- [Dan Aykroyd] Warning, what you are about to see
could be disturbing to some viewers.
(suspenseful music)
Imagine an island so strange
it drives a man insane.
- He decides to pay homage to the deceased young girl
with a shrine of thousands of dolls.
- Or a village where, without warning,
every living thing simply drops dead.
- He begins seeing dead bodies around cooking fires,
dead bodies in their homes.
- Everything looks fine
other than this weird, silent death scene.
- How about a mysterious lake,
where unknown forces result in macabre collection?
- [Hakeem] What this turns up is completely unexpected.
- [Don] Skeletons upon skeletons upon skeletons.
- These are the places so surprising,
they are truly unbelievable.
(dramatic music)
We've all heard tales about the Bermuda Triangle,
everything from magnetic anomalies
to sea monsters and aliens,
but could there be an even stranger place
in our own backyard?
(suspenseful music) (thunder rumbling)
- The Lake Michigan Triangle is shaped like a dagger.
This section of Lake Michigan has, over the centuries,
earned a reputation for a place
where all kinds of weird things
and disasters have taken place.
- I mean, we're talking shipwrecks, drownings,
disappearances, strange UFO sightings, and so forth.
All of this is happening in an area that is minuscule
compared to the Bermuda Triangle,
but equal in strangeness.
- The first notable thing to happen
in the Lake Michigan Triangle
goes way back to 1679.
Rene-Robert Cavelier is a fur trader.
He builds the largest ship
on Lake Michigan at the time, Le Griffon.
- This is a huge ship.
It is a 45-ton, seven cannon barque.
- It's loaded with fur and he and the crew
really think they're about to make bank.
- It really indicates how rich this guy really wants to get.
This is all about getting the furs out of the Midwest,
up the St. Lawrence River, and back to Europe.
So the ship's ready to set sail,
but just before they go,
the Native Americans there warn them
that the lake is known for these strange and sudden squalls.
The weather can just come out of nowhere.
They hear the warning,
but they don't have time for this local superstition
and they're not gonna be held back.
- [Dan] Cavelier ignores the warnings,
ordering his loaded ship to set sail
while he waits behind for more furs.
Le Griffon heads off into the triangle and vanishes.
- There's no evidence of a storm.
There's no evidence of weird weather taking the ship down.
There's no evidence of piracy.
- There's no wreckage. There are no survivors.
It's gone.
- Is there any evidence
of this incredibly expensive load of furs anywhere?
No, their disappearance is a total mystery.
- That boat is gone and 340 years later,
we still do not know what happened.
- [Dan] Le Griffon may be the first ship
to fall victim to the Michigan Triangle,
but it's hardly the last or the strangest.
(dramatic music)
- In August of 1875,
this hundred foot schooner, The Rosabelle,
is found floating upside down in Lake Michigan.
Hull in the air, no damage to the boat.
The weird thing is the 11 man crew is gone, disappeared.
No bodies in the water, they seem to just have vanished.
- There's no evidence of any kind of foul play
or bad weather.
The ship is in such good condition, they're able
to right The Rosabelle and put it back to work.
- [Holly] And it has 50 years of fine service.
- [Dan] That is, until an unbelievable case of deja vu.
- On October 30th, 1921,
the ship is going out the next day with a load of lumber,
but the captain, Ed Johnson,
is having a premonition of something terrible happening.
- So, the captain is filled with dread
and doesn't wanna board the ship
and decides he doesn't feel right, can't explain it,
doesn't wanna get onboard the ship.
- Less than 24 hours later,
the ship is found floating upside down
and the same exact thing happens.
11 members are missing for the second time.
- The odds of this particular event
reoccurring, the same exact ship,
same situation, same circumstances,
no evidence, crew disappears.
I mean, that's just too uncanny.
The odds are impossible.
So when people start hearing about this particular event,
even the skeptics are convinced.
Something's going on out there.
