Original subtitles

Narrator: A Kentucky ghost town caught in the crossfire.

In some cases people were literally killed in these fights.

There was always conflict.

In Japan, a once opulent retreat reclaimed by nature.

The decoration here is fantastic,

this place must have been absolutely amazing.

A mountain top ruin in Italy with a harmful legacy.

What they left behind wasn't just documents,

machinery and equipment, it was an ecological nightmare.

And in Scotland, fragments of a bridge foundation,

all that remains of a terrifying disaster.

This just shook up the whole of the UK.

Decaying relics...

..Ruins of lost worlds...

..Sights haunted by the past...

..Their secrets waiting to be revealed.

The remote backwards of Harlem county, Kentucky,

hide the remnants of a grand looking town.

This was a confident town, a proud town,

there's buildings here made of beautiful stone,

these are buildings made nicer than they needed to be.

People wanted to get here,

there was something there that was drawing them.

Scattered ruins point to an industrial purpose.

One of the more impressive derelict sites

is this big house with a huge chimney.

It's hard to know what it is exactly.

Just looming over these abandoned railroad tracks.

The operation is even more extensive below the surface.

You can see these tunnel entrances,

they look like New York's Lincoln tunnel or Harlem tunnel.

Among these relics lie signs of catastrophe.

So what spelt the end for this once imposing town?

This deserted settlement of a 1,000 homes is lynch Kentucky.

It dates back to the early 20th century.

With it's wide streets and fine municipal buildings,

lynch was once one of the richest towns in the state.

Michael o'bradovich worked here.

This town was so big and so impressive

that people were coming from Chicago and New York, it was impressive.

Constructed in 1917, this was the town's department store.

We who live here call this, the big store.

All of this here in the front

was women's apparel or men's apparel,

over on this side there was a diner,

in my time, soda shop.

On the far end over there was sporting goods and home goods.

Within eight years a large town had been built around it,

powered by an enormous state of the art generating station.

Its owners spared no expense building this grand place

in the middle of nowhere.

Us steel bought up hundreds of acres

under black mountain in this part of Kentucky.

In 1917,

the demand for steel was skyrocketing,

you had all the armaments that were being used in the war,

everything was made of steel,

ships were being built, you know, rail carts were being built.

Even though there's no iron ore nearby,

us steel invested millions of dollars in to these Kentucky back woods.

The real thing that made lynch was actually underneath the town

and that was black gold, coal.

Lynch was created for one reason

and that was to provide a reliable

and massive supply of coal

to the country's leading steel producer us steel.

This part of the appalachian mountains

is very, very rich in carboniferous coal,

this is a famous coal deposit that stretches

all along North America

and it's been mined for many, many years.

The thing that makes the coal at lynch so special

is it's low in sulphur so it's very good for making steel.

These turned out to be some of the wealthiest coal mines

in the country.

As the son of a miner, Nick sturgill

knows the hazards that lie below ground here.

This is portal 31.

Once part of the largest coal complex in the world.

Portal 31 even by today's standards is enormous.

The north heading of portal 31

goes approximately 13 miles,

the east heading actually goes in to Virginia just a little way.

Back in the 1930s,

extraction continued to pace despite the risks.

No matter how well a mine is run,

it's still very dangerous and difficult work.

The coal company also wanted to showcase,

to show off their high standards, they also stressed safety a lot.

They even named this place after the father of mine safety,

Thomas lynch.

They wanted to counteract this image

that mining was this terrible dangerous occupation

where people were exploited.

It worked.

Lynch attracted workers from all over the world.

With a German mother and Montenegrin father,

former mine manager Michael o'bradovich's own family

is typical of those who flocked here.

In it's heyday, lynch had around 10,000 people...

..With all those different nationalities,

most of the families here had five, six, seven, eight kids.

The schools, churches and hotels of lynch accommodated them well

but the relentless objective here was to dig coal.

They engineered the town to move the coal as efficiently as possible.

They built a structure called the tipple.

This is like a giant bin that holds coal

and then loads it onto rail cars.

They built the biggest tipple in the world.

This tipple could handle 15,000 tonnes of coal a day.

Lynch was actually world famous, it held the record

when miners produced nearly 13,000 tonnes of coal

in one single nine hour shift

and that's pretty impressive statistics.

But the miners were dissatisfied with the low wages and the risks.

Coal dust is so fine and so volatile,

that it can combust with any little spark,

it can catch on fire, cause an explosion.

And at one point, in the history of this building,

they actually stopped using it

because there was so much dust being created

and some spontaneous combustion with that dust

that created some issues.

