Original subtitles

Narrator: A beachside resort in Bulgaria

built on deception and dirty money.

Man: This is one of those cases where fact is stranger than fiction.

A wind swept outpost in Scotland hiding a once life-saving technology.

Woman: From the outside,

none of these buildings are anything special.

But one in particular, when you get inside it,

is just phenomenal.

A nondescript tunnel in Switzerland

where there's more than meets the eye.

Man: When you open the door it exposes an underground labyrinth

that was constructed when the world was teetering

on the edge of disaster.

And a shadowy sight in Iowa usa

plagued by its chequered past.

Woman: This place is haunted by stories.

It began as an idyllic home set in green pastures

until it turned into something else.

Decaying relics.

Ruins of lost worlds.

Sites haunted by the past.

Their secrets waiting to be revealed.

In Scotland looking across

the cold waters of the firth of forth

is a facility that was once ahead of it's time.

Well, this place has an apocalyptic feel to it.

Kind of a mad Max era thing,

you've got these abandoned buildings

with rusty tin roofs and all the glass is gone.

Has a real institution feel to it.

There's not a single pane of glass

left in the place by the look of it.

Most of the doors are missing.

It's had it's time and it's moved on.

Other features here clearly point

to it's original purpose of this place.

Instead of one or maybe two long runways,

this site has loads of them,

crisscrossing each other in a spaghetti junction.

You're used to seeing this kind of jumble of runways

in modern day airports but to find a,

a runway this complex in remotest Scotland

is quite strange.

But inside one

non-descript building lies a strange construction.

It's theatrical on its scale,

it's round it's white, it's quite oppressive,

there's things hanging up above you.

It's clearly incredibly specialised.

The upper half is painted white

and the lower half is painted blue

and this must have some significance.

These crumbling remains

tell a story of remarkable ingenuity and ambition.

At a time of national peril.

In 1940

these ram shackled structures on this exposed coastline

went by a surprising name.

The name of the location is hms jackdaw.

His majesty's ship jackdaw

and that is your clue to what this place is.

This was not a raf royal air force base.

This was a royal Navy air base.

The British Navy in its infinite wisdom thought

that all land based airfields that serve the royal Navy

had to have naval designations.

Her majesty's ship this, her majesty's ship that.

Soon after the start of the second world war,

pilots here were training to operate

not from land bases but from those on the sea.

By 1940

it was appreciated that no battle at sea

could be won without using aircraft.

Commander David hobbs

is a former royal Navy pilot

who spent decades flying from aircraft carriers.

The Navy kept it's runways small

because it wanted pilots

to get used to the idea of operating from a confined space.

Even the layout of the runways prepared pilots for a life at sea.

With an aircraft carrier

your pilots are always going to land in to wind

heading along the line of the flight deck

with the carrier steaming in to wind.

So, one of the ideas of having 4 runways

is you've more often got a runway that points in to wind.

But learning to take off and land

was only the first part of the training.

Away from the runways,

the royal Navy were developing a secret weapon

one that would revolutionise the fight on the high seas.

The floor is covered in debris

and bits of metal and when you look up

you see this bizarre contraption,

only half of which is left.

This machine was going to help the allies win the war.

As war broke out,

the German Navy launched their largest

and most advanced battle ship yet.

Germany went in with one of the biggest battle ships

anyone had ever seen, the Bismarck.

This thing is a behemoth, it displaces 50,000 tonnes.

It has an armament of 8 big main guns,

12 secondary guns, anti-aircraft guns.

It's an absolutely awe inspiring floating battery.

As an island nation,

britain relied on imports

by sea to fuel it's war effort

and the Bismarck posed a huge threat

to those vital supply lines.

But attacking it would not be easy.

There's an old adage among fliers that you know,

dive bombing a ship you're going to put holes in the deck,

if you want to sink you have to fire a torpedo at it.

With its powerful anti-aircraft guns,

getting a plane close enough

to launch a torpedo

required a difficult and often deadly aerial manoeuvre.

The young pilots would have to perform

an almost 2 mile near vertical dive in just 30 seconds.

It was from bases like this

that the dangerous training for the mission took place.

They would take off and they would practice

with dummy torpedoes against dummy targets.

It's hard enough on a dry clear day

but this is Scotland,

it's wet and windy

and of course they had to train at night as well.

All of them were at risk of blacking out

because the blood would be slashing around

from their head to their feet and then back up again.

Accidents were common,

good pilots were lost in the firth of forth

miles away from the frontline.

Despite the tragic loss of life

it was still believed

that perfecting this manoeuvre

could make all the difference in battle.

But the Navy needed a safer way for pilots to master this tactic.

And the solution came from a rather unlikely source.

A firm called fit ups

that made theatrical lighting

asked the admiralty

if there's anything they could do for the war effort.

They explained to them this training issue

and they came up with a radical solution,

one of the worlds first immersive flight simulators.

This is the torpedo attack trainer...

The structure and equipment

were centred around a replica cockpit

where the trainee would take the stick.

It could roll up to 30 degrees either way

and it could pitch

I think it was 15 degrees nose up or nose down,

obviously it didn't move

but when you open the throttle

a noise sounded like an engine revving up

and the effect of the lighting

sweeping across the blue painted floor

gave him the impression of speed.

You can see the horizon painted on here

so this is giving you the effect of sea.

The area above here is painted off white

because it was the perfect colour

on which the lighting gantry up here

could transmit the effect of clouds, rain, snow, sleet passing etc.

A target ship was projected on to the wall.

By changing it's size and position,

the different stages of an attack were simulated.

The pilot would find and line up his target.

Dive towards the water and level off, aim and fire.

A beam of light showed whether he had hit his Mark.

This would have operated all day every day

with a team of instructors running it

and student pilot after student pilot coming in here.

It was the first of it's kind when you know,

this opened there was literally nothing like it.

I'm told by people who flew it

that within seconds

once the lighting was on and running

you really believed you were in the effect

they were trying to give you,

a tropical paradise or an arctic blizzard.

Undoubtedly a number of lives were saved by this technology.

Not long before the torpedo attack trainer came online,

the devastating effectiveness of the Navy's torpedo bombers

would become clear.

So, on may 24th 1941

the Bismarck is set upon by two British warships,

the hood and the prince of wales in a big naval battle.

The Bismarck managed to get a shell

right in to the ammunition blocker of the hms hood

and the subsequent fire tore the ship apart.

The Bismarck was damaged

but managed to get away

and the prince of wales had no chance

to catch it up by itself.

Fortunately

the royal Navy's torpedo planes were ready.

Two days later

a torpedo bomber launched from the hms ark royal

intercepted the fleeing Bismarck.

It only needed to get one hit, one hit in a key place.

And it managed it.

The torpedo strike jammed the Bismarck's rudder

and now all she could do was spin in circles,

that gave the royal Navy time to catch up and sink her.

Having proved that this technique was crucial

even against the seemingly impenetrable Bismarck,

this new technology

helped ensure that torpedo bombers

continued to play a vital role in numerous allied victories.

The torpedo bomber force was extremely successful,

they sank a lot of enemy ships which is what they were there to do.

They were a force that achieved more

with not very much

than a lot of others in the second world war.

When the war ended

however the miraculous torpedo attack trainer

was no longer needed.

It was locked up,

they threw the key away

and basically it was just left to fall apart.

So, what you see here is 80 years worth of neglect.

Although hms jackdaw now lies forgotten

the training techniques that began here

are still being used by the royal Navy today.

That training has been the foundation

for the fleet air arm ever since.

With some aeroplanes like the f35 lightening,

60% is carried out in a simulator

because you can't do it with the real weapon

in the real aeroplane in the real world.

In Bulgaria

next to the blue waters of the black sea,

lies a concrete shell of epic proportions.

This is a sight you can't miss,

it commands a view of the entire landscape,

these huge concrete structures climb up and down the cliffs.

It is massive.

Nothing's in a straight line,

they're all built along various arcs,

they surround various courtyards.

This place was clearly built

to house many people in great luxury.

As you walk through this site

you really get a sense of what it's all about,

tower after tower of apartments surrounds you,

these enormous concrete structures

stand tall and proud but unfinished.

They say that property development

is about location,

location and location,

well look at this location, it's gorgeous.

Why would you invest so much in building here

only to walk away?

The answer to that question

is not just down to the money drying up.

This is one of those cases where fact is stranger than fiction.

You've got money laundering, you've got the Russian mafia,

you've got international intrigue

and they all culminate in this massive site

being abandoned before it was finished.

This area of the black sea

is a famous holiday destination

where property is relatively cheap,

the view's stunning and for developers

there is serious money to be made.

In 2006,

lowdess, a somewhat mysterious development company,

bought land from the local government

and they did it with the announced intention

of building a holiday resort complex.

What they were planning

was a really big state of the art luxury resort.

They were going to have 5,000 units,

13 swimming pools, pubs, restaurants, a theatre,

underground streets, underground parking.

This luxury resort was to be called costa del croco

and to help fund the project,

huge swathes of the apartments were sold on spec.

Some of the folks who bought them were investors

but a lot of them just went to ordinary individuals.

Folks nearing retirement

or men and women just excited at the prospect of a holiday home

in this most famous of holidaying areas.

One of these people was Anna Ivanova,

for Anna though it wasn't just money she was investing

but also land she owned near the site.

The construction started in 2007

and they just poured everything in to it.

The crews worked day and night, they bought in tonnes of cement,

all of these buildings went up extremely quickly.

The project was due to be worth a staggering 94 million pounds

and the plans were hugely ambitious.

But unbeknownst to Anna,

this development was hiding a very dirty secret.

This is a story about people building here

for the purpose of turning money they can't spend

in to clean money that they can take anywhere.

Information began to come out

about who were the real investors behind it,

turned out one of them was a guy named konstantin ciganov

a notorious Russian mobster

who was part of a criminal gang called euro mash.

In the 1980s

ciganov had been a founding member of the gang.

This was back when the Soviet union

was falling to pieces and the old Soviet government

and the new Russian government could not maintain control

so gangsters like ciganov and his friends,

they became like the godfather.

Ciganov soon had tens of millions of Euros

in illegal money gained through violent crime

but before long the authorities were on to him.

So, as Russia starts to sort itself out

in the 1990s and early 2000s,

ciganov has got to leave Russia.

Ciganov claimed Bulgarian citizenship

through his ancestry.

But he still had a major problem, how to clean his dirty money.

You might wonder why someone with vast money

from criminal enterprises

would want to invest some of it

in a beachfront resort property.

But ciganov was facing a problem all mobsters face eventually,

what to do with their money.

You can't just go to a bank and say

here's $50million or Euros or whatever,

I don't know where I got it,

I never paid taxes on it

but I want you to keep it for me.

Money laundering is a very, very common activity

across criminal enterprise internationally

and one of the most common ways to do it

is by investing in legal businesses.

Ciganov had started making investments

in various enterprises.

One of those was the...

Property group and it's investment in costa del croco.

Now, these millions which came

from ciganov's multiple criminal enterprises,

they really should have flagged him up to the police

but mysteriously he got away with it.

We don't know exactly what his relationship was

with the man who is now the president of Bulgaria.

We don't know what his relationship was

with the former head of the Bulgarian secret service,

but what we do know is that they all played soccer together

and I guess that shows there was a network of relationships

that konstantin ciganov

was able to use to advantage for a while.

Ciganov's easy ride however was about to come to an abrupt end.

In 2008 the global financial crisis hit.

The bottom fell out of the world's economy

and a lot of financial institutions,

a lot of companies and a lot of people went broke.

So, it starts in the United States

but the consequences are going to ripple outwards

like a stone thrown in a pond.

All of a sudden nobody had extra money

to invest in anything

especially not anything related to real estate

because real estate values were collapsing all over the world.

Work in costa del croco just stopped,

like somebody flipped a switch,

the crews just left, no explanation.

For ciganov

the global financial crisis wasn't his only problem.

It appears that there was a shift in power in Bulgaria

and that shift in power meant

that ciganov's highly placed friends could not help him anymore.

A year after the halt of construction at costa del croco

in April 2010 ciganov,

his business partner

and a number of other dangerous Russian mobsters

were arrested and expelled from Bulgaria.

At that point ciganov seems to have disappeared.

And there's no way to trace what happened to the millions

that were invested in costa del croco.

For those left behind,

this vast site is a constant reminder

of what might have been.

In central Switzerland, at the foot of the alps,

lies the medieval city of lucerne.

It's a tranquil place surrounded

by the most breath-taking scenery,

you've got mountains, forests and gorgeous lakes.

It is a fantastic place to go

but as you're travelling in your car

and you go through a couple of tunnels,

just have a look around because they are not what you think.

In a quiet suburb nearby

is a scene that at first seems unrelated.

Tucked in amongst a block of flats

there's this unassuming door set in a wall of concrete.

It peaks out just below this mound of grass

right next to a children's playground.

When you open the door

it exposes an underground labyrinth.

But inside it's a whole Warren

of passages and rooms and spaces.

The hidden domain extends

all the way to the busy motorway tunnels

connecting the two sites.

There was a lot of space for people down here

because there's lots of beds, there's kitchen areas,

there's offices,

there seems to be a lot of individual rooms

for particular purposes.

The a2 motorway runs directly through lucerne

carrying over 85,000 vehicles a day.

But these tunnels weren't only designed

for handling traffic.

When this tunnel was opened in 1976

it had a much bigger purpose.

One that was supposed to protect the people of this city

in a time of national emergency.

Zora schelbert is an expert on the site's ulterior use.

So, this is the security station

where they had prison cells

for potential tunnel trouble makers

so if people hadn't been obeying downstairs in the tunnels,

they would have been pulled out of the tunnels

and put behind bars in here.

I have my doubts

if 16 prison places would have been sufficient

considering the circumstances

that would have led to people coming here

because they would have been in greatest fear already.

Further clues in the bowels of this place

show that prisoners wouldn't have been alone down here.

This is a dorm

where 64 people would have slept with bunk beds,

4 layers high, not a lot of space.

There is some sort of military element to it

in terms of communications and medical facilities

but this was something bigger.

This was bigger than what would house an army.

The key to understanding this buried structure

is the era in which it was created.

I mean Switzerland is famous for its neutrality

and yet it doesn't mean it,

it isn't er, under threat from other things.

At the time this structure was built

the world was staring

down the barrel of the deadliest threat

it had faced since the end of world war two.

The cold war bought an urgent need to protect the population

from a nuclear strike.

It is important to realise

that the fear was not to be

under direct attack during the cold war,

the fear was always to become collateral damage

between the Soviets and er, the us.

So, the Swiss introduced a law

that required nuclear shelters for the entire population

and in some places this meant thinking big.

This is the sonnenberg shelter

completed at a cost of over 300 million pound in today's money,

the price of protecting a city's population

doesn't come cheap.

The mountain hides the true engineering

in this particular location,

you will never ever know how much work has gone in to this.

But it's there and it was expensive.

The two motorway tunnels stretch on for almost a mile.

At their heart

a 7 storey logistics centre was built.

If called upon

the intention was that the entire complex

could be transformed in to the world's largest

civilian nuclear bunker.

If the alarm sounded 20,000 of the cities residents

would descend on the fortified fall out shelter,

with the doors closed

the road would then be converted

in to a vast makeshift accommodation block.

This building here is not

where the 20,000 would have been living

but in here,

this is one of the two motorway tunnels,

these would have been filled with beds and toilet areas

for 10,000 people each.

450 tonnes of flat pack structures,

beds and bathrooms

were all stored ready for assembly

and to ensure life underground ran smoothly

the bunker contained a command room,

hospital, prison, radio station

and when operating could house

a staff of 700 in the logistics centre.

State of the art technology made certain the tunnels occupants

had a clean supply of breathable oxygen.

Those air filters were vital

for the tunnel inhabitants

because during the cold war

the threats were nuclear threats mostly

so they needed a very powerful air filtration system

to protect the tunnel inhabitants.

But if the dooms day bunker was ever called in to action,

would it all have worked as planned?

In 1987 it was put to the test, operation ant had begun.

The Swiss maybe known for their time keeping

but this particular operation didn't run like clockwork.

First of all it took 24 hours to shut the doors,

there were some problems with the door mechanisms.

Although officially this part of the test did work,

there are numerous people involved

that say that one of the doors didn't actually close properly

and if this was not a test

that would have been fatal for everyone inside.

Malfunctioning doors however,

weren't the only life threatening issue.

Not only could the 20,000 beds not be assembled quickly enough,

even if that had gone to plan

they'd have run out of water within just 2 weeks anyway.

So, operation ant was probably

the beginning of the end of this facility,

of the idea of housing 20,000 people in the two motorway tunnels

because the drill showed that it would have taken

way too long to get everything ready in the case of a nuclear problem.

The scope and scale of the site's use as a nuclear bunker

was reduced over the years,

and eventually the two road tunnels became single purpose structures.

In 2006 the grand plan was abandoned.

Traffic does still flow through the tunnel 24 7

but it's days as a nuclear bunker are long gone.

Today one section of the central complex

remains on standby as an emergency bunker

ready to house 2,000 people.

Just 10% of the original plant.

But it does go to show you that when faced with something like

nuclear terror or nuclear disaster just what lengths

people might go to to try and protect their population.

In Iowa usa

stands a solitary building filled with memories

of a troubled life.

This building is a really large impressive structure

and back in the day this probably would have been something

that caught people's attention.

It's surrounded by acres of countryside

like a refuge away from the industrial world.

But that picture starts to change

as soon as you step through the door.

So, yes there's peeling paint

and there's rust and there's mould

but there's also these really long corridors

with door after door after door,

there's just so many places

someone or something could be hiding.

What haunted tales still echo through these halls?

And what finally bought this place to its knees?

There's a lot of stories that took place here

but unfortunately a lot of those stories are tragic.

The old cemetery nearby gives us some clues

that whatever was going on here, it wasn't ending well.

While uninhabited today there is still evidence

of the property's final use as a home to a few dozen people.

And as Cindy Anderson,

the site's manager has discovered,

much of this is of a personal nature.

One of the sad realities of living in an institution

is that sometimes when you left your things

didn't get to come with you.

And people's belongings were left behind.

We don't know who they belong to.

But worldly possessions weren't necessarily

the only things that didn't leave.

There's an energy that seems to be you know,

swirling or when you walk in to a place

you kind of get a little tingle feeling.

Some people have reported

seeing apparitions or hearing giggling

and if you're looking for paranormal activity

you might be able to find it in this place.

Many such reports of paranormal activity

emanate from the shadowy rooms below.

The most famous story belongs to a supposed spirit

called the joker and he roams the basement,

it's said that he hung himself down there

and has stalked the corridors ever since.

He has thrown things,

I have been pushed, I have had my hair pulled.

He likes to also be a little intimidating

so he might get up close to you

so that he can overwhelm you at some point.

This place is haunted by stories

that are linked to it's past,

it began as an idyllic home set in green pastures

until it turned in to something else.

Established in the mid 1800s,

the oldest traces of the site can be found

at the rear of the property like the old machine shop.

This is now in pieces

but originally it would have stood up

near the main house and it wasn't alone,

there would have been

a number of other structures as well.

There was a corn crib on site,

there was a big barn.

They farmed, they had animals, cows, pigs, chickens.

In the original system

when it was first created this property had over 200 acres.

But this was no ordinary farm,

this place had another specific purpose.

The state of Iowa

passed the poor laws and under these laws

the counties created homes for the poor,

these were designed

to be benevolent charitable institutions.

The idea was that the able bodied poor

who unable to find employment could find shelter and work here.

The structure standing here however

is not the original building.

This is Edinburgh manor.

Completed in 1911 it signalled a whole new direction for the site.

As soon as this new building was constructed,

a committee was established

to look in to mental illness in the county

and with that a number of patients who had mental illness

were transferred to this new site.

It was becoming almost a catch all

for all these social problems in one place.

You end up with the vulnerable,

weak and elderly cohabiting with the violent and threatening.

It's like throwing in foxes in to the henhouse.

The use of some rooms may have been altered over the years

but the design laid the foundations

for a more institutionalised approach

to social care.

On the women's wing on the first floor

has some resident rooms

but you have a room that contains your medications,

the majority of residents would have been medicated.

On the opposite side, on the men's wing,

very similar as well you have some offices,

you have some resident rooms.

There's a game room at the end of the hall,

they tried very, very hard

to make it a comfortable place for people to be.

Reflecting changes taking place across the country

and the care system,

some of the old establishing ideas here

would soon be lost.

When it was a poor farm the people were required to work,

they did not want lazy people.

After the transition to this building

it was still considered that way

but over time the poor farm system collapsed.

Global events like the first world war

and the great depression

increased the pressure on the care system

leading some to champion a controversial new approach

known as eugenics.

You have social scientists looking at county homes

and homes for the incurably ill to say

what is it about these people that makes them so.

The United States takes some of this early charge

in the eugenics movement

and the movement for compulsory sterilisation

of those who were deemed genetically unfit

or institutionalised.

This facility does not have as negative a history

as some of the others,

there are some poor farms around the country

that people who were in charge were not nice people.

They did not take care of the residents.

While Edinburgh manor escaped that horror,

it would soon face struggles

that plagued similar facilities across the us.

Sadly over the years

with this place being under such strain,

there were reports of violence,

assaults and even suicides at the property.

In the 1950s

we've learned of a gentleman who didn't like it here.

Wasn't a locked facility,

he could have walked out the front door

any time he wanted

instead he chose to leave by hanging himself

and he did hang himself in a small room

at the end of the hall on the first floor.

When you have a stressed infrastructure

that is caring for so many different people

with so many different needs

it unfortunately means

that most of these people aren't getting the kind of care

that they need, that's individualised to them.

One room found in the basement

added in the late 1960s speaks to those troubling times.

This room here was the original padded room,

back then if you were out of control

they would grab you and put you in a straight jacket

then they would put you in a room like this.

And then you would have sat here until you could calm yourself down

and then they would let you out.

For almost 100 years this building moved with the times,

accepting new patients,

adapting it's layout

and trialling new approaches.

But finally in 2010

Edinburgh manor was deemed unfit for use.

While advances and improvements to the us care system continue,

many issues remain to be confronted.

We still have a legacy of those institutions today,

we have hospice care, we have nursing homes,

we have all of these other institutions

where we put people who cannot care for themselves

but we also have a history of mass incarceration in our country

and depending on

what source you look at 10 to 30% of those inmates

have mental illness.

So, have we reformed our institutions

or are we just reshaping them in new forms?

I think the stories that are linked to this house,

about its haunted past still haunt us today

because we're still dealing with so many of the same problems.

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