A burial mound above a hidden chamber. A huge basement that the U.S. feared might be sabotaged by World War II’s Axis Powers. A warehouse storing artifacts of a maritime disaster. Secret schools where teachers and students alike fear for their safety. A hospital in the jungle of a war-torn nation. A house built on the sly. A museum paid for by a public who’s denied entrance. A secret lab in which dangerous pathogens and animal research is underway every day. A remote military base that no one knew existed until an airplane’s pilot caught sight of it. These are 10 secrets you won’t believe!
Related: 10 Creepy Secrets about the Town That Never Existed
10 Burial Chamber
Table of Contents
Archaeologists unearthed a secret chamber beneath the Riedlingen burial mound, which was constructed somewhere between 620 and 450 BC. The discovery, in southern Germany’s Danube Plain, was made after the team opened the 213-foot (65-meeter) diameter, 20-foot (6-meter) tall mound reserved for elite Celts. Damp soil at the site protected the oak walls, ceiling, and floor from oxygen, so the wood remained well preserved for over 2,600 years.
Experts believe that the double-thick ceiling was designed to prevent thefts, but the effort was unsuccessful as looters “broke through the chamber ceiling and gained access through a small entry hole.” The robbers made off with a good deal of the chamber’s treasures, including, possibly, a four-wheeled chariot. The chamber also housed the skeletal remains of two males, one 15 to 20 years old and the other 25 to 35 years of age. A third grave contained the ashes of a cremated individual. Once the wood is salvaged and restored, the chamber’s reconstruction will be exhibited in a museum.[1]
9 Basement
A 2015 Business Insider article notes that a huge, secret basement ten stories beneath New York City’s Grand Central Terminal remained “a prime target” throughout World War II.
During a visit to the subterranean chamber once guarded by armed troops to prevent enemy sabotage, Metropolitan Transit Authority’s Daniel Brucker pointed out the roomful of gigantic rotary converters that ran around the clock, “converting alternating current into [the] direct current [needed to electrify] third rails and [power] trains in and out of Grand Central Terminal.” Later, three solid-state rectifiers replaced the rotary converters. If two of the rectifiers are sabotaged, the remaining one can continue to power all the trains that enter and leave the terminal.[2]
8 Warehouse
An alligator-skin purse, still-potent perfume bottles, an upturned bathtub, a dented porthole, etched glassware, and tiny buttons are just a few of the 5,500 items stored in the secret warehouse somewhere in Atlanta, Georgia, owned by the U.S. company that has the salvage rights to the RMS Titanic.
Allowed to tour the facility, the BBC discovered the stories behind some of the objects. One of these accounts is poignant, recalling the hopes, dreams, and tragedy of Marian Meanwell, a third-class passenger aboard the ill-fated ocean liner. She was traveling to the U.S. with her recently widowed daughter. Among the contents of Meanwell’s purse were a photograph presumed to have been of her mother, a letter of reference from her previous landlord, and her “medical inspection card,” proving her to have been in good health., Tomasina Ray, director of collections for RMS Titanic Inc, says having these items, is really important because they allow Meanwell’s story to be told, preventing her from being “just another name on the list.”
Some of the other artifacts are reminders of the luxury liner’s many comforts and conveniences, but brittle rivets containing slag support the theory that substandard materials used in the ship’s construction may have caused it to sink faster.
Cups and plates show class distinctions, with the items’ quality increasingly improving from one class of passengers to the next. A third-class mug, simple and sturdy, was undecorated except for its “bright red White Star logo.” A second-class plate boasted a “pretty blue floral decoration and [looked] a little finer,” while a first-class plate was made of fine china and bore “gold trim and an intricate garland pattern.” First-class passengers, unlike those of the second and third classes, were also served on silver.[3]
7 Cameroon Schools
In Cameroon, over 260 schools have been closed. Increasingly, those that remain open, such as the one in Douala that 11-year-old Mackjourney attends, are becoming illegal. In both the nation’s capital, Bamenda, and in much of the rest of the country, schools have been closed because they have become targets of gun-wielding separatist fighters.
A key component of the separatist struggle has been a school boycott, which is “enforced through the kidnapping of students and teachers who flout the order.” As a result, school is out for 600,000 children. Mackjourney said he left Bamenda because there was a war, and it was scary to “sit in class with bullets raining on the roof.” Now, he and other children attend “secret” schools with locations “chosen so that [they are] hard for the authorities to find.”[4]
6 Afghanistan Schools
In Afghanistan, the Taliban forbids all girls but those in primary grades from attending school. In defiance of the prohibition, some girls aged 15 to 19 attend secret schools. If their teachers are caught, they could be arrested and beaten, but such perilous possibilities have not dissuaded them. Even should her educating girls come to this, “it’s worth it,” a female teacher said.
One such school has a student body numbering twelve. BBC reporter Secunder Kermani writes, “They’ve done an impressive job trying to replicate a real classroom, with rows of neat blue and white desks.”
