Why You Shouldn't Explore Abandoned Gold Mines

Today, we descend nearly 100 feet below ground to explore the remains of a thousand-year-old gold mine, where, after wading through miles of chest-high water, we discover an underground waterfall, ride an industrial train, and see the type of catastrophic collapses that have claimed the lives of many here throughout the centuries. But here's the strange thing. In contrast to the scale of the 300 miles of tunnels and chambers, and all the associated tragedy required in their exploitation, just 16 tons of pure gold had been harvested throughout the years, which, for a little perspective, is an amount of gold basically compact enough to fit inside the back of your SUV. So what was it all for, and what remains? Stay tuned to find out, as we explore the forgotten tunnels of the Zwaltestock gold mine. I'm your host Ryan Socash, and you're watching It's History On Location. To understand this ancient mining site, we first need to understand a few things about who controlled the money in medieval Europe, the church. In 1273, a regional duke granted his mining rights over this particular hillside to a nearby monastery. Apparently, the order there was known for its focus on profit, so the monks got right to work granting nobles licenses to dig, kind of like a franchise system. And it just so happens that our guide Marta showed us the exact location where things began. During the works, the miners in 1913, they start digging this adit. It was made just for transport, there was no gold here. But before they entered the mountain, they found the very old corridors. This one going down deep there, and finishing just there. So that's the very old part of the gold mine, because the mining in this region started almost a thousand years ago. So that's probably the mine from 13, maybe 14 centuries. How do we know it? Because it's very small, very narrow, and it was made by hand, without any explosive materials, without any machines, just by hand by the miners. Though by the time the operation hit its real stride in the 1500s, the monks were long out of the picture, as the nobles took hold of the region and started minting their own coins. To accommodate this, extraction methods were rapidly evolving, unlocking the site's full potential. For example, over the first few centuries, miners would access deposits by driving soaked wooden pegs into natural cracks. When the wood expanded, the cracks would widen and gold could be removed. Ladies and gentlemen, now we are going through the 16th century corridor, made by hand. It's very old, very narrow, and you will see in a minute underground waterfall. Wow, that's fantastic. It's eight meters high, and it's natural. That means like we did nothing to make it like running. The water is going by itself. It's going through the stones down and going up outside. The amount of water shows that it's supposed to be like a maze, because there's so many. If that would be just like a tiny drip, that means there's just, you know, maybe there is a spring in there somewhere. But the way it's running, the speed it has, that means there somewhere there is another mine and another mine and it's many kilometers of it. By the 16th century, this technique was replaced by the first documented control underground explosion, as in the meantime, alchemists developed new methods to extract gold from the rocks directly. The operation was so aggressive that by this time, the site was producing eight percent all European gold. Even so, those glory days wouldn't last forever. By the 16th century, the gold veins were starting to thin and the owners, perhaps some of who were desperate to turn a profit at this point, began sending men into more precarious areas of the underground. These were inhumane measures that resulted in many horrific deaths. Perhaps most notable was the golden donkey disaster, a collapse that killed 59 miners at a depth of 236 feet. There was only one entrance, the golden donkey shaft and a huge mine, one entrance. So this shaft collapsed and these people were there like prisoners and they were waiting for their death. After the mine collapsed, the owners were saying, right, we have enough, ciao. So they left the town, they never made any rescue, rescue what in 16th century? Nothing. They just died there. After so many years, we tried to get there from the outside using the still existing mines, but it's very, very difficult. You have to wear special suit, go by the ropes down the deep shaft. We get quite close to this place and we found the bones. We made them to the laboratory and that's the human bone from this part. So probably it's not the myth. It's not the legend. It's really happened in that time. We're still looking for them. Perhaps that event was a bad omen, as not long after 30 years war devastated the region's population. What started as a religious war ended in the near destruction of an entire generation of central Europeans. And to top it all off, pandemic followed immediately after. From that point on, things would never be the same. Gold production effectively stopped. However, early 20th century methods of gold extraction, as well as outright arsenic mining, did reinvigorate the operations for a time. And this is where the mine's electric rail system was installed. The system was originally designed to improve transport of both ore and people throughout the whole complex. It eventually spanned hundreds of miles over 21 levels. Oh, that surprised me. So this is a 300 meter train route to the heart of the mine, from which we're going to have a fantastic adventure. Though where rail lines were impractical, freight deliveries via boat became an option. This was surprisingly common in mines, as an adit provided both drainage and low friction movement of raw commodity. Furthermore, I actually had a chance to explore the mine by boat on my visit. The experience was unlike anything else. We took the boat a mile and a half into the mountain