Original subtitles

Abandoned structures hold the secrets of America's past.

An imposing construction reveals a little-known chapter

in an era-defining story.

A frozen landscape shows how wars abroad shaped the homeland.

When they set off all the powder from the bombs,

you'd stand outside the house,

and it would just shake the earth

and the little mushroom clouds would come up.

And an ancient wonder offers a glimpse

into this land's long human story.

We don't really know why they created this place

and then what caused them to leave.

That's the great mystery.

Scattered across the United States are abandoned structures,

forgotten ruins of the past,

monuments to a bygone era.

Each shines a light on the story of this land

and its people.

These are the secrets of hidden America.

Deep in the heartland,

hundreds of miles from the nearest major city,

is an old facility with a new secret.

We're out basically in the middle of nowhere.

The site is enormous.

And we have these different structures dotted around for miles.

The first impression that everybody has when they come here,

hands down across the board,

is simply "wow."

The more you traverse this landscape,

the more you realize how much is here

and how much possibly happened here.

While much of the site fell into disrepair long ago,

the largest section appears almost unchanged.

The scale of the original site was right around the size of Manhattan.

But what you see behind me right here,

this is the most important part of it all.

The design of the bunkers,

the spacing between the bunkers,

tells you all you need to know.

This was a place that was filled with danger.

But with those risks now long gone,

something else is taking root here,

and life is slowly beginning to return.

This facility was abandoned for decades.

But now things are changing.

What these were built for originally

makes it absolutely perfect for what it's becoming today.

In operation for over two decades,

this was once a highly-secure military site,

as Tom Simons recalls from his days growing up on a neighboring ranch.

When we were kids,

we'd hunt rabbits and bobcats over on the west end

and we found a hole under the fence,

and we'd crawl under there and pursue our bobcats,

and the guards would come.

They were in jeeps,

they had like a .50 caliber machine gun mounted on the back.

When you're nine years old, you get pretty scared.

Now a shell of its former self,

at the time,

the armed security was here for a reason.

These buildings, from what I gather from some of my friends,

was small arms storage.

Like weapons, ...50 caliber machine guns, handheld,

I guess ammunition for like ANA aircraft

and different things like that.

The facility, as a whole at some point,

housed bombs, grenades, rockets

and chemical toxins.

There was a truly nasty cocktail

of chemical agents stored

such as VX gas, mustard gas and sarin.

They weren't nice ingredients.

This is the Black Hills Ordnance Depot,

a site established to make sure the United States was equipped for war.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941,

America was thrown into the war.

So, all of the sudden, is was no longer about preparation

and more about ramping up production of weapons and munitions.

The purpose of this place was to receive munitions,

store it safely and maintain it

so it was ready when it needed to be sent out.

Construction began in early 1942.

Here stood a vehicle classification area.

Nearby was an airfield, ammunition workshops and packing areas.

Burning grounds for old munitions were located at the edges.

Chemical weapons were in the northwest.

But the largest area was filled with storage bunkers

or "igloos," as they were nicknamed.

In total, 802 were built.

2,200 square foot apiece.

2 to 3-feet thick concrete walls all around

and double rebar

insulated under the earth.

Inside every one of these bunkers

was as many as you could imagine

bombs, ordnance or all kinds,

these things were packed to the gills.

These bunkers were constructed impeccably.

And the worst you'll see out of any of these

after 80 years in existence to this day

is minor cracking.

The first shipments arrived in late 1942,

well before the site was fully completed.

But with war raging abroad,

across the country,

sites like this were put straight into use.

We had military personnel,

we had the advanced technology.

If you can't back that up with the ordnance

and the weapons to sustain that fight

that they knew would go on for a very long time,

we would have been out of the game a lot earlier.

A permanent labor force had to be brought in

to operate the facility.

And from this, a new community soon grew.

To accommodate the work force,

they essentially had to develop a small town.

There was accommodation for 1,000 people working here,

a hospital, a school, a movie theater,

a bowling alley.

But the call to arms

also brought with it something unexpected.

Across the country,

age-old barriers were beginning to break down.

Reports show that there were 160 Native Americans working in this space.

And there was also a strong presence of the WOWs,

women ordnance workers.

It's a shame that it actually took a war

to bring about that kind of change,

but this was a turning point in that history.

However, social change at sites like this

came at a price.

For those working here over the years,

danger was ever-present.

In 1946,

a forklift driver punctured a 100-pound bomb

filled with white phosphorus.

It then engulfed over 38,000 bombs in flames.

When you're storing these extremely dangerous materials,

accidents can happen.

