Go back to a time before the invention of artificial light and experience a world petrified in the pitch of darkness...when fear ruled the night. See more in Season 1, Episode 1, "Afraid of the Dark."
Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:00:00For most of human history, night time was not a time to relax and watch TV.
00:00:12It was a time to be afraid.
00:00:20No artificial light.
00:00:22No police.
00:00:24Nowhere to hide.
00:00:28Our past feared everything.
00:00:31From ghosts and vampires to highway robbers and home invasion.
00:00:37Even being eaten alive.
00:00:43For the next two hours, we uncover the most dangerous night time environments in history.
00:00:50An epic journey spanning 10,000 years.
00:00:56Seeking the answer to an eternal question.
00:01:00Why are you...
00:01:04Afraid of the dark?
00:01:17New York City.
00:01:19Present day.
00:01:21Millions of people go about their business enjoying the night.
00:01:25Feeling safe and secure amidst the glow of artificial light.
00:01:36This is the earth at night as seen from space.
00:01:40The brightest areas are the most urbanized.
00:01:46But modern cities, where air pollution and bright lights conspire to wash out the stars in the night sky.
00:01:55A phenomenon known as sky glow.
00:02:01How bad is it?
00:02:04Consider this.
00:02:05Tonight, a person standing on top of the Empire State Building would only be able to see about 1% of the stars visible to Galileo's naked eye over 400 years ago.
00:02:23Today, we measure how dark an area is using the Bortle Dark Sky Scale.
00:02:30A nine-level numerical system used to identify exactly how dark an area is.
00:02:38The darkest rating is a Class 1.
00:02:41Parts of the Australian Outback and the mountains of Peru score a 1.
00:02:48The bright New York City sky is a Class 9.
00:02:52The darker the sky, the lower the number.
00:02:57There are very few places on earth that still rate a Class 1.
00:03:03In fact, today, there are no locations in the continental U.S. that rate darker than a Class 2.
00:03:16To experience Class 1, or true darkness, Americans would have to travel by boat some 300 nautical miles from the coast into the heart of the ocean.
00:03:29At this distance, light from cities on the coast is over the horizon, beyond the curvature of the earth, producing a truly dark night sky.
00:03:44Before the invention of artificial light, what were the most dangerous places to be outside at night?
00:03:55And why are we afraid of the dark?
00:04:03Is our fear of the dark something we're born with?
00:04:07An instinct that's hardwired in our DNA?
00:04:11Or is our fear something we learn?
00:04:16A warning from our ancestors, passed down from generation to generation?
00:04:22For answers, we're sending our cameras around the world in search of true darkness,
00:04:29to discover places where people experience darkness today, much in the same way our ancestors did.
00:04:42We begin our journey in East Africa, one of the darkest regions on earth.
00:04:55Here, the night sky currently rates a Class 2 on the Bortle Dark Sky Scale.
00:05:05This is where man, and our fear of the dark, may have been born more than 10,000 years ago.
00:05:20We're here to investigate what night time was like for early humans, and to understand the extreme dangers that they had to overcome, some of which are still present.
00:05:34Night was man's first necessary evil, our oldest and most haunting fear.
00:05:44A. Roger E. Kirch is a professor of history, and award-winning author of At Day's Close, Night in Time's Past.
00:05:53He has spent a lifetime studying what made the night time of our ancestors so dangerous.
00:06:01Some psychologists believe that if human beings, prehistoric peoples, did not immediately fear the darkness of night,
00:06:12they nonetheless developed an instinctive fear over a series of generations,
00:06:20particularly as sources of danger became synonymous with darkness.
00:06:29Our first theory is that today we are still afraid of the dark,
00:06:35because of a primitive instinct dating all the way back to a time when our ancestors were prey.
00:06:42The fear that they would be eaten alive.
00:06:48One of the chief dangers, then and now, was from predatory cats.
00:07:00The lion is a skilled hunter, a nocturnal predator whose call can be heard over an area of nearly 80 square miles.
00:07:14Spreading fear and uncertainty across the terrifying African night, there were very few places to hide.
00:07:27Even when the first villages sprang up nearly 200,000 years ago,
00:07:38they probably couldn't offer complete safety from nocturnal predators.
00:07:55Stanley Nubu is a Maasai villager who has lived an entire lifetime amidst the threat of animal attacks.
00:08:08Thousands of years ago, lions could be found in pockets over much of the world,
00:08:18with their territory stretching from Western Europe to India.
00:08:23But as the human population spread, the lion's territory began to disappear.
00:08:31At present, nearly all lions in the wild live in southern and east Africa, where they continue to pose a serious threat.
00:08:42To this day, nearly 100 Africans are killed every year by hungry lions on the hunt.
00:08:50Meticulous, time-tested protection is a must.
00:09:02Maasai warriors, some as young as 13, share the responsibility for keeping the tribe safe.
00:09:12The tribal compound, called a manyata, is protected by a simple wooden fence of gnarled sticks,
00:09:22the only thing standing between them and the lions.