(loon calling)
- Over the next hundred years,
the triangle claims hundreds more ships,
prompting countless searches for evidence,
but resulting in no definite answers.
Then in 2007, archeologists make an astonishing discovery.
(tense music)
- A team of faculty and students
from Northwest Michigan College begin doing sonar scans
in order to find shipwrecks,
but they find something they weren't looking for,
a formation of rocks seemingly intentionally put there
by people under 40 feet of water.
- [Dan] What could these possibly be?
- One of the stones appears also to have a carving on it
of a mastodon.
Now, the mastodon went extinct about 10,000 years ago,
which would suggest that this is a really old rock formation
and that maybe in fact, even though it's underwater now,
it might've been on the edge
of what was Lake Michigan at the time.
- [Dan] The discovery is a sensation.
Some dub it America's Underwater Stonehenge.
But who put these stones here and why?
(thunder rumbling)
- One theory put forward by paranormal investigators
is that given the dark history of disasters in the lake,
that this may be some sort of warning
to people on shore.
We don't know.
- It's not just the water that's strange here.
The next time you head to Chicago,
you might want to check your flight path.
(tense music) (thunder rumbling)
- On June 23rd, 1950, Northwest Orient Flight 2501,
carrying 55 passengers and three crew,
leaves LaGuardia headed to Minneapolis.
- And the weather is not so great.
It's raining. It's a bit stormy.
At about 11:00 PM, the captain radios air control and says,
"I'd like to drop down to 2,500 feet."
Essentially, come under the storm.
- Not strange request, perfectly natural,
but at that point,
the DC-4 completely disappears off the radar.
(dramatic music) (thunder rumbling)
Local witnesses explained
that they had seen a huge flash in the night sky
about the time when this would've happened.
The Coast Guard goes out into Lake Michigan
to find this plane has gone down.
They see nothing.
- And then, things start showing up,
people's clothes, people's luggage.
It gets a little grisly, because then bodies
and moreover, parts of bodies start showing up.
- [Dan] The one thing they never find, the plane.
- What's weird is that we found the Titanic
at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
This is only 60 feet deep.
They can't find a jet airplane?
- There's no fuselage, no chunk of wing anywhere.
It's just gone.
- [Dan] Since flight 2501,
dozens more planes have disappeared here.
But if you think you can avoid the triangle's pull
by staying on dry land, think again.
- Stephen Kubacki, 23 year old college student,
Hope College, is cross country skiing near Saugatuck.
A couple hours later,
some snowmobilists find his gear in the snow.
The police show up, they arrive on the scene.
- They find footprints leading out
onto the ice of Lake Michigan,
but then they sort of disappear.
So, they can only assume
that he fell through the ice and drowned,
but there's no sign of any broken ice.
- [Sami] Stephen Kubacki is presumed dead.
- There's memorial service
and they decide to list him as an accidental drowning,
even though the ice wasn't broken.
- 15 months later,
Stephen Kubacki awakens in a field
in clothes that don't belong to him near his aunt's house,
700 miles away in Massachusetts.
(suspenseful music)
He has no recollection of how he got there at all.
- It's a very strange story
and he does talk to the press, talks to the newspapers,
but at a certain point decides to go into radio silence
and never talk about it again.
So, it remains one of these
great Lake Michigan Triangle mysteries.
(tense music)
- Today, Steve lives a quiet life in the Pacific Northwest,
thousands of miles away from Michigan's strange triangle.
- The next stop on our strange places journey
takes us just outside of Mexico City
to an island overrun with... dolls?
(suspenseful music)
- Outside of Mexico City
is one of the strangest places on Earth.
Why? Because there are over 4,000 mutilated dolls
tied to the fences, to the trees,
and spread around everywhere on this island.
- [Dan] But this area's strange origins
go back long before the dolls took over.
- It's the 16th century
and the Spanish Conquistadors
are invading the Aztec Empire.