And that's exactly what happened in 1950

when three people were killed by an explosion.

But while originally designed to contain deadly materials,

more recently,

the bunkers have been offering protection

from the outside, instead.

In 1950,

this site was suddenly thrown into action once more.

The Korean War saw America calling on its stockpiled ordnance,

and this time, Black Hills was ready.

War played a key part

in the United States history of the 20th century.

So often, we think about the battles.

We don't talk about what was happening here

on the home front.

Hidden sites like this

remind us of all the effort that goes into that

in order to be able to fight these wars successfully.

After 25 years of service,

the site would close.

The bunkers were emptied and left to the elements.

But far from remaining silent forever,

something new is drawing people back here.

There's really two reasons why people want to be here.

One is because there's a huge desire to just be off-grid

and living a simpler life, in a way.

The other reason is

this facility is amazing for disaster preparedness

because these bunkers will protect you

from just about anything.

In 2016, a company called Vivos

bought up around 575 of the bunkers.

So this is my bunker. Home away from home.

It started out very modest and very empty and basic,

just like the other ones you've seen.

But this is what can be done inside here.

I have a large solar panel outside.

That's my primary power generation.

We have water purification up front.

And we have, um, you know, casually,

just a nuclear biological chemical filtration unit on the other side.

Back here, we have fuel storage.

And this is your ladder to get up into the attic.

If you were to be locked down in here for a year or even more,

you need all the storage you can get.

Um, back here, we have a nice large gun safe.

For the Black Hills site,

this latest chapter in its story is bringing back

something that was lost a long time ago.

Like many communities that are built up around military investments,

once the facility closes, people move away.

Slowly, this community is beginning to reappear.

It's really all kinds of people.

We have people with very high-tech medical equipment,

entire arsenals of weaponry,

people with basically all the seedlings that you could need

to start and run a greenhouse that could feed a community.

We're full-time residents here.

There are about 30--

between 30 and 40 other full-time residents here right now.

From our perspective, this is home.

While bunker life isn't for everyone,

these old structures continue to hold their own in the modern world.

I have a good number of friends that I've known for a long time,

and they were curious about what I was doing

until the pandemic.

They are suddenly incredibly interested

in putting themselves in a better position

to where their pantry won't run empty in three days.

If things did go crazy in the world,

if someone straight up declared war on America

or there was enormous civil unrest,

I feel completely safe here.

I can provide for my power and my water.

We're good.

Today, the bunkers and the other parts of the site

help illustrate how the country's past

has left its mark on the land.

In the '40s,

war was totally different than it is today.

And this was a necessary facility back in those years.

In a way, I'm glad it ended,

because we don't need this no more.

And it's sad to see all the buildings falling down.

It's just a part of our history that we can't change.

In the foothills of the Appalachians

is a quiet site that became famous for the wrong reasons.

We're in a rural part of Tennessee,

kind of far away from any place that you would really wanna be

by foot or car.

A winding road cuts through the range,

ending at a walled fortress.

It's built out of a light-colored sandstone.

And with its prenylated top,

it looks rather like a castle.

It's very out of place in the area.

This place is a mishmash of architecture.

Some of it is modern.

There are older structures.

Cleary, it has been built and rebuilt over the years.

But inside are rotting walls and rusted bars

that reveal its true purpose.

It's absolutely depressing.

You know that the prisoners inside this prison

had horrific existences.

This is Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary.

Some of America's most dangerous criminals were locked inside here.

But it was one inmate's crime

that changed the course of American history

and drew the eyes of the world to this place.

Teddy Basler arrived here nearly 40 years ago.

His job, to keep convicted felons under lock and key.

Behind these doors were murderers,

violent criminals

and sex offenders.

Stand here, and every fiber of your being will scream,

"This is the end of the road."

But this high-security facility

started life as a simpler structure.

In the late 1800s,

Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary

was a wooden prison.

But in the 1930s,

authorities decided to put the prisoners to work

to rebuild it

basically ensuring that they would not be able to escape.

Brushy was designed to be a threat.

To be sent here, you'd either been convicted of a heinous crime

or no one else would have you.

For the inmates,

living quarters were small and sparse.

Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary

kept some of America's most notorious felons.

But in March of 1970,

Brushy's most famous inmate arrived,

a man named James Earl Ray.

James Earl Ray was a fugitive

from the Missouri State Prison.

He was a petty criminal.

He's the dregs of American society.

And he played a role in forever changing the landscape of America

by killing Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

On April 4th, 1968,

King was staying at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis.

As he stood on his balcony,

a single bullet struck him.

The world stopped.

Riots took place across the country.

I actually remember the day

and how afraid I was of the National Guard

when they came into my Black community,

as a little boy.

It stayed with me like it happened yesterday.

A manhunt began.

James Earl Ray was the number one suspect.

He was captured in London, England,

and sentenced to 99 years in prison

at Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary.

When we found out he was coming here,

we had staff meetings here all the time.

He was a major escape risk.

On a June evening, seven years into his sentence,

Ray made his move.

That evening, I'm eating supper

and the whistle starts blowing

and then this long-- I think it was seven times.

And I told my wife, I was like, "Oh, hell, Lola.

Oh, my God, honey, this-- it's a bad one.

This is bad.

If that man escapes,

it's real bad."

The inmates squeezed through a gap in the barbed wire,

just 18 inches wide.

And with that,

America's highest-profile criminal was on the run.

Any escapee is dangerous.

He's extremely dangerous.

He'll hurt anybody that gets in front of him.

On June 10th, 1977, the nation's attention

was suddenly brought upon this prison,

for the man convicted of killing Martin Luther King had escaped.

We had to call every employee.

Every employee of the prison, we would call in.

The media descended on the space.

And people all over the country

watched the unfolding of this manhunt.

The sent the FBI in here.

And I know most of the people in the FBI are good people.

But the ones they sent up here,

if they had been hand-picked to be total rear ends,

they-- they got 'em.

They drove around at night in cars

shining lights up in the woods.

But you're not gonna catch him

shining lights up in the trees at night.

While the FBI swept the roads,

Tucker and his colleague, Stawney Lane,

planned an expedition into the woods

with bloodhounds.

We called at night

and he said, "We got a really good track going over here."

Now he said, "I'm gonna tell you something.

If I call you anytime tonight on the radio

and I say the word 'shallow,'

I got him. We're looking at him."

For two days, Brushy's officers and the FBI

raced to find James Earl Ray.

When it come over the radio,

he said, "We've still got a good track going."

He said, "It's hotter than hell."

He said that "over here is a shallow church,"

boy, my hair stood up all over me.

He's looking at him. They done got him.

He said "shallow."

The hounds tracked Ray to a spot in the woods.

Later, the dog handlers showed reporters

how he discovered Ray buried in a pile of leaves.

By the end of the fourth day,

all the escapees had been rounded up.

And Ray was heading to solitary.

James Earl Ray was put into D block.

This was the bleakest place that Brushy had to offer.

Those in D block who were put into solitary confinement,

the spent 90% of the time on their own.

Their food was pushed through a gap in the door.

Ray spent six months in here.

A few years later,

he was transferred to another facility.

He died behind bars in 1998.

Brushy kept going, but eventually,

it couldn't keep up with the growing prison population.

In 2009, it was shut down permanently.

While this prison played its role in the aftermath of Martin Luther King's death,

that tragic event had much further-reaching consequences

for American history.

His assassination,

particularly amongst young African Americans

and other civil rights activists,

created doubt about nonviolence

and the hope for a better America.

It changed the face of American history.

Many situations, those riot-torn urban centers,

have never bounced back from the destruction of 1968.

So, in essence,

the killing of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

was a critical moment in, um,

the larger chronicle-ization of American history.

In the lush hills of wine country

is a building whose disastrous end

was shrouded in mystery for decades.

We're in one of the most beautiful parts of America,

just north of San Francisco.

Wineries, golden hilltops,

oak rows,

and we come across this large structure.

This place was clearly something special.

But it isn't immediately apparent what happened here

to leave it in this state.

Found in a tranquil setting,

together, it all reveals something unexpected.

This place tells a story of one of America's most famous writers.

But the ruins show that there was a twist in this tale.

What we're looking at here

is the product of one man's dream.

It all came crashing down in a single night of tragedy.

Today, these remains stand within the boundaries

of a state historic park.

Bern Lefson has been a docent here for 10 years.

This was the home of a very important

famous individual in US history.

This structure was the dream of Jack London,

the most influential writer of his time.

His books were read by people around the world.

Today, Jack London's books

like White Fang Call of the Wild,

they're not held in the highest literary esteem,

but in his day,

Jack London was a superstar.

Costing close to $2 million in today's money,

this was intended to be the home of Jack and his second wife, Charmian.

He named it Wolf House.

Living here would have made you felt like luxury.

But with all of the windows,

one would also feel that you're part of nature,

which was very important to Jack.

In 1911,

the foundations were poured

and they hid a secret.

They were strong enough to carry a 40-story building.

The reason was down to the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake.

It's estimated that between 70 and 80% of the city was destroyed.

London wanted to make sure that his house

would not only be stable in an earthquake

with the massive foundation,

but also, as close to fireproof as possible.

He used volcanic rocks for the walls.

Where he had exposed wood,

he used redwood with the bark still on.

Redwood trees are famously resistant to fire.

So with it engineered to last,

how did it end up like this?

Jack London had intended Wolf House

to be a lasting monument on his grand estate.

What he was trying to establish here

was a far cry from his adventure-fueled formative years.

Jack London grew up poor on the streets,

literally, on the streets of San Francisco.

He worked on seal boats,

sailed as far as Japan,

rode the rails back and forth across the country,

and this was all by the age of 20.

At 21,

he chose to follow the gold rush north

into the Klondike.

He spent about a year up there

meeting all the various characters,

talking to people, taking in the scenery,

and it's out of that experience

that the germ of his writing was really born.

London's novel The Call of the Wild in 1903

was a huge success and it made him rich.

An affair, the breakdown of his marriage

and then a new marriage followed.

By 1905,

the now-famous author was looking to settle down.

So, little known about Jack London,

he was actually very passionate about conserving the soil.

And at that time in California,

farmers were using chemical fertilizers

and just basically farming the soil out

and moving on to another farm.

And his travels around the world showed him

ways to farm in a better more earth-friendly way.

And that is something he wanted to share with the world

through his work here in the land.

The couple bought up small areas of land

to create their new property called Beauty Ranch.

And this parcel here is the one

that allowed them to physically move onto the land

and become residents of their new dream together.

This was really a mark of success for Jack.

This was really the pinnacle of his dream,

was to have a wonderful place in the country

that he could farm with his wife

and be very close to nature.

The small cottage provided lodging,

but Wolf House was intended to be their true home.

However, in August, 1913,

with the house nearing completion,

the unthinkable occurred.

Jack was awakened in the middle of the night

being told that the Wolf House was on fire.

And when he got here,

he noticed the whole roof was engulfed

and he knew there was no saving it.

What's left standing is all that does not burn.

Contained inside,

a fire had burned out of control

before the alarm was raised.

The sad irony is the thick walls

that were designed to keep fire out

did not handle the fire that began within.

For decades, the cause of the fire remained a mystery.

But in 1995,

a forensics team conducted a study of the site.

We are in the dining room

and the fire was determined by scientific methods

to begin right in front of that fireplace.

Rags soaked in linseed oil

had been used to treat the interior wood surfaces.

And it's believed that at the end of the day,

those rags were left in a pile there.

They were able to actually confirm the spontaneous combustion theory.

It was an incredibly hot day

and the sun beaming in the open window

hitting those rags just heated them up

until the point of combustion.

In this case, by the time anyone was aware

the building was on fire,

it was far too late to do anything.

Today, many question Jack London's personal and political views.

What these sites offer, though, is perhaps

a glimpse at another side to the famous author.

London was a fascinating figure

in the history, not just of literature,

but ideas about conservation,

about man's relationship with nature

and still, in some ways,

there's a hint of that lingering around these ruins.

In the Four Corners region,

where Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico meet,

ancient structures hide an often overlooked part

of this land's story.

We're out in the wilds here.

It's striking and it's desolate.

This feels like such a quiet and distant place today.

But you can see from all the remains dotted about

that, years ago, this was anything but.

Aged forms cover these grounds.

But one stands apart.

It's the kind of settlement we associate

with Mesoamerican Native architecture,

the Mayans or the Aztecs,

or South America, like the Incas.

This was once a thriving and populace area.

But something changed and people began to leave.

That's the real mystery here.

Something must have happened.

This is one of the most important archeological sites in North America,

one of the most important in the world,

and yet most Americans don't know much about it.

Dating back over 1,000 years,

the structures here reveal an early chapter

in the human history of this land.

Jon Ghahate is a member of two of New Mexico's Pueblo communities.

The skills that were evolved here

to create the kinds of structures that we see a millennia later,

they are still here.

This structure, at one point in time,

was about the height of about four to five stories.

This wall is at least 3 feet thick.

That there are two external walls

and then a second wall where rubble would be used

because it has to support the surrounding or upper walls.

That's why it has to be so thick.

The structure covers an area of around two football fields.

And through years of excavations,

it's been estimated it had around 650 rooms.

This is Pueblo Bonito,

the grandest of the great houses built in this canyon.

It's not just the skill of the labor,

it's the sheer physical work.

They didn't have draft animals,

they didn't have mules or oxen.