00:09:27The manyata is constructed using the thorn trees as a way of protecting wild animals not to penetrate inside the village.
00:09:44Armed only with a spear and a club, the young men spend sleepless nights guarding the village perimeter,
00:09:51ready to sacrifice their lives to protect the tribe.
00:09:56All too often, that's exactly what it takes.
00:10:18In today's world, for many of us, we have very little contact with wild animals.
00:10:24But thousands of years ago, predators roamed the nocturnal terrain on a global scale.
00:10:31While there are no hard and fast statistics on human predation in ancient times,
00:10:36new theories based on fossil records suggest that approximately 6 to 10 percent of early humans were preyed upon.
00:10:45The scars found reportedly on the fossilized remains of human beings
00:10:52suggest that this was a threat that early peoples took very seriously.
00:11:01Today, the Maasai continue to live with an ancient nighttime threat that most societies would never consider.
00:11:16Especially in case of danger.
00:11:19If we can say we have something bad here, we may just cry and everybody will know something bad here.
00:11:28And everybody will run here very quickly.
00:11:31Sylvester Linkoko Kirikur explains how his tribe uses fire for protection.
00:11:38In the dark, we use torch in case of any danger.
00:11:43We light where we can, using the studs.
00:11:48This simple but effective tool has helped the Maasai fight the dangers of night for thousands of years and is still used today.
00:11:58Inside our hut, we use olive tree, which is being pieced into small pieces
00:12:07and being dried up.
00:12:10And then light on fire.
00:12:12Then fix it on just a corner of the house.
00:12:16And then you'll be able to see a lot.
00:12:27Fire was the first of many defenses mankind would use to effectively take back the night with light.
00:12:37But as we will see, the destructive power of untamed fire was the source of another dangerous nighttime fear.
00:12:58We're uncovering history's most dangerous nighttime environments to explain our fear of the dark.
00:13:07Our next stop takes us to the old city of Jerusalem, in the heart of modern-day Israel.
00:13:22Today, the Jerusalem night sky rates a class four on the Bortle Dark Sky Scale.
00:13:37We're here to explore our second theory.
00:13:43The fear of the dark, particularly in the West, also has religious roots.
00:13:49To understand Satan's connection to our fear of the dark, we must first understand Satan's importance before the emergence of Christianity.
00:14:12We can say that Satan is a part of the biblical narrative.
00:14:16And so therefore it begins with the Bible, with the covenant on Mount Sinai.
00:14:23Religious scholar Jovan Culebric is an expert on Satan's role in religion and human consciousness.
00:14:30Satan is a former angel that refused to live under God's light.
00:14:40Evil is the rejection of good, rejection of God, and Satan was the one who first to reject it.
00:14:49He rejected community with God.
00:14:54For thousands of years before Christ, Satan was often considered to be an abstract expression of evil.
00:15:03He was not a real being, but a force used to explain man's inhumanity to man.
00:15:10At best, Satan was responsible for misfortune and mischief.
00:15:17At worst, Satan took the blame for all death and disease.
00:15:24By the year 100 A.D., the teaching of Christianity advanced the idea that Satan was a real physical presence,
00:15:34a belief that spread quickly throughout the Western world.
00:15:41Satan was believed to be most active at night.
00:15:46Satan was thought capable of assuming any number of animal disguises,
00:16:12whether it be a black crow, a wolf,
00:16:19leaving others, upon encountering wild animals at night,
00:16:24to wonder, in fact, if this was not the devil himself or one of his minions.
00:16:33Early Christians believed that Satan stalked the darkness.
00:16:45Some theologians believed that God banished the devil to the hours of darkness.
00:16:55On the other hand, others pointed out that darkness naturally suited the devil's designs.
00:17:03It was a time for him to prey in the hours of obscurity upon human beings,
00:17:11particularly when they were asleep and thought to be the most vulnerable.
00:17:16Indeed, in the minds of many early Europeans,
00:17:21night time became the devil's unholy kingdom on earth.
00:17:33Artificial light, a way to relieve feelings of vulnerability, had historically not been widely affordable.
00:17:42While candles made from beeswax had been in use since 3000 B.C.,
00:17:48only the rich and powerful could afford to use them on a nightly basis.
00:17:54In today's dollars, even a relatively inexpensive candle could still cost over $20,
00:18:04a small fortune for first century peasants.
00:18:08For families of a middle class or lower middle class, lower class rank,
00:18:16more than likely their candles were made out of tallow, out of fat.
00:18:22Even more commonly, especially for impoverished families,
00:18:27they had to rely, if lucky, upon what were called rush lights,
00:18:34which were rushes, reeds, literally harvested from outdoors that were dried
00:18:42and then dragged through bacon fat or some other form of tallow,
00:18:48which burned for up to an hour but affording very little light.
00:18:53But beginning in 100 A.D., the inhabitants of Jerusalem had a new kind of light.
00:19:01The Herodian oil lamp, made from clay, the new lamp burned olive oil,
00:19:07a fuel widely available and much cheaper than beeswax.
