Original subtitles

Narrator: A dense Indian forest that hides a royal family secret.

She seemed to appear out of thin air, like a ghost from Macbeth.

A fortified compound in england overrun by a determined force.

Any Soviet spy would kill for the secrets kept there.

A windswept Atlantic island once home to an iconic American family.

All this beauty and grandeur masks what this place is actually about.

And in South Africa,

a building that offered hope, hijacked by criminal intent.

It's definitely not the kind of place you'd wanna be alone at night.

Decaying relics...

Ruins of lost worlds...

Sites haunted by the past,

their secrets waiting to be revealed.

In the middle of Delhi,

an Indian megacity of 30 million people, is an unexpected sight.

It's one of the biggest and most bustling cities in the world,

and then right there in the centre is this giant jungle-like forest.

To find a forest of this size where we are is amazing.

It's said that the only residents are mobs of

monkeys and howling jackals.

There seems to be something hiding behind all that

thick foliage - the ruins of an old building

that look like they're from another world.

There is bushes and trees growing out of the roofs,

and some of the staircases are beginning to collapse.

But they were quite well built, because they're still standing

after what looks like centuries.

Formidable stone walls and grand archways haunted by years of neglect

disguise a more recent past.

Whatever furniture and decor were once in this place are gone.

This has been thoroughly plundered, thoroughly ransacked.

There are hints to its former glory, but now

it's just a shell - no amenities, no interiors, no signs of any life.

Yet concealed within is a story of intrigue and deception.

Given the imposing nature of the place, it's sensible

to conclude that someone of significance must have once

lived here. But that doesn't get us any closer to answering

the question, where have they gone and why was this abandoned?

Only a few years ago, a mysterious family occupied this

forlorn jungle home. Although rarely seen, rumours of

their strange existence quickly spread.

Jawahar lal lives nearby and was captivated by

the incredible tales of these reclusive forest dwellers.

There are different versions.

Some people said they look like jinns or supernatural beings.

They were not social at all. They really wanted to live in secrecy.

There were many stories told about them. What is clear is that

the people who lived here wanted no contact with outsiders.

There were even signs up saying that unauthorised intruders

would be gunned down.

Though every so often they would Grant

an interview to a foreign journalist.

And what a story it was they had to tell.

The first record we have of

the inhabitants is when the mother of the group

showed up unannounced at a Delhi train station in the early 1970s.

She turned up with her two children, servants

and 15 bloodhounds.

She called herself begum wilayat mahal,

and she claimed to be the direct descendant of the kings of awadh.

She was the rightful heir to the throne. Of course,

there was no throne anymore, India was a democracy,

but she claimed they owed her something

for the great injustice done to her family.

The kingdom of awadh was a wealthy Muslim state in the northern region

of India, but it hadn't existed for over a century.

The British east India company

in the 19th century was gradually taking over more and more of India.

Sometimes they collaborated with

the local governments, other times they more or less overthrew them

to take control of the resources of India.

But the final in richest state was forcibly seized

by the British on the basis that their prince lived

a debauched life, which made him unfit to rule.

Outraged by the wrongdoing inflicted on her royal ancestors,

queen wilayat demanded the Indian government return

what was rightfully hers.

And her bizarre behaviour soon attracted the world's attention.

The children, called prince Cyrus and Princess sakina,

addressed their mother as her highness or your highness,

and the Nepalese servants only approached her

walking on their knees.

She would never answer any question directly.

It should be placed on a silver platter

and then through servant and the servant will read aloud.

This must have been quite a sight.

I mean, imagine all this going on in a train station waiting room.

Over the years, the Indian government offered her various houses

and large sums of money. She refused all, demanding she be given

something worthy of her standing.

And reporters would come and she would give interviews

and she would make demands, and she was such a compelling,

imperious figure that people eventually said,

"well, we have to do something for her.

We have to get her out of the railroad station."

In 1984, after ten years of living in the train station waiting room,

the government finally offered

the begum a building of regal descent to occupy,

and to their great relief, she accepted their offer.

This 14th century medieval hunting lodge, called malcha mahal,

became the new home of the deposed aristocrats.

