(suspenseful music)
- Imagine, strange creatures lurking deep
below the ocean's surface.
Creatures, some say,
are responsible for countless tragedies.
- The ship disappears,
all 31 crew members are lost, gone.
- [Dr. Joseph] I know exactly what I saw,
it's a dragon in the water.
- Or shocking evidence of the undead,
buried in a New England hillside.
- [Sabina] The skull has been detached from the body.
- Everyone gets superstitious, is whipped up into a frenzy,
and starts desecrating graves.
(suspenseful music)
- How about uncovering an entire lost city in your basement?
- [Don] Little do you realize
that beneath your feet is an engineering marvel.
- These are the stories of things
that lie beneath that are so surprising,
they're truly unbelievable.
(suspenseful music)
For many of us, the most disturbing answer
to what lies beneath is also the most common, the dead.
But do you know what's even more disturbing?
The undead.
(suspenseful music)
- It's 1990 in Griswold, Connecticut,
and what is about to happen is insanely creepy.
A group of boys are playing in the woods
and they discover a human skull.
(suspenseful music)
The Griswold, Connecticut police think it's a serial killer
and immediately cordon off the area as a crime scene.
- But once forensic anthropologists
start doing their analyses,
they figure out that this is someone
who was buried many years ago, in the 1800s.
- [Dan] As they dig deeper,
they uncover something even stranger.
- There's four burials, three of them are normal,
but the fourth, they find that the skull
has been detached from the body
and it has been laid on top of the coffin
with the two thigh bones crossed in front of it.
In other words, like a pirate flag on top of the coffin.
- And carved upon it are the letters, JB.
(suspenseful music)
- They dig down and they opened the coffin,
that's when they find this one grave,
honestly, it looks like it
could have been ritualistic.
You've got a decapitated skull,
you've got the ribs cracked open.
As the forensics experts do their thing,
they're able to tell that this body
was dug up five years after death
and then dismembered and rearranged.
- They call archeologists, they call museums,
they call universities,
and finally someone tells them, well,
you know about the Jewett City vampires, right?
(suspenseful music)
- [Dan] It turns out those kids playing in the woods
stumbled across the first physical evidence
of something deeply irrational.
(suspenseful music)
- The New England vampire panic sweeps New England
from the late 18th up through the late 19th century.
- When a death seems foggy or strange,
everyone gets superstitious, is whipped up into a frenzy,
and starts desecrating graves,
making sure that the dead don't rise again.
(suspenseful music)
- Not entirely dissimilar from the tests
that were used in Salem or in other eras with witches.
If we have a series of deaths in a village
and we have a suspected undead member of the community,
we'll exhume that body, cut it open,
(suspenseful music)
remove the heart, cut the heart open,
and if there's blood inside, bingo,
we've found our vampire.
(suspenseful music)
- [Dan] The mysterious JB
is just one of many suspected vampires dug up
during the panic.
Perhaps the most notorious is the poor Mercy Brown.
(suspenseful music)
- In the 1880s, Mercy's mother
and sister both succumb to tuberculosis,
and Mercy is left with her brother and father.
Mercy seems fine for about 10 years, but when she's 19,
she too develops the symptoms of tuberculosis infection.
- [Dan] By the dawn of the 19th century,
tuberculosis has killed one in seven people on the planet.
So there's reason to be afraid.
- Tuberculosis is not fun.
It's a bacteria and it attacks your lungs,
but it also does a lot of other terrible things.
It rots part of your body,
it can cause you to spit up blood, you can't breathe,
you get gaunt and pale,
and this sort of looks a little bit like maybe vampires.
(woman coughing)
- Mercy is being greatly diminished by this disease.
Death is on her door, but rather than having compassion
or have mercy shown to her by her neighbors,
(woman coughing)
they think she was the source of her mother
and sister's death a decade before,
and they accuse Mercy of vampirism.
(suspenseful music)
- [Dan] That resentment continues even after she dies.