00:19:12Now, the average person had a tool at his disposal to help fend off darkness and even the devil himself.
00:19:22But humankind's fear of the dark didn't end.
00:19:311,300 years later, our ancestors were busy battening down the shutters against a very different threat.
00:19:40This is Widdicombe-in-the-Moor, a medieval village in Dartmoor National Park in southwest England.
00:19:53We're here to uncover one of history's most dangerous times and places.
00:19:59To ever venture outside at night,
00:20:04Europe in the Middle Ages.
00:20:08Dartmoor is truly an area of outstanding mystery.
00:20:14Anthony Beard is a local historian in Dartmoor,
00:20:18an area that has barely changed since his family first moved here in the 15th century.
00:20:24Our village, Widdicombe-in-the-Moor, hasn't altered that much.
00:20:30We have still got the church house, which was a magnificent building,
00:20:35which was built back in about the 14th and early 15th century.
00:20:42Part of the charm of the whole area of Dartmoor is the result of the fact that many people are still living in a style that's very different.
00:20:53Located over 200 miles from the overwhelming white pollution of London,
00:20:58the town's unique geographical position, hidden deep within the Widdicombe Valley,
00:21:04makes the entire area extremely dangerous.
00:21:08It's the only place in the world where people are still living in a style that's very different.
00:21:16The town's unique geographical position, hidden deep within the Widdicombe Valley,
00:21:21makes the entire area extremely dark at night,
00:21:27earning it a Class 3 on the Bortle Dark Sky Scale.
00:21:33We do not get any light filtration from the cities out here.
00:21:38We can still get a really extreme darkness.
00:21:43The effects of this one offer us a perfect window into the dangers our ancestors would have faced in medieval Europe.
00:21:53It's the darkness that creates the atmosphere and that create the frightening aspect of being out on the moors.
00:22:02The third theory, that fear of the dark, stems from a time when we were afraid of being attacked in the night.
00:22:13One of the biggest dangers at night was simply traveling home along dark country roads.
00:22:23An area like Dartmoor has to be respected.
00:22:27Once you start to try to compete with it, you have to learn to respect it.
00:22:34An area like Dartmoor has to be respected.
00:22:40Once you start to try to compete with it, that's when everything goes wrong.
00:22:46On the dark and windswept moors, hazards were hidden around every corner.
00:22:53The other big danger at night time was obviously from thieves and highwaymen.
00:22:59Medieval expert Tim Sandals has been walking these woods for decades.
00:23:05The local farmers could have gone to market with the cattle in the morning.
00:23:08They'd be coming home at night having sold the cattle.
00:23:11So the thieves often used to know they'd be carrying gold coin or coin of some sort.
00:23:19Contrary to popular stereotypes that we have of highway robbers,
00:23:24being gentlemen on horseback, hardly ever daring to harm their victims,
00:23:30the vast majority were brutal, violent.
00:23:37Some were even known to stretch ropes across rural paths and roads in order to trip their victims up.
00:23:48Now these trip wires weren't six inches, nine inches off the ground to trip you up.
00:23:53They were six foot or perhaps seven foot off the ground.
00:23:59And of course this would be in the dark of the end of the day in the night time
00:24:03and as they were coming back they wouldn't see what would be classed as a trip wire.
00:24:12And it would act as a garrote and catch them, bring them off and the highwaymen would pounce on them, rob them.
00:24:23Ah!
00:24:31Why are you afraid of the dark?
00:24:35Our worldwide quest for answers has brought us to a remote town in England called Whittacombe in the moor.
00:24:44We're here to explore the idea that your ancestors passed down a mortal fear of being attacked in the night.
00:24:54From the late middle ages until the 19th century,
00:24:58the dangers of encountering highway robbers on the road at night were very real.
00:25:06The darker the night, the better from their point of view.
00:25:11They were afraid of the dark.
00:25:14They were afraid of being attacked in the night.
00:25:17All the more so since people travelled more widely after dark than we might ordinarily expect.
00:25:27The thieves would be armed quite heavily with knives and they had no hesitation in using them.
00:25:37The best evidence of the night was the fact that the thieves were armed with knives.
00:25:44The best advice given to any pedestrian was to travel in a company of as many people as possible for there was safety in numbers.
00:26:01Sometimes highwaymen were caught.
00:26:04But even then, they would still terrorize night time travellers because of the macabre way they were punished.
00:26:13Back in the 15th century, hills like this one behind were used to hang cages on.
00:26:21Criminals, especially highwaymen, once they were caught, their bodies would be hung and then the bodies put in the gibbet just to rot.
00:26:32Or in some certain cases, criminals were actually put in cages to starve to death.
00:26:41If you were travelling in those roads at night,
00:26:47you could hear the corpse swinging backwards and forwards.
00:26:51And you heard the creaking of the cages.
00:26:55You'd have the cries of a starving man.
00:27:08I mean, just imagine what that man must have felt like when he was just stuck in a cage.
00:27:13The anguish must have been pure anguish.
00:27:19You can perhaps well imagine the fright of someone walking on a moor at night, hearing a strange noise.
