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, dark and deadly discovered

from a shocking secret hidden under the home

of a founding father.

He finds something gruesome.

Sticking outta the dirt is a human thigh bone.

To a strange bunch of coffins.

Each of the coffins contains figurines carved out of pine,

but the bodies are disfigured

with missing parts like arms and legs.

To a cursed army of soldiers.

The villagers suffered such terrible fates

and the dark legend that they feared

really did come to pass.

Join us now because nothing stays hidden forever.

It is a Saturday in Denmark.

You and your brother are wadding through a bog.

It's a strange place at the best of times

and it's about to get stranger.

Two brothers, Vigo and Emil Hogart

are harvesting this wet spongy carpet of peat.

Peat can be cut into brick form

and burn for use and cooking and heating their houses.

Now as the brothers are digging deeper

into the vegetation, they hit something that feels off.

They start digging deeper and deeper into this hole

until they see a face looking right back up at them.

It is definitely a body

and it looks like a recent burial

because the skin and the soft tissue is intact.

It hasn't decomposed.

The body is male.

He's wearing a pointed sheepskin cap

and a belt around his waist,

but other than that, he's totally naked.

The corpse is on the small side,

a bit like a child curled up in a fetal position

and a terrible thought occurs to these brothers.

A schoolboy nearby has recently gone missing.

This must be his dead body.

So the brothers make the trek to the nearby village of

Silkebork to notify authorities of their dark finding.

Police investigate, but some things just don't add up.

There are no signs of digging.

So how did it get so deep?

Even weirder is that the corpse's nails

are cured and blackened

and the skin is this bluish black color.

The police call in some backup,

archaeologist, Dr. P.V. Glob from a local university.

Dr. Glob takes a look at the body

and he knows one thing conclusively.

This is is not a recent death.

He doesn't know how old it is, but it's old.

Then the professor shares something

even more disturbing.

When he removes a lump of peat next to the corpse's head,

he finds two leather ties twisted into a rope

around the corpse's neck.

It's clear that this person

did not die of natural causes.

In order to study the body properly.

Glob realizes that they have to move the body from this bog

to the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen.

When they finally make it to the museum,

Dr. Glob makes another surprising discovery.

Even though it's perfectly preserved,

the body turns out to be over 2300 years old.

It is from the Iron Age

and it isn't a child.

From dental analysis, they estimate

that he is between 30 and 40 years old.

They nickname him the Tollund man.

But why is he so well preserved?

The moss, which covers the entire surface of the bog,

it's called Sphagnum,

and it discolors and preserves the skin and the hair.

The moss makes the bog water highly acidic.

This turns the skin and soft tissue

into a leather like material

that under the right conditions can last for centuries.

Peat bogs also lack oxygen,

which means that the microorganisms

that cause decay in dead bodies can't survive.

Coupled with that acidic water,

you have the perfect recipe for preservation.

This also allows experts

to figure out how he died.

Analysis of his neck and the rope that he was buried with

pinpoint that the cause of death was hanging.

Back in the Iron Age

people were hanged and killed not only for crimes,

but as ritual sacrifices.

To the ancient people who placed the Tollund

man in the bog, the wetlands were seen as otherworldly.

Sort of like borderland to the beyond.

People back then believed

that the Gods controlled everything.

Now that includes the success of their harvest,

and since the bogs produced so much of their food,

they would make sacrifices

to ensure that the God stayed happy.

Many scholars see the fact that he is buried

so intentionally in the bog

with his mouth and his eyes gently closed

and his body sort of carefully arranged as eternal rest.

All of these are signs that Tollund Man

may have achieved a kind of immortality

as a sacred sacrifice to the gods.

Next, imagine yourself strolling on a beach

in northern Alaska.

It's a nice sunny day,

but it's going to lead to something dark and deadly.

In 2007, a family is taking a stroll

in the town of Quinhagak, Alaska,

which is this small village

on the coast of the Bering Sea.