Though she's dead and buried,
the entire village remains terrified.
- It just so happens that Mercy's brother
is also ill at this point,
and the neighbors think Mercy is coming back
to feed on her family members.
They convince her father to exhume the bodies
so that they can examine them
for what they believe will be proof of vampirism,
namely that there will still be blood in the heart.
(suspenseful music)
So they open the graves of Mercy's mother, sister,
and Mercy's grave as well.
Of course, her mother and sister
have been dead for 10 years.
There's no blood left in their hearts.
Mercy's only been dead for a little while,
so of course, when they open her chest,
her heart still has blood in it,
and they determine she must be a vampire.
- [Dan] And how the villagers plan to stop
the vampire virus is, well, merciless.
- They take Mercy's heart, they burn it,
those ashes are then fed to her younger brother
as basically a vaccine against vampirism.
- Hopefully at this point in time he's too fevered
to recognize what was happening.
(suspenseful music)
- [Dan] But Mercy's scorched heart can't save her brother,
and two months later he too dies of tuberculosis.
- Mercy's story is well covered in the media,
it goes global.
- Following these events, Bram Stoker is writing
his soon to be world famous novel "Dracula",
and there is supposition
that Mercy Brown is translated
into the story of Lucy who also withers away
and then returns as a child of the night.
(suspenseful music)
- But what legend inspired Stoker's infamous blood sucker?
Most believe it was an actual medieval prince,
one with a very real thirst for blood.
(suspenseful music)
- Vlad the Impaler is the original Dracula.
(suspenseful music)
And he does execute people in nasty ways.
He's famous for impaling alive his enemies.
- He will go on to earn his moniker,
the Impaler, where he would kill,
according to Greek historians, upwards of 80,000 people,
more than a quarter of whom were impaled.
- [Dan] Tales abound of Vlad dining
among his impaled victims,
even dipping his bread in their blood.
- Some reports even say that Vlad drinks the blood
of his enemies, which would make him the closest thing
we have to, well, a real vampire.
- [Dan] The question is what caused this unholy bloodlust?
- Early in his life,
Vlad the Impaler is imprisoned for political reasons.
According to lore,
Vlad spends years in an underground dungeon
in a castle called Tokat.
(suspenseful music)
- He develops this taste for impaling rats,
essentially conducting certain kinds
of grotesque experiments on the corpses of rats.
Mind you, if you were incarcerated in a dungeon
or dark, damp cave underneath a castle for years on end,
you might go a little bloodthirsty yourself.
- [Dan] Makes a weird kind of sense,
but most historians write off this story,
because the castle where Vlad was imprisoned
doesn't have dungeons.
At least that's what they think until 2014.
- The historical site of Tokat Castle in Turkey
is finally excavated,
and the archaeologists discover something
that they never thought they'd find
in a million years, tunnels.
- [Dan] Tunnels that lead to two hidden dungeons.
- They start to realize this was a place
where people were imprisoned.
- They put two and two together
and realized that these tunnels
and dungeons closely matched the accounts of those
where Vlad and his brother suffered torment.
- [Dan] Does this prove that the tales
of the real life Dracula are actually true?
- So this chance discovery in Tokat Castle
may actually be the connection
that we need of the dungeons and the terror experienced
by Vlad the Impaler that led to the inspiration
for Bram Stoker's Prince of Darkness.
(suspenseful music)
- Dungeons, the undead,
what else could lie beneath?
As we'll find out, the deeper you go,
the stranger it gets.
- The age of exploration opened the world's eyes
to just how vast the planet's oceans are.
It also opened the door to many questions,
like just how deep are those waters
and what the heck is down there?
(suspenseful music)
- In 1875, the HMS Challenger is circumnavigating the globe
in what was really the first great oceanographic expedition.
- Pretty big adventure here.
They're making the first charts of the ocean, if you will,
and this is pretty important.
So they roll up to the area called the Mariana Trench,
and they drop a line, and it keeps going and going.