What's called Tenochtitlan,
which would later become Mexico City,
is the capital of the Aztec Empire.
What we think of being in a high altitude basin
is actually a massive lake with manmade islands,
canals, and causeways all through it.
(suspenseful music)
- So, some of the earliest, darkest tales
about these islands really emerge in this period,
and they come from the Conquistadors
who, when they fall off these islands,
because of their heavy armor, sink, never to be seen again.
And this leads to some of the mythology about them
being haunted or spiritually guarded places.
(tense music)
By the 20th century, these islands are still attractive
to people who want to be off the grid,
and that's the case with Don Julian Santana Barrera,
who has a falling out with his family
and decides to go to one of these islands.
- [Dan] And that's when things start to get a little weird.
- The lore is that at some point, he finds the body
of a drowned child, a drowned girl,
but he also finds a doll nearby that he believes is hers.
And he hangs the doll up as this way to honor her.
- He doesn't stop at this one doll.
He decides to pay homage to the deceased young girl
with a shrine of thousands upon thousands of dolls.
- [Dan] Thousands of dolls hung from trees?
What prompted this macabre memorial?
- There is this sense that this discovery
of a deceased child, which would be harrowing for anyone,
is especially troubling to him
and that this maybe has caused him
to have some sort of break with reality
or some sort of issue.
He also is said to hear spirits,
hers and possibly others.
- He continues to hang dolls as part of superstition,
or to honor this young girl, or to ward off evil spirits.
He is so moved and scared of the bad omens
that go with this tragedy
that we assume he went absolutely crazy.
- [Dan] Even stranger is what happens to Don Julian
in April of 2001.
- His nephew comes to visit him on the island
and he finds Don Julian Barrera face down,
drowned in the canal at age 80
in almost the same spot that he alleged
that he found the original girl so many years before.
- [Dan] After Julian's death,
tourists keep his peculiar tradition alive
by adding their own dolls to the collection.
- Dolls are created in our image,
so it doesn't matter what your belief system is,
to see 4,000 mutilated dolls hanging from trees.
An island full of that would drive anybody crazy.
- Today, Gondola like boats called trajineras
take the curious out for a closer look,
but only during daylight hours.
The island is strictly off limits to visitors after dark.
If an island of Chuckys doesn't make your spine tingle,
our next place will.
20 miles off the coast of Brazil is an island
that visitors are prohibited from setting foot on.
Why?
The answer is unbelievable.
(snakes hissing) (tense music)
- There's approximately five snakes per square meter.
That is a ton of snakes.
- By all accounts,
it is essentially a moving carpet of serpents.
(snakes hissing)
- Snake Island is formed at the end of the last ice age
when rising ocean waters isolate what had been a peninsula
off the coast of Brazil and they make this island.
And in doing so, they isolate a population of snakes.
- [Dan] Specifically, one of the most venomous snakes
in the world, the golden lancehead viper.
- The golden lancehead population
that's left on Snake Island
quickly goes through all the available prey.
And then, the only thing left to eat are birds,
which they don't normally eat.
And that forces them
into some pretty tremendous evolutionary pathways.
Now when a golden lancehead, which is a venomous snake,
attacks its normal prey, a mammal,
it bites it, the mammal walks away, doesn't get too far,
and the snake can easily find it.
But with birds, the bird can fly away
and the snake doesn't get a meal.
So, evolution favors golden lanceheads
with more potent venom, so that they can bite a bird
and have it die instantly.
- The snakes on that island have a venom
that is estimated to be five times as deadly
as the venom for mainland snakes.
- So, it's creating this kind of super snake
on this island that can thrive.
- [Dan] You would imagine no one in their right mind
would ever set foot on this island.
Rumor has it that sailors prefer to stay on burning boats
rather than swim ashore here, but some have tried.
(dramatic music)
- And in the early 1900s,
a group of entrepreneurial banana farmers
go to Snake Island
in the hopes of establishing a banana plantation.