While they're out on the beach,

their kid stumbles upon something unexpected.

It turns out to be a wooden mask,

but this wooden mask is really old and weathered.

The child's parents take the mask back to the village

to show it off to the community,

and sure enough, members of the Yupik tribe

recognize it as something

that could have been created by their ancestors.

The Yupik people inhabited the coastal regions of Alaska

and Northern Greenland for roughly 2,400 years.

They were all but wiped out

by European colonizers in the 18th and 19th century.

Soon several more relics

begin to wash up on the shore.

There are baskets, carved harpoon shafts,

ivory tattoo needles, hundreds of them.

What's going on is that unseasonably warm temperature

has melted the permafrost and has released artifacts

that were at one time stuck in the ice.

The Yupik people reach out to a professor

from the University of Alaska at Fairbanks,

Dr. Rick Knecht.

Rick Knecht arrives and he realizes

that these are some of the oldest Yupik artifacts

ever found, and they become

like a trail of breadcrumbs that leads

to the remains of a hidden settlement

dated to have been from 1590 to 1630.

A dig site is immediately established

to see what else can be salvaged.

Only for them to find more than they bargained for.

They discover skeletons all lying face down.

Some of them appear to have been tied up

and then murdered with spears or arrows.

Essentially, the settlement that they find

is the scene of a massacre.

The remains are analyzed

and it's determined that they're almost all women,

children or elderly men.

So what this suggests is that men

of fighting age were probably away

engaged in battle when the massacre took place.

Who or what could be behind these killings?

Carbon dating of the artifacts suggests

that the massacre might have taken place

around what are called the bow and arrow wars,

which were a series of brutal and bloody battles

that happened in Alaska before Russian explorers

arrived in the 1700s.

28 bodies are discovered in all

as well as the charred earth, burnt baskets

and evidence of a fire.

The belief is that a fire was lit

to smoke out the inhabitants of the village,

and upon coming out, they were all captured and executed.

The roots of this conflict

go all the way back to the 13th century.

Around that time there was a 550 year period

of awful weather called the little ice age.

With temperatures dropping,

there is obviously going to be massive scarcity

of food, of resources.

So during times of crisis

with people starving can easily lead to conflict.

Whatever its cost,

this massacre was buried in the permafrost for centuries.

The discovery of the site is huge

for archaeologists and for historians.

To date they've found and brought back for research

around 100,000 different artifacts.

Not only can the Yupik people now find

a true link to their past,

but it is an important link for the people of today

to understand the way their ancestors lived

thousands of years ago.

It's 1974 and a small village in northwest China

and severe droughts are about to set off

an alarming chain of events.

We have the small sleepy town of Xiyang, China.

People in this village are farmers

and need water to grow their own food,

but with no rain in sight, things are starting

to get desperate and they need to take action fast.

So the villagers come up with a plan to dig wells.

By the third day of this project,

they've made great progress.

They're down about 15 feet.

Now, one of the workers man by the name of Yang Zhifa,

as he's digging his shovel hits something hard.

He's not exactly sure what it is at first.

When he keeps digging it out,

the broken head of a sculpture emerges.

Feeling he's discovered something important,

Yang takes it back to the village,

but everyone is terrified to touch it.

For the local people, finding the broken head of a statue

points to things that aren't necessarily good.

This could be sacrilegious,

it could be something to do with the ancestors.

At any rate, it's not the kind of thing

you want sitting around your house.

Word of the mysterious sculpture

spreads fast.

So the government brings in a team to investigate.

What they find next is astounding.

One by one these large

terracotta warrior statues are unearthed.

The men vary in height, uniform and hairstyle

depending on their rank, and the soldiers

are armed with actual bronze weapons,

with axes, crossbows, and spears.

Some of them are even mounted on horses and chariots.

When the dust is settled from this excavation,

archaeologists discovered more than 8,000

of these terracotta statues.

This incredible treasure represents

one of the rarest and most priceless archaeological finds

of the modern age.

