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NARRATOR: Did this woman really see a burning
house in this empty field?
Was she witness to a tragedy yet to happen?
Well, there's no doubt in my mind whatsoever
as to what we saw.
NARRATOR: And did this man see back in time to glimpse
a vision of the past?
And why did this arctic explorer map a land that never was?
Mysteries from the files of Arthur C. Clarke,
author of "2001" and inventor of the communications satellite.
Now in retreat in Sri Lanka, he ponders the riddles
of this and other worlds.
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This is the oldest government department
in Sri Lanka, the survey set up by the British in 1800.
It still keeps some of the empire's traditions.
For example, the boss is called the Surveyor General.
But otherwise, it's a fairly modern place, using satellite
imagery to make maps of every feature in this island
of 65,000 square kilometers.
Thanks to survey departments like this one,
we should now have an accurate picture of the entire planet.
But do we?
Because travelers are reporting on eerie phenomenon.
They say that buildings they spot from a distance
turn out not to be there.
Sometimes they discover that the building
was demolished years before.
Sometimes it never existed at all.
Such tales seem weird, even preposterous,
but I take them seriously when they
come from reputable observers.
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NARRATOR: This wild and uninhabited glen
in the highlands of Scotland is one
of Europe's loneliest places.
It's accessible only by boat, helicopter, or the most
determined of hill walkers.
George Bruce and Donald Watt are both members
of mountain rescue teams.
They are intrepid climbers and know
the moods of the mountains.
I've been working for 40 years in the Scottish Highlands.
With George here, we've been doing 30 years together,
in all kinds of conditions, day and night,
and winter and summer, all year round.
We don't imagine we're seeing things.
What we see we know we're seeing.
NARRATOR: The last time they came down the slopes of Beinn
Fhionnlaidh, the friends were on the first stage of a weekend
hike.
The day, it was beautiful.
It was the third of May, all peak type conditions.
The sky was pure blue, a bit of snow on the ground.
Visibility was absolutely fantastic.
NARRATOR: The two planned to shelter in the ruined house
further up the valley.
But to their surprise, they spotted another building first.
I was about 100 yards behind George up the hill.
And I saw this cottage before George stopped.
And then he stopped ahead of me.
And I got down to him.
He turned to me and said, there's a cottage there.
And I said, yeah, I see it.
So I mean, we both saw the same thing.
And we saw it clear over the path.
NARRATOR: The cottage was in clear view at the water's edge,
but it was not on the map.
The thing that stopped me was there
was no moss overhanging the roof.
Normally in these cottages, the slates
would have dropped some moisture,
there'd be a bit of moss.
And it would look worn at bit.
This thing was not worn.
The sun was reflecting off the slates,
and it was almost as though it had
been-- either had a good scrub to clean
it up or freshly built.
So we just kept going down.
And we had taken a little gully system and lost sight of it.
And right down to the loch site, walked around the path,
anticipating this cottage, and there was nothing there.
NARRATOR: The house had vanished.
George and Donald were mystified.
Both were completely certain that they had seen
a real building from above.
GEORGE BRUCE: I knew exactly what I saw.
It was solid, set in on the side of the loch on solid ground
with solid ground behind it and all around about it.
Two windows in the bottom, two dormer windows at the top,
two chimneys, no smoke, I'm afraid, but very new looking.
Where we're standing now here is where we think we saw it.
And it's very strange again.
I remember vividly years ago doing exactly what we're doing.
I'm standing here.
We walked about here, totally puzzled,
walked right on to the end so we could see right down the loch--
no cottage.
And I feel somewhat similar just now.
It's no surprise it's not sitting here
like it should be sitting here.
And maybe someday I'll come back in the distant future
and it will be sitting here, I hope.
Yeah, it's such a strange feeling.
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NARRATOR: Only 60 miles north, Susannah Stone
believes she, too, may have had a brief glimpse of the future.
Come on. Come on.
NARRATOR: It happened one evening as she drove
a friend home after dinner.
We drove along this April evening, peacefully,
lovely evening, a light evening.
And we came round the church.
And to our horror, we saw a largish house, high house,
blazing, flaming.
I mean, the flames were coming out
of all the windows, the upstairs and the downstairs,
and curling up the lintels.
NARRATOR: Suzannah knew the road like the back of her hand.
She had driven up and down it every week for years.
So we stopped the van, and we turned off the engine,
and we watched it.
It had long, narrow, Georgian windows,
which are quite different to any of the other houses
around here.
And it, um, had a long, narrow door
in the middle that was shut.