00:27:30Not being able to investigate whether the source of that noise was someone in distress or perhaps even more frightening, an evil spirit.
00:27:43There's a sense of fear. There's a sense of claustrophobia. There's a sense of the unknown.
00:27:50So many people literally will not step foot in these places.
00:27:54It's a place where you're not alone.
00:27:57It's a place where people are not alone.
00:28:00It's a place where you can't be alone.
00:28:03It's a place where you can't be alone.
00:28:05There's a sense of claustrophobia. There's a sense of the unknown.
00:28:10So many people literally will not step foot in this woodland.
00:28:15The sounds of the moors can create voices.
00:28:26What's that I hear?
00:28:32I should go and investigate.
00:28:36It is the sounds, the sights, the smells, almost a taste in the air.
00:28:44It's odd. It could be described, I suppose, as the call of the moor.
00:28:54In certain weather conditions, when the wind howls down the valley, it sounds very much like somebody's howling.
00:29:06It's called the cry of the dark.
00:29:13That can be a frightening thing, especially in windy conditions and in cold conditions.
00:29:18With so much crime plaguing travellers at night, it's no wonder early cultures around the globe developed the night watch.
00:29:30A select group of men who walked the streets at night, safeguarding citizens against dangers in the dark.
00:29:37They were the police before there was a police force.
00:29:41One of the purposes of the night watch, among others, in patrolling their neighbourhoods, was to shout at the top of the lungs the nature of the weather, the time of the day, the time of the night.
00:29:54One of the purposes of the night watch, among others, in patrolling their neighbourhoods, was to shout at the top of the lungs the nature of the weather, the time of the night.
00:30:08And perhaps make certain that people did not sleep too soundly, especially in the event of a fire or perhaps an act of crime.
00:30:21While the system of night watches worked well in the big cities, smaller communities had a much tougher time convincing farmers to give up precious hours of sleep to protect their neighbours' property and lives.
00:30:35It did not help that the night watch frequently operated under a cloud of suspicion that if not asleep somewhere in a dark alley, rather than patrolling the neighbourhood, they had been bribed or otherwise corrupted not to attend to their nightly task.
00:30:59As a result, the night watch was often an ineffective defence against crime, which left citizens in medieval Europe at the mercy of their fellow man.
00:31:10If a person was foolish enough to cry murder, robbery, more often than not, they would not stir any town dweller to action.
00:31:28The best advice, according to the contemporaries of this period, was to shout fire.
00:31:36Unlike crime, fire threatened the entire village or town rather than just one mere individual.
00:31:49500 years ago, night time didn't last any longer than it does today.
00:31:55It just seemed that way.
00:31:58With no means to effectively extend the day by use of electric lights, darkness lasted from sundown to sunrise, a full 18 hours or more during the winter months in northern latitudes.
00:32:14With so much night, sleep patterns were entirely different than they are today.
00:32:20Contrary to our pattern of sleep today, which tends to be compressed and consolidated in a single phase, sleep was segmented into two distinct phases.
00:32:36First and second sleep as they were widely called at the time.
00:32:43In a variety of languages, that is how they were literally translated.
00:32:50This was the dominant pattern of sleep since time immemorial.
00:32:56Most people began first sleep just an hour or so after sunset and woke up just past midnight.
00:33:05What did people do during the intervening period of wakefulness between first and second sleep?
00:33:13The answer is anything and everything imaginable, from using a chamber pot, checking on an ill child, visiting a neighbor.
00:33:26Of course, a late night trip to the neighbors often meant traveling down town roads with little or no light, a dangerous practice that often ended in disaster.
00:33:40Anybody that's foolhardy enough to try to cross these boggy areas in the dark is asking for trouble.
00:33:48The result, many a midnight hiker wound up falling into ditches or worse.
00:34:03Twilight, deep inside Dartmoor National Park in southwest England.
00:34:09Not the sort of place to wander outside after dark.
00:34:14Why? Because nighttime before the advent of streetlights was full of physical dangers.
00:34:22It's another factor that explains our historical fear of the dark.
00:34:37Dartmoor is an area which you can get easily disorientated in.
00:34:42And you can get easily lost.
00:34:49Coroner's reports from the late Middle Ages suggest how often people died if they did not pay sufficient attention to the surrounding landscape.
00:35:03To navigate the night, locals relied on moonlight and carried homemade torches or lanterns.
00:35:11Committing the landscape to memory for fear of walking into lakes or plummeting to their deaths.
00:35:28The roads and the footpaths around Dartmoor have always been treacherous places.
00:35:34As you can see, the whole floor of this wood is covered with various types of mosses.
00:35:42If it's wet, the granite boulders beneath become slippy. You can easily turn your ankle, break a leg.
00:35:58Because it's such a dense carpet, it can also hold hide holes in the rocks which you can turn your ankle on.
00:36:11Back in the Middle Ages or the medieval times, it had been even worse.
00:36:15And in the darkness, all you've had would have been the light from a small lantern, which had made it very, very difficult to see where you were going.