This place was all carpeted,

and on these columns there were nice paintings were hung.

Everything was tidy. In the kitchen there was

a nice crockery and a silver tea set, and everything was lined up.

Royalty may have originally built malcha mahal,

but that was 700 years ago. It was never intended

to be a permanent residence in the modern era.

The word 'mahal' means 'palace'.

We all know it from the Taj Mahal, of course.

So when you see this crumbling ruin out in the forest,

it doesn't really look like a palace.

It was overgrown long before the begum arrived

and hadn't been occupied in decades.

There was no running water. There was no electricity.

When she came here, she was promised to have the facility of

water and electricity, which she did not get.

Moreover there were no doors, nothing.

You can see Delhi off in the distance, and standing up here,

the family - you can imagine them thinking,

"oh, we rule over everything we can see."

But that wasn't the truth. Really all they ruled over was this

tiny little building and its environs.

But for the queen of awadh,

malcha mahal wasn't enough, and soon tragedy struck.

In 1993, the begum killed herself.

It was even said that the way she committed suicide

was by grinding up all of her diamonds and eating them.

And after that, it was only the prince and the Princess left.

The surviving heirs continued to tell their tragic tale for

the next two decades until they too died alone and in poverty.

It was at that point that

the whole story of queen wilayat and her family started to unravel.

In 2019, a reporter for 'the New York times'

was curious about this famous story, and she started digging deep.

She looked into records.

The journalist followed the family coffers, which led not back to any

royal ancestry but to a certain mr butt back in Bradford, england.

He was her stepson and he was no prince and she was no queen.

It was all an elaborate hoax.

She was a Muslim woman whose family had moved to Pakistan

during the partition of India and Pakistan.

This was a wrenching moment.

In the late 1940s, when India was granted its independence,

the British in their wisdom,

decided that they should just divide it up into two countries,

and the muslims were all supposed to move north to Pakistan,

the hindus were supposed to move south to India.

In Lahore, the family lived a comfortable life,

but wilayat had never wanted to move to Pakistan.

Her home was in India and, consumed by unhappiness,

the cracks started to show.

After her husband died, she grew more and more eccentric.

There were also signs of her mental health failing.

She was said to have received electro shock therapy

while she was in Pakistan.

And then, next thing we know, she turns up at the Delhi train station

proclaiming herself this long-lost queen.

For three decades malcha mahal served as the residence for

a royal family that never was.

We don't even know if prince Cyrus and Princess sakina

knew that they weren't in fact royalty.

Did they believe their mother or had they just lived

this lie for so long that they had forgotten the truth?

It's a tragic story about lives torn apart

by conquest and division.

Today the jungle encroaches ever closer to the ruins of

this crumbling building. It faces an uncertain future.

The government is not paying any attention, and it's very difficult

to approach here. It's such a thick forest, so I think

it will just remain like this.

In southern england is a common where history

is hidden in plain sight.

At first glance there doesn't seem to be much out of the ordinary

here at all. It's shrubs, grass, pleasant fields.

You'd have never imagined that something

earth-shattering happened here in this region.

There are chain-link fences and barbed wire all around it.

Today people just walk past, but at one stage

this was very high security.

These fortifications were put in place to protect

a precious resource inside a concrete vault.

Tucked away at one end is the most striking part of the site,

long, dome-like structures, covered in grass, possibly as camouflage.

Buried within are secret rooms built at a time of national panic.

This place looks like something out of a science fiction movie.

With its heavy doors and the security around it,

it really gives the impression of something that's either

from the future or heavily technological from our present.

I grew up fairly close to here, but I never came here as a child.

This was like a massive no-go area.

Long ago, this was a place of state secrets and maximum security,

but in 1983, that security was breached.

At one end of the site is a reinforced building

that few people have been permitted to enter.

Rebecca mordan has been given access.

This is a really exciting room.

Gosh, it's like something out of a film.

Some of the rooms have these strange, purpose-built troughs

full of like a weird white powder.

It's like talcum powder. It's like to absorb something.

This place is clearly a rat run.

You go through a series of rooms, passing this absorbing powder,

and then you get to this room with this big, heavy metal chute.

It's becoming quite clear what this is for.