before climbing out into the frigid water to start our exploration. The first thing is this water is unbelievably cold. The second thing is that the ground here is completely uneven. So there's been fallen rocks, there are holes. And so it might look peaceful and easy to wade through this, but it's actually not. This mine was made just for transport, just to connect two different mining fields in one piece. And it's two and a half kilometers long. So can you imagine? It wasn't flooded all the time, obviously. It was flooded when they closed the mine in 1961, because they put the dam there, because the water is going on itself with no electricity, no pumps. So the pressure in the pipes is very high. So this water actually is going to lots of buildings and it's working in the factories to cool the engines We need to get to the water. Please don't touch any beams. This is kind of a safe place because it's what's supposed to be collapsed, it's already did. But that's the sign that there is another part on our right side. So there was a corridor going right and there is a shaft going up. So that's the way the abandoned mine looks like. Actually, a few tips for future. If you hear your echo, that means it's kind of safe. That means the rocks are bouncing, your voice, nothing's going on. But sometimes you're standing actually in the same corridor and you feel like you're standing in a studio, like your voice is not going anywhere, which is weird because a few meters ago there was an echo. That means something's going on in this place. That means the rocks are different. If the rocks are different, that means they could collapse because they're not solid like the others. So it's very important when you're going to the place somewhere, even here, I was here like a thousand times, but every time I'm here, I'm watching, I'm listening, I'm checking. It's something new. If you see really nice and pale colors, that means something just changed their position because it's supposed to be gray, but not very white. This is new. So that's what the fresh. Yeah. Yeah. That's how it looks like when it's fresh. So you could even tell without watching this. And again, it's not very echo moment here. And if you will watch carefully the structure of this rock, you could even tell it's going to be more of these. If you have rocks like that with lots of stones, like looking with this structure and you see that there's lots of beams, that's mean something was wrong with this place. That's why we don't have to stay here for long. We need to go to other places, which is better to talk. You see, there's no echo here. Can you hear that? Yeah. The sound is totally different. Why? Because we have this again, this Gertrudes added split to two and that was still Gertrudes just for transport, but no, actually it's almost the end of it. So good morning. So if the train was coming, there was a gentleman sitting here and counting them and with the special lever or whatever it's called, he was changing the truck going right, left or right. So that was a train station here. You could even see the tracks. The tracks were going through here? Yeah, probably. All right. I guess this is the worst place we've been so far because the sound is constantly muffled. That's the worst part. That's why we don't want it to be here too long, but this one is totally safe. So I want to show you something on the end and we're coming back. I want to show you the end. Can you see the ladder? Yeah, I see that. Nobody knows where it's going. I guess that maybe some mysteries are meant to be undiscovered. We eventually reached a drier area where we were confronted with a series of junctions and collapses. Marta was taking me to see a point in the mind that remains one of Zwarte Stock's most intriguing mysteries. Many suspect that the former German population left behind either personal goods or state treasures, and there is some merit to the idea. You see, the Second World War had enormous consequences for the people who lived around here. When the war ended, borders were redrawn and Zwarte Stock passed from German rule to a new Polish state. From there, the German population was expelled and only allowed to take a modest allowance of personal goods with them on the way out. For that reason, many, if not most families, hid items of value wherever they could, intending to return to collect them one day. But as history would show, many of these treasures were simply left to time. As for the mine, well, most of its documentation was actually left behind for the new Polish government to resume operations if they saw fit. But one corridor was absent from those plans and mysteriously demolished. In fact, it was demolished at a junction that didn't really make sense. And this is precisely where Marta and her friends had spent years digging for answers. We cleaned up the first place they destroyed, the second one to make it passage for the tourists, we made it safe. But there is another place just straight away there, which is still not really open. You have to know that the sum of the exploration here, it's just because there is a group of people who really want to do that. It's not like we now hired the group of the miners, they're coming here every day and they're working here. No, you see, nothing happened today. And they're coming here and then we're coming here with them. And we're trying to remove another make this corridor longer. And now we just lost our hope for now. So quite a long time we didn't work here because it's looked like that. We could go even further and it will be closer and closer. In one point, you have to lie down and crawl. So our job was looking like there was few people crawling. The first one was still taking all this material you can see here. So the rocks, the mud and everything was just giving it backwards to other person. The other person was giving it backwards to other person and etc. So it's like a very tiring job. And we have to be sure it's safe