# Incredible Secrets of Abandoned Places Forgotten by The World

An episode of [Be Amazed](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1687637469), 25 Dec 2025, 27 min.

Audio: https://audio4.redcircle.com/episodes/ed79edc3-f84e-4d1a-847b-2ae1a4b7525f/stream.mp3

From the sinister secrets of neglected sanatoriums to churches hiding long-forgotten truths beneath their very floorboards; here are the true stories and incredible secrets of abandoned places that were completely forgotten by the world, ready to be remembered once more. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

## Transcript

[0:00] \[SPEAKER_00\]: There's something about abandoned buildings and structures and disrepairments, disturbingly fascinating.
[0:06] \[SPEAKER_00\]: We want to get inside and explore them, take a look around, and see what prior occupants have left behind.
[0:13] \[SPEAKER_00\]: However, there are some places out there that have been left abandoned with very, very good reason.
[0:19] \[SPEAKER_00\]: From the sinister secrets of neglected sanatoriums to churches hiding long forgotten truths
[0:27] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Here are their true stories and incredible secrets of abandoned places that were completely forgotten by the world ready to be remembered once more.
[0:49] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Lardal located in Norway is a place that's iconic in every way.
[0:55] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Green hills, clear rivers, striking mountains.
[0:59] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Though all this serenity is interrupted by the dark, jagged structures situated in the middle of a valley surrounded unmistakably by rows of headstones.
[1:11] \[SPEAKER_00\]: This is Borgen Stave Church,
[1:19] \[SPEAKER_00\]: in the tiny village of Borgend.
[1:22] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Much like the black and exterior of this multi-tiered building, the interior is incredibly dark going to there being very few windows.
[1:30] \[SPEAKER_00\]: A design specifically meant to keep evil spirits out.
[1:34] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Built on a stone foundation, the building itself is made entirely of wood, went that on the exterior being dark coated for protection against the elements.
[1:44] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Although that's not its only protection, the wooden walls and doors inside are covered with carvings of protective rooms and marks, ancient carvings of dragons and snakes guard the rooftops, and wooden crosses are positioned all over to keep out evil.
[2:01] \[SPEAKER_00\]: This place functioned as a parish church until 1868 when it was suddenly abandoned, likely because state churches were going out of fashion at the time.
[2:11] \[SPEAKER_00\]: But its 600-year-long legacy was saved from complete destruction, and it was converted into a museum.
[2:18] \[SPEAKER_00\]: While that seems awesome, the museum itself now sits on a harrowing secret.
[2:23] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Although a graveyard surrounds it, locals used to bury their dead underneath the church.
[2:28] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Only abandoning the practice because the smell got too much to bear.
[2:33] \[SPEAKER_00\]: But despite banning the practice, apparently locals would secretly in the den of night, dig out small plots right next to the church, small enough that tiny coffins might fit inside and lie beneath the church where their ground was considered more sacred.
[2:49] \[SPEAKER_00\]: So any visitors to the site hoping to learn of Norway's rich and cultured past may not know they're treading on floorboards that conceal the last resting places of many small bodies.
[3:01] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Like this place didn't look dark enough from the outside.
[3:06] \[SPEAKER_00\]: You might know the name Nagasaki, the Japanese side of the horrendous atomic bomb explosion in World War II.
[3:13] \[SPEAKER_00\]: But are you familiar with the tiny island off its coast?
[3:17] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Known by many names such as Gunkanjima, battleship island or simply Hashima island from afar it looks like 16 acres of rocky outgrabings.
[3:27] \[SPEAKER_00\]: But the closer you get, the more you notice the old crumbling buildings blanketed by a thick foliage.
[3:34] \[SPEAKER_00\]: It's a concrete jungle which had its peak supported up to 5,000 people who lived there back in 1959.
[3:40] \[SPEAKER_00\]: The island sat on a rich coal mine, bringing in a staggering 15.7 million tons of the stuff between 1891 and 1974.