This is a decontamination chamber.

It was built in the 1980s

when the world faced nuclear annihilation.

In the 1980s, you had america in the west and the Soviets

in the east, and each of them with their fingers

hovering over the nuclear buttons.

And britain and Europe were quite literally caught in the middle.

The cold war was a massive, overhanging grey cloud

on our childhood in the 1980s.

And it seeped into everything.

It seeped into our television programmes.

If there is a nuclear attack and you survive the initial effects

of an explosion, you will have at least

a half-hour to get to a public or a home fallout shelter.

Built at a time of global crisis, this is greenham common,

a former American military airfield and key strategic base

prepared for war against the Soviet union.

Any Soviet spy would kill for the secrets kept there,

so security was very tight. But on one night in 1983,

three unauthorised people snuck onto the base

and into the control tower.

In 1980, this base was chosen to host a new development in

atomic warfare - the cruise missile.

Cruise missiles were cutting edge and ultra high-tech,

and they could carry nuclear warheads at speeds

of up to 550 miles an hour.

But not everyone was happy to see their arrival.

The cruise missile program was

very, very controversial in britain, and one group

decided that they were going to be the ones to put a stop to it.

I remember there being people waving you in, sitting you down

and, "come and sit with me at the banners."

Or, "would you wanna come to the fire? Are you warm enough?"

Rebecca's mother is one of many who answered a call to arms

for what was to be a women-only protest.

A chain letter spread across the UK. This was a time

before the Internet, so still had to go through snail mail.

And that letter invited those who read it to come to greenham common

on December 12, 1982.

When the missiles arrived,

they were met by a crowd of protesters some 30,000 strong.

These greenham women, determined to protect

their children's future, built camps all around the base.

So this is one of the gates for the base.

The American military added razor wire. They then added

dogs and sentries and more police, we've got military police

and English squaddies, British squaddies, all protecting

the Americans who were living right in the middle of the base.

It was by and large peaceful, but on occasion it did have

a sort of anarchistic kind of flow to it, and that's,

of course, when it made the news.

The protests made global headlines,

an embarrassment for the British government.

They ordered the police to move the protesters by force.

There was definitely a feeling that, particularly when a lot of

outside police were bought in, there was a much higher risk of

violence to the women. They'd come with the bin Van

and they chucked everything that the women

weren't carrying into this Van and just destroy everything.

But this group of ordinary women wouldn't be got rid of so easily.

In 1983, britain's secretary of state for defence explicitly

told parliament that there was no way

the protesters would ever get onto the base. He was wrong.

One night, three protesters outside the base discovered an open pipe.

And they realised, quite rightly, that it was probably

an overflow pipe, so they crawled into it,

not knowing where they'd come up, and where they came up

was actually on the runway, or near the runway for the whole base.

They make their way over to the control tower

for the most heavily guarded nuclear airfield

in the country, and they haven't locked the door.

They just literally waltzed in and they found state secrets.

They found log books about what to do in the case of

nuclear emergencies, and they wrote their names all over all of it.

Eventually American soldiers found them, pointed guns at their faces

and escorted them off the base.

By the time the women were discovered,

they'd been inside the control tower for five hours.

This wasn't just embarrassing for the government,

it was a humiliation.

But the control tower wasn't the biggest breach

of security at greenham common.

The key thing on this airfield

was not the control tower or the runways themselves.

It's the silo. The big, big structure that actually houses

the vehicles with the nuclear warheads on the back.

The protesters drew up a plan to storm the nuclear bunkers.

The greenham women waited until it was new year's Eve,

and they reckoned that all of the squaddies, most of the base,

the military police and that would all be in town celebrating.

This was incredibly dangerous.

You would have to keep in mind how important

this site was and how crucial it was to keep these weapons secure.

The soldiers were all armed with assault rifles, and their orders

were to shoot intruders on sight.

They managed to put ladders up, put the carpet over the razor wire,

get onto the silos where, theoretically,

the nuclear missiles were kept.

These women are not there to do malicious harm. All they can do

is sing and dance at the soldiers responsible for the security.

The dance on the bunkers was broadcast around the world.