It's an amazing discovery

that raises an obvious question.

Why are the warriors buried here?

The village is actually close

to some pretty sacred land.

It's the site where China's first emperor Qin Shi Huang

was laid to rest around 2000 years ago.

It becomes clear to the research team

that these statues were carved

and then buried as an army

to protect the emperor in his afterlife.

However, not everyone's excited

about this find.

It is believed that to disturb this land

could cause a series of epic misfortune

for those who dig out these statues.

Soon their fears are realized

when the government of evicts all residents from their homes

to make way for a museum

dedicated to the terracotta army,

The villagers are forced to leave

the only lives they'd ever known

and are erased from the history of this discovery.

It destroys their lives and their livelihood,

and then they have to start over with very few resources.

It's even worse for the men

who make the initial find.

As years go on, several of the discoverers

sink into really desperate poverty.

One of them gets a skin disease

and another one dies in great pain at home,

but he never knows what's wrong with him.

And then in 1997, racked with disease

and having no money to pay for medicine,

former digger Huang Puji waits until his family is out,

places a rope around his neck and hangs himself.

For the villagers who were evicted from their land

to make way for this museum

and who suffered such terrible fate as a result of it,

to them, it seems like the dark curse that they feared

really did come to pass.

While some people fear unleashing a curse by accident,

others call on them deliberately.

In 1785, a farmer near Silchester, England

is plowing his field

when he spots something shiny in the soil.

He bends down and is shocked to see this large gold ring

sticking out of the tracks.

It's a 10 sided faceted hoop

with a square bezel that has the goddess Venus on it.

It seems rather ancient and pretty ornate.

Both the hoop and the bezel have Latin inscriptions

carved on them, and the translation reads,

Seniciane Vivas n de, live in God.

The farmer sells the ring

and it's forgotten for decades

until a garden renovation in 1805,

The Bathurst family of Litany Park in Gloucestershire

are having their garden excavated

and then suddenly as they dig,

they discover they've hit a stone wall.

Soon, to everyone's surprise, they unearth the ruins

of a building along with photo of artifacts on the grounds.

As they continue, they find out

that this is a temple dedicated to the God

known as Nodens.

Nodens was a Celtic healing God in ancient Britain

and very little is known about this God.

So this temple becomes a very important archaeological site.

Archaeologists take over the excavation

of the temple site for the next two years,

when another surprising find is made.

A lead tablet is discovered

and written on this tablet is a curse.

Curse tablet or a defixio

is a common part of many ancient religions.

It can actually be a positive, thanking a God for a kindness

or a good fortune, or a demand for divine vengeance.

And in this case, the writer of tablet asks for revenge.

The translation reads, "For the God Nodens:

"Silvianus has lost a ring.

"Do not allow the thief Senicianus any good health

"until the ring is returned."

But it's not until 100 years later

that someone actually starts to connect the dots.

Renowned archaeologist, Sir Mortimer Wheeler.

In 1928, Wheeler examines the cursed tablet

and he remembers hearing the discovery of the ring

with Senicianus described on it.

He thinks these two discoveries

must be connected.

Wheeler's belief is that Senicianus

stole the ring from Silvianus

and then had his own name inscribed upon it

to throw off suspicion.

Then when Silvianus finds out he creates

the curse tablet against his foe.

But how did Sensianus get his hands

on the ring in the first place?

It turns out that the main temple building

was believed to be a large dormitory

for sick pilgrims to recover there,

and it's believed that Silvianus had his ring stolen

while he was sick and battling illness there.

The site where the ring is found in Hampshire

is about 80 miles from the temple of Nodens

where that cursed tablet is discovered.

Both are located on an important trade route

known as the Devil's Highway.

It's also known that the Latin word Redi Viva

was added to the tablet to basically say

the curse shall go into effect again,

meaning that Silvianus still didn't lose

his thirst for revenge.

The ring goes on display in 2013

and can now be seen by visitors

from all over the world.