[3:50] \[SPEAKER_00\]: But when the cold ran out, the island was abandoned in a matter of weeks, with residents quickly leaving their lives behind in a desperate bid to get back to the mainland as fast as possible.
[4:02] \[SPEAKER_00\]: But the desertion aside, this island has a past that's much blacker than cold.
[4:07] \[SPEAKER_00\]: During the World Wars, Chinese and Korean prisoners of war were forced to work on the island, laboring almost a mile underground for over 12 hours a day.
[4:17] \[SPEAKER_00\]: They lived in torturous conditions having to go without proper food or water rations.
[4:23] \[SPEAKER_00\]: It's no surprise the inmates there nicknamed it Hanna Island, and at this day it's unknown exactly how many prisoners perished there.
[4:31] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Today Hashima's creepy ruins are all but closed off with only 5% of the islands still accessible to visitors.
[4:39] \[SPEAKER_00\]: It's far too dangerous to go wandering around the side with buildings on the
[4:46] \[SPEAKER_00\]: like I needed more excuses not to visit.
[4:50] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Of all the abandoned places in the world, Chernobyl is arguably one of the most famous.
[4:55] \[SPEAKER_00\]: On April 26th, 1986, Chernobyl's nuclear power plant suffered a catastrophic meltdown.
[5:03] \[SPEAKER_00\]: It's estimated the disaster released about 400 times more radioactive material than the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki put together.
[5:12] \[SPEAKER_00\]: As a result, an area with a radius of 19 miles centered around the plant was immediately evacuated, now known as the Exclusion Zone.
[5:22] \[SPEAKER_00\]: With some 116,000 citizens in the zone forced to abandon their homes permanently over the days and weeks following, cities caught in the zone, such as
[5:35] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Today, almost 40 years later, crumbling, classrooms overgrown ruins and even a fairground are the only things left proving people once lived there.
[5:45] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Some educated guesses state that it could be 20,000 years before the area can be considered habitable again.
[5:52] \[SPEAKER_00\]: specifically zones around the power plant itself, but that hasn't deterred some determined tourists.
[5:59] \[SPEAKER_00\]: In 2011, 25 years on from the disaster tours were permitted on some of the less irradiated areas of Chernobyl.
[6:08] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Although seas of abandoned gas mass and creepy dogs appear to have been staged for tourists amusement and social media hype, one fixture hasn't been.
[6:17] \[SPEAKER_00\]: the claw of death.
[6:19] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Now in the weeks following the meltdown, this enormous piece of crane machinery was used to help dismantle the reactor and clean up the radioactive graphite that had exploded out of it.
[6:30] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Once the task was completed, the claw itself was dumped by the side of a road a few miles from Pripyat, and apparently forgotten about.
[6:38] \[SPEAKER_00\]: But 30 years later, in 2011, Sidney Archaeologist Robert Maxwell was conducting a field visit of the area and stumbled across it.
[6:48] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Not only did it stick out of the scenery like a sore thumb, but it was sending his Geiger counter a radiation detection device while
[6:56] \[SPEAKER_00\]: The amount of radiation being emitted by the claw was some 39.8 micro-ceverts per hour.
[7:04] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Now it takes exposure to roughly 1,000 micro-ceverts over a short period of time to noticeably affect the human body.
[7:11] \[SPEAKER_00\]: So staying in the vicinity of this thing for more than 24 hours would be a bad, possibly fatal decision.
[7:18] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Well I guess now, at least we know why it's called the claw of death.
[7:22] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Hospitals can be scary at the best of times, but a band-in-hospitals?
[7:27] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Oh, they're terrifying.
[7:29] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Oh, the die.
[7:30] \[SPEAKER_00\]: If you want proof, then set your eyes on Germany's Billet's House Stutton Hospital.