Working inside the mine was even more dangerous.

The leading cause of death here at portal 31

was by rough falls

and believe it or not, a lot of coal car accidents...

..Of men being run over

or pinned against the rib by a coal cart.

The air will kill you, miners could contract black lung.

There's a lot of different ways

that a man or woman can perish in a mine.

The owners of lynch

refused to compromise the efficiency of their production.

No amount of grandiose town planning could make up for the dangers

and low wages of mining.

The miners were gearing up for a fight.

There was always conflict between miners and owners

and the owners often responded to that conflict

with overwhelming force.

Skirmishes broke out across Harlan county.

This is where battles between the coal companies

and the miners came to a head.

We had these clashes between miners fighting for more rights

and owners trying to keep up production and keep wages low.

In lynch rumour has it that the violence didn't end there.

One eye witness told Nick sturgill

what she believes she saw back in the 1930s.

She would be sitting out on the porch

and company officials would walk or ride up black mountain

with known union members or union sympathisers,

what have you,

and after a few minutes she would hear gunshots

and a few minutes later the company officials

would come down the mountain and they would come alone.

No one knows for sure what happened in those troubled times

but the mine owners eventually quashed the discord.

And the enormous underground complex at lynch

continued to produce coal for many more years.

Total mileage of tunnels in this mine,

if I had to guess,

would be upwards or exceed 1,000 miles.

During the height of us steel's operations

here at portal 31 on any given day,

you would have approximately 1,500 men on one shift.

But this boom time couldn't last forever.

The last piece of coal left the colossal portal 31 in 1963.

And the other mines in lynch closed during the following decades.

Us steel pulled out of here

simply because they pretty much mined out

what they could mine easily and economically

but also because, you know, this coal was needed for steel.

Well, you know, in the last few decades

steel is really not in demand like it used to be

during world wars or during the industrial revolution

or the building of skyscrapers or anything like that,

so this grade of coal is just not sought after

as it once was.

By the late '80s,

the economics were changing and the mines eventually shut down.

In those 46.5 years,

us steel they mined approximately 120 million tonnes of coal here.

Today, this ghost town echoes

with the memories of the industrious residents

who mined this land.

A lot of people tend to forget the blood sweat and tears,

the struggle that these men put up with every single day

to bring this rock out of the ground.

In the city of cobi in Japan,

buildings stand tightly packed together

but one empty structure looms above the rest.

Right at the edge of the city, suddenly the buildings stop

and this hill just climbs up away from you.

It's heavily wooded with very, very dense foliage

and so it's really extraordinary

to find in the middle of it, this striking decrepit building.

It's like something out of a Sci-Fi movie,

where its half man made and half just taken over by nature.

The only way to reach it

is to step on board the old funicular railway.

Translator: "Above here there's a structure that's about 90 years old.

"The building sits on top of a very high precipice.

"With an incredible view over the whole of cobi city."

The unrivalled position the site holds

was matched only by its elaborate interiors.

The decoration here is fantastic,

it's so many brilliant details

and you can tell in it's time this place must have been

absolutely amazing but now it is falling to pieces.

Translator: "The building has suffered

"with all sorts of events over the years."

It really looks like it's been through wars or hell,

but the question is, what ended this place?

From the top of the railway on Mayan mountain,

a solitary path leads towards the old abandoned structure.

Utsumi kenichi works for the heritage group

now in charge of the building.

Translator: "Originally, Mayan mountain was a religious site.

"Then a large temple called tennoji temple was built here

"and it needed a funicular to bring all the materials up.

"After that many visitors used the funicular

"to come up to worship,

"so this structure was built to welcome them when they arrived."

The original art deco features point to the early ambition

of this place which opened in 1929.

Translator: "In Japan at that time, art deco was seen as futuristic,

"it was the latest cultural import from the west

"and this building reflects that fashionable trend."

There's a lot of enthusiasm about the future

and a lot of the design aesthetic

really reflects that machine age perspective.

You see it in New York, in Paris, in London

with these beautiful lines

trying to imitate the same clean lines

of a locomotive or an aeroplane.

That style, you see it all over Japan

and that enthusiasm is expressed in this building as well.

Translator: "Over there around the stage,

"it's designed with curves, that's the style.

"If I had been alive at the time,

"I would have loved to have seen it in all it's glory."

This vision of modernity was the Maya club.

Boasting public baths, a restaurant and a theatre.

This was a destination in its own right.

Translator: "This is the screening room,

"it used to be a cinema where they showed films every day.

"Chandeliers hung from the ceiling.

"And there was a red carpet on the floor,

"this was a place where people in Kobe came to enjoy themselves.