00:36:25All those dangers by the light of a small lantern had been very, very difficult and very, very scary.
00:36:35In an era before flashlights, walking through the woods at night meant peasants and farmers were literally gambling with their lives.
00:36:47Don't matter how well you think you know the area, it's quite simple to get lost.
00:36:57Particularly in the dark, when the wind is howling.
00:37:05And then you come to a river of this nature.
00:37:13If you're lucky enough to find a bridge to cross over, that's fine.
00:37:22But they're so wet, they're so slippery.
00:37:29The power of the wind is quite fantastic at times.
00:37:33Then disaster.
00:37:38Many, many people have got blown into the river.
00:37:42Their body is simply swept down the river and in some instances as far as the sea.
00:37:48Even if a villager managed to make it home without incident, there was little protection within the house from ruthless thieves who intruded in the dead of night.
00:38:00Terrified citizens began a practice called shutting in.
00:38:05This was the only way to get out of the house.
00:38:08Barricading themselves against the dangers outside.
00:38:13Pull the shutters, pull the blinds, shut the door, keep the night out.
00:38:22Shutting in referred to that period when it was essential to keep the night out.
00:38:30Shutting in referred to that period when it was essential to bar one's doors, close the shutters, and prepare yourself for the advent of darkness.
00:38:48We're standing in a house which is a farmhouse dating from the 15th century or prior to that.
00:38:54After a lifetime studying the history of Dartmoor, David Addis is able to shed light on human behavior in darkness.
00:39:04Now, wintertime, particularly the hours of darkness were very long.
00:39:11That would be the first thing they would think about.
00:39:18The second thing would be the roles of the marauders.
00:39:21The second thing would be the roles of the marauders coming around.
00:39:31They would have been looking around for easy access to a house to get the valuables.
00:39:46They would need to shut down the house so nobody could get in.
00:39:52They would need to shut down the house so nobody could get in.
00:40:06On the main doors, there would have been this simple system of locking the door with a big key, probably would have been six inches long, a key, quite heavy metal.
00:40:22The second thing, they would try and fix the windows so nobody could get inside.
00:40:36Now, this may have been by way of a shutter on the windows.
00:40:52Shutters and locks were not the only way to keep intruders out.
00:40:57When all else failed, villagers had one last line of defense.
00:41:05To make sure that they were well protected, they had to make sure that no one could get in.
00:41:11When all else failed, villagers had one last line of defense.
00:41:18To make sure that they were well protected, they had dogs, which were ravenous dogs, they hadn't eaten for a while, placed outside at strategic areas.
00:41:34So anybody coming towards the house would be attacked by these dogs.
00:41:42Daytime
00:41:49Sunrise. Another night has passed, but there's no rest for the weary.
00:41:57Daytime is the chance for families to prepare their defenses for the next nightfall.
00:42:03And for 15th century villagers, that meant making weapons to defend their homes.
00:42:12Daytime
00:42:15They would have quite long poles to defend themselves with.
00:42:20The other thing that they would have had, cudgels.
00:42:25Now, a cudgel would have been probably that size with a big knob on the end, especially from a tree with a knot in it.
00:42:36Just imagine, you look at the window here, somebody trying to get through this window.
00:42:42Daytime
00:42:46And they could just hit somebody on the side, on the head. He's finished with.
00:42:53Conditions inside a medieval home were bleak and at times, darker than anything outside.
00:43:01At nightfall, upon entering the typical rural household in early Europe, to our eyes today, it would have been indeed a grim, gloomy existence.
00:43:20They would have all piled into one bed, six or seven foot across.
00:43:25And they had the children down one end, the adults up the other end.
00:43:29Their bathroom didn't exist. They could only go down to a stream and wash.
00:43:35And if it was in the winter, it would have probably frozen over.
00:43:38So they just didn't wash. They would be infested with bugs.
00:43:43Totally, totally infested with different sort of body bugs.
00:43:48The interior would be dark, except for the minimal light that some primitive form of artificial illumination, be it a rush light or perhaps the hearth itself.
00:44:04But for the light that the hearth provided, so too in many homes did it provide an equivalent quantity of smoke.
00:44:14With so many long, cold nights warmed by open flames, often the greatest danger came from fire itself.
00:44:24Throughout history, fire has been a prime reason people were afraid of the dark.
00:44:40There's always a danger of fire.
00:44:43Looking up towards the roof, it's thatched, a thatched roof.
00:44:48So you could think about a couple of sparks going off and your roof is going to be on fire.
00:44:55Not only were fires more frequent at night, they were more dangerous as well.
00:45:01As most fire deaths occurred when people were asleep.
00:45:05In medieval Europe, fire was a major killer of children, with nearly one-fifth of all children under three dying in house fires.
00:45:18One of the worst sounds that the inhabitants of a town could hear at night was the clanging of a fire bell or the call of the night watch,
00:45:31warning people of a growing blaze.
00:45:35At which point, it was thought criminal, if you were in the immediate neighborhood, not to respond.