And there's one final twist to this story.

It turns out Wheeler had a little help

putting the pieces together

from an Oxford scholar of ancient languages

named J.R.R. Tolkien.

Of course, Tolkien famously went on to write

about a stolen cursed ring in his 1939 book "The Hobbit"

and again in "Lord of the Rings".

Is this a coincidence

or was Silvianus's ring the inspiration?

We will never know.

In 1971, a researcher aboard a ship

in a remote part of Asia

is enjoying a summer day on the water.

Then a dark cloud descends.

It is mid-July in the Aral Sea

and the 12 person crew of the Soviet research vessel,

Lev Berg is collecting water samples

and other sea creatures in an effort

to identify why there is a dramatically declining

population of fish.

The youngest member of the crew is a 24-year-old female

who is working on the deck

collecting fish and plants

and then takes them below deck

to evaluate them and then incorporate them

into her lab journal.

One morning the ship approaches a remote island

called Vozrozhdeniya, otherwise known as rebirth

or a Resurrection Island.

This island was once home

to a very picturesque fishing village,

but today as the ship passes by,

it moves through a mysterious brown haze.

The passengers don't think much of it

and continue on with their research project.

On August 6th, they returned to Aralsk

and the female researcher

had developed an illness during the last five days

of the cruise.

And as soon as they put into port, she rushes home.

She's suffering from fever, coughs, muscle aches,

and the doctor prescribes antibiotics and aspirin.

But then very angry looking rash begins to occur

on her face back and other areas of her body.

Eventually her fever breaks and she recovers,

but then her 9-year-old brother

comes down with a fever as well

and also develops a skin rash.

The boy's entire body is covered with painful lesions.

The boy's school teacher comes to visit with him

and then she too gets very ill.

She can't eat or drink.

She gets high fever and gets covered with sores

everywhere on her body, face and scalp.

So many sores that there's like no space between them.

She dies soon after.

The boy's parents are terrified

and call a pediatrician to the house to examine their son.

When he does, he's shocked.

After multiple incorrect

or simply wishful diagnoses,

the correct diagnosis is finally made, smallpox.

A disease that formally had been eradicated

in the Soviet Union in the 1930s.

This is really strange because both the researcher

and her brother had been vaccinated against smallpox

and she doesn't have any idea

how she could have contracted the disease.

Over the next few weeks, eight more people

come down with smallpox.

And sadly, three die.

The Soviet government shuts down

the entire town of Aralsk,

stopping all transportation in or out.

And the 50,000 people are vaccinated

against smallpox in two weeks.

Quick containment of the virus

helps to prevent a full blown outbreak of smallpox,

and the authorities never take any responsibility.

It's not until 30 years later

that the source of the outbreak is finally uncovered.

Turns out that for many years

the Soviets had been using Vozrozhdeniya Island

as a test site for some of the world's

most deadly pathogens.

The site is called Arask Seven,

and on it they were developing anthrax, smallpox,

antibiotic resistant bacteria

and other diseases that the world had never seen.

When the Lev Berg

passed close to the island in 1971,

the female researcher was the person to get it

because she had spent more time on deck than anyone else.

And even though she was vaccinated,

she got it because the Soviets

were weaponizing smallpox virus

so that it would invade people

who were vaccinated and infect them.

When Arask Seven is ultimately abandoned in the 1990s,

the Soviets pumped formaldehyde

across the entire island in an attempt

to kill everything there because the pathogens

that have been released here

can survive for centuries.

And it could bring back some of the world's

deadliest biological weapons.

3,500 miles away, a different kind

of deadly discovery puts an entire town at risk.

Plymouth, England, about 240 miles southwest of London

is a naval port city, famously known as

the location where the pilgrims set sail

for the new world.

One day, then February, 2024,

Natalie Jury is just working on an addition to her home.

Her father Ian digs out an area

to lay out a foundation.