How much does that get under your skin if you're in charge of

guarding the world's biggest nuclear deterrent and you've got

a bunch of rag-taggle middle-aged women dancing and singing on top of

your prized possession? It's brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

(Indistinct singing)

The activists remained outside the base for nearly two decades.

Their watch ended when the final missile

was removed and the airfield closed.

There's no doubt that the greenham common protesters

were one of the most iconic images

of the 1980s, which was a decade of real conflict in britain.

I also remembered a greenham woman talking to me and saying there was

a point when she was stood in the mud at her gate looking

at women, even though they were in driving rain, cooking, helping

each other to create a community, and she just thought,

"oh, my god. We can do anything. We don't need men or anybody."

In 1997, the fences that had surrounded

greenham common for 50 years were finally torn down

and the 800 acre site returned to public use.

The anti-nuclear movement has made some really, really important

accomplishments and certainly bought the nuclear issue

out into the open in a way that simply wasn't possible before.

On the northern edge of Johannesburg, South Africa,

are the remains of a sprawling facility.

This is a very impressive building.

Multi-wing edifice.

And it doesn't look like it's that old - built maybe 50 years ago?

Though it might look quite new from the outside,

internally it's a whole different story.

The inside is just completely ravaged and ripped apart.

There's paint that's peeling from the walls.

Some of the windows are smashed, papers and documents strewn about.

It looks like something out of a horror picture show.

This is a pretty scary place. There are gaping holes in the ceiling.

There's what looks like bloodstains on the wall.

It's definitely not the kind of place you'd wanna be alone at night.

As you venture further, the more ominous the building becomes.

There's medical equipment, confidential documents.

It looks like people were just there one day

and then they suddenly got up and left.

It one room there are giant refrigerators that look so big

you could fit a body inside. And then there's huge, broken slabs.

This building is rumoured to be one of the most haunted in South Africa.

It's said that paranormal activity often concentrates

in places that have had a lot of deaths and births.

So what is it that happened here that might cause it

to be haunted like that? What dark secrets does this facility hold?

This place was intended to help those in need,

but not everyone who came here got the care they deserved.

This is kempton park hospital.

It was completed in 1978, and at the time it was the largest

medical facility in the region.

It's a huge hospital, as you can see, 400 beds.

It had a maternity section. They had all the surgical disciplines.

It had a medical ward. It had an intensive care unit.

Dr Nick wolmarans was a consultant surgeon and head of

the emergency department at the hospital.

This used to be a excellent facility, and to see it

in this dilapidated condition is very disturbing.

I worked here for ten years.

I treated a lot of patients here, and it was an amazing place to work.

When it was built, it had a very specific purpose in mind,

and the clue is hidden in its design.

I walked along this passage for a very long time.

I never noticed how wide this passage is.

And one of the hospital groups' ceo told me this was built for

disaster purposes with the idea that, in the case of a disaster

coming from the airport or the explosive factory

not very far from here,

they could park and accommodate beds in this passage.

At the time, the hospital was at the cutting-edge of technology.

This is a very spacious theatre.

Look at the size, look at the high ceiling, look at the equipment.

They don't make and build theatres of this size anymore.

In such an expensive and advanced facility, one would imagine

that the staff would be very highly qualified

medical professionals, but it turns out

the kempton park hospital was hiding a horrific secret.

In 1982, the hospital took on a paediatrician

called dr esterhuizen.

He had his own practice and he came highly recommended.

It's believed that during his time at the hospital he treated

more than 4,500 patients - mostly babies in the paediatrics ward.

Dr esterhuizen was so confident in his abilities and his expertise

that he put himself forward as head of department, and he had a lot of

support from his colleagues at the time for this.

But it turned out that dr esterhuizen

was not who he seemed to be.

Dr wolmarans was working at the hospital at the same time.

This is the paediatric ward where dr Andre esterhuizen worked.

He worked here for approximately

three to four years in the late '80s and '90s.

As time went on, a lot of parents and colleagues were very concerned

of his way he treated the children.

A lot of... children had serious complications.

One of those children was in dr wolmarans' care.

I had a very sad experience with one of my patients,

a four-month-old baby which I operated for a groin hernia,

and post-operatively, the anaesthetist told me that

the child aspirated in the recovery room.