They burn down a bunch of vegetation
to plant the banana fields
and that's when they see all the snakes.
They realize immediately this is not a place,
not only not for a banana plantation,
this is not a place for human beings to stay.
- So in 1910, they decided to build a lighthouse
to warn people to steer clear of this island.
- It's probably a pretty difficult job description
in that here you are invited
to inhabit a very picturesque lighthouse on an island
inhabited by one of the most venomous snakes in the world
and a lot of them.
- So, they do find a lighthouse keeper
who's willing to take this job
and he brings his family to Snake Island.
- [Dan] According to local lore, life on Snake Island
goes about as well as you think it would.
- The legend is, one night,
supposedly someone left a window open,
the snake slithered in and killed the entire family.
(snake hissing)
Snake Island is basically communicating to mankind,
"You are not welcome here.
You will die here."
(snakes hissing)
- [Dan] The lighthouse on Snake Island still stands today,
but it is automated, so no human
has to set foot anywhere near it.
(snake hissing)
- Caves, most people think of them as a fun place to visit,
but the ancients believe they were portals
connecting the living to the dead.
When it comes to one cave in New Zealand,
the ancients may be right.
(dramatic music)
- If you were to look at the north island of New Zealand,
you would see rolling hills, sheep pastures,
essentially the landscape of "Lord of the Rings."
However, just below the surface, there are a series
of limestone caves known as the Waitomo Caves.
- [Dan] In the light of day, it's lovely, almost inviting.
- But when night falls, Waitomo Cave
becomes an entirely different kind of atmosphere.
Strange, blue, neon lights, one at a time,
begin to shine on the walls
until you're looking at millions of them.
(gentle music)
- [Dan] What could account for this unearthly glow?
Is it a strange new power source or something more sinister?
- Their scientific name really says it all.
They are called Arachnocampa luminosa.
- [Dan] Also known as the glow worm,
larvae of the fungus gnat.
Their bioluminescence may seem beautiful from afar,
but up close, it's anything but.
- They combine these enzymes in their abdomen
to form a chemical reaction that creates
this urine tinged goop with this greenish blue glow.
And they lower down tentacles, if you will,
of this goop, literally in the scientific literature
are called fishing lines.
And then if a fly or a moth or some other insect
gets tangled up in those sticky lines,
the grub reels the line in and devours them.
- [Dan] Their radiance is quite literally captivating.
- And I have to say that I think horror movie directors
have missed a great opportunity here.
They often rely on the sort of giant spider routine
and the big web.
That's nothing.
Imagine a moth being dragged up to the ceiling of the cave
to be eaten alive by a glowing worm!
Now, that's truly horrifying.
- Strange? I'd say so.
But if you can believe it,
this glowing death trap isn't the strangest cave out there.
That honor belongs to a killer cave in Africa.
(suspenseful music)
- Situated between Kenya and Uganda
is a volcano called Mount Elgon.
At the base of this mountain,
there is a lush, green jungle and the opening to a cave.
This is Kitum Cave.
The cave mouth is very wide, but this is totally deceiving
because once you get inside, there are steep drops
and low ceilings that make it very, very difficult
to navigate.
- When you walk into Kitum Cave,
you're pretty much guaranteed to encounter wildlife,
everything from leopards and hyenas
to buffalo and even elephants.
- [Dan] In fact, elephants are part of the reason
the cave is 700 feet deep.
- Elephants have learned
that Kitum Cave is a source of salt.
And for hundreds or perhaps even thousands of years now,
they have visited that cave,
raking their tusks against the walls to pry off these stones
that are rich in salt to the degree
that they have enlarged that cave.
(suspenseful music)
- [Dan] But something far more frightening than salt
lurks in this cave.
- In 1980, a 57 year old Frenchman visits the cave
and leaves in awe of its beauty and grandeur.