There is dissension in the Islamic clergy’s ranks regarding the Taliban’s stance. Kermani points out that although he’s careful not to”criticise the continued closure of schools,” Sheikh Rahimullah Haqqani, an Afghan cleric in Pakistan, who is well-respected by the Taliban, points out that “there is no justification in the sharia [law] to say female education is not allowed. No justification at all.” Similar judgments issued by clerics in the Herat and Paktia provinces in Afghanistan signal “widespread support for girls’ education even amongst conservative circles.”[5]
5 Jungle Hospital
Sky News’s chief correspondent Stuart Ramsey shared an eerie personal anecdote in his recent report on Myanmar’s secret jungle hospital. A doctor interrupted his sleep to announce the arrival of a patient—a 17-year-old boy whose back had been peppered with shrapnel from a mortar round’s explosion.
The surrounding guns of warfare require blackout conditions, but the chief surgeon, Dr. Myo Khant Ko Ko, who “moved to the jungle to treat those wounded in the fighting” that has persisted since 2021, when the nation’s military seized power, is able to assess the patient’s injuries by flashlight.
Blackout conditions are lifted—inside the tent surgery, at least—while the injured youth undergoes an operation. The hospital’s location is secret because the military doesn’t obey international law, and although the medical staff don’t have guns and weapons, they attack all hospitals. Equally worrisome, the medical staff fear that “a spy posing as a family member will take a GPS reading and pass it to the military.”[6]
4 House
Reeta Herzallah and Hamdi Almarsi were fined £2,000 each after they were found guilty of having built a secret house inside their garage. A tall fence hid the new habitat, as did the garage itself. The new residence included access from a nearby one-way street, which, like the converted garage, was also illegal.
Although the Blaby District Council found the Enderby, Leicestershire residence completely unacceptable and ordered that the garage be restored to its original condition and that the fence be “removed, the unlawful changes remained, prompting legal action. Neither Herzallah nor Almarsi showed up in court or entered a plea, and they were “each ordered to pay a £770 fine for breaching the orders, legal costs of £1,252, and a £77 victim surcharge.”[7]
3 Museum
Among the 600 artifacts on display in a secret museum in McLean, Virginia, are a miniature camera that fits inside a cigarette pack, an exploding martini glass, and a scale model of Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, which was used to plan the May 2, 2011 mission in which the U.S. Navy’s SEAL Team Six killed al-Qaeda’s founder.
According to BBC’s security correspondent, Gordon Corera, the model of the compound had only recently been declassified when journalists, accompanied by a security escort, were allowed to visit the secret U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s secret museum, the purpose of which is to acquaint CIA officials with the Agency’s storied past, including both its successes and failures, “so that they can do a better job in the future,” the museum’s director, Robert Z. Byer, explained.
The museum does involve the public in one way: the CIA plans to share coded images on social media to see if citizens or others can unscramble them.[8]
2 Laboratory
Like other nations, the UK conducts research concerning chemical weapons and deadly diseases. This research takes place 5 miles (8 km) outside Salisbury, in Wiltshire, England, within the nation’s heavily guarded, top-secret laboratory, Porton Down, or, as it is officially known, the Ministry of Defence’s Science and Technology Laboratory. Here, scientists study Ebola, Yersinia pestis (the bacteria that causes plague), and anthrax, among other pathogens, or, as Frank Gardner, BBC’s security correspondent, puts it, “diseases that can kill us.”
The UK assures us that it abides by the Chemical Weapons Convention but still makes small amounts of chemical and biological agents just to be sure that medical countermeasures can be developed and systems can be tested. Porton Down also tests its microbes on animals but aims to reduce the number of such controversial experiments, to say the least. Perhaps the lab’s use of Porton Man, a humanoid robot, will help bring down the number of sacrificed animals. It has already been employed to test whether any leaks were present in a respirator and a camouflage protective suit such as soldiers might wear.[9]
1 Military Base
Although it’s been in existence since the Cold War, a defunct military base hidden deep beneath the frigid Greenland Ice Sheet remained unknown to all but a few until cryospheric scientist Chad Green, who worked for the U.S. National Aeronautic and Space Administration, flew over the site and “snapped an image from the window of his Gulfstream III aircraft.” As Jeff Thompson reports, at the same time, the aircraft registered “a ping” from below the ice, which turned out to be the remains of “Camp Century.”
Initially, no one at NASA knew what to make of the discovery, but its identity became apparent when the U.S. revealed its true nature to the Danish government, which administers Greenland: The site was a military base. Built in 1959, it consisted of a network of 21 tunnels that served as both a U.S. Army Corp of Engineers facility and the home of Project Iceworm, built to store nuclear missiles aimed at the Soviet Union. When officials realized that the ice sheet was unstable, Project Iceworm was abandoned.
Gone but not forgotten, the secret military base remains a potential threat. If climate change quickens the erosion of Greenland’s ice, nuclear waste, diesel fuel, and other hazardous materials left behind at the site could contaminate the environment.[10]