He hits some old pipes

and some broken bricks, nothing out of the ordinary,

But then Ian hits something he doesn't recognize.

It's big and he's not sure what it is.

So they call the police.

When police take a closer look,

they're shocked to see what

Natalie and her father have found.

An unexploded 1100 pound bomb from the Second World War.

It's a German SC500 transverse fused airdrop weapon,

the biggest type of bomb the Nazis dropped on England

during the entire war.

Plymouth is one of the most heavily bombed cities in England

during World War II.

The Plymouth Blitz occurred over the course

of seven nights in 1941,

and during that time, the Germans dropped more

than 205,000 incendiary bombs,

burning out the heart of the city.

But not all of those bombs went off

as Natalie and her father discover over 80 years later.

Police officers, firefighters,

more than a hundred military personnel

take charge of the site,

because there's a chance this bomb

could still explode.

And then anybody who lived

within a thousand feet of the bomb

was ordered to evacuate.

That was over 3000 people.

For two sleepless nights, around 30 of the armed forces'

most experienced bomb disposal specialists

work around the clock assessing the condition of the bomb.

They decide the least dangerous option

is to haul the bomb two miles through the city

and detonate it at sea.

Authorities eventually end up evacuating

more than 10,000 people,

and that's just to clear a path for the bomb

as it passes through the city.

This ends up being the largest evacuation

of people in the United Kingdom

since the second World War.

The streets are empty, it is eerily quiet,

and the whole community is holding its breath.

You have a military convoy slowly hauling this bomb

towards the Tour Point Ferry Slipway,

The convoy completes the mission,

taking the bomb out to sea.

It's successfully detonated 40 feet

below the surface of the water, sparing the city of Plymouth

from reliving the horrors of World War II.

Let's say you are renovating a historical landmark.

What you probably don't anticipate

is finding evidence that seems

straight out of a horror movie.

In 1998, the Benjamin Franklin house in London

is falling apart.

The Founding Father's home,

which is located at 36 Craven Street,

served as his residence

while he was serving as an ambassador for the colonies

to England prior to the American Revolution.

But 36 Craven Street is about to be turned into a museum

and it's in need of some serious renovation.

About a month into the renovation,

a worker is digging in the basement

and he finds something gruesome.

Sticking outta the dirt

is a human thigh bone.

The police are called immediately

and they're soon joined by a team of forensic scientists.

As they dig deeper day by day,

they unearth more and more bones.

Eventually the team ends up uncovering

over 1200 bone fragments

from 10 different bodies,

some of which are children.

Forensic tests indicate

that the bones are roughly 200 years old,

which means that they were more than likely buried

at the same time Benjamin Franklin

was living in that house.

The bones are too old to justify opening a homicide case,

but people wanna know why does Benjamin Franklin

have so many human remains buried in his basement?

The Institute of Archeology decides to take up the case,

and upon further analysis,

they find that some of the bones bear the marks

of having been scratched or broken by surgical instruments.

A femur bone shows signs

of having been amputated

and a number of skulls have small circles drilled out

probably from trepanay,

an ancient type of neurosurgery to treat head injuries.

The researchers connect a few gruesome dots

and realized the landlord of Franklin's home

was the mother of an anatomy student named William Hewson.

It turns out that William Hewson

was actually pretty close with Benjamin Franklin.

In fact, Franklin helped the young student

get elected to the Royal Society in London.

Hewson studies anatomy.

And in the 18th century anatomy as a field of study

is viewed with suspicion and contempt.

And the idea of dissecting bodies

is considered abhorrent

and it's even an outlawed practice.

So for these anatomy students

to actually conduct their practice,

they used to hire what they called resurrection men.

Essentially, these people who are criminal body snatchers

who would get their hands on human corpses

by any means necessary.

The location of 36 Craven would be the perfect spot

for resurrection men to drop off a snatched body.

At one end of the street was the gallows

and a wharf, a perfect place for delivering bodies

under the cover of darkness.