[7:36] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Let's then a state of desecration for some 30 years, appealing paint, yearly empty stairwells and long dark corridors make any visit to this sanatorium complex at uniquely terrifying experience.
[7:49] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Especially, once you realize it's more than 125 years old.
[7:54] \[SPEAKER_00\]: It was once the largest treatment center in the world for long diseases like tuberculosis, which 125 years ago didn't have the highest recovery rates.
[8:03] \[SPEAKER_00\]: So we can only imagine the horrors suffered within these walls.
[8:08] \[SPEAKER_00\]: During the World Wars, however, it served as a military hospital, and during World War II was occupied by the Soviet military.
[8:16] \[SPEAKER_00\]: The Soviets managed the hospital for 50 years before its total abandonment and 1995, following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
[8:25] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Although it was emptied after its closure, some features are main, that decrepit old piano and bands installed deep into the floors once used for intensive therapies are bone-chilling features for sure.
[8:37] \[SPEAKER_00\]: But perhaps the most unsettling secret of the Billet's house, Tutton, is its treatment of an infamous former patient.
[8:45] \[SPEAKER_00\]: During the Battle of Somme and the First World War, the future leader of the German fascist movement, yeah, the madman with the toothbrush mustache, stayed in the hospital as a patient after wounding his leg in battle.
[8:58] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Little did the nurses and doctors at the time know that this injured embassur would become the biggest blight on Germany's history.
[9:05] \[SPEAKER_00\]: If they had, I wonder if he'd have made it out of their alive.
[9:09] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Rumou located in Estonia is a disused and now submerged limestone quarry with the white rock making the groundwater that a flooded here look beautifully blue.
[9:20] \[SPEAKER_00\]: But as picture resk as it may seem something along the shore's whole secret sohainus it spoils the beauty for as far as the eye can see.
[9:30] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Here you can spot the ruins of derelect quarry utility buildings, both of them also under water.
[9:37] \[SPEAKER_00\]: These were built during the 1940s at the height of the quarry's use.
[9:41] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Scooby-Divers can still see the board windows underwater with the large buildings filled with reads, moss, and debris.
[9:48] \[SPEAKER_00\]: To explore this creepy Atlantis, you'd need to be very careful.
[9:53] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Jump diving into the water is extremely dangerous since the lake bed is home to chunks of thick concrete, tree branches, spikes, even rusted for god and machinery.
[10:03] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Coils of barbed wire can be seen too, strewn about the place like a deadly fishing net.
[10:08] \[SPEAKER_00\]: But something deadlier took place in these now-dramed buildings.
[10:13] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Back in the 1940s, the Soviet Union was in control of rumour quarry, and what utility these buildings really served was labor.
[10:22] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Hard labor.
[10:23] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Yes, these were, in fact, prisons.
[10:27] \[SPEAKER_00\]: And mates here were forced to mine the quarry, the physical strain of their work was extreme, and their primary goal was to extract the limestone.
[10:35] \[SPEAKER_00\]: The Soviet Union employed, which is certainly one word for it, over 400 prisoners, and this only led up when Estonia gained independence in 1991.
[10:46] \[SPEAKER_00\]: The prison was swiftly abandoned and left to rot, but without any maintenance holding the fort together, the groundwater seat into the quarry, creating this ironically beautiful lagoon.
[10:57] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Some buildings were swallowed whole by the water, where the remains of others poke out.
[11:02] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Though if you ask me, no amount of water can wash away the atrocities that undoubtedly took place here.
[11:10] \[SPEAKER_00\]: You go to the hospital to get better, right?
[11:12] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Well, as it turns out, not always.
[11:15] \[SPEAKER_00\]: This building is most famously known as the Smallpox Hospital, which was once located on Roosevelt Island, and known as Blackwell's Island in Manhattan, York City.
[11:26] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Originally designed by architect James Renwick Jr., the 100-bed hospital opened back in 1856.