00:45:43In fact, in Stockholm, you could be beheaded if you refused to participate in fighting a fire that threatened not only to engulf your neighbor's house,
00:45:56not only your own house, but the entire community.
00:46:01Fire remains a nighttime threat.
00:46:04In the United States today, a home burns every 74 seconds, with 25% of house fires starting between the hours of midnight and 6 a.m.
00:46:14500 years ago, that number was nearly triple.
00:46:25We are on a worldwide journey to find out why we are afraid of the dark.
00:46:37Is it a hardwired evolutionary trait, or something that's been passed down through the generations?
00:46:44Warnings to be afraid, based on real dangers that still plague us today.
00:46:55As we have seen, two theories about why we are afraid of the dark have to do with nighttime attacks and fire, two dangers that still keep us up at night.
00:47:10Medina County, Ohio, located deep within America's Midwest farmland.
00:47:18The sky here rates a relatively dark three on the Bortle scale.
00:47:24With absolutely no outdoor lighting seen for miles, these hills are truly a place of darkness.
00:47:32Just like the kind we've seen throughout history.
00:47:36In a rare opportunity given to few outsiders, our cameras were invited inside the homes of the strictly private world of the Amish.
00:47:47The people here have limited contact with the modern world.
00:47:51Their continuing efforts to endure the dangers of the night offer a glimpse into the traditional methods their ancestors have used for hundreds of years.
00:48:01Our kids hardly go outside after dark, even to the barn by themselves.
00:48:08Roy Keim is a direct descendant of the first Amish community that settled in America in the early 18th century.
00:48:17A lineage that started here when devout Mennonites fled religious persecution in rural Europe.
00:48:25The kids, they never go away from the buildings, like back to the field or down the road.
00:48:33If they're outside for five minutes, I'm worried about it.
00:48:38By the 18th century, cities and larger towns were making great strides to light up the night.
00:48:46With the widespread use of streetlights.
00:48:52But in rural areas like this, farmers still relied on handheld lanterns and even moonlight to light their way.
00:49:02Even in the absence of moonlight, people could still fall back upon starlight.
00:49:09Which was capable of illuminating a landscape to a far greater degree than it is today.
00:49:18By one modern estimate, before the advent of widespread artificial illumination and what is typically referred to as light pollution.
00:49:30Probably 2,500 stars at a minimum could be seen in the night sky.
00:49:39With the Milky Way segmenting the sky into two parts.
00:49:46Some roads deliberately followed much in the same path as the Milky Way.
00:49:54Thereby permitting travelers to keep to their roads safely and securely.
00:50:01Often by finding their bearings by viewing the night sky.
00:50:11Amish citizens, just like their 18th century counterparts, would be content not to venture out after sundown.
00:50:19But they have no choice.
00:50:22Their lack of technology forces an excessively long workday that often extends well into the night.
00:50:30Surprisingly, often at night, there were rural jobs to be performed, even outside.
00:50:39Butchering stock, picking apples, collecting firewood.
00:50:45All labor intensive tasks that could be performed in poor light.
00:50:52With so many chores to be done at night, there was no time to rest.
00:50:59As performed late into the night, the use of lanterns posed a particular problem for farmers.
00:51:06One that cuts across many different times and places in history.
00:51:11The continued threat of fire.
00:51:17Wherever there was an abundance of hay or thatch, there was a persistent threat of fire.
00:51:26People were restricted at times from carrying torches or candles into barns.
00:51:34Or if they did so, they had to be extraordinarily careful not to set the entire structure ablaze.
00:51:42With only firelight to guide farmers through the darkness, an out of control blaze could be sparked at any time.
00:51:50I was having a lantern sitting in the barn and it was sitting up on a beam and I was throwing hay down.
00:51:58And some hay kind of went too close to the lantern and knocked it all the way down on the floor.
00:52:04I heard it break.
00:52:06I was freaked out. I knew the barn was going to burn down.
00:52:11I just got down the ladder real quick and cut the hay off of it and somehow it suffocated it.
00:52:18I was very scared about that.
00:52:22There is a very specific danger about the open flame like that.
00:52:32Another source of fire danger came from the unpredictable behavior of working animals on the farm.
00:52:39For farmers, horses were absolutely essential for countless life-sustaining tasks.
00:52:46Over 90% of rural homes in the 18th century had at least one horse, a fact that led to countless accidental fires.
00:52:56Bringing the horses in after dark, it gets really dangerous.
00:53:00Amish villager Sam Schwartz has experienced this nighttime danger firsthand.
00:53:06You've got lanterns hanging around, just kerosene wick lanterns hanging around.
00:53:10The horses are tired. They want to get in the barn and eat.
00:53:14And you're trying to get them undone from each other.
00:53:17And the really dangerous part about this is a horse is very tall.
00:53:22They can hit those lanterns real easy and when they do, they knock them over.
00:53:26If there's any kind of hay or any kind of straw there, it's kerosene, flames and hay and it goes in flames real fast.
00:53:36It's just a very dangerous thing to be doing after dark.
00:53:56Daytime in the Amish countryside.