My anaesthetist called doctor Andre esterhuizen,

and he looked after the child.

Unfortunately he extubated the baby at the wrong time,

and she stopped breathing and unfortunately died.

Alarmingly, this wasn't the only child

to have died under suspicious circumstances.

Then in 1991, came an official complaint from a mother about

her son, gareth, who had died under dr esterhuizen's care,

and it's at that point that hospital staff

started to make more specific investigations

into esterhuizen, his diagnoses and his treatment.

Dr wolmarans was at the forefront of the investigation, and what

he discovered shook the hospital and its staff to the core.

When I phoned the medical council, they told me that

there is no such a person or doctor in their doctors files

and he never qualified as a doctor.

He only had a high school diploma,

and he had been masquerading as a physician for all of these years.

Eventually dr esterhuizen was arrested, charged and put on trial.

Apparently some of the testimonies during

the trial were just horrendous.

One mother told the court of

her baby ending up with cerebral palsy after esterhuizen had done

four lumber punctures on her child when she was just four months old.

He was ultimately charged with culpable homicide,

impersonating a doctor and defrauding his patients,

and he was sentenced to 18 years in prison. However, nothing can

bring back any of the children that he lost due to his negligence.

The big question is how did the hospital never check

his credentials when they hired him? It makes you think, was this huge

scandal part of the reason that the hospital closed so suddenly?

I climbed these stairs every day going up to theatre

and to the wards... And unbeknown to me,

they closed this hospital within weeks.

At the time, the local health department blamed it

on staff shortages and under-utilisation,

but this just didn't add up.

Reports from staff working there at the time denied

any staff shortages, and they said that working conditions were good.

Closing a public hospital next to one of the biggest townships

in the country seems an odd move, especially when other hospitals

in the region were reported as being close to capacity.

It seems the reason this hospital really closed

will remain a mystery to both the staff and the general public.

Nothing was said.

Even up to today after 25 years, you know, we do not know

why the government wouldn't keep a magnificent asset like this going.

Today the hospital sits abandoned,

but it's not as quiet as it might initially look.

People still come, drawn by the terrible stories

of what took place here.

The site has become infamous for the spectres that wander

the hospital at night, and given what happened here, it's perhaps

no surprise that it's rumoured to be full of the ghosts of children.

And the hopes that it might one day

be bought back to life now seem to be a distant dream.

It was very painful to see a magnificent structure like this

so dilapidated and almost totally destroyed

is really a big heartache.

Off the south-east coast of Georgia, usa,

is a breath-taking island wilderness.

It's just a sort of lush, green place with sawgrass, palm trees,

marshes, and then it opens up in to this sort of great estate,

and you see the remains of what looks to be a massive stately home.

You can see that the grounds of this place were extensive,

and I bet in their day they were quite impressive. You can still see

ornamental lawns, and amongst them there's a few outbuildings as well.

Whoever lived here was pretty wealthy.

And it doesn't look like a place that's just sort of garden-variety

dilapidated by the years. It looks like something violent,

something terrible happened to reduce it to such destruction.

Further in, there are a series of curious brick buildings.

You can see these strange, chimney-like structures.

So you're wondering, what happened here?

Was this a site of manufacture?

Look closer and a very different picture emerges.

For some of the people that called this place home,

it wasn't a particularly pleasant place to be.

Clearly we're standing in the midst of some important

piece of American history.

Today the national park service is the custodian of this remote island

and its buildings. The only way to reach its rugged coast is by boat.

This island has many fascinating stories.

You could spend a lifetime studying the history of this island

and not fully be able to understand everything that happened.

Park ranger Robinson barker has spent many years investigating

the island's secrets.

The family that lived here most recently is the carnegie family

of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Originally the carnegies emigrated over to america from Scotland

in the 1840s, and the young brothers Thomas and Andrew carnegie worked

their way up until they amassed a large wealth in the steel industry.

The story goes that Thomas's wife Lucy was so enthralled by

the island's beauty, she insisted it be bought at any price.

In 1884, the carnegies built this mansion and called it dungeness.

It was the heart of the estate

that they built for them and their nine children.