[11:32] \[SPEAKER_00\]: It was built to quarantine those diagnosed with, you guessed it, Smallpox, a deadly and highly infectious disease you either recovered from, or you didn't.
[11:43] \[SPEAKER_00\]: The hospital had a surprisingly high turnover, treating approximately 7,000 patients a year, most of which did not survive.
[11:52] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Then in 1875, it was relocated to North Brothers Island further up the East River, and by the 1950s, with the passing peak of the disease, the isolated complex became more of an inconvenience to upkeep in it fell into a state of disrepair.
[12:08] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Today,
[12:13] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Its center building is made entirely from front to back of the island's own shist rock, quarried cut, dressed and laid by prisoners of the penitentiary.
[12:24] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Wait, penitentiary?
[12:26] \[SPEAKER_00\]: I thought this was a hospital.
[12:28] \[SPEAKER_00\]: While as it turns out, not always.
[12:31] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Before attempting to provide respite for the hill, in 1832 up in a tentry was the first thing built on the island, isolating prisoners from the city in mainland.
[12:41] \[SPEAKER_00\]: But the prisoners weren't the only inmates there.
[12:43] \[SPEAKER_00\]: The island was also soon home to workhouses, hospitals for the incurable land, seven years after the penitentiary was built, the New York City Lunatic Asylum, a special hospital for the insane.
[12:58] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Far from the quality of mental health services people received today, back then undercover reports brought to light how mentally ill patients had been put on the island more to be out of sight and out of mind.
[13:09] \[SPEAKER_00\]: They were living in some truly harrowing conditions over crowded rooms and filthy states, ice-cold, bath, spoiled food, physical abuse from caretakers.
[13:19] \[SPEAKER_00\]: This wasn't a place people went to get better.
[13:22] \[SPEAKER_00\]: This was a place people went to live out their days for
[13:27] \[SPEAKER_00\]: By the 1900s as health care progressed, the last patients were moved to other hospitals, and like the smallpox hospital it too fell into disrepair by the 1950s.
[13:38] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Never mind the building, the sorted history of this entire island, is best left in the past.
[13:44] \[SPEAKER_00\]: The name Chateau Miranda may sound like an incredibly expensive hotel, but in reality, it's much more impressive and also haunted.
[13:54] \[SPEAKER_00\]: It's the name of a neogothic Belgian castle complete with a definitely 9-haunted 183-foot tall clock tower.
[14:02] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Build all the way back in 1866.
[14:05] \[SPEAKER_00\]: This stone residence was completely demolished in October 2017, but before it came crumbling down, it was home to the line of Kirki debut fort family who escaped to this high-to-way castle during the French Revolution.
[14:19] \[SPEAKER_00\]: It's had a long standing history of violence and war having also been occupied by German forces in World War II.
[14:27] \[SPEAKER_00\]: During this time, the estate had rests on hosted one of the bloodiest single battles fought by the United States, the Battle of the Bulge, which saw almost 200,000 men, lose their lives in just six weeks.
[14:42] \[SPEAKER_00\]: The family soon lost residents of the mighty fortress, succumbing to the control of the National Railway Company of Belgium in 1950.
[14:57] \[SPEAKER_00\]: It all sounded very innocent and sweet, able to provide 200 children with a holiday experience that advocated fresh air, a swimming pool, and even a small football pitch.
[15:07] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Seems like a dream.
[15:09] \[SPEAKER_00\]: But secretly, the kids were treated only slightly better than vermin.
[15:14] \[SPEAKER_00\]: It turns out that what they didn't want you to know is that the staff here lived in luxury, while the children were cruelly subjected to strict rules and traumatic living conditions.
[15:25] \[SPEAKER_00\]: After the camp closed, the costs of keeping the Shaco maintained were too high and so it deteriorated.
[15:32] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Until one evening a fire caused heavy damage to the building.
[15:36] \[SPEAKER_00\]: It was likely to have been started deliberately, but whoever this mysterious figure is or what their motives were, we may never know.
[15:44] \[SPEAKER_00\]: The building lingered in a derelict state with the K and Vanilism being frequent problems.
[15:50] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Even years after it was completely abandoned, dolls were found in strange places with urban explorers claiming they'd heard the chilling screams of children inside.
[16:00] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Some even said they'd seen the ghosts of kids wandering around the site.
[16:05] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Well, I can't say I'm sad this has been demolished, and I'm sure whoever's at that fire.
[16:11] \[SPEAKER_00\]: is just as thrilled.
[16:13] \[SPEAKER_00\]: If you're of sensitive nature, nice suggestion to get your tissues ready because this treehouse is the site of a nightmarish tale.
[16:23] \[SPEAKER_00\]: It's located in Redmond, Washington with Victorian style architecture built into the branches of this maple tree and a designed
[16:35] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Built in the 1980s, Steve Rondell hoped this treehouse would be the perfect play area for his kids.
[16:42] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Certainly, looks like it would be a lot of fun, with a balcony look out, for floors, a jetty, leading to a mode, and even a spiral staircase that leads up to the top floor.
[16:52] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Steve and his wife Diana had purchased the area of land a decade previously, transforming the huge maple tree and a swamp into their woodland paradise.
[17:01] \[SPEAKER_00\]: As their children grew up, they began to take an interest in the Carpentry and Engineering needed to maintain the Treehouse.
[17:08] \[SPEAKER_00\]: It was a real family project.
[17:11] \[SPEAKER_00\]: That isn't till tragically in 2004, one of the children unexpectedly passed away.
[17:17] \[SPEAKER_00\]: The family was broken.
[17:19] \[SPEAKER_00\]: They came together on projects trying their best to recover what they had lost, but then in 2008 the financial crisis dealt them another blow.
[17:29] \[SPEAKER_00\]: And like that wasn't enough, Diana fell ill and also passed in 2015.
[17:34] \[SPEAKER_00\]: During this time, the family's priority shifted in the treehouse fell into disrepair.
[17:39] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Today, it still stands alone in the forest, desperately waiting to be played in.
[17:45] \[SPEAKER_00\]: In 2019, crowdfunding was started to try and restore it to its former glory, but it sadly never took off.
[17:53] \[SPEAKER_00\]: In the years following its fallen into a state of slow decay, and without restoration, it's faded to slowly fall apart, a dying monument to the once-happy memories of the Rondell family.
[18:05] \[SPEAKER_00\]: I told you you'd need those tissues!
[18:07] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Ovo Palace Hotel on the Croatian island Kirk was once considered one of the most beautiful and exclusive getaway destinations in the world.
[18:18] \[SPEAKER_00\]: This building attracted the wealthiest tourist and boasted some very extensive activities.
[18:24] \[SPEAKER_00\]: This included bowling lanes, tennis courts, and enormous swimming pools rumored to have once been filled with champagne.
[18:31] \[SPEAKER_00\]: But today the hotel resort is abandoned, and the interior completely destroyed.
[18:36] \[SPEAKER_00\]: What happened?
[18:37] \[SPEAKER_00\]: While built back in 1971, the exclusive hotel attracted investments from Bob Goochione, the founder of Penthouse Magazine who bought $45 million in opening the hotels, Penthouse
[18:54] \[SPEAKER_00\]: However, the following year the casino went bankrupt and was closed, with the scale of its debts threatening to take the rest of the hotel with it.
[19:02] \[SPEAKER_00\]: It just managed to keep it set above water until 2001, when it shut its doors for good.
[19:08] \[SPEAKER_00\]: However in the 10 years leading up to its demise, it wasn't exclusive clientele this hotel was serving.
[19:15] \[SPEAKER_00\]: As the Yugoslav Civil War raids from 1991 to 2001, the hotel was converted into a refugee
[19:23] \[SPEAKER_00\]: When the war finally ended, the refugees were told to leave, but they didn't take kindly to this at all.