00:54:00The community moves about under the safety of sunlight.
00:54:05But before long, they'll begin a nightly ritual they've repeated for hundreds of years.
00:54:13People know that we don't have phones and electricity, so we're very prone to being attacked.
00:54:20The Amish have been shutting in from the threat of ruthless thieves ever since they first settled here in the early 18th century.
00:54:29And these home invasions have not subsided.
00:54:34The secluded nature of the Amish makes statistics limited.
00:54:39But in one area of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, law enforcement reports that an Amish household is five times more likely to be robbed than a contemporary home.
00:54:54I'll wake up as soon as I hear a footstep in the house or on the porch being attacked by something.
00:55:02It's always in the back of your mind.
00:55:05I know one particular incident where somebody got robbed in the middle of the night.
00:55:12The guy got out of bed and they knocked him over the head.
00:55:17And his wife was in the bedroom. She went outside while her husband was being attacked.
00:55:24Ran to the neighbors without any light or anything.
00:55:28To this day they haven't caught whoever did that, but we're just praying that that wouldn't happen again.
00:55:41The practice of shutting in has helped keep people safe at night all around the world.
00:55:48But what about those times in history when people lived in places that had little to burn?
00:55:55No walls to hide behind. No doors to barricade.
00:56:08Our journey to uncover why you are afraid of the dark leads us to a land where no one can escape the night.
00:56:19Because in this place, there's nowhere to shut in.
00:56:25In Israel's isolated southern Negev desert, the night sky is dark and forbidding.
00:56:34On the Bortal Dark Sky Scale, where Class I is darkest, the desert nights here rate a very dark Class II.
00:56:44We've come here to experience a place where the danger at night has changed little in the last 7,000 years.
00:56:55Here, a group of nomadic people makes their home in one of the world's most desolate landscapes.
00:57:02They're Bedouins, an ancient culture that for centuries has battled a unique nighttime danger.
00:57:14The Bedouins
00:57:24Historically, the Bedouins of the Negev survived the harsh conditions of the desert by moving from place to place in search of water and fertile land for their livestock.
00:57:37The tents and shelters they designed for maximum mobility lack the protection of permanent dwellings that can be locked and barricaded.
00:57:47At night, the Bedouins shut in by making use of their numbers.
00:57:55Darkness is treacherous.
00:58:00We have no electricity, so our trails are pitch black.
00:58:05Abu Afashi Ibrahim is a member of the ancient El Azazma Bedouin tribe.
00:58:14All of the families live only about 10 feet away from each other.
00:58:20Tents placed next to tents, like teams of tanks fortifying a position.
00:58:28That's how we protect ourselves.
00:58:32These Bedouins have been living with the threat of nighttime animal attacks for thousands of years.
00:58:40Many cultures have spawned nomadic peoples, from Native Americans to the Bedouins of the Middle East, the Maasai of Africa, to gypsies of Eastern Europe.
00:58:54On the one hand, by electing not to construct and remain in permanent dwellings, they have spared themselves the persistent threat of fire.
00:59:07Still in all, they have put themselves at risk to the elements, to thieves, and to wild animals.
00:59:15While all manner of beasts have preyed on these desert dwellers, it's the hyena that still earns a deadly reputation as most feared.
00:59:30Snakes and scorpions are a constant threat, but hyenas are the most deadly at night.
00:59:37We use our weapons to fend off hyenas.
00:59:40Hyenas attack the Bedouins and eat them.
00:59:44I mean literally eat the people.
00:59:49Nocturnal predators have always posed a mortal threat to humans.
00:59:57Although animal attacks worldwide are relatively rare today,
01:00:05500 years ago, one night stalker reigned supreme as the ultimate hunter.
01:00:12The wolf.
01:00:17Bucharest, Romania.
01:00:21A modern city in modern times.
01:00:25Like many urban areas, it currently rates a relatively high Class VIII on the Bordel scale.
01:00:32But in the Middle Ages, Bucharest was at the frontier of a civilization that was rapidly moving east,
01:00:40colliding with the formidable Carpathian Mountains,
01:00:46a region that was once home to a full 40% of Europe's entire wolf population.
01:00:53Increasingly, forest land and other wilderness areas became more and more encroached upon for agricultural purposes.
01:01:05Invariably, this denied predators the environment that they had long enjoyed.
01:01:13Wolves are fierce predators, hunting their prey almost exclusively at night.
01:01:24Thousands of European peasants are known to have been killed by wolves.
01:01:31But in the Middle Ages, wolves were not the only predators.
01:01:36Thousands of European peasants are known to have been killed or injured by wolves on the hunt.
01:01:45In the darkness of the mountain forests, a clash raged between man and beast.
01:02:06Eastern Europe in the 15th century.
01:02:15Besieged by vicious night-time wolf attacks,
01:02:21villagers began to account for the danger in their folklore,
01:02:26attributing the violence to mythical creatures,
01:02:30and supernatural forces.
01:02:37The seventh theory.
01:02:39You are afraid of the dark, because people in the past believed that real horrific events were the work of werewolves, vampires, and other creatures of the supernatural.
