let's take a look and let's figure out the exact provenance

of what we found here.

Irwin calls the county government

and the next day,

they send a team of archaeologists to take a look.

At first glance,

it looks older than the 19th century.

The problem is that mosaic floors

are very difficult to date,

so what they need to do is dig around

kind of the edges of it a little bit

and see if there's any other kinds of material there

that might help them to date it properly.

The team excavates a small area,

and their minds are blown.

Below this mosaic,

they find pieces of another large structure

buried below the ground.

They realize through carbon dating and research,

that this structure must have been built

between 175 and 225 AD.

That's when the Roman Empire ruled

what is now modern day Great Britain,

And they used ground penetrating radar

to get a sense for what was going on underneath the ground.

It turns out there is an entire Roman villa

and it's huge.

It measures 165 feet by 165 feet.

It's probably three stories tall.

It may be the most complete Roman villa

ever found in the UK, untouched for 1500 years.

The British government designates the site

as one of national importance

and says it must be preserved at all costs.

Therefore, the Irwins are extremely limited on what

and where they can build on their own property.

But on the bright side,

Luke Irwin used the mosaic pattern

that he found in a new line of rugs.

And by the way, that beautiful stone planter

filled with geraniums,

well, the archaeologists recognized this too.

They saw that it is also Roman

and it's not a stone planter, it's a coffin.

Home renovations aren't the only thing

that uncover surprising finds.

Sometimes a routine repair turns up something remarkable.

It's 2004 in Jerusalem,

and the authorities have quite a mess on their hands.

An old pipe has burst just outside the old city walls,

and it is spilling raw sewage all over the streets.

Authorities send in archaeologists

Ronnie Reich and Eli Shukron to supervise.

The crews start digging into the ground with a backhoe.

Suddenly Shukron hears something weird, a scraping sound,

which is odd because he thinks

they're just digging through dirt.

He yells for the workers to stop

because he thinks that there must be something under there.

Shukron and Reich start going down

and digging in with their bare hands

to see what they find.

Shukron is digging and he clears away a flat area.

He keeps working at it

and he finds that there's an edge,

and it turns out what he's discovered

is actually a series of three steps.

As they dig down,

they found another set of steps and another,

all of them leading down to an open rectangular area.

Now, the location where they are is at the bottom

of a slope that leads to the Temple Mount.

This is where the second temple of Jerusalem stood.

So they start to put two and two together.

According to the Bible,

this area once held an important site

known as the Pool of Siloam.

The Pool of Siloam was used by Jewish pilgrims

to purify themselves

before they had access to the temple.

It's also referenced in the Bible as the site

where Jesus is said to have healed a blind man.

But when the Romans

destroyed the temple around 70 AD,

the pool was also demolished.

The team starts to wonder, could this be it?

Soon the archaeologists get a lucky break.

Embedded in the steps they find four coins.

All the coins feature the image

of somebody called Alexander Jannaeus.

He was a Hellenistic Jewish king

who ruled in this area from 103 to 76 BC.

This indicates that the steps were built

at that time when the Pool of Siloam was first in use.

Shukron and Reich are now positive.

This is the Pool of Siloam.

The Israeli Antiquities Authority

announces the discovery to the world,

and it's considered the most significant

Jewish ritual bath ever discovered.

In 2023, the Israeli government decided

that it was time for the pool to be open to the public,

And it's all because one archaeologist, Eli Shukron

decided to make everybody stop

when he heard that scraping noise.

We all learned about Greek mythology at some point.

Stories about gods like Zeus and Apollo

or strange creatures like centaurs.

But could these stories be real?

Crete is a large island off

the southern coast of Greece.

It's the most-visited island in Greece,

which is why the Greek government has been trying

to build a new airport there.

In 2020, work begins on a new airport

near the town of Castelli.

Crews are excavating to put down the foundations

for a new radar tower.

But as they're digging,

they hit something that's not supposed to be there.

They find a stone wall.

After digging further,

they realize it's actually part

of a larger structure,

so they call in the big guns.

Archaeologists from the Greek culture ministry show up

and they start very carefully excavating

to see what this structure is.

Over the next several weeks,

they discover a set of eight stone rings

with walls that are about five and a half feet high.

In the center of this, there's a structure

that archaeologists believe once had a roof.

Also radiating from the center

of the circle are other stone walls.

Looked at from above,

it almost looks like a giant wheel

about 157 feet in diameter.

Archaeologists are completely stumped

as to what it might be,

but they find some pottery nearby

that might hold a clue.

The pottery at this site dates

to between 2000 and 1700 BC,

which means that this structure was built by the Minoans.

And the Minoans were an advanced civilization

that thrived here on Crete

and other islands until they mysteriously disappeared

around 1100 BC.

The dating of the wheel structure places it

to around the same time as some monumental Minoan palaces

that had been earlier discovered nearby.

But unlike the palaces,

the purpose of the wheel is completely unknown.

In a statement,

the Greek culture ministry

called this labyrinthine, like a maze.

There are pretty obvious connections between mazes

and Greek mythology.

This gives experts an idea

of what the circle could be and it's legendary.

One of the most famous stories in Greek mythology

takes place on the island of Crete,

and it pits the heroic Theseus against the half man,

half bull creature known as the Minotaur.

And the Minotaur of legend is said

to have lived in the center of a maddening maze.

Is it possible that this structure

proves the mythological Minotaur was real?

It is certainly possible

that history can become distorted

and altered over time.

Maybe this structure is the historical

origin of the Minotaur myth.

Archaeologists continue digging at the site

in search of clues, and who knows,

maybe they'll discover something that proves

that something like this ancient myth actually happened.

2000 miles away,

another ancient structure is revealed.

This time by Mother Nature.

It's 1850 and a massive winter storm slams

through the Orkney Islands in Scotland.

The storms are fierce.

We're talking about two days of high tides,

flood waters, high winds.

It rips apart the villages.

It floods them and kills roughly 200 people.

When the waters recede,

locals find that much

of the picturesque landscape has washed away.

A wealthy landowner named William Watt

has a massive estate called Skaill House,

and after the storm, he goes out to assess any damage

that might have happened to his property.

Now, this property includes a knoll

and a grass-covered mound that's existed

for as long as the locals can remember.

They call this knoll Skara Bra.

As Watt looks at his property,

he discovers a strange collection

of animal bones, shells,

and stone tools sticking out of the dirt.

Watt's son called Willie has an interest in geology,

and so when he learns about this,

he decides that he's going to explore a little bit.

Willie starts digging

and he suddenly hits a solid stone slab.

It's the roof of a buried stone hut.

Now he doesn't want to damage the site,

so he works slowly.

He knows this could be something historically significant.

He hasn't seen any stone structures

like this around the island.

Excavations continue in the ensuing decades,

ultimately revealing nine stone hunts.

Willie realizes these are the remains

of an ancient village.

And the site comes to be known as Skara Brae,

a play on the original Skara Bra.

In the 1970s with advancements made in carbon dating,

experts determined that Skara Brae was created

around 3,100 BC,

which makes Skara Brae the oldest

and most well-preserved Neolithic site

in the entire United Kingdom.

Now, researchers also find that the village was abandoned

around 2,500 BC, but they don't know why.

People speculate that it had been another terrible storm.

Might have driven them out.

Could it have been something else?

Disease, conflict, it's hard to know.

Now if a devastating storm did destroy Skara Brae,

it's oddly fitting that another storm is

what revealed it more than 4,000 years later.

He's one of pop culture's best-loved heroes.

Could a recent discovery in Nottingham, England

prove he really existed?

Back in 2009,

the Galleries of Justice Museum in Nottingham,

England is undergoing some renovation

in preparation for new exhibits.

The museum was housed in a former jail

and courthouse building, and there are caves below it

that were used as cells for centuries.

One day when workers rip up a floor

in one of the cave exhibits,

they make an unusual and chilling discovery,

a very clear manmade shaft that goes down 20 feet.

The workers aren't sure what to make of this discovery.

So they bring in the museum's director, Gary Holmes.

Holmes immediately recognizes the structure.

It's an oubliette.

The oubliette was a notorious

all-in-one torture and execution chamber

used throughout medieval France and England.

It comes from the French word oublier "to forget"

and that was the whole idea

behind this terrifying structure.

They just threw prisoners in there

and deliberately forgot about them.

Holmes describes this particular oubliette

as a bottle dungeon

because its silhouette is similar

to that of a wine bottle.

The only entrance is a grate or trap door at the top.

Prisoners would be lowered and often thrown

into these holes.

The dungeons themselves were often so narrow,

the prisoner could neither sit nor lie down.

So now they were stuck staring at this hatch,

oftentimes going insane

while they stood starving in abject blackness.

Sometimes prisoners would be alone,

but often they would share the space

with the decaying remains of the previous inhabitant

and the vermin that these rotting corpses would attract.

The find in Nottingham is certainly grisly,

but some experts believe this particular torture chamber

once held an infamous prisoner.

We all know the fictional character of Robin Hood

who took from the rich and gave to the poor

and tangled with the Sheriff of Nottingham.

Experts have debated for years

whether he was a real historical figure.

Many believe that he was.

The first known literary reference

to Robin Hood comes from 1377 in a poem called

"The Visions of Piers Plowman"

and the Sloane Manuscripts

in the British Museum have an account of his life

that says he was born around 1160,

but there are other accounts

that say he lived in the 1300s.

Either way,

Robin Hood's life seems to overlap

with the history of the dungeon.

At the Nottingham Museum site used to hold prisoners

as far back as the 7th century.

An English ballad from the 1400s

called "Robin Hood and the Monk"

tells a story about the bandit being observed,

praying in the Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Nottingham.

In this story, Robin Hood is captured

and taken to a jail where he's held in a dungeon

until his lieutenant, Little John, is able to save him.

The St. Mary's Church is believed

to be dated back to at least 1086.

It still stands today

and just steps away from the jail building

where the oubliette was found.

So putting these pieces together,

some experts believe that Robin Hood himself

could have been in that oubliette waiting

for his ally to rescue him.

Museum officials are working hard to raise funds

for a comprehensive archaeological

exploration of the site.

They hope that someday research may shed some light

on this oubliette's very dark history.

Ancient lost ships, Roman villas,

and so many mysterious structures.

What they tell us about human history is truly incredible.

I'm Danny Trejo.

Thanks for watching Mysteries Unearthed.