[19:30] \[SPEAKER_00\]: This hotel had been their home, some were the best part of a decade.
[19:33] \[SPEAKER_00\]: When they were finally forced out, they decided to strip the hotel of every valuable item you could think of, down to the pipe's radiator's copper wiring, and electric sockets.
[19:44] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Hollow Dovo was completely desecrated, with shards of broken glass on the floors and bits of concrete staircase littering the ground.
[19:52] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Most frighteningly, a long red stain leads up two flights of stairs to the top floor and creepy messages flood the walls.
[20:01] \[SPEAKER_00\]: It's a stark reminder of the impact the war had on the country, one that's literally left writing on the walls.
[20:09] \[SPEAKER_00\]: When I say ghost town, I bet most of you think of wild-wish to America, Cowboys and Shoot-amps.
[20:15] \[SPEAKER_00\]: But over in the Namib desert in the middle of Namibia, Africa lies the mysterious ghost town of Coleman Scott.
[20:23] \[SPEAKER_00\]: I salated in completely abandoned, the region is known as the Forbidden Zone.
[20:28] \[SPEAKER_00\]: That's reason enough to be wary, right?
[20:31] \[SPEAKER_00\]: It gets even more intriguing though, because in 1908, diamonds were discovered in this area.
[20:36] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Word of the Discovery spread fast, and by 1912, a town that sprung up, producing a million carrots a year.
[20:44] \[SPEAKER_00\]: responsible for 11.7% of the world's total diamond production.
[20:49] \[SPEAKER_00\]: But this huge wealthy industry was destined to collapse, and tens of mining meant the area attracted a lot of hopeful prospectors, and so the area was depleted of the precious gemstones by the 1930s.
[21:01] \[SPEAKER_00\]: When the town's people left, they abandoned their homes along with any bulky possessions and by 1956, Coleman scoff was completely deserted.
[21:10] \[SPEAKER_00\]: In a matter of years, the shifting sand dunes had gradually crept into the town, moving through the open windows and doors of the houses and filling them to the brimwood sand.
[21:20] \[SPEAKER_00\]: While the depletion of diamonds is blamed for the desertion, it was mostly due to German jurisdiction over the colony, which wanted greater control over the native jewels.
[21:30] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Green often fuels the most sickening crimes, and in common scomped there was no exception.
[21:36] \[SPEAKER_00\]: The area was heavily restricted with rights to the diamonds falling exclusively into the labs of a Berlin-based company.
[21:43] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Native tribes' people were actually displaced from their land due to the zone's construction, with only authorized personnel out access.
[21:52] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Before its demise, Coleman Scott and nearby Ludoritz had become the wealthiest locations in all of Africa, with colonial exploitation at the heart of it all.
[22:03] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Of course, this couldn't have happened without the miners who worked there who were as you might have guessed, and maybe in locals.
[22:11] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Today much of Coleman Scott has been reclaimed by the desert with only the walls and foundations of a few houses remaining, like a time capsule lost to the sands.
[22:22] \[SPEAKER_00\]: One that very few want to dig up.
[22:25] \[SPEAKER_00\]: What is it about a band in hotels that make them so spooky?
[22:29] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Their size, maybe?
[22:30] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Their designs?
[22:31] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Maybe it's the secrets all of them seem to be hiding, as Bacor Hill station proves all too well.
[22:39] \[SPEAKER_00\]: This is a collection of French colonial buildings located on the top of Bacor Mountain, about 23 miles west of Campot and Cambodia intended to have been a luxury resort for the occupying French soldiers in the early 1920s.
[22:53] \[SPEAKER_00\]: But the region has since been entrenched in arduous political difficulties, involving rebellious coups, tyrants, and regimes, all of which played into the hotels downfall.