Carnegie spared no expense in the construction of dungeness.

He not only built this magnificent main house and its outbuildings,

but he added a heated swimming pool, squash courts,

and he had 200 servants that would attend to

his family and any guests that were on the estate.

This is cumberland island national seashore,

once the exclusive playground of one of america's wealthiest families.

For many years, their life here was idyllic.

But before carnegies' arrival, it had a very dark and evil past.

What happened here, what people did here

came at a terrible cost, a terrible human cost.

The carnegies removed most of the structures from this time,

but one building remains.

This house was used as the overseer's home during

the Greene-Miller plantation here on the island. Over and in front

of me would have been a large cotton field where enslaved africans

worked throughout the day as they grew crops here for the market.

The Greene-Miller family took up residence here in the early 1800s.

They were the first to make use of the island's natural resources,

ushering in a shameful cycle that would endure for decades.

But something was coming that would give hope to the exploited people.

Slave labour made the owners rich, but a looming conflict

offered a chance of salvation.

Cumberland island has a really interesting history

during the war of 1812, with the British

trying to clamp a blockade up and down the American coast.

On January 10 of 1815, rear admiral cockburn invaded cumberland island

and set up camp down in the dungeness area using

the Greene-Miller dungeness house as his officers' headquarters.

British law prohibits slavery at this point.

He takes advantage of this.

He knows that if he can get enslaved people on British vessels that

he can spirit them away to freedom, and this is exactly what happens.

But in 1815, with the fighting officially over, a treaty

was signed between the warring nations.

It stated all slaves must be returned to their owners.

Cockburn says, "to hell with that." He takes any slaves

he can get and he ships them off to Canada or the Caribbean. In all,

cockburn ships out 1500 freed slaves from cumberland island.

Tragically this would prove to be no more than a short reprieve

for america's enslaved people.

Once again, this island would become a place where slavery thrived.

And the clues can be seen in the landscape.

And one man was infamous for his cruel desire to make profit

from the forced labour of people.

Born on the island in 1790, Robert Stafford worked on

the Miller-Greene plantation and had a really good sense of

just how profitable cotton enslavery was.

These chimneys, these structures that are left,

these are the only lasting physical legacy from this time period.

They're actually the chimneys that were part of the slave quarters.

So, based on archaeological investigation of the Stafford

slave cabins, we believe these cabins were fairly small,

about 16 by 21 feet long, a single room, a small kitchen area,

sleeping quarters, and that's just about it.

At the height of his empire, Stafford owned

most of the island and 348 slaves.

Stafford had no qualms about reintroducing slavery

on the island. He was a died-in-the-wool southerner

with a great belief in the, as they called it, peculiar institution.

But the slaves who were forced to toil here

against their will, change was coming, albeit slowly.

Once again war would offer a route to freedom.

This time, its legacy promised to endure.

After union victory in the war in 1865,

slavery is abolished in the south.

And that's gonna have a big impact on cumberland island's economy.

Most of the slaves had escaped to the mainland, leaving Stafford

with no real means to run a plantation economy.

Most other owners, they sold for a pittance and moved on,

but Stafford refused.

Until his dying breath, Stafford remained a stalwart

of the south and its racial beliefs.

And Stafford is proof of the aphorism

that only the good die young. He lives to a ripe old age of 86,

takes a slave wife, has six children and leaves them nothing.

For the former slaves that stayed on the island,

there was a glimmer of hope.

They would work, they would do menial work, but they also could

create on the north end of the island a small community

for themselves. They used reclaimed materials from old buildings to

build their own structures, and in 1893, very importantly

they erected the first African church,

which would become an incredibly important community centre.

After the tragic era of slavery had passed, the island was transformed

under the stewardship of the carnegies. But not even

their enormous wealth could save it

from the descent into ruin seen today.

The dungeness mansion was eventually closed down in 1925,

almost ten years after Lucy carnegie passed away,

and at that point it started to fall into disrepair

to some degree, and eventually it did burn in 1959.

The exact origin of the fire is not 100% certain,

but it's believed that it was poachers

illegally hunting on the island, though no-one was ever caught

or convicted, that is, as the story goes.

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