NARRATOR: The building Susannah saw was on the grass field
beyond where the new road now runs.
It stood just where the football goal posts are.
The blazing house that we saw was just exactly there.
And it was very obvious, very clear.
It was by itself.
Those wooden houses weren't there.
NARRATOR: Eerily, they heard no noise and saw no people.
They wanted a closer look.
So we set off, and we got nearer to it.
And we were quite a distance down.
I was driving.
She was watching.
And when we got quite near, it vanished-- completely
disappeared. It just simply wasn't there.
So I said, well, perhaps the levels had changed.
We may be lower down, and perhaps I'd got my angles wrong
and we couldn't see it.
NARRATOR: Suzannah dropped her friend
off and began the journey home.
But close to the field where the two had seen the blazing house,
she had a puncture.
She had to walk to a telephone to call for help.
As I walked on up the hill, I realized that there
was something terribly wrong.
There was something very strange.
There was nothing in the field that I just walked past.
And I'd looked into the field.
I had a few humps and bumps in it and some stones,
but no house, no ashes, nothing.
So I thought, that's most extraordinary.
I really felt quite frightened.
I've often thought about this since, and it worried me,
as I walked up the dark road, as to what on Earth we had seen,
the two of us, and, um, I really don't know.
Except that I have a feeling that perhaps it's the future.
I-- I just wonder.
And if anyone ever builds a light-colored house
in that position, I'm not a bit sure what I'd do about it.
I think I might have to go knock on the door and warn them.
NARRATOR: Mountain Lowe rises above the city of Los Angeles.
It's a wilderness haven above the smog.
At the turn of the century, the mountain was
a popular tourist attraction.
A railway took day trippers up for a breath
of fresh air and lunch in the Alpine Tavern Hotel.
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The more adventurous could ascend to the very top
and enjoy the panoramic views, thanks to Herbert the mule.
But even Los Angeles' favorite day out
could not survive the economic depression of the 1930s.
The resort closed, and now all that remains of the railway
is a track for hikers.
Bo Orsjo is a keen walker.
The first time I hiked to Mount Lowe was in the 1970s.
And I hiked from the bottom of the mountain, which is about
four miles up here, I think.
And I saw a huge building up here that looked like a hotel,
green in color.
And I saw a maid was sweeping a big staircase.
She was using an old-fashioned hand broom.
And nobody does that today.
They use vacuum cleaners or other tools.
And so it looked kind of old-fashioned.
NARRATOR: Puzzled, Bo went down the mountain
and described the hotel to a friend, Vaughan Thompson.
An argument began.
I told him, I said there hadn't been any buildings
up there in years.
I knew there had been a long time ago, but they burned down,
and they were just gone.
I said to him, this hotel is still standing on Mount Lowe.
And he said, no way.
There are no buildings on Mount Lowe.
There haven't been in our lifetimes.
And I said, yes, there is, because I've seen it.
I certainly wasn't dreaming.
This was reality.
It was as real as anything can be.
NARRATOR: Although no one will believe him,
Bo refused to budge from his story.
He climbed the mountain again.
This time, he went to the exact spot
where he had seen the hotel standing.
He found his friends had been right.
There was only rubble.
BO ORSJO (VOICEOVER): There was no building.
There was just this empty structure with high trees.
And it was a very surprising situation.
I am 100% sure the hotel was there.
The cars came up, right up to the front of the hotel.
NARRATOR: Ron Marcroft, a Mount Lowe ranger,
keeps a collection of old photographs.
Amongst them, Bo recognizes his phantom hotel.
There is one.
That looks exactly like it.
Gee, that's fascinating, because you
know, it burned in '36, a shell of it sat here for years,
abandoned.
And then in 1959, what was standing
was dynamited to the ground.
BO ORSJO: But that is the hotel, all right.
NARRATOR: Bo is certain he saw this hotel building almost 40
years after it was destroyed.
That was a very scary experience.
Because I question myself.
What else have I seen that is not there?
And it was with me for a long time
when I was out hiking alone.
I always question myself.
Is that for real or is it not?
The people who report sightings of apparently phantom buildings
are usually condemned to years of frustration
without ever discovering what they really saw.
Yet sometimes a bit of persistence,
a fresh look, and a bit of luck finally solve these mysteries.
Here's one such case.
Ironically, it comes from the city
that thrives on confusing reality
with illusion, a place where nothing is
what it seems-- Hollywood, USA.
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NARRATOR: This woman is on her way to a meeting
that she hopes will solve the mystery that's
been bothering her for years.