"Those people who visited weren't rich or anything,

"this place was for everyone."

It was built on the promise of a prosperous future

but the rumble of war which could be heard in the distance

began to threaten the hilltop haven.

Those rooms that had been packed,

the grand dining hall,

the entertainment room, once filled with people,

slowly began to quieten and empty out.

During the early decades of the 20th century,

Japan had been pursuing a policy of imperial expansion.

They entered world war ii

after attacking the us in December 1941,

Japan's mainland cities

were in direct line of fire

when the us fought back

most infamously in 1945.

The skies above Kobe were filled with us bombers.

Tonnes of explosives were dropped on the city.

So in the last few months of the war,

the city is devastated.

Almost 9,000 people

and three square miles of Kobe were obliterated.

The destruction went right to the foot of Mayan mountain.

The club itself escaped the worst of the carnage

and amid the devastating aftermath of war,

it would soon prove invaluable.

Translator: "So this was the guest room floor

"for the original facility.

"After the war, soldiers who came back from overseas

"and those people who lost their homes in Kobe

"began living here in these rooms."

So the site is turned into a kind of barracks

and they can use this as a base

from which they search for their lost family members

amidst the devastation of what used to be Kobe.

Their task, their terrible task

was to try to find in all of the rubble their families

and their lives and to try and put those back together.

After somehow, making it through to the other side of the war years,

for this building there was hope for a brighter future.

Yes, it was damaged and derelict

but actually throwing a little bit of money at it,

it could be bought back to it's glory days

but with a slight twist as a hotel.

The whole site's been restored to it's former glory,

it's vibrant, it's luxurious

and people can once again enjoy these magnificent views of the city.

But as the damaged writ large across the building

shows this story had no fairy-tale ending.

Just when it looked as it's future was assured,

disaster struck again.

The year was 1967, the storm was typhoon Billy.

A typhoon hits Kobe, killing hundreds

and causing catastrophic mudslides,

those mudslides damage the building beyond repair,

it probably could have been fixed

but the new owners, the cost was just too much,

so it's abandoned again.

It had a second life but it was painfully brief.

Translator: "Those mud slides came inside here,

"it was such a mess that they couldn't run it as a hotel anymore."

While the site has seen

a few other short lived uses through the years,

it would never fully recover

from this devastating natural catastrophe.

Now, being watched over by

the Mayan mountain revitalisation association,

the building is about to enter a new phase.

Translator: "I was born and bred in this city.

"And this building has always been here,

"I believe tangible things will eventually return to nature.

"So I want to protect them."

In a blustery, Scottish estuary,

a world famous structure spans the deep waters.

The first thing you notice

is this big red giant of engineering.

This is a very dangerous place to build a bridge.

It towers over a craggy outcrop.

In the middle of this enormous estuarial river,

you find this tiny rocky island.

There's all sorts of things tucked away around the edges,

there's quite a lot going on.

An insignificant structure at the base of the bridge

could hold a clue to this small island's importance.

And its link to a fatal disaster that rocked a nation.

This waterway is known as the firth of forth.

The size and depth of this estuary

made it Scotland's most important trade artery for centuries.

Sitting below the forth bridge,

is the abandoned island of inchgarvie.

Historian, Ron Morris,

has been studying the site for decades.

We are approaching inchgarvie and it's about 500 yards long

and just maybe 30 yards wide at it's widest point.

It looks a very small island

but has a wealth of history attached to it.

Inchgarvie translates as rough island

and this place really lives up to the name.

The currents are terrible, the waves crash into it,

it's cold, terrifying and claustrophobic.

Evidence suggests inchgarvie had been inhabited since the late 1400s.

That's, you know, the early mortar

from 500 years ago

and it's still holding good today.

People have been building here,

clearly with an eye to defending this bare rocky island.

In the days when the only way to cross this estuary was by boat,

inchgarvie was an important staging post.

In 1491, king James of Scotland

granted a local laird the right to build a fort here.

So a castle here fortified with Cannon

could offer a safe Anchorage upriver for mercantile traffic.

But inchgarvie's ruins,

show that someone has defended the estuary much more recently.

Newer fortifications date back to world war I.

The first thing you notice is a gun emplacement

which is obviously 20th century and the gun battery faces east

which would be towards the north sea,

towards the entryway to this estuarial river.

Now see, this is the easternmost

four inch gun position.

There should be a ring of bolts in here

but really covered with the vegetation

which was the holdfast

for the actual four inch quick firing gun.

This was the original living quarters

for the original Garrison,

which was a very small number of men.