Whether or not Franklin knew

that Hewson was performing illegal dissections

in his basement is not clear.

But eventually, with tension rising

against the British and the colonies,

the men go their separate ways.

In 1775, Franklin makes his way back

to what will become the United States of America

and then ultimately signed

what will become the Declaration of Independence.

But as for Hewson, his fate isn't so illustrious.

While performing one of his dissections,

he accidentally cuts himself

and he dies from the ensuing infection.

The strange find at Ben Franklin's house is unnerving.

But what a crew discovers in Germany

is even darker and more surprising.

In 2024 in the town of Oppin, Germany,

a crew is digging in preparation

for an energy infrastructure project.

Everything on the dig is going according to plan.

Until the workers discover a pit.

And inside of the pit, they find a skeleton.

But this skeleton isn't laid out to rest

like a normal person would be as if it was buried.

Now the man is in a crouched position

on his left side with a massive four inch thick

110 pound stone on his legs.

It's clear the stone has been placed

on the body deliberately,

and it sure looks like it's been put there

to hold the corpse down.

Archeologists are called in

and examine the site.

They estimate that the grave dates

from the stone age over 4,000 years ago

providing a clue about the boulder

placed on the skeleton.

People from the stone age

were actually afraid of zombies

rising from the grave,

but they weren't known as zombies.

Back then they were known as Revenants.

Beings who returned from the dead

to terrorize the living,

either as spirits or as walking corpses.

Some cultures believe that until

a body completely decomposes,

it sits in a terrifying no man's land

between life and death.

Throughout Europe, graves have been found

showing extreme measures used to prevent bodies

from rising from the dead.

Bodies have been staked to the ground

or chained up or hung upside down

so that when the Revenant awakens,

it digs but in the wrong direction.

Further into the ground.

At least one corpse has even been found

with a scythe placed above the head

so that rising would lead to decapitation.

Now up to this point,

no Revenant graves had ever been found

dating back to the stone age in this area.

So this discovery in Germany is a really big deal.

Archaeologists have recovered

the remains from the skeletal grave

and are transferring them to a research facility in Holla

to try to figure out more about these bones

and this deviant burial once and for all.

What would you do if you stumbled on a strange place

you thought was a backdoor to Hell?

The mystery begins in Mexico 500 years ago.

In 1521, Spanish missionaries arrive in the Oaxaca Valley

of what is now southern Mexico

to spread Christianity throughout the region.

The Zapotec, the main indigenous group of the region,

have inhabited Oaxaca for the past 2200 years.

As the Franciscan monks are exploring their home in Metla,

they admire the intricate mosaics

and geometric designs on the clusters of buildings.

Then as they roam the area,

they find a strange cavity in the ground.

So they decide that they want to explore it,

and they begin to descend into the darkness.

They travel down 20 to 25 feet underground

and find a damp, cold, and dark maze

of tunnels and chambers.

This subterranean labyrinth.

In the chambers are idols, mummies,

and some kind of chapel.

This is a Zapotec place of the dead

and the Spanish friars are completely unfamiliar

with the Zapotec's belief systems,

and so they're afraid that this is a place

where black magic is performed

or devil worship happens.

Then they find one more underground chamber,

which is the most unsettling discovery of all.

A large stone door that leads to a deep cavern

that looks like, to the monks, it goes on forever.

Fearing that this is a literal back door to Hell,

the missionaries flee

and immediately seal off the underground maze.

Then right on top of this site,

the Franciscans build the church of San Pablo

to turn it from a place of devil worship

into a place for the worship of God.

Legends of the monk's discovery

passed down through the generations.

Then in 1674, Francisco de Burgoa,

Dominican priest and historian,

writes down the Tale of the Monk's discovery

for the first time ever,

and the site comes to be known by the Mexican people

as Mequita, which means Hell, or the place of sadness.

Christianity spreads through the region

over the ensuing centuries

and the Church of San Pablo

becomes a religious and cultural fixture to locals.