He also leaves with something else.
(dramatic music) (coughing deeply)
- In a couple days time, he starts feeling intensely sick
and he starts noticing facial paralysis.
In seven days, he starts vomiting a black bile.
(dramatic music)
His nose, ears, and eyes start bleeding uncontrollably.
So, he immediately hops on a plane to Nairobi,
the nearest major hospital.
(suspenseful music)
- He somehow manages to get to the hospital
where he starts just vomiting up massive amounts of blood
and finally dies.
- [Dan] His devastating symptoms are consistent
with those caused by a rare virus,
one even deadlier than Ebola,
the Marburg virus, named after the German City
where it was first found.
- Marburg is a viral hemorrhagic fever.
In fact, Marburg is one of the deadliest viruses
known to mankind.
And in the military oftentimes, they refer
to Marburg and Ebola viruses as crash and bleed.
Meaning that it is such a dangerous virus
that it has the ability for you to bleed out, essentially.
- Every doctor is terrified that this could spread.
Medical authorities retrace the Frenchman's steps
and they lead it back to Kitum Cave.
- Investigators visit the cave, but they can't find any clues.
They can't find any indication of a virus.
And the trail goes cold.
(suspenseful music)
- Flash forward seven years,
it's 1987 and a very similar thing is happening.
- [Dan] A Danish boy living in Kenya
mysteriously bleeds to death.
When he dies, scientists retrace his movements.
They learn he was a recent visitor to,
you guessed it, Kitum Cave.
(suspenseful music)
- All the ailments line up
and medical authorities are again perplexed and terrified
that we've got an infectious disease on our hands.
- [Dan] A team is sent to investigate.
Can they find out what's happening inside Kitum Cave
without contracting whatever's inside Kitum Cave?
- Just picture this job.
I mean, you're suiting up in a biohazard suit
to go look for evidence
of perhaps the most dangerous illness known to mankind
inside of a cave.
- Rocks and caves tend to come in two types,
super slippery and super sharp.
So, think about what could happen to a hazmat suit.
The risk is just very high being on this team.
- [Dan] And it isn't just scientific experts
putting their lives on the line.
- In addition to gathering samples,
the scientists leave behind literal guinea pigs,
hoping that perhaps they will contract this virus.
- [Dan] After seven days,
the team leaves Kitum Cave unscathed.
- This is a good news, bad news scenario.
On one hand, nobody on the team has contracted Marburg.
The bad news is they couldn't find any evidence
of the disease inside the cave.
- [Dan] For 20 years, the source of this deadly virus
remains a mystery.
Until 2007, when miners near Kitum gets sick.
- The Kitaka Mine joins Kitum Cave.
So there, all of a sudden, we've got it.
Finally, scientists go in
and they find a species of Egyptian bat
whose waste holds this virus.
(dramatic music)
- [Dan] As it turns out,
the mysterious killer at Kitum is bat poop.
- In the depths of the cave,
there is a roosting site for the Egyptian fruit bat.
It looks sort of like a flying teddy bear,
but it's also potentially a host for the Marburg virus.
And it seems possible then
that people might contract the virus
by inhaling the desiccated droppings of these bats.
- [Dan] And there may be more killers inside the cave.
- There's a lot of unknowns in Kitum Cave.
We have no idea, you know, what other viruses,
or bacteria, or fungi live there
that we are yet to discover.
It is a cave that many call the hellhole for a reason.
- Believe it or not, guided tours of Kitum are available,
But if you do plan a visit, bring a hazmat suit.
- Believe it or not, guided tours of Kitum are available,
Do you believe in ghosts?
For me, it's never been a question.
My great-grandfather was a spiritualist psychic researcher
and my father wrote a book about mediumship.
It's what inspired me
to write the screenplay for "Ghostbusters."
I've had my own weird experiences,
but none compare to a place in Louisville, Kentucky,
dubbed the most haunted building in America.