01:02:52Our journey into why you are afraid of the dark has led us to a place that straddles the boundary between the real and the imaginary.
01:03:03Our journey into why you are afraid of the dark has led us to a place that straddles the boundary between the real and the supernatural.
01:03:12Our journey into why you are afraid of the dark has led us to a place that straddles the boundary between the real and the supernatural.
01:03:24Here, in the forests of Romania, lies Ponari Castle,
01:03:29legendary home to one of history's most violent figures,
01:03:35Vlad the Impaler.
01:03:39A 15th century Romanian prince who is better known by his more infamous and sinister name,
01:03:47Vlad Dracula.
01:03:51He has two nicknames, Dracula and Impaler.
01:03:57Dr. Constantin Stolnici, who claims to be the only known living descendant of Vlad the Impaler,
01:04:03explains the origins of the term, Dracula.
01:04:07The nickname Dracula was because his father was knight of the order of the dragon.
01:04:16Dracu in Romanian means the devil.
01:04:20Yes, you are the name Dracula because you are the devil.
01:04:27This prince in the late 15th century was a cruel, ruthless tyrant
01:04:35who derived his nickname, the Impaler, from employing impalement as one of any number of grisly punishments
01:04:45which he imposed upon political rivals and those who simply met his disfavor.
01:04:57In all, it's estimated that Vlad put to death as many as 100,000 enemies of the state.
01:05:05The stories detailing his cruelty are legend,
01:05:09subjecting his victims to torture, burning, and most disturbingly, drinking their blood.
01:05:18Vlad the Impaler
01:05:22Vlad was a very strange personality because behind his real history you have many, many legends.
01:05:33In an age without forensics or an organized police force,
01:05:38the superstitious citizens of Eastern Europe concluded that these acts of extreme violence
01:05:44were so evil, so wicked, they could only be caused by supernatural demons of the night.
01:05:57People try to find explanation for everything around them
01:06:00and sometimes, not having something logical, they try to find it in the supernatural.
01:06:08Bogdan Popa is an expert in Romanian history
01:06:12and a member of the Transylvania Society of Dracula.
01:06:19What the Romanian folklore has is a category of undead, which we call strigoi or moroi.
01:06:27It is a person who died but comes back because the soul can't find a rest,
01:06:36just like in the case of the vampire Count Dracula.
01:06:42But was Vlad truly a vampire?
01:06:45A vampire he was not.
01:06:49He happened to inhabit that part of the world,
01:06:56which, yes, had a legendary connection with vampires.
01:07:03Today, scientific evidence can dispel theories about supernatural creatures, including vampires.
01:07:11But to some in the 15th century, this nighttime danger was all too real.
01:07:18These European peasants handed down this fear through folklore and legends that still endure.
01:07:25Vampires were a commonplace, a source of fear, at night,
01:07:32throughout much of Eastern Europe and parts of Western Europe as well.
01:07:42Today, here in Fortress Punari, otherwise known as Dracula's Castle,
01:07:48tourists come to stay the night, daring themselves to face the danger behind a 500-year-old legend.
01:07:57It is getting dark now, and you have to imagine that it was getting dark also in the Middle Ages,
01:08:04and by then the people had nothing to light their fortress but their torches.
01:08:12You have to imagine now how it would have been to be a soldier or perhaps a prisoner in this dungeon
01:08:19during the night and to confront the dark all the time.
01:08:26Well, it must have been perhaps cold, wet, certainly dark and frightening.
01:08:42We're on a journey to uncover why you're afraid of the dark.
01:08:47For centuries, that fear was fueled by a belief in the supernatural.
01:08:54But in our final destination, we encounter something much darker, a place where fear never relented.
01:09:04Edinburgh, Scotland.
01:09:08A city of nearly 500,000, located on Scotland's southeast coast near the famed North Sea.
01:09:18With its dramatic setting and medieval architecture, Edinburgh is known as one of Europe's most beautiful cities.
01:09:26Today, Edinburgh is a sea of light, rating a class 9 on the Bortle Dark Sky Scale.
01:09:33But this city holds a dark secret.
01:09:37Edinburgh is home to one of the most dangerous nighttime environments in history.
01:09:43It is also one of the darkest.
01:09:47Because this place is underground.
01:09:51Four stories beneath the streets of Edinburgh, near the famous Edinburgh Castle,
01:09:59lie the remains of a 19th-century labyrinth of underground tunnels.
01:10:06The tunnels were built in the early 19th century.
01:10:09Four stories beneath the streets of Edinburgh, near the famous Edinburgh Castle,
01:10:17lie the remains of a 19th-century labyrinth of underground passageways, known as the vaults.
01:10:26The original intention of these vaults was to be used by merchants.
01:10:31Avril Maidunaki has spent years researching this dark and dismal place.
01:10:36Merchants would come down here and store things like whiskey, snuff, tobacco, leather, very expensive goods in the 1700s.
01:10:45However, they ran into a quick problem.
01:10:49It was the ