Original subtitles

Narrator: A secret world war ii allied base in Albania

with an extraordinary backstory.

So this place not only has a history of the guerrilla camp

but also as a way point for people escaping capture.

An infamous asylum in the usa

that became notorious for a brutal treatment.

Surgeons would literally go into the brain

and experiment with damaging

or severing certain parts of the brain.

And the underground home of a satanic society

with an American founding father among it's members.

This is a strange, spooky place

but it has an incredible history of glamour,

celebrity, scandal and debauchery.

Decaying relics and ruins of lost worlds,

they were forged by years of toil

but now they are haunted by the past,

their secrets are waiting to be revealed.

On the Balkan peninsula of Europe

is what's known as the land of the eagle.

Deep in the hills of southern Albania

are the dramatic remnants of a secretive history.

Albania is a mountainous

and somewhat beautiful and desolate region.

There's a rugged beauty to this landscape

but it's very, very isolated,

it's probably one of the forgotten countries of Europe.

This is a mysterious place.

For much of the last century,

it was hidden away behind closed doors

and it retains a certain mystique even today.

There's still a lot of things to be explored in this area.

A lot of secrets to be uncovered from those decades.

The isolation was born of a conflict that touched every corner of Europe.

Clinging to the hillside overlooking the bay of flora

is a relic of those troubled times.

This village produced 45 of what Albanians called martyrs.

Heroes of world war ii,

this tiny village has a phenomenal tale to tell.

A few miles away is a mysterious cave

linked to the village

and that's also connected to a remarkable escape story.

That is a machine gun tripod,

that's the smoking gun.

This is their guerrilla home.

This is their cathedral.

But what were British and American secret agents

doing in this remote backwater?

This is a classic world war ii story,

you've got spies, resistance,

smugglers, heroes, villains, this has got it all.

This humble looking settlement played a key role

in secret operations led by British soe

and American oss agents during world war ii.

They choose this village as a base from which to wage a guerrilla war.

Ex special forces operative, klint janulis,

has come here to find out more.

I served in Iraq in the special forces

and the us special forces are guerrilla warfare specialists.

I'm here to understand

why the precursors to the modern spec ops units

decided to choose this abandoned destroyed village

as a base of operations

because it was those groups like the oss and soe

that basically wrote the playbook

on guerrilla warfare that we still use today.

Founded during the war,

these organisations co-ordinated espionage activities

behind enemy lines.

But to take a closer look at this former base

in such rugged terrain, requires some serious wheels.

Driving up here,

I was trying to put myself in the position

of an attacking soldier,

and I realised just how terrifying that would be

because getting up here, you see the fortified positions.

From down there,

there's not much of a view but you're completely exposed.

From up here you are safe from bullets, artillery rounds,

yet you've got a clear field of vision 270 degrees.

Oh, wow.

This place looks like it was designed to be a fortress.

This is a snipper point, snipper point.

You could even have small artillery pieces up here

and be protected and secure,

and you have a view of the entire valley

from this exact location.

This is where I would want to fight a guerrilla battle

against an invading force down that valley.

Up close, the village displays all the marks of a battle ground.

It's obvious that there's been combat here,

the mortar on these walls here have these pock marks in them.

Some of them look like the pock marks you'd see

from the impact of a bullet,

some look like the ones you'd see from artillery

which are going to be more dispersed and sort of chaotic looking.

The other really important question for me is, who attacked?

Where did they come from?

Because just behind these two massive fortifications

is a funnel of death for anybody trying to get into that village.

Klint's meeting with sofokli daupaj

who's family lived here before they were displaced by the fighting.

Translation: "This tile carries the names

"of my great-grandfather and of my great-great-grandfather."

(Speaks foreign language)

Translation: "They had three rooms,

"one here, a second here and a third here.

"We were at the house of my ancestors,

"the house of my grandfather, great-grandfather

"and of my great-great-grandfather.

"As you see, what remains is only the ruins.

"This is because of the second world war."

This is tragjas,

a settlement that dates back to the 6th century bc.

It was once home to hundreds of Albanian families,

just like sofoklis,

who had a proud tradition of resisting foreign invaders.

This is a place that has been a centre of conflict

and on the border of conflict for centuries.

These are people who have not had

a large connection to the outside world.

So they're very insular,

they don't like a heavy-handed foreign rule.

For centuries, these villagers fended off Turkish raiders.

In 1847, the people of tragjas

somehow beat back the soldiers of the ottoman empire.

So did Turkey's military forces take revenge on tragjas?

To get to the heart of the story,

klint is heading out to vlore bay,

an area littered with the wreckage of war.

For me, I want to understand both sides of the equation.

The guerrilla warfare,

why a little tiny village like tragjas

had so much investment in special operations activities,

and out here in this bay

where we had large maritime things going on.

And I want to check out this ship wreck

because that's going to help me understand the conventional side.

As you move through the murky waters

emerging into different parts of the ship,

you can almost imagine the people walking around,

going about their business.

Holy cow.

That was amazing.

That was absolutely incredible.

You could see all the holes in the ship,

you could see the outline,

you could see where the engine was, or looked like an engine.

Man, it was perfectly crystal clear.

That was fantastic.

That's the best shipwreck

I've ever, ever had the opportunity to check out.

Exploring the wreckage further

throws up some questions and a few surprises.

Which high profile passenger was this ship carrying,

and how is it linked to the attack on tragjas?

Ex special forces operative, klint janulis,

is come to explore a shipwreck in Albania

which is part of the secret history of the region.

This ship has been the victim of a devastating attack.

But this doesn't look like a war ship,

there's no sign of guns or turrets, so what happened?

This ship is a testimony

to a time before the outbreak of world war ii

when the Italian dictator bernito Mussolini

took the world by surprise

by attacking the main Albanian ports

including vlore which lies near tragjas.

Mussolini was looking at

expanding this Italian empire.

Albania was an easy grab for the Italians.

Mussolini wanted this piece of territory

that was just across the adriatic from Italy.

When Mussolini's forces crossed

Albania's southern border into Greece,

Great Britain stepped in

and began to target Italian ships in the region.

One of these was the po,

and in march 1941, she was sunk by British torpedo bombers.

In the darkness and with it's lights off,

the British airmen believed

this was a legitimate war-time target,

they had no idea what this ship actually was and who was on board.

The po was in fact a hospital ship

evacuating wounded Italian soldiers from the Greek Albanian front.

By coincidence, one of the nurses aboard this hospital ship

was Mussolini's own daughter.

Edda ciano, Mussolini's daughter survived the attack,

but the sinking was part of a campaign

that was soon costing Italy dear.

The Italians are losing on every front.

Equipment, leadership, moral is breaking down.

They're trying to maintain their control of key areas

and certainly, the coastal region in Albania

is considered by the Italians as a key area.

The Albanian resistance sensed an opportunity,

and tragjas became both a base and supply point for local guerrillas

who now took the fight to the Italians.

The guerrillas decide to make a fight of it

and in this case, they do very, very well

and they cause very heavy casualties

because in this terrain,

it's ideally suited for guerrilla style defence.

Klint has returned to tragjas

to investigate why it became a focal point

of the resistance movement.

Essentially, I'm making a, sort of,

logistical reconnaissance of this village.

The tactical advantages of this village

are pretty obvious right away.

Thick walls, rough terrain, good, strong buildings.

But really what I'm interested in is the logistics.

Armies win and lose based on logistics.

Special operations units specialise in inverting the logistical chain.

Most armies rely on large numbers, large logistics chains.

Spec ops, small numbers, find the weak point

in the armies big logistics chain, cut it in half.

In the logistics war, water is crucial,

and this isn't just a well, this is a natural spring.

Which means hydro static pressure is pushing water out,

they've got water year round.

Anybody attacking from up the hill, they'd have to haul their water up.

Now... yeah, this is cool.

This reminds me a lot of Greek villages I've been in

that were designed to be windy and mazy.

Basically to defend against pirates,

which meant anybody that was trying to come in and attack by foot,

would get run through corridors and mazes and funnel points

which we call funnels of death.

With these advantages,

the guerrillas were making life a nightmare for the Italian army.

They were able to pick off troops

and harass infantry columns with lightening hit and run raids.

Eventually, Italian colonel, Franco climenti,

bought in a whole division to re-establish control of tragjas

and the four other villages in the area.

On new year's day 1943,

there was a massive pitched battle

where 2,000 very well equipped Italians

were beaten by the local Albanian guerrilla forces.

This David versus Goliath battle ended in victory for the Albanians.

Despite increasing his troop numbers to well over 5,000 men,

outnumbering the Albanians by three to one,

colonel clementi was himself killed

as his forces suffered a humiliating defeat.

But repercussions soon followed,

Mussolini's forces returned to tragjas to take their revenge,

this time, their targets were civilians.

Translation: "Italians came here first

"and it is said they even hit the village with mortar fire

"from the mountain peak of cherpu.

"Above the village of urakam.

"Then when they burned the village,

"they alienated the villagers even further."

Despite the reprisals, the Italian army were disintegrating.

And so the allies sent undercover units

to support the local resistance

fighting against Mussolini's crumbling occupation.

And the Nazi's who were also closing in on Albania.

British agent, Jerry field, based his team here in tragjas.

Jerry field was this very daring operative for the soe.

And he came in with a small group of men

and initially set up shop right in tragjas

and worked with the local partisans,

relayed information back to the British,

tried to supply local partisans who were fighting the Nazi's,

and basically trying to figure out

how to do as much damage to the Germans as possible

without actually having to commit

any British troops except for him and his very small team.

Field's principle task was to smuggle in arms from Italy

which had been invaded by the allies.

Once the Americans and British land in 1943

and occupy southern Italy,

it's only a very short hop from a major Italian port like Bari

across the adriatic into Albania.

It's very easy to supply guerrillas by boat,

and, of course, you send in small teams

to make contact with the guerrillas and you supply them.

Yet klint has discovered

the British secret agents suddenly abandoned tragjas.

He's been given coordinates for a location

that will help him understand why.

Even today, it's really hard to find.

It's not on the map

and most locals don't know where it is or that it even exists.

I didn't expect to find this, and this tells quite a lot

because this is a British machine gun mount

and it says right here a mk iv, 1942.

And then you'd have the ability

to mount a really heavy machine gun on this

and anybody coming up that hill

would have faced a barrage of gunfire.

But also this thing is heavy,

I've carried machine gun mounts before.

We can't be too far from the cave. We're getting close.

Ok.

This isn't just a rock overhang, this goes really deep.

Oh, this has got to be the place.

That is a machine gun tripod,

that's the smoking gun,

this is their guerrilla home,

this is their cathedral.

But how is this cave

linked to a remarkable American escape story?

Just looking at this, makes me really think...

Yeah, it's a great guerrilla hide out

but this is potentially a really horrible death trap.

Couple of hand grenades thrown down in here,

and look at all these, these are gonna just,

you'll just die under a massive stalactite.

And that is something I'm sure they thought about constantly.

It could have just even been as simple as a bomb

landing just overhead the cave.

Imagine being right here, a 500-pound bomb lands.

Agent field led his team down from the mountains above tragjas

to this place, sea view cave.

A perfectly camouflaged hideaway near a dog leg cove

used to smuggle arms and supplies into Albania.

For months, field and his team

survived here on mule meat and rain water.

I can't imagine how surreal it would have been to live here every day

and then go fight, pick up elicit supplies from the coves.

Go sabotage the enemy

and then come back to this and have a meal of a hot mule.

After being forced out of tragjas

when the Nazi's rolled into Albania in September 1943,

field's team now had to co-ordinate resistance

from this extraordinary cave.

But it would soon prove to be more than just a secret base,

it was also to play a key role in an incredible escape story.

An American plane that was carrying 13 American nurses,

ran low on fuel and got lost in bad weather.

They crash landed in a field

in the middle of Albania in the middle of winter.

Trapped in Nazi occupied territory with no food or supplies,

local partisans smuggled the nurses

out of the Albanian interior

across the snowy mountains towards the coast.

They had to dodge German patrols.

At one point they got caught up

when the Germans were invading a particular town

and the group got split up,

but they all survived and were able to keep moving on.

After eventually making contact with the soe,

they bought the nurses to this cave.

And klint himself, a combat medic,

believes he may have found some evidence from their time here.

This is world war ii medical gauze.

It looks just like medical gauze we use today.

From a med kit from 76 years ago.

Wow.

You can even see the cotton stitching in it still.

That's pretty cool.

How did the nurses manage to complete

one of the most remarkable escapes of the second world war?

In Albania, 13 American nurses

were trying to evade the clutches of the Germans

during world war ii,

to complete an extraordinary escape.

Allied agents led the nurses to a secret cove

where an American boat was waiting

to take them to allied controlled Italy.

So after walking hundreds of miles in the middle of winter

through some of the roughest terrain I can imagine,

the nurses managed to hook up with the soe

who were fortunate enough

to be able to have arranged

transportation that day.

So they came down this crazy ravine and valley that I just walked,

and the first thing they'd see

is this gorgeous smuggler's cove, and that's their ticket home.

So in the end,

they wound up travelling between 600 and 800 miles

on this incredible survival escape march.

It's one of the great survival stories of world war ii.

But while the nurses were heading home,

the villagers and partisans were still in a war zone.

This was their home. For them, there was no escape.

Klint wants to find out

what became of them after field's unit left tragjas.

How did the Nazi's respond

when they found out about the heavy resistance movement

going on right here in this village?

Translation: "They came in and they burned,

"they ruined everything.

"You can see only ruins remain here.

"That's why the population abandoned the village and resettled elsewhere,

"they were left with nothing here but bare walls and ruins."

The Germans decided to raise this village to the ground

while the British and American agents

that had been working with the villagers

were sitting on these hillsides,

watching as this group that they had known, cared about,

lost every single thing they had in one fell swoop.

The Nazi's left the settlement engulfed in flames.

Sofokli explains how it made his family

even more determined to take the fight back.

Translation: "My eldest uncle joined the partisans,

"the 5th brigade,

"he even went with them to fight the Germans up to yugoslavia."

I really loved hearing sofo's stories

because it reminds me that world war ii

was such a big complex mess

and a lot of people, particularly in the United States,

had family members who served

and took great risk and may have died or been injured.

The little tiny villages all over Europe just like this one,

every day people had to make decisions about whether or not

they were going to resist and fight.

Decisions they made here

could have resulted in their entire family being executed.

They were fighting for their homelands.

They were working with the soe

and the office of strategic services

and doing so at great risk to their families life,

their lives and the communities' lives.

Today, a memorial to the partisans stand here in the rubble.

A fitting monument to their brave resistance

against the forces of fascism.

On the banks of the fork river

deep in the heart of West Virginia usa,

there's an enormous structure with an incredible story to tell.

It's an incredibly imposing building,

like something from the colonial era.

It looks like it was laid out for some vast civic purpose.

And there's a whole lot of other buildings around it,

almost like it's some kind of a college campus.

You can see that it was a major project in it's day.

Inside, there's a confusing picture

about the purpose of this strange place.

There's something a bit eerie about the juxtaposition

between the children's toys and the serious medical instruments.

When you look inside, it's a mess.

I mean, clearly it's abandoned, neglected.

There's peeling paint,

there's bars over some windows and doors.

It has a forbidding quality.

This was clearly a place designed

to keep people in but not those convicted of a crime.

This place emerged out of an enlightened view.

It was meant to be a haven

for people who were cast out from the world.

What started it is a really noble experiment,

quickly degenerated into a real horror show of abuse.

What turned this dream into a nightmare?

And who were the inhabitants forced to call this place home?

Construction here began in the mid 1800s.

In time, these halls would witness terrible things

that left their Mark on the building and on the surrounding community.

It's purpose was the management of the clinically insane.

Two centuries ago,

mental illness was viewed very differently than it is today.

Those showing signs of it were thought to be possessed by demons.

The treatment of mental health back in the early 19th century

was almost worse than a death sentence.

Families with members

who had mental health problems often hid them away.

Those who weren't lucky enough to be able to do that

had their relatives simply carted off and locked up.

Mental health was never really understood

and they were a lot of super natural explanations.

I mean, even the word 'lunatic' comes to the idea

that it was somehow inspired by the moon.

But one forward-thinking doctor

would stand as a beacon of hope.

His name was doctor Thomas kirkbride.

Doctor kirkbride was one of those rare reformers.

He saw a new way, a new world

in which people could be treated and cared for and cured.

And key to that,

was the provision of a healthy, open, normal environment.

This place was going to be his masterpiece.

This is the trans-allegheny lunatic asylum.

In the mid-19th century,

ideas about mental illness were finally changing,

and the asylum was designed

as a place for the most progressive, scientific

and humane treatment of the mentally ill.

Kirkbride wanted to move away from the prevailing model

in which the mentally ill might be chained in city jails.

And so instead, one of the main buildings

is this huge structure

that was designed so that sunlight and air

could easily come in as opposed to, sort of, damp, dank cells.

Originally intended to house 250 people,

patients were given the freedom

to walk the long, bright corridors

and enjoy the lovingly manicured grounds.

But before long, kirkbride's great humanist vision

would be twisted beyond all recognition.

The understanding of mental illness was still very much in it's infancy.

Patients were being referred with conditions like fits or superstition

or loss of limbs, or even asthma.

This is a time period in which women who behaved in unconventional ways

could be deemed insane and sent away.