[23:05] \[SPEAKER_00\]: It was first abandoned in the late 1940s due to local insurrections, and 1962 a casino was opened and buildings added to the complex, including an annex for the palace and a mayor's office.
[23:18] \[SPEAKER_00\]: At their seahannuic, the head of state of Cambodia was overthrown in a 1970 coup.
[23:24] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Bacore Hill Station was considered an appealing location to conduct guerrilla warfare.
[23:29] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Almost overnight it went from a luxury vacation spot to a war camp.
[23:35] \[SPEAKER_00\]: and from there it got progressively worse.
[23:38] \[SPEAKER_00\]: In 1972, Becore Mountain was abandoned again when the chemo Rouge took control of the area.
[23:44] \[SPEAKER_00\]: This was an army backed by the repressive, totalitarian party that dominated the country at the time.
[23:51] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Seven years later, in the Rouge entrenched themselves firmly into Becore Hill, holding
[24:00] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Now completely forgotten, it stands alone with more military memories than those of luxury.
[24:05] \[SPEAKER_00\]: While derelict, most of the buildings are still standing.
[24:09] \[SPEAKER_00\]: The Catholic Church, for example, is in surprisingly good shape.
[24:13] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Pekor Hill station's best-cap secret, however, isn't to do with its military occupation, but its very construction.
[24:20] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Because of the remote mountain location, building the resort was labor intensive and it's estimated a staggering 1,000 people lost their lives during the nine months it took to build.
[24:32] \[SPEAKER_00\]: I mean, they say luxury comes at a price, but that cost is far too high if you ask me.
[24:38] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Psychiatric hospitals these days have an unsettlingly, clinical field to them.
[24:43] \[SPEAKER_00\]: The almost universal mint green paint and stark rooms can send a shiver up your spine.
[24:49] \[SPEAKER_00\]: But America's first privately licensed psychiatric hospital was much, much more sinister looking.
[24:56] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Craig House of Victoria and Manchin and Upstate New York built for a civil war officer was converted into a psychiatric hospital back in 1915.
[25:05] \[SPEAKER_00\]: The gigantic Gothic mansion is surrounded by over 60 acres of land, and while it looked like a house of horrors from the outside, it was marketed as a safe haven for the mentally ill, practically a vacation spot.
[25:19] \[SPEAKER_00\]: With skiing and tents of taunt therapy, a music room complete with an entire organ and find dining on offer to all patients.
[25:27] \[SPEAKER_00\]: As you can imagine, it could only be afforded by very wealthy clients, putting them out $750 a month.
[25:35] \[SPEAKER_00\]: That's roughly $22,500 in today's money.
[25:39] \[SPEAKER_00\]: For that price, patients rightly expected only the best treatment.
[25:44] \[SPEAKER_00\]: In reality though, the sanatorium only made them worse.
[25:48] \[SPEAKER_00\]: The wife of author Episcoppech Gerald was admitted to the institution, along with many other famous names such as Truman Capote, Rosemary Kennedy, Francis Seymour, even Marilyn Monroe.
[26:01] \[SPEAKER_00\]: However, tragedy surrounded Craig Hillhouse in many forms.
[26:06] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Many patients severed untimely deaths on the ground several fires and gulf some of the estate's buildings and a litany of strange occurrences forced it to close in 1999.
[26:17] \[SPEAKER_00\]: The curse of Craighouse wasn't finished there, though.
[26:21] \[SPEAKER_00\]: In 2003 it was bought by Wall Street businessman Robert Wilson, but he too passed away on the grounds.
[26:28] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Today, the estate sits empty, boarded up, and end ruins.
[26:33] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Well, for all the cash flowing through there, it seems not even money could save this place from the ruin of its own reputation, which of these places strikes you as the creepiest, and which would you most like to see with your own eyes.
[26:47] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Thanks for listening to the podcast, we'll see you again next time you'll want to be amazed.

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