(suspenseful music)
- The Waverly Hills Sanatorium was built in 1910
and it's one of many such sanatoriums across the country,
because it deals with patients suffering from tuberculosis.
- TB is a bacterial disease,
and so before the invention of antibiotics,
the treatment was to isolate people.
- They don't have an effective vaccine for tuberculosis
and so, they have these sanatoriums
that are set up to essentially isolate
and quarantine individuals that have tuberculosis.
Give them rest and fresh air
that they consider treatment back then.
- Because tuberculosis has a 50% mortality rate,
tens of thousands of people will take their last breath
at Waverley Sanatorium.
(tense music)
- Some days are so bad at the sanatorium
that six people a day are dying.
- [Dan] With statistics like these,
death is a constant presence.
- When people die from tuberculosis,
the staff carts the bodies through a particular tunnel
to keep them out of sight from all the other patients
so as to not lower morale.
- And this underground tunnel is given the name
the body chute, or death tunnel.
It is a downhill sloping tunnel
and it is about 500 yards long.
Essentially taking the dead bodies from the morgue
to where they are going to be disposed.
And that tunnel sees
thousands of dead bodies
moving through it throughout the TB outbreak.
- [Dan] This probably doesn't shock anybody,
but an abandoned hospital with a body count of more than 6,000
is the perfect recipe for one hell of a haunted house.
(tense music)
- The belief is that there is so much psychological trauma
trapped by these dead souls
that they now haunt the Waverly Hills Sanatorium.
People who go there report seeing shadow people,
seeing apparitions.
- There are people who say that they see orbs
that they've witnessed.
That there are these strange spirits lurking around.
And there are even reports that the lights are coming on
at a time when there isn't working electricity
in the building.
- [Dan] But that is just a small sampling of the hauntings
at the sanatorium.
Depending on what you're into,
room 502 is a place you either want to visit
or avoid like the plague.
- You have the case of Mary Lee.
She's a nurse at Waverley Hills at the sanatorium.
She contracts tuberculosis.
She also becomes pregnant by one of the hospital's doctors
and she can't cope with the fact that she's sick
and the fact that she's also with child,
and so she ends up hanging herself in room 502.
Mary Lee's body is not found for days.
Two years later, there's another nurse
that jumps to her death from the window of room 502.
So, people that are studying hauntings at Waverly Hills
say that room 502 is the epicenter
of a lot of this negative energy.
(tense music)
- There was a photo taken
and standing in the doorway of room 502
is the figure of a woman looking baleful and scary,
maybe even a little angry.
And the resemblance to Mary is uncanny.
- [Dan] If you prefer your ghosts a little less frightening
and a little more friendly in a creepy sort of way,
there's always Timmy.
(tense music)
- Timmy's appeared in two different photos
and people report hearing child's laughter.
People report hearing a ball bouncing.
If you go there and bring a rubber ball
and roll it down a hallway,
Timmy will supposedly roll it back to you.
- [Dan] Is it possible these encounters
with Timmy and Mary are real?
- There is a theory that some physicists posit
that human beings are these bio electromagnetic beings
and that our bodies, when we're in a place,
leave a sort of marker or shadow behind.
- Maybe what are perceived as ghosts or spirits and things
are actually just sort of residuals
from that electrical activity.
That's what they say.
Even if people don't believe in all that stuff,
it certainly is a place that if you were to walk into,
it would give you a funny feeling.
- There's a reason so many years later,
paranormal investigators are drawn to spaces like Waverly.
People want to know, if there's an afterlife,
where's the best place to uncover it
and it's generally at sites of mass death.
- Now, that's a place I genuinely wanna visit.
I'll just need to remember my proton pack and a trap.
- It's September, 1942, and high up in the Himalayas,
Indian Forest Ranger H.K. Madhwal
is collecting samples of local flowers.
That's when he stumbles on a small, glacial lake.
(dramatic music)
- As the lakes water has receded,
this Indian forest officer noticed bones,
and then more bones.
- He's seeing skulls. He's seeing hands.
He's seeing all kinds of features
and he realizes he's looking at human skeletons.
Skeletons upon skeletons upon skeletons.
- Eventually, about 500 skeletons
are discovered in Roopkund Lake.
- [Dan] From this moment on,
Roopkund Lake is forever known as Skeleton Lake
for 500 obvious reasons.
But that still leaves one question.
How on Earth did the bodies get there?
- When he reports back that he's found this,
the first thing people start thinking
is that this is a Japanese invasion force.
This is a time when Great Britain
is still in control of India.
So, the thinking is that the Japanese were attacking India
as a way to strike Great Britain.
But that doesn't really hold up,
because when you actually look at the various accoutrements
that are with these skeletons,
they're not contemporary military gear.
- It doesn't look like modern tools or modern clothing.
There's these leather slippers, there are these spearheads.
What army is using spears in World War II?
- [Dan] As the war comes to an end,
investigators turn their attention
back to the skeletons in Skeleton Lake.
- The first serious study of what these skeletons are
really happens in the 1950s after the war.
The first theory is that these are some sort of holy men
who committed a mass suicide.
But when they look closer at the bones,
I mean these are men, women, and children,
so that's not likely.
- There is also an idea that these people
were all part of some huge epidemic
and that they are trying to stay away
from the rest of the population for everyone else's safety
by all moving to this lake area.
This doesn't really hold up either
because none of the evidence on those skeletons
suggest the kind of, like, degradation or disease
that would've been part of that story.
So, that's one more that we can, (clicks) right out the window.
- Based on an evaluation of some of the skulls,
they showed damage,
unhealed wounds that happened to the skull.
- A theory that's a little more lore bound
that adds a layer to that is that the goddess Nanda Devi
strikes down pilgrims, who were not behaving
and that this is evidence of her wrath.
- Perhaps there was a once in a century,
once in millennium hailstorm of giant hail
and people were just caught out in the open
and they were hit on the head
by these giant hailstorms and passed away.
- [Dan] What caused these mysterious deaths
remains, well, a mystery.
Then in 2019, investigators tried DNA testing,
hoping for answers.
- What this turns up is completely unexpected.
It turns out that their origins were from widespread places
across the globe, Southeast Asia, India,
around the Mediterranean, Greece.
The other problem, it stretched over centuries.
- The biggest mystery of Skeleton Lake
is the fact that this wasn't one mass death event,
but numerous events
spread across as long as a thousand years,
involving people from as far away as Southeast Asia,
as well as people from several locations
in the Island of Crete.
- [Dan] Rather than solving the mystery,
the results just deepen it.
- So, what is it about Skeleton Lake
that made this strange phenomenon happen?
Why did these people come
and why did all these skeletons
end up at the bottom of this lake?
- In the world of science and engineering, we have a phrase,
data solves argument.
Not here.
The data has only made it a deeper mystery.
So if you have any ideas, please let us know.
- [Dan] Even after 70 years of speculation,
Skeleton Lake defies explanation.
- Sunday, July 13th, 1980, Nottinghamshire, England,
a seemingly normal place on a seemingly normal day.
That is, until something bizarre begins to unfold.
(suspenseful music)
- On this particular Sunday,
they're having a marching band competition.
This is a mining community,
so there's hundreds of people there.
Families having picnics, hanging out with each other.
It's a joyous gathering.
- And all of a sudden, some of the young people
start to feel sick and to faint.
First, it's one or two children,
but then, it really picks up.
- It's men, it's women,
and it's children fainting all at once.
- People start dropping right there in the field.
Four, five, six people just fall to the ground
and this starts to happen more and more.
No one really understands what's happening,
but people keep fainting all over the place.
- [Dan] What could possibly be causing these fainting fits?