A whole range of people

who didn't necessarily conform to societal expectations

might be considered

as having a nervous condition that required treatment.

At it's height,

the asylum was crammed with 2,600 patients,

more than ten times it's capacity.

As the numbers increased,

so did the depths of the depravity.

As Rebecca gleeson, who manages the site, has discovered.

Unfortunately, because of all the different people

that were coming in and not able to leave,

they weren't getting that fixed, it became like warehousing.

Not only did such over crowding

lead to people sleeping on the floors,

but it completely worked against the therapeutic atmosphere

that the asylum was meant to engender.

But worse was still to come.

Soon the hospital was inundated

with dangerous criminally insane inmates from nearby prisons.

We have to remember that

there are so many different types of patients that were here.

You've got mentally challenged patients,

you've got someone suffering from depression,

bipolar disorder, major depression, schizophrenia.

All different types of aspects of mental illness.

And then you have the criminal predator

that was added to the situation as well.

It sounds like it became a hellish place to be.

There were actually murders, there were assaults,

and I can imagine just an atmosphere of fear all the time.

But the violence and terrible conditions

were just the tip of the iceberg.

Understanding of the brain and mental disorders,

it was still very rudimentary.

And treatments were experimental and often brutal.

And in the 1950s,

the treatments were to become even more grotesque

when the centre became the home

of the West Virginia lobotomy project.

The man behind it all was doctor Walter Freeman.

He is known as the father of the lobotomy.

To perform an ice-pick lobotomy,

they would take this long, sharp piece

and they would point it towards the corner of your eye.

They would ting it once

to break through your skull,

and the second time to basically

get into your prefrontal lobe.

And they go back and forth,

something like a windshield wiper does in your vehicle.

The belief was that patients who suffered

from obsessive behaviours,

had fixed circuits in their brains.

Surgeons would sweep the rods from side to side

and physically cut the connections.

It's astonishing, almost barbaric to modern eyes.

But back then, even the sister of a us president

choose to undergo one of Freeman's lobotomies.

Rosemary Kennedy had her operation by Freeman

and she was lobotomised.

She ended up spending the rest of her life,

50 plus years, in a mental hospital,

only being able to mumble a couple of words

and not anything comprehensibly.

Had this procedure not been done to her brain,

she might not necessarily have had to have been institutionalised.

It just left many of these patients a shell of their former selves.

They sat around passively.

So maybe they weren't raging, you know, in hallucinations,

but they also weren't anything

like a healthy person with an intact mind.

How any surgeon, let alone a brain surgeon,

could have thought that sticking a metal rod through the eye

and rummaging it around in the brain indiscriminately

was helpful, is beyond belief.

What happened to the trans-allegheny asylum,

and what became of the patients there?

Most of them would never leave.

The only area that was expanded to accommodate more people

was the graveyard.

We're in our morgue.

Unfortunately thousands of people

died at the asylum over the last 130 years.

Now, this freezer here,

basically two bodies would lay in there and be able to stay cool.

Now, at one point in time,

the walls were lined with these refrigerators.

But in 1994,

the doors of the asylum were finally closed,

and at last, the years of neglect were at an end.

You can only imagine how horrified doctor kirkbride would have been

if he'd seen what became of his visionary asylum

that he had so many hopes for,

and it turned into, really, such a hell hole

that didn't help patients, and in many cases made them worse.

Today, the hospital lies abandoned,

a disturbing reminder of a well meaning project

that went terribly, tragically wrong.

It's an eerie place to visit.

Some of those horrors just don't go away.

They live on in the space in some way, shape or form.

30 miles west of London

is a scene typical of the English countryside.

But here set amongst the rolling hills

is an opening to a subterranean world.

There's this incredible gothic entrance,

but then when you enter,

you go deeper underground

and you end up in these sinister-looking caves.

Dark chambers with heavy metal gates,

almost like cells, are hidden away.

This is a strange and spooky place,

but yet it has this incredible history of glamour

and celebrities and dignitaries, but above all, debauchery.

How did these caves become infamous?

And how did one of america's founding fathers

become embroiled in the controversy?

The origins of these subterranean passageways

date back to the mid-1700s.

Their history is filled with tales of pagan rituals,

the dark arts and scandalous depravity.

Jack orr is a historian at the site.

These caves go a quarter of a mile underground,

and the thing that's so incredible about it

is that it's not at all natural in any way.

It's completely 100% man-made,

which 250 years ago,

that's just an incredible feat of human engineering.

The elaborate network excavated to provide the chalk

that would help to build the great west road

to link this area and London.

What these caves became is actually shocking.

It sounds like the thing of myth and legend,

but this is real life.

So we're about to go into the heart of the caves,

and this is where the very mundane story

becomes slightly more macabre.

These are the hellfire caves,

home to one of the most secret societies in British history.

The hellfire club was made up of

some of the most famous and respected men of the age,

at it's forefront was the owner of the caves, sir Francis dashwood.

Sir Francis dashwood was a rather wealthy man.

He was born into landed gentry.

And just like other men of his status at that time,

he spent his final years of education

visiting the royal courts of Europe,

sampling the intellectual arts

and all of the treasures that the continent had to offer.

It was in Italy that he found his true passion,

and it was here that sir Francis dashwood

began to revel in the study of the forbidden arts,

particularly the elusion mysteries

which were the most famous secret ancient Greek initiation cult.

Inspired by what he had seen and heard,

dashwood returned home

to set up the exclusive hellfire club on his family estate.

There were lots of rumours of nefarious deeds.

It was whispered that men practised all manner of black magic

and satanic rights in these caves.

It wasn't just dark satanic worship that the members liked to do,

they also knew how to party.

Women were bought in from London to join the frolics dressed as nuns.

And comely local nymphs were hired

and allegedly laid out on alters

so men could lick holy wine from their navels.

In the hellfire club days,

there would have been curtains across

and beds inside this chamber.

If you look at the back wall,

we still have the original tally marks

from where the men were keeping score

when they took their prostitutes inside here.

Incredibly, the shocking antics

were carried out by some of the most famous men of the day.

They included one of the most

influential figures in the United States.

Some of the members of the hellfire club were very famous,

but one of the most famous members was William hogarth, the artist.

And some of his art is actually down our caves.

But the odd thing is is the most devilish figure

who matched dashwood in debauchery was actually an American.

Benjamin Franklin,

one of the founding fathers of the United States,

was a good friend of the dashwood's.

And he would frequently visit the UK

and when he did, he would attend

these scandalous parties deep underground.

Franklin loved the fun, prankish nature of the club

that he found here.

He often wrote home to his friends in Philadelphia

about dashwood and his friends.

One of the letters even said,

"dashwood's genius is just as apparent

"above the earth as it is below the earth."

With so much to lose,

these powerful men went to great lengths

to make certain word of their nefarious activities stayed hidden.

To try and protect their reputations,

members of the hellfire club took assumed identities.

Your reputation was everything in those days,

you say the wrong thing and you're out.

And devil worshipping,

keeping anything about black magic,

any of those sort of books,

that was still illegal, that was still a crime.

Much of what happened there is unknown,

and a lot of the documentation has been burnt or destroyed

in order to cover up the scandal.

Even though the members of the hellfire club

were sworn to secrecy,

word inevitably got out.

It seems the antics of the hellfire club

were somehow leaked to the public.

Rumour has it that it was an old member of the club

that exposed it for what it really was.

The public outrage took it's toll,

so in 1766, the club was closed down.

With the doors to his very colourful club now closed,

dashwood is said to have lived a more wholesome life

until his death in 1781.

This incredible flint structure is another creation of dashwood.

It's the mausoleum for his family,

but like everything,

there is a darker side to this creation.

Dashwood and his four wives were all buried here,

as is one other member of the hellfire club

was part of a strange story.

So there used to be an urn in the middle of this mausoleum,

and in that urn was the heart of Paul whitehead,

and he was a former poet and the head steward

of the hellfire club.

Whitehead's heart lay here peacefully for almost a century

until the victorian era.

Now, the victorians were weird, they loved death, they loved Gore,

so they made this a tourist attraction.

It's rumoured that his heart was stolen by Australian visitors

around 100 years ago.

And ever since, people say

they've seen him wondering the caves and the hills

holding the place where his heart should have been,

looking for it in the grounds.

Today, the hellfire caves are open to the public.

And for those wanting to channel the spirit of dashwood,

they can even be hired for private parties.

Because of the dark, debaucherous history of the hellfire club,

they have left this lingering legacy behind

and now we are meant to be one of

the most haunted sites in all of england.

Now they're abandoned, crumbling ruins.

Many remind us of dark times

but some were once beacons of hope and progress,

lasting testimonies to human imagination,

enterprise and spirit.

Captioned by ai-media ai-media. TV