- [Dan] With five miles of rope on board,
the crew figures they have plenty to reach the bottom,
until the unbelievable happens.
- They run out of rope
and they can't actually get the exact depth.
- And then 76 years later in 1951,
the HMS Challenger II goes out.
(suspenseful music)
- [Dan] Do they bring a bigger piece of rope this time?
No need when you've got sonar.
What they find shocks the world.
- The Challenger II measures the Mariana Trench
to be seven miles deep.
It is officially the deepest part of the ocean.
- It is also the deepest place on earth.
(suspenseful music)
- Let's put how deep this goes in perspective.
It's as if you stacked 25 Empire State buildings
on top of each other, that's how deep this is.
- [Dan] That's pretty deep.
So deep it makes curious explorers worldwide wonder,
can anything live there?
- The first ones to take the plunge are oceanographers,
Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh in 1960.
- And they get in this thing called the Bathysphere
that descends underwater.
(suspenseful music)
- These guys get down to the bottom,
they see what appears to be a barren landscape.
The pressures are so great,
there's no light to support photosynthesis.
But when they look more closely,
they see that there
actually is life.
(suspenseful music)
- There is life at the bottom.
I mean, this is unbelievable.
This changes everything people know
about what is happening in the ocean depths.
- [Dan] After a three hour ascent,
the divers return to tell their tale,
but now there are new questions.
How many creatures are down there
and how on earth do they survive?
- Most of the life that we see in the ocean lives
within the first 600 feet where the waters are warmer
and there are kind of thriving ecosystems based on the sun.
Below that, you enter the twilight zone
where not a lot of light filters down
and the ecosystems are kind of different.
Below that, it's pitch black,
(suspenseful music)
and you get into alien worlds like something out of space,
but they're happening right here below the ocean.
- The creatures that live down there
sound like creatures of darkness, vampire squid,
zombie worms, goblin sharks.
- One of my favorites is the dragon fish.
And the coolest thing about them
is that because it's so dark down there,
they don't really use their eyes that much,
but they've evolved to use bioluminescence.
And so along their face and their jaw,
they have these little spots
that light up in different colors.
And that actually attracts smaller fish,
which when they approach the mouth of that animal,
become a meal.
(suspenseful music)
- [Dan] To say the trench's temperatures fluctuate
is an understatement.
It can range anywhere from a chilly 34
to a scalding 700 degrees Fahrenheit.
- At those depths,
there are also vents into the Earth's crust
that release boiling hot water.
And believe it or not, there are actually creatures
that are also evolved
to survive in those extreme conditions as well.
- I'd say that the coolest thing about the trench
is that it still remains largely unexplored.
We've landed more people on the surface of the moon
than we have in the depths of the Mariana Trench.
So there is so much more there to find.
There are more surprises to come,
and more evil, deadly creatures to discover.
(suspenseful music)
- Just off the coast of Japan dwells a creature legend calls
both evil and deadly,
one that lies hidden
deep beneath these treacherous waters.
(suspenseful music)
- There's this area of the Pacific Ocean
that's between Japan, Taiwan,
and Yap Island that could give the Bermuda Triangle
a run for its money.
It's called the Devil's Sea,
and it has a ton of shipwrecks and disappearances,
- [Dan] But according to Chinese legend,
it's not the ocean that's to blame.
- 3000 years ago, Chinese sailors tell stories
of this huge undersea dragon pulling ships underwater
and feasting on their crews,
which is how the area gets its other name,
the Dragon's Triangle.
- [Dan] The Dragon's Triangle continues
to claim countless victims over the years,
including a hoard of fearsome 13th century warriors.
- The conqueror, Kublai Khan,
who is the grandson of Genghis Khan,
decides to invade Japan.
And according to records,
lost 40,000 sailors to shipwrecks
and determined to discontinue his planned invasion
and to stay away from the Dragon's Triangle.
The place is considered too dangerous.
(suspenseful music)
- [Dan] So what actually destroys Kahn's massive armies?
Some say a typhoon, others say the gods,
but Khan himself thinks something different.
- Kublai Khan and and his advisors believed
that their navy was swallowed by a sea dragon.
Even one of history's most fearless warriors
was rattled by these waters.
(suspenseful music)
- [Dan] The legend endures well into the 20th century,
galvanized by an eyewitness account during World War II.
(suspenseful music)
- It's now 1944, and in the heat of a naval aerial battle,
Japanese airman, Toshiaki Lang,
swears, as he looks down,
that he sees the Loch Ness Monster-like head
of a giant sea serpent.
In his after action report, Toshiaki says to his superiors
that the beast was at least 150 feet long
and used giant triangular wings to paddle
its way through the tumultuous seas.
(suspenseful music)
- He's pretty indignant about this,
because when he mentions it,
people think, "Have you been drinking a little bit?
Or maybe you're mistaking it for a submarine."
And he's like, "I know exactly what I saw.
It's 150 feet long, this thing is a monster,
it's a dragon in the water."
(suspenseful music)
- [Dan] The pilot's warning is brushed aside.
But after nine more ships vanish in the Devil's Sea
between 1946 and 1951,
the Japanese government
can no longer ignore
that what's happening
here could be fishy.
- In 1951, the Maritime Safety Agency assigns
the task to a research vessel known
as the Kaiyo-Maru No. 5.
And what happens?
The ship investigating the disappearances disappears.
All 31 crew members are lost, gone.
- So the Japanese government decides
that maybe investigating this is not the best thing to do.
So what they do is they just issue this thing called
the notice to mariners and they say, okay,
just officially avoid this area,
'cause bad things happen.
(suspenseful music)
- [Dan] Even with the warning, ships continue to vanish.
Some say as many as a thousand since 1951.
- One thing seems certain,
no matter what you think causes these problems,
whether it's rogue super waves,
or underwater volcanic activity,
or here's another favorite theory, methane gas eruptions,
something weird is happening in the Dragon's Triangle.
- If you know where to dig, all kinds of strange
and interesting things can be uncovered,
but sometimes it's the hole itself that's the mystery.
(suspenseful music)
- In the early 2000s, geologist Heinrich Frank
is driving in Novo Hamburgo in southern Brazil.
And he passes a construction site,
and something catches his eye, something weird.
He sees this tunnel. It's a hole about 15 feet wide.
This is a Friday afternoon and he has to keep driving.
But Frank thinks about this all weekend.
I mean, what is it?
Is it a tunnel?
Who made it?
Where does it go?
Why is it there?
- He can't stop thinking about it.
So a few weeks later,
he goes back to the
site to investigate.
He goes up to this tunnel that is leading underground
and he starts walking into this giant 15 foot hole.
- And right away he notices something weird.
Remember, he's a geologist,
he knows that earth shaped by water
is not gonna create a perfectly round opening.
So this is an odd thing.
- As he walks into this tunnel, the deeper he gets,
he looks up at the ceiling,
and he's noticing these giant claw marks.
- [Dan] Even as a geologist,
Frank now understands the chilling reality.
He's standing in the home of something very big
and very deadly.
- These look like the homes of giant jungle creatures.
And Frank wants to know what kind of creature
makes a tunnel this big?
- [Dan] Local paleontologists are thrilled to share
that these huge burrowed tunnels
are the work of giant prehistoric sloths.
- When you think of a sloth today,
you think of something that is slow and beyond adorable.
But these prehistoric giant sloths,
they put today's sloths to shame.
- The extinct giant sloths all belong
to the genus Megatherium, which is an awesome word,
that I think sounds like the name of a heavy metal band.
These are huge animals.
They can be 10 feet long and weigh 2000 pounds.
That's a ton.
And they have these huge, long, hooked claws.
They're nine inches long.
Think about your kitchen knives,
now imagine that being on the end of the hands
of these animals and them using it
to pull tree branches down to their mouth.