As far as the walls and the ceilings,

most of this wood comes from at least 50-55 miles away

from the Chuska Mountains and the Zuni Mountains.

We have to also remember,

all of this was done with human labor

as well as simply other simple tools, bone, wood and stone.

We learn a lot from the evidence left behind.

But at the core of this story

is the mystery of what this place really was.

Originally a nomadic people from around the mid-9th century,

it was ancestral Puebloans who began to settle here.

This is when the construction of this site really begins.

And it continues for centuries.

Key walls of this site

were constructed along the cardinal directions of the compass,

while certain windows are aligned with astronomical events.

They were positioned around the sun

to mark the solstice and the equinox.

The had meaning and purpose.

This was an engineering marvel.

Sites such as this really reveal that there was a long history

in this land before Europeans came,

and that it was sophisticated.

Twelve other great houses are found here.

But this was just one area in a larger civilization.

There were around 150 of these great houses in the region.

And they were connected by a road system.

They were all part of the same society,

a shared way of life.

This culture reached across large parts of New Mexico

up into Colorado and Utah

and west into Arizona.

This was a very dominant group.

For centuries,

Pueblo Bonito flourished as the largest of these structures

and the center of this so-called Chacoan culture.

But then, something changed.

The twist in the tale comes soon after

when, suddenly, they began to leave.

In one corner of the site,

you can see there's been a rockfall, a huge collapse.

And you immediately wonder if that played a role in its decline.

Built around 1,000 years ago,

Pueblo Bonito stood as the largest building in this land

for around eight centuries.

Dominating the site is the large central plaza,

a clue to what this all may have been built for.

Most scientists presume that this was a place

where all the people, all the community members,

participated either with trade or ceremonies.

But they also kind of congregated

to perhaps maybe celebrate or just have a feast or a fair

that you would expect them to share something together.

The scale of the structure suggests

a large population could have lived here.

But something is amiss.

One of the things that we do not see here

is what we call trash mittance or garbage.

Why don't we have large-- evidence of large amounts of trash?

That's why the accepted hypothesis is

that only a small group of people lived here at any one point in time

and other groups came here either on a pilgrimage

or of a way to visit this place.

Something that adds to this theory

is the abundance of these large circular structures

known as kivas,

the largest of which has a diameter of around 70 feet

and lies to the south of Pueblo Bonito.

It's suspected that perhaps it probably was

able to hold the whole community at one point in time.

They would have been covered over

either as underground structures, sunken down into the earth,

or as roofed buildings with an access point on top,

likely with a ladder to lead you down inside.

We see them throughout Chaco Canyon

as well as other extensions of the culture

that existed throughout the southwest.

But it's a way that we can simply understand

that the humans who created places like this

had some existential constructs.

They perhaps have belief in the afterlife,

a belief in the spirit or the soul of a human being

that they made a conscious effort to incorporate that into their society.

While Pueblo Bonito could have been a site of pilgrimage

or intended for ceremonial use,

the kivas also represent something more,

a link to the modern day.

Only this time, any mystery surrounding their use

stems from a conscious decision.

The current-day Pueblos have these structures within our communities

that we still use,

that they are part of our rituals,

our existential constructs.

Kivas are ways of helping us understand that we are spiritual beings,

but at the same time,

we protect what we want to

and simply not divulge in completely everything.

Across three centuries,

the structures of Chaco Canyon continue to grow in size and importance.

But it wouldn't last.

There's a huge rock collapse in the corner of this site.

But that happened long after the ancestral Puebloans were gone.

Something else led to their leaving.

And it wasn't only Pueblo Bonito that was affected.

Around the 12th, 13th century, something happened,

something significant enough to change the culture,

to change the approach to living across the region.

This thriving community just started to empty.

Theories covering drought, disease, violence

and religious change have been suggested.

But for now, at least,

the answers to exactly what this place was built for

and why it ended

remain a mystery.

While the inhabitants departed long ago,

the significance of Chaco Canyon and these sites remains.

Perhaps some of the first impressions that people experience

is that it's abandoned.

But it's really not abandoned

as it applies to our Pueblo culture.

These places are significant even today.

They give us a sense of looking into the past,

but it helps us understand who we are in the present

and then certainly who we are in the future.

For Jon, however,

the lessons aren't limited to the descendants of this culture.

One of the important things we as humans can learn

is what history is.

It gives us a sense of place, where we belong

in this greater thing we call the cosmos,

this universe.

Literally, we are just part of something

and we are connected to everything.

By learning about some of those components,

we realize that we belong here.

And, therefore, we should take care of this planet.

That's what we can learn by experiencing places like Chaco.