- 300 people faint overall
and 259 of them have to go to the hospitals.
The symptoms are almost as strange as the fainting itself,
vomiting, sore throat, irritated eyes.
Some kids report that they can't feel their bones.
- Even paralysis is described.
- [Dan] At around 1:00 PM, people stopped collapsing
almost as suddenly as they started.
Terrified locals want to know why.
- One theory is that there were pesticides that were in use
that could have caused people to faint
from inhaling the fumes of the pesticide.
- Another theory has to do with the fact
that Nottinghamshire is an old mining area
and there are a number of old abandoned mines.
These mines sometimes have gasses in them
and the gases can escape
and make people feel sick and pass out.
- Another theory was that it had something to do
with the portable toilets that were in the field.
Maybe a mixture of cleaning supplies created some toxic gas
that led to people fainting.
People are affected across the entire field,
not just near the toilets.
So, that doesn't make any sense either.
- [Dan] Even stranger, it happens just once.
Is there something about the field itself that's to blame?
- They still don't know what has happened
and there's no real, satisfying answer.
- [Dan] Our final strange place is beside a beautiful lake,
one hiding a deadly secret.
- It's a pretty average day
for this young Cameroonian on his bicycle
riding from his village to the neighboring village of Nyos.
Well, he's riding down the road with his wagon behind him
and he encounters a dead antelope
right in the middle of the road.
"Great," he thinks, "That's free meat to feed my family."
Straps it to his wagon, continues on his way,
only to encounter another dead antelope,
and then dead rats, and dead cows,
and all kinds of livestock are dead all around him
and this isn't looking right at all.
- And as he approaches the village,
he realizes that it is freakishly silent.
- So, he goes into one of the neighbor's houses
and finds that all those people are dead.
He goes to another house, same thing.
- He begins seeing dead bodies around cooking fires,
dead bodies sitting at tables, dead bodies in their homes.
- He rides his bike to Lake Nyos,
where that village is named for,
and finds hundreds of dead bodies
lying along the lake shore.
(dramatic music)
- Stranger still, there are no flies buzzing around.
They're completely gone.
- The buildings are all intact, everything looks fine
other than this weird, silent death scene.
- What you find here is 1,700 dead people,
thousands of dead livestock.
There's nothing left living,
and even the tiny insects that feast on the dead
are not even present.
Everything has been killed off.
What can you imagine is going on here?
Has there been some sort of new weapon tested
that does not leave a trace,
but yet kills every living thing?
It's the stuff of science fiction.
- [Dan] Scientists from across Africa, the U.S.,
and France are sent to investigate.
What could cause such mass casualties?
- Lake Nyos is sitting on top of a magma pool
where carbon dioxide is venting continuously
into the waters in the depths of the lake
and reaching super high concentrations.
- All these incredibly deadly gases
are trapped in the more dense cold water
at the bottom of the lake.
There is a layer on top of that of warm water,
which is less dense,
but it acts like a cork sealing a bottle.
- [Dan] Until something causes that cork to pop.
- So, what happens at Lake Nyos is that there's a landslide
and the landslide displaces some of the water at the surface
allowing the carbon dioxide that's trapped below to escape.
- That's what causes a limnic eruption to occur.
Limnic meaning a lake eruption.
And then, all of that trapped gas surges to the surface
and suffocates any living thing that's caught in the cloud.
(tense music)
- [Dan] But what are the chances
a tragedy like this could happen again?
Experts worry that it's a question of not if, but when.
- There's another lake, Lake Kivu,
that has 2 million people living around it.
- If a similar disaster occurs there,
estimates state that it could result
in the deaths of 4 million people.
Lake Kivu is without question
and in no exaggerated terms, a ticking time bomb.
- Yet another reminder that the world we live in
can be as dangerous as it is fascinating.
In fact, all these places trigger curiosity.
We find ourselves drawn to the strange, the peculiar,
and the downright unbelievable.