They can also use those claws as a form of defense.
- [Dan] Turns out those same claws
are the perfect tool to dig giant burrows in the ground.
- So Frank, super curious guy,
starts using satellite imagery
to map out these network of tunnels,
and he finds out there's not just one, not just two,
there are 1500 separate tunnels that are kind of snaking
through this southern Brazilian area.
I think it's incredible that these 2000-pound creatures
that once roamed the earth,
that there's still evidence of them, like,
next to a construction site.
It's wild.
- Created more than 10,000 years ago,
today these ancient tunnels feel
more eerie than frightening.
Now, that's not the case
with a mysterious cave in the Americas.
Here it's not the size that matters, it's what's inside it.
(suspenseful music)
- In the jungles of Yucatan, Mexico,
near a place called Kantemo village,
there is a cave that could only be described
as a living nightmare.
(suspenseful music)
- So you go into this cave, it's a 65-foot mouth,
but it narrows a little bit.
And once you get into this narrower part,
there are things hanging from the roof of the cave.
They kind of look like vines,
but they're not vines, they're snakes.
(snake hisses) (suspenseful music)
- It's the yellow-red rat snake.
And there's this one population of them
that have evolved to live only in this cave.
- At night, when the bats leave,
they leave in this giant drove.
And the snakes see this opportunity as dinnertime.
Tucked into the crevices of this cave,
they'd open up their mouths and pretty much allow the bats
to impale themselves on their fangs.
It's easy picking, especially with the amount of bats
that are in this cave.
(suspenseful music)
- And there are so many of the bats
in this particular cave system
that this population of snakes has learned
that they don't ever need to leave the cave.
(snake hisses) (suspenseful music)
- They're very aware of the time of day.
They know when the bats are gonna be coming out,
and they actually get themselves into position.
So it just goes to show you
that these are actually very intelligent creatures.
(suspenseful music)
- [Dan] Believe it or not, visitors are actually welcome
to tour this dangling hall of terrors.
(suspenseful music)
- I've been to the cave of the hanging snakes
and it is one of the eeriest
places I've ever been to.
The ceilings are very low,
and as a human inside that cave, you have to crawl in
with your head nearly touching the ceiling,
and then hundreds, hundreds of snakes coming out
of the ceiling to catch little bats,
grab them with their mouths, and back up into the ceiling.
It is the definition of a living horror movie.
(suspenseful music)
- No, thank you.
This is my nightmare.
This is my nightmare, cave with the hanging snakes.
- [Dan] That's one cave you won't find me hanging around.
- Sometimes what hides beneath is neither deadly nor evil,
but rather a glimpse into a mysterious past.
Take this astonishing find by a miner in 2022.
(suspenseful music)
- In the Klondike gold fields of
the Yukon Territory of Canada,
you have a man by the
name of Travis Delawski.
(pickaxe hits ice)
He's working in a trench
and in this trench you have this creek
that is covered with permafrost that's sitting on the top layer.
(pickaxe hits ice)
- As Travis is chipping away at the rock hard ice,
suddenly a crevice opens.
(suspenseful music)
- Inside, he discovers something strange,
some kind of creature.
He sees a short tail
and at first he thinks it's a mummified buffalo calf.
- [Dan] But as Travis looks more closely,
they see something a buffalo doesn't have, a trunk.
- So he immediately calls his boss to try
and figure out what the hell he just came across.
So the boss comes down to see what Travis actually find,
and he's shocked.
He sees fur and it looks like it died maybe an hour ago.
So he immediately yells out
for everyone in the trench to stop working.
And he takes some photos with his phone,
and then he calls some local paleontologists
to come in and inspect the scene.
- [Dan] When they see the photos,
they confirm the unbelievable.
It's a baby woolly mammoth straight out of the ice age.
(suspenseful music)
- And they're all hands on deck,
and they have to act immediately,
because once this woolly mammoth baby is exposed
to the elements, it can start to deteriorate.