because when you're lying in a hole like that, and there is just rock million tons above us because there is a hill there. So now we are about 100 meters underground. So it's kind of heavy in there. Do you know what I mean? So sometimes we need to build special support and it's very difficult to do it in the hole like that. The place where they destroyed this, can you see that? Yes. And it's going there. It's very clever because if you have corridor like that, just straight and you destroy it here, it will just collapse. But if you have corridor going straight and somewhere else, and maybe there will be shaft here. If you destroy the place like that, it's almost unbelievable to open it again because the rocks are coming from different direction. So if you have more free space underground and you destroy a place like that, it's very difficult to make it clear. All these places, the three places which were destroyed, they were destroyed in a very specific moment, not in the straight corridor. Again, that means something because if that would be just by accident, they'll be in different places. Every single collapse we were going through, it was the place where there was a crossroads of the mines and the shafts. So they made sure that if they will destroy this specific place, there will be no chance to open it. Obviously, it was 70 years ago. The technology is different now, so now we can try to do that. It's kind of one thing to climb to this point, but when you see the finely laid bricks there, you know there's much more to the story. And again, 300 kilometers of the mines here. We got maps of every single place, not this. Oh, it's not even on the map? No, that's why it's so interesting. This place, it's not that safe, what you're thinking. All these rocks here are not because they want to be here. You see this brighter place there, like different color, that means something collapsed from there. And underneath this wooden floor, there's this place for the divers. This size of the 24-meter shaft, full of water. When the diver was there with lights, and we closed the lights here, that was absolutely amazing. The water is crystal, so he was like an astronaut in the cosmos, because you cannot see the water. And in here, that was the lift shaft, so there was machinery there and above, and there was a lift coming down and up. Obviously, nothing left by now, but there is original wooden leather in the shaft. Down this shaft, this flooded shaft, connects to all those other levels. Two levels, 12 meters and 24. And could the divers access those levels? On the bottom, he entered the bottom level, 24 meters deeper, just a few meters. And there was a kind of dangerous moment, because he disappeared. And we were sure he's safe, because there were still bubbles coming, because he was breathing, so the bubbles were coming, coming, coming. At one point, the bubbles stopped. There was no sound, no bubbles, no lights. And he was so deep in the corridor. At one point, we start hearing bubbles coming from that crossroad we were before. So he was just there. So the corridor is going underneath somewhere, and it was collapsed. So he couldn't dive deeper. And what did he see down there? The corridors, the wooden support, the wooden ladders. He saw the mine, left it. Somebody stopped pumping the water. Obviously, there's supposed not to be water there, because the people were working there. So it's supposed to be a pump here, and pumping the water from these corridors. Although the idea of something like hidden treasure might sound improbable to the more skeptical of us, it's not an unfounded idea. Honestly, the only reason that this mine is so well known and accessible today is thanks to a notorious treasure hunter who's uncovered many mysteries in her lifetime, named Elżbieta Szymuncka. Elżbieta grew up in the region and uncovered thousands of artifacts left behind by Germans, from boxes of documents to precious jewelry and the oldest known medieval mine pump ever discovered. And I have to say, after I had the chance to eat lunch with her, I could only describe her as being something like the real-life version of Kevin Cosner's Field of Dreams character. Embracing that notion, to build it they will come to an almost insane degree. In short, Elżbieta started as a tour guide here decades ago, and when the estate became available for purchase in 1997, she decided to risk everything. With the support of her then teenage daughters and husband, the family took out a mortgage against their farm, bought the mine, and from that point forward gave everything in pursuit of preserving one of Europe's oldest gold mines. Against the odds, they succeeded. To this day, it's still a family-owned operation. In fact, Marta is her eldest daughter. And I have to say, their story really hit home with me. She lives like the real-life version of what we try to do in these videos. Their story is just packed with magical twists of fate, then and now discoveries, and so on. For example, when they began transforming one of the many decrepit buildings they purchased into a museum, one of their workers discovered old German inscriptions behind a thin layer of plaster, revealing that the exact room that was under renovation had already been a museum for the site 100 years ago. Further research confirmed that it was previously the mine's thousandth anniversary exhibition. My point here, I'm talking to the skeptics, is that much of what the family has discovered was previously disregarded as speculative. And so if they have a hunch that something important is waiting to be discovered at the end of that collapsed corridor, I for one am inclined to believe it. So leave it there for today. I thank you guys all so much for watching. Special thanks to Marta and her family for hosting me here. If you guys come to Europe, you have to come to Złoty Stok. I'm telling you, it is the most amazing mine experience in Poland. Otherwise, as always, this is Ryan Socash, signing off.