There was only about six or seven men

actually stationed on the island to look after the battery.

Yet the disaster linked to this place

came not through war but in peacetime.

40 years earlier,

the advancing age of invention,

meant that Scotland's firth of forth had to be conquered.

The UK was exploding in trade and transportation.

The railway boom had kicked off, big style

and goods and people were moving all over the UK.

But the firth of forth is huge deep water channel,

was an unsurmountable obstruction.

To get from one side to the other, would be a 40 mile detour

or a tricky trip on the ferry.

So they commissioned a bridge but there was a problem.

The depth of the estuary made it very difficult to build.

The estuary's about a mile wide here.

It's where the estuary really narrows

that we have about 30 fathoms of water depth

on either side of inchgarvie.

In the 19th century,

inchgarvie was bought by the forth bridge railway company

to provide a foundation for a bridge.

What you see on the surface is just a tenth of it

but the geology underneath the water means that rocks extend out.

Over millennia, glacial ice scoured away soft layers of rock,

leaving behind hard rocky outcrops like inchgarvie.

And that provided a solid foundation

in order to get the cantilever for the centre of the firth bridge.

There was a natural column,

a stone foundation right there in the middle of the firth of forth,

inchgarvie, it was like a gift from the gods.

But an abandoned pier points to a complication.

To be quite honest,

people are so taken up with the wonder

of the forth bridge itself that they tend to overlook this.

If you look at the bottom of the bridge,

there's like a stump as if an extra caisson

had been built and then discarded.

A caisson, is the first step in building a bridge,

this watertight structure allows the foundations to be laid.

The geology of the region here

makes it very hard to successfully build a bridge.

You've got to build caissons,

float them to just the right spot

and then sink them deeply on to the sea floor

in order to build the footings for the bridge.

Here on the island,

we can see that somebody has started to put caissons down.

The explanation for the abandoned caisson

lies 30 miles north.

On another windy Scottish estuary, the tay.

Here the celebrated engineer Thomas bouch

had built the tay bridge.

Sir Thomas bouch, he designs caissons,

the ability to sink a ring into a water body

and then put concrete inside it,

so you can build up these supports.

His next commission was to design another bridge

to span the firth of forth.

This brick pier was the first pier

that was constructed to hold the first design

of the rail bridge.

And there was to be eight of these piers

in which the centre of the bridge would be supported,

there would be two great spans.

Bouch's new design was hailed as the wonder of the age.

Until the howling winds of Scotland

sent dozens of helpless souls in to the waters.

One night, the wind got up really quite strong,

so a big, big load from sort of horizontal direction

pushing against the tay bridge

that sir Thomas bouch hadn't accounted for.

The central section of the tay bridge collapsed.

The train continued to carry on

and plunged back into the water.

More than 70 people died in the tay estuary that night.

This was bad news for the forth bridge.

The future of that new rail bridge was now in doubt.

Could they continue building the bridge

using the design of this now disgraced architect

or should they abandon the project?

Well, they decided to scrap it.

All you can see now and what's left behind

is one pillar sticking up out of the sea.

Thomas bouch was devastated,

his reputation was ruined

and he never recovered and he died a disgrace.

A few years later, a new bridge was commissioned

and it still stands to this day.

The forth bridge is now one of three to span the estuary.

If any structure was described as the eighth wonder of the world.

And if it wasn't for the presence of inchgarvie,

we could never have had the forth bridge built.

In the north of the mediterranean island

of sardinia

is the imperious granite massive of monte limbara.

You ascend up this winding steep mountain road

until you reach the peak

and then in a clearing,

these six massive structure appear out of nowhere.

All of a sudden, you see this compound

of massive antennas pointing off in all directions.

Some very large and ambitious communications centre was built here

but what was it for?

At almost 4,500 feet above sea level,

this mountain creates its own micro climate.

This place is at high altitude.

The weather can turn on a knife edge,

one minute it's brilliant sunshine

and the next, you're enveloped by cloud.

They must have had an excellent reason

to want to build this kind of very ambitious high tech facility

in exactly this spot.

Inside you have row upon row of electronics equipment,

massive generators, living quarters

and of course, these six huge dishes.

Whoever built this

had access to some serious resources.

Kept top secret for decades,

speculation over the type of operations that took place here

has always been rife.

And rumours still abound.

The locals have no details,

so the locals make up their own stories

to explain this mysterious hulking presence

on top of the mountain.

Marcello moretto remembers well what this site looked like years ago.

Translator: "It is rather weird to see it today

"but at the time it was abandoned,

"it was left in perfect working condition

"even though, of course, it was no longer in use."