And there's a storm coming
that is gonna totally flood out the trench.
With moments to spare,
they manage to get the woolly mammoth baby out.
They carefully wrap it in a tarp,
and then they transport it to a location
where they actually have a ceremony
with local indigenous elders.
(suspenseful music)
Gathered in a circle, the tribal elders offer a blessing
and name the mammoth Nun cho ga,
which means big baby animal in their native Haen language.
(suspenseful music)
- [Dan] With the clock ticking,
scientists must examine the baby mammoth quickly
before getting it into a freezer for preservation.
- But they're able to determine that Nun cho ga is a female,
and she was only about a month old when she died.
They estimate that she died around 30,000 years ago.
- The geology of where the mammoth is found indicates
that she was walking across the grassland,
strayed from her mother,
and then she fell,
gets stuck in the mud,
and is preserved under tons of permafrost to be found
by us thousands of years later.
- [Dan] Incredibly, they find a piece
of grass in the woolly mammoth's stomach.
Fortunately, this means Nun cho ga died quickly.
- While it's sad that Nun cho ga only lived about a month,
her discovery today is really incredible.
- This is the most intact mummified ice age animal
found in North America, if not the world.
(suspenseful music)
- While a 30,000-year-old creature trapped beneath the ice
might be fascinating, something terrifying lies
in an otherwise enchanting setting,
something that has locals afraid to go anywhere near it.
(suspenseful music)
- This place is 25 miles south of Merida
in an area surrounded by dense jungle.
There's this little opening,
this hole, which enters into a void,
and inside this void is a drop into an abyss
of watery darkness.
- [Dan] It's called Sac Uayum,
and it's one of at least 40 cenotes, or underwater caves,
that lie beneath this mysterious region.
They collect so much naturally filtered groundwater
that in the 13th century the Mayans decide
to build their new capital here, Mayapan.
(suspenseful music)
- This walled city of like 17,000 people thrives
for centuries, and it has dozens of life sustaining cenotes
inside the city.
(suspenseful music)
- Most of them are within the walls of Mayapan,
except for one,
that for some reason the walls zigzagged around
and moved around to avoid having
that one cenote inside
their city, Sac Uayum.
(suspenseful music)
- They believe Sac Uayum is a sacred place,
a pathway to the underworld.
(suspenseful music)
The Maya also believed that this place is guarded
by a feather covered serpent with a horse's head,
who will snatch children who get too close.
(suspenseful music)
- I've personally visited Mayapan,
and wanted to go to Sac Uayum,
and every villager I have met have told me their story,
that they have seen a snake-like creature that flies
and has a horse head that is guarding that place,
and I should not get anywhere close to Sac Uayum.
- [Dan] Is it possible
that Sac Uayum's legendary feathered serpent is real,
or at least once was?
In August of 2013, archaeologists,
led by Dr. Bradley Russell attempt to find out.
- You can imagine that getting in
and out of a sinkhole that has a 40-foot drop
is quite difficult.
So they basically have to be lowered down into the water
and then they can start their dive.
But remember, if something goes wrong,
you gotta be hoisted back out that 40 feet.
(suspenseful music)
You're being slowly lowered,
now you're in this dark, murky water,
and you know you have to actually penetrate through
and go into a cave.
(water gurgling)
- As Bradley and his team scuba
through these tight passages,
their tanks are hitting the limestone,
I mean, it's so tight.
That's where they discover human skeletons.
(suspenseful music)
- [Dan] Could these be ancient victims
of the notorious serpent monster?
- There are just dozens of skeletons of men
and women in this place.
(suspenseful music)
In Mayan civilization,
we do not have evidence of mass graves or mass burials.
These people seem to be in the prime of life.
There's nothing that shows, for example,
damage through warfare to the skeletons.
And there's nothing that suggests
that they're victims of human sacrifice.
(gentle music)
So the fact that in this cenote there are dozens
and dozens of human remains makes it a bit of a mystery.
We don't know why these people ended up in this cenote.