Her date is with Larry Gelbmann.
He is a movie actor with an interest in the paranormal.
Shirley Lawrence used to be part of the Hollywood dream machine.
One day near Paramount Studios, she
found a little basement shop.
For the first time I saw a sign on one of the doors
that said Bookstore, Step Down.
And I kind of--
NARRATOR: After browsing for a while, Shirley turned to go
but was stopped by the shop owner.
And she said, wait.
I have something for you.
Don't leave.
And she disappeared through a door behind her desk.
And she came back carrying this.
And she handed it to me, this old tome called "Ardath"
by Marie Corelli.
I've never read this one.
Well, I took the book, and I said, why, thank you.
What do I owe you for this?
And she said, absolutely nothing because, she said,
I think you're going to appreciate this book.
NARRATOR: Shirley loved the book.
She looked forward to returning to the shop next time
Paramount employed her talents.
I wanted to thank this lady, because I loved the book.
So the next time I worked at Paramount,
I went back to that bookstore.
But it wasn't there.
It was gone.
NARRATOR: A paranormal publication
picked up Shirley's story.
She believed the bookshop had been a phantom.
But one reader knew better.
From his own days at Paramount, Larry remembered
exactly where it was.
I was really amazed, because I'd been to that bookshop
numerous times.
So I couldn't believe it.
So I did go over, and I prowled around, you know,
like a good detective.
And I found out that the signs hanging in front were gone,
the window markings were gone, and a new man was downstairs,
three, four steps down.
So I went in and talked to him, and I said,
are you running the bookshop?
And I looked around.
There weren't any books.
He says, no, I'm an engineer.
The bookshop had indeed vanished.
But its disappearance was not paranormal.
The building still stood, but an engineer's office
had taken it over.
If Shirley had looked harder, she would
have discovered the truth.
But now, it's too late.
LARRY GELBMANN: You recognize any of that?
Oh, how it has changed.
But that's the same old gate, Paramount Pictures gate.
Yes.
And the bookstore was just down, but there's nothing there.
NARRATOR: Paramount's expanding empire
has engulfed the whole street.
Benfleet Downs in Essex is the unlikely location for one
of the most famous reports of phantom buildings in the annals
of psychical research.
This is the story of how investigator
Melvin Harris believes he has cracked
this longstanding puzzle.
Earlier investigators Bob and June Andrews
were told that two people had spotted
an old house deep in these woods by the railway tracks.
But it had never been seen again.
One Sunday afternoon, they were going along to their friends
and they saw what they thought was
a large, imposing Georgian house,
from which ran a girl and a dog.
They looked at this, and they saw
what they later described as a gravel drive
leading to the Georgian house.
Then they went to their friends and said,
we've just noticed this Georgian house on the way to see you,
which we've never seen before.
And their friends said, well, of course
there isn't one there at all.
NARRATOR: The couple lived locally and were asked
by the Society for Psychical Research
to look into the mystery and see if they could resolve it.
We spent two evenings walking along together, along the path,
looking in all directions, and there was just literally
nothing at all to be found.
We went to the library.
We asked relevant questions.
We looked at maps that they had, such as they had.
We then looked at these ordinance survey
maps and the borough engineers.
There was nothing there that they
could have claimed to have been in remotely
like a Georgian house.
NARRATOR: The case was reported in the prestigious "Journal
of the Society of Psychical Research."
Bruce and Grace MacMahon described the house they saw.
They said they had searched the wood
and had never found it again.
Melvin Harris thinks the key to the mystery
probably lies close to the scene of the sighting
in the little local library at Hadley.
It was a story that was cobbled together by two children.
They talked about an imposing Georgian house.
Well, the first thing I thought, well, most children don't
know much about architecture.
A Georgian house is maybe just a rough guess.
So I'm not looking for an imposing Georgian house.
I'm looking for a large house in the forest.
NARRATOR: Harris knew the Andrews had studied ordinance
survey maps, but he thinks they had been given the wrong map
by the wrong library.
If you go to South End and ask for large-scale version
of the survey maps, you'll see this map,
and that map doesn't show the Ben Fleet Downs in full.
They really need to go on much further.
And as you see on this map, the downs start there.
They go right across [INAUDIBLE].
And in the middle of that wooded area,
the path walked by the children and the Andrews
in the center of the wood is a small rectangle,
which was a house.
NARRATOR: The map in Hadley Library
showed a house called Rayview.
The Andrews had missed it for two reasons.
They had not been shown the full map of the downs.
Secondly, they had not been told that the original report
had come from children.
They must have taken their friends to the wrong place.
Yes, they still went to the same road every time.
Yes, yes, yes.
NARRATOR: Harris wants to show the Andrews Rayview
and satisfy them that the story of the phantom house
grew from a series of simple misunderstandings.
And you don't associate it-- from the railway track,
it just looks like a house stuck on the edge,
but the children were adamant that there was no house
in the forest anywhere.
Yes, yes.
And this is the point.
Didn't say apart from Rayview, which is this house.
JUNE ANDREWS: And yet I always knew this house was here.
That's right.
The people who know this house can't find it at time.
They will come here.
They'll come for a visit.
They will to make a second visit, and they would get lost.
It's still a very mysterious place for a lot of people.
BOB ANDREWS: Yes.
Sometimes travelers claim they've
seen not just one phantom building, but whole cities.
For example, in 1915, Frank Worsley
was captain of Sir Ernest Shackleton's polar exploration
ship, "Endurance."
As he sailed along the Antarctic coast,
he made this note in his log.
"In shore appears a beautiful, dazzling city of cathedral
spires, domes, and minarets."
Well, as Worsley knew, the only buildings
in the Antarctic at that time were
a few wooden expedition huts.
So what was this fabulous but illusory city?
I'm glad to say that sightings of this kind
can be explained by science.
NARRATOR: The Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge
houses mementos from polar exploration over centuries.
Besides artifacts of icy adventures,
it preserves travellers' tales of distant lands
reported by explorers.
Dr. Gareth Rees has discovered that not all of the stories
have stood the test of time.
I think we can say that if all of these reports
were true, which we now disbelieve,
the maps of the polar regions would be a great deal more
cluttered than they are now.
NARRATOR: Arctic explorer Commander
Robert Peary claimed to be the first to reach the North Pole.
On his journey there in 1906, he thought
he sighted an undiscovered island in the Arctic Ocean.
He named it Crocker Land and marked it on his map.
Now, that sighting was subsequently investigated
by another American explorer called McMillan, who
went to look for it in 1914.
He did not find it, although he could see
it when he began his journey.
And this book, which is essentially
the reminiscences of McMillan, shows Crocker
Land, big question mark on it.
It was never found.
And indeed, what we can say now from what
we know about the geography of the Arctic
is that the nearest land in the direction
in which these chaps were looking is in Siberia,
2,000 kilometers away.
NARRATOR: At the other end of the Earth,
the Antarctic has its own elusive lands.
One of the earliest recorded was Peeps Island,
which was originally recorded in the late 17th century down
here somewhere between the Falkland Islands
and the coast of South America.
It's not there at all.
It's another of these fictitious islands.
And Sir Joseph Banks, who sailed with Captain Cook
in the endeavor, gives a description in his journal
of their attempts to find it.
They saw it, all right, but when they sailed for it
and tried to locate it properly, it disappeared.
NARRATOR: But Sir Joseph Banks had not been mistaken.
The lands he, Peary, and McMillan reported
had a scientific explanation. They were mirages.
This land behind a lighthouse in Finland is not really there.
It's a complicated mirage called a Fata Morgana.
A Fata Morgana is a special kind of mirage.
As well as lifting the image up and magnifying it,
it also involves a lot of stretching.
So there's a lot of distortion.
It becomes an unrecognizable shape.
For example, the edge of an ice float will become stretched out
and look like very tall, thin columns of ice,
like a crystal cave.
These don't look like anything every day.
They like something from fairy tales.
NARRATOR: So what the explorers reported
was real, but distorted and out of position.
The lands did not exist where they were seen.
We might imagine that as soon as somebody has sailed over
the site of a fictitious island and proved that it isn't there,
it comes off the chart.
This isn't always true.
And I can show you one example of this
in the case of Swain's Island, which is here near Antarctica.
This has been known for decades to be
a bogus island, a fictitious or illusory island.
It's still here on the map.
Mirages obviously can't account for many of these reports.
Buildings can't appear and disappear.
So what's the explanation?
I suspect the answer must lie in the observer's mind.
It's easy to be fooled, especially
in unfamiliar surroundings, and to misinterpret
what you actually see.
Something similar once happened to me.
I used to commute by train to my home in North London.
One evening when I thought I'd reached my destination,
I suddenly realized that my surroundings
were totally unfamiliar.
Even 50 years later, I can still recall
the shock of un-recognition.
Of course in this case, I quickly
realized what had happened.
I simply had gotten on to the wrong train.
How much more disorientating it must
be to know you've seen a building
but never to be able to find it?
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