But dark tales of what lies beneath never go away.

In 2020, having read de Burgoa's account

researcher and explorer, Marco Vigato puts together a team

to see if there is any truth to the stories

about what lies beneath the church of San Pablo.

But for Vigato, getting a permit

to dig under this revered church

that's been there for 500 years

is not going to happen.

So Vigato and a team of researchers

set out to explore the area underneath the church

using non-invasive methods.

With ground penetrating radar,

Vigato creates a 3D map of the area beneath the church.

The map confirms the existence of a series of tunnels

and chambers underneath the church

where legends say, a great underground temple was located.

But the most fascinating discovery

is the stone doorway that leads to this deep cavern

that extends far into the earth.

Vigato wonders if this could be the story backdoor to hell

that made the monks so frightened

that it led them to seal up all of the tunnels

around 500 years ago.

Investigations at this ancient site are still ongoing,

but there are no immediate plans

for a closer firsthand exploration

of the back door to Hell,

which honestly seems like a wise choice.

In Scotland in 1836, a group of boys

are about to make a discovery

that can only be called scary.

It's a late fall afternoon.

Three boys are hunting for rabbits

on the outskirts of Edinburgh in Scotland,

and they're climbing up this extinct volcano

that's called Arthur's Seat,

which is named for the legendary King Arthur.

But then suddenly one of the boys loses his footing

while holding onto a piece of rock and falls.

Now he's completely fine.

He clambers right back up.

He notices that the rock

that he had grabbed onto came loose

and behind the rock, he sees this hole

and when he looks inside,

he sees something surprising.

Coffins.

They're 17 in total, laid out in three rows,

but these aren't normal sized coffins.

They're tiny, barely four inches long.

While the coffins are generally just plain wood,

some of them have little ornamentations in filigree

from little bits of tin,

and all of the coffins are pinned tightly shut

so that they can't be easily opened.

The boys don't really know what to do,

so they take these coffins to their school teacher,

man by the name of Mr. Ferguson.

When Ferguson Prize opened the coffins,

he finds something even more unsettling.

Each of the coffins contains figurines carved out of pine,

but the bodies are disfigured

with missing parts like arms and legs.

Some of them are in clothing

that's crudely stitched together.

Others are in ornate fabrics.

Some are wrapped in fabric like a mummy

and some are naked.

When Ferguson shows this finding to his colleagues,

they're fascinated, but they're also concerned.

Why would somebody build these 17 tiny coffins,

then create these tiny pine figurines,

and then place these coffins

into the side of a mountain?

The find ignites wild tails in the press,

including one suggesting the coffins

are part of a Satanic spell manufacturing.

But the truth may be even more sinister.

A few years earlier, two men,

William Hare and William Burke

are arrested for selling bodies to an anatomy lecturer

at a college in Edinburgh.

Digging up corpses and selling them

was a fairly common, but illegal practice.

Remember Resurrection Men?

But Burke and Hare went about their business

a little bit differently.

In addition to robbing graves and stealing corpses

to bring to these medical facilities,

they kill people and sell the bodies for profit.

By the time the pair are arrested,

they've snatched 17 bodies,

exactly the number of coffins

the boys found at Arthur's Seat.

So the thinking goes that maybe Burke and Hare

built these 17 tiny coffins

with the small figurines

and placed them in the inside of Arthur's Seat

as a way of showing penance for their sins.

Or perhaps just as a sick joke.

175 years later in 2005,

researchers collect DNA samples from the coffins

to compare them against DNA samples from William Burke.

But the results are inconclusive.

So to this day, we don't know for sure

if Burke and Hare are the ones

that created these creepy little coffins.

But what we do know is that these 17 tiny coffins

are currently resting in peace

at the National Museum of Scotland.

We may never know the full truth

behind these discoveries,

but one thing is certain,

there are more buried secrets out there.

I'm Danny Trejo.

Thanks for watching "Mysteries Unearthed".