(gentle music)
- Whatever science might eventually uncover here,
many of those who live by Sac Uayum believe
the legends are true,
and that this mysterious pool is indeed an entrance
to the underworld.
- The city of Paris is known for romance,
art, and cafes.
But below its charming street lies
something quite different,
miles of tunnels stuffed with human remains.
(suspenseful music)
- The tunnels themselves are the result
of limestone quarries that are dug around the 13th century.
But quarrying was unregulated.
People just dug where they wanted to
and then when the limestone ran out,
the tunnel was abandoned.
So by the 18th century,
this part of Paris was like Swiss cheese.
- [Dan] By 1780, the city of Paris is left
with nearly 200 miles of abandoned mining tunnels
beneath its streets,
until they find a dark, new purpose.
(suspenseful music)
- Parisian cemeteries are literally overflowing.
(church bell rings)
Graves are buried on top of graves on top of graves
on top of graves.
- It gets so bad that a building next
to the cemetery has its basement wall completely collapse,
because there are so many bodies
on the other side of the wall.
- The Paris city officials realize
something has to be done.
They think, what we really need
is a good underground storage area,
and we have one, all of those limestone tunnels.
- So in 1786, thus commences
the most macabre public works project of all time.
(suspenseful music)
Wagon upon wagon
upon wagon cloaked in black cloths are shipping bones
from the cemetery down into the disused mines
to create the Paris catacombs.
We're talking about millions upon millions of human remains.
- [Dan] Today, visitors can tour this bizarre display
of over 600 years of the dead.
- There's an official door to the catacombs
where you can pay and you can go tour
a certain small section of the catacombs.
- [Dan] But not everyone sneaks down there to gawk
at old bones.
- The catacombs also plays host
to a very interesting and amazing heist.
A team of people start going down through the catacombs,
using the tunnel as a means of getting
to a very fancy Luxembourg apartment.
(suspenseful music)
They drill up 20 feet in order to get into this apartment.
What's there are really expensive bottles of wine,
each bottle at least $1,000, and they steal 300 of them,
and disappear back down into the catacombs,
just melting into the darkness.
- [Dan] The wine thieves are never found,
but it's not even the strangest secret use
of this underground labyrinth.
- The Paris Police Department
has a unit to patrol these tunnels,
and they regularly go down there to train.
They're going along this dark tunnel
and they suddenly see a sign that says,
building site, no access.
And they haven't been informed of any kind
of city construction project happening underground.
So they push through this tarp to find out what's beyond.
- They lift the tarp away to find a security camera,
and suddenly dogs begin barking from everywhere.
(dogs barking)
They don't turn out to be real dogs.
It's pumped through speakers to frighten people away.
But that makes it even more intriguing.
Who is trying to keep us out of this space?
- [Dan] What they find is truly bizarre,
even for catacomb police, a movie theater.
(gentle music)
- Not only that, this movie theater has attached
to it a fully-featured restaurant and bar.
Not only that, it has telephone lines.
So that means someone knows the reservation number.
They're like, "Hi, secret bar?"
They're like, "Yeah?"
Like, "Table for four?"
"Yeah."
- [Dan] This underground theater is obviously illegal.
But when police return three days later,
they get another surprise.
- They come back, everything's removed,
and there's a sign that says do not try to find us.
- A photographer named Patrick Alk,
whose whole thing is to document
the underground exploration movement.
is disappointed that the movie theater got busted,
but he says, "You know,
no problem, there are dozens more where this came from.
You guys have no idea what's down there."
(suspenseful music)
- Finding unusual things in your basement
is fairly common for most people.
But what one man finds in his home in Turkey, unbelievable.
- In 1963 in the Turkish town of Derinkuyu
a man is doing a home improvement project.
Now, most of us who do this kind of DIY stuff,
you expect to find old stuff in the walls,
you know, old photos and maybe some jewelry.
Well, this guy takes his sledgehammer
and he hits the wall
and he hits it again and again, and he breaks through.