He works for an environmental agency

now trying to clean up the noxious mess

left by this decaying infrastructure.

Translator: "From an environmental standpoint,

"especially from a forestry standpoint,

"this is a dump of basically iron materials."

This is built at the top of a mountain,

everything that happens up here flows downstream.

And as this place starts to disintegrate,

it becomes a toxic threat to people living down below.

The long term environmental impact

was the last thing on the minds of those constructing this complex

back in 1966.

When the world was split by two bitterly opposed ideologies.

It is no exaggeration to say

that this is a moment when the NATO countries,

the United States and its European allies

are convinced that at any moment, the Soviets are going to attack.

This place is born out of a very real expectation...

..That the cold war is going to turn in to world war III, any day.

Both sides knew they needed excellent communications,

both to know what was happening

but also potentially to prevent a misfire, you know,

to prevent a false alarm.

These six vast dishes date back to that time.

Inside, rusting machinery reveals the identity of their owners.

Built by the us air force,

this was one of NATO's most secret radio communication centres,

the monte limbara station

was designed to plug a weak spot in NATO defences.

NATO's southern flank,

that is the NATO countries facing south

towards north Africa

was always the soft underbelly of NATO,

it was always a place where the Soviets,

where their allies might be able to strike.

The location of this facility reveals NATO's clandestine intention.

The island of sardinia is beautifully placed

for this kind of communication.

For one thing, you're sitting in the mediterranean

between Italy and Spain.

To the east, it points to a similar station in Naples,

to the west, to the island of menorca

off the coast of Spain

and via those ultimately around the world.

This station was part of a vast network,

capable of transmitting crucial classified messages

over thousands of miles.

Until the 1950s,

radio communication beyond the curvature of the earth

which blocked the signal was impossible.

The ultra high frequency devices

and abandoned technology found here show how this was overcome.

This was a microwave communications base

that used microwaves to communicate

by using the troposphere part of the atmosphere

to send microwaves over the horizon

and the best way to communicate long distances

at this time was called troposcatter or tropospheric scatter.

With the invention of troposcatter,

stations like monte limbara

could transmit to a receiver station

out of the line of sight

by using particles six miles up in the earth's lower atmosphere

to reflect microwave signals.

That system can amplify the signal,

send it up again and repeat the process.

So instead of sending your radio signal, you know,

30, 40, 50 miles, now you can send it 250 miles.

That meant fewer costly relay stations

and much faster long distance communication.

We were ready to coordinate the nuclear forces

that were going to have to smash a Soviet advance

into Western Europe.

The amount of communication and coordination

that was required by the supreme headquarters,

allied powers in Europe by NATO,

by the vast American commitment to defending Europe,

all of that required an immense amount of coordination.

Thankfully, they never had to but the fact that we were ready

maybe is part of the reason on both sides

why the cold war never turned hot.

Yet legend has it,

this base did play an active role in war.

A us fighter bomber was supposedly guided

by monte limbara antennae on a controversial mission.

In 1986, a disco in Berlin is bombed

by Libyan sponsored terrorists

and American servicemen are involved.

President Reagan orders muammar gaddafi,

the Libyan dictator that his family compound

be bombed by American aircraft.

Gaddafi's private residence was struck

and dozens of civilians were also killed.

The claim that the station facilitated the strike, however,

remains unproven.

Even as the iron curtain was lifting across Europe,

it hadn't yet outlived its usefulness.

As late as the first Gulf war in 1991,

this system was still very much in use

and useful during that period when all kinds of secure traffic

had to travel around the mediterranean and Europe.

The monte limbara station was finally retired in 1993.

It had been made obsolete by satellite communications

which communicate with any point on the planet.

When the us forces left,

it was like they just vanished into thin air,

but what they left behind wasn't just documents,

machinery and equipment, it was an ecological nightmare.

For the locals, there was one final insult.

There's this revelation of exactly how much the us paid

the Italian government

for the use of this mountain top site for 27 years.

Just five lira a year.

That's less than $1.

Environmentalists like marcello moretto

are attempting to clean up monte limbara

and transform into a place of historical significance.

Translator: "We would like this place to become a museum

"about the cold war,

"a museum of industrial and military archaeology,

"it would have its own importance."

In a more recent turn of events,

tropospheric scattering is experiencing a resurgence.

And military experts see renewed potential

for sites like this.

As NATO weakens

in the face of American disinterest,

as Russia becomes more powerful,

it is not difficult to see a scenario

in which someone desiring to dominate the mediterranean

could deploy anti-satellite weapons.

And could create a situation

in which this mountain top might again be useful

as a communication station.

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