(sledgehammer slams) (suspenseful music)
What he finds is a passageway,
which, when he crawls into it,
leads to another tunnel and another tunnel beyond that.
(suspenseful music)
- And the tunnel goes on a little bit longer,
and a little bit longer, and then opens into chambers,
and then more chambers and then more tunnels.
He's discovered an ancient subterranean city
right in his cellar wall
all through the throw of a sledgehammer.
- [Dan] It's the 2000-year- old lost city of Derinkuyu,
one of the largest subterranean towns in the world.
- What he uncovers is absolutely unbelievable,
a tunneled city that can house up to 20,000 people,
animals, livestock, grain stores.
The first eight stories have ventilation shafts
that ensure that fresh air circulates
through the entire subterranean city.
- They've dug out troughs
for the camels that are down there.
They have large vats for the wine that they're fermenting.
All of this is dug of the stone itself.
It's very, very resourceful.
- [Dan] But why build such an elaborate city underground?
- The main purpose of this underground city
is for the people of Derinkuyu
to come in and hide from outside forces,
from dangerous people who may have infiltrated the area.
- One of the most amazing sites is there
are these huge millstones
which are in place still to this day.
They have a round hole in the middle
and you can roll this millstone into place,
which would then block the tunnel
and stop the enemy from going any further.
- [Dan] This defense system works so well,
the city remains in use until 1923
before it's sealed up and nearly lost to history.
Good thing for DIY projects.
(suspenseful music)
- If you're just walking in one of these areas
with one of these underground cities,
nothing looks different.
I mean, it's just life as normal on the surface.
Little do you realize
that beneath your feet is an engineering marvel.
- [Dan] Makes you wonder what unexpected things
could be on the other side of your own basement wall,
or in your own backyard.
(suspenseful music)
- In 1974, a plumber named Rosendo Cruz from Alhambra,
California, buys his wife a brand new Ferrari Dino
for her birthday.
She's so excited, she can't wait to take it out.
They cruise on out to the Brown Derby
to have a birthday dinner, have a wonderful time,
come outside the restaurant, and the Ferrari is gone.
(police sirens)
- Police are never able to find the Dino,
and ultimately, it becomes a
cold case that's unsolved.
- Four years later,
(suspenseful music)
you have a couple of boys playing in the backyard,
and these boys decide, let's
dig up stuff in the backyard
and see if we can find some buried treasure.
And then their shovels start to make a clinking sound.
Oh no, did we hit a pipe?
So they immediately run out
and they flag down an LA County Sheriff's cruiser.
- The policeman contacts the city,
they bring out a bulldozer and begin to dig,
and lo and behold, what do they excavate?
A 1974 Ferrari Dino 246 GTS,
the same Ferrari Dino that was parked
outside the Brown Derby four years ago.
- [Dan] But after a little more digging,
they noticed something totally unexpected.
- So when investigators uncover the car,
they find that it's been
almost impeccably preserved.
It's been wrapped in plastic, and tarp,
and even blankets, and someone clearly wanted
to maintain this car.
- Another thing that helps preserve the vehicle
is that it's in Southern California where it's dry.
And during this time, there was actually a drought.
So they basically made a Ferrari mummy.
- [Dan] No one was ever charged for the theft of the Dino,
though theories abound as to who stole it
and why it was left there.
Maybe the thieves just forgot where they put it.
(suspenseful music)
But even after four years underground,
this Dino isn't destined to just be scrapped for parts.
- Believe it or not, to this day,
the Dino still lives.
After it was recovered, it was sold to a collector.
He decided to keep as much
of the original materials as possible.
It still has two of the original wheels,
the original chrome, and today it sports
a license plate that says, DUG UP.
(suspenseful music)
- Whether it's a perfectly preserved baby mammoth,
mysterious bones, or a vintage Ferrari in mint condition,
what lies beneath us is fascinating, terrifying,
and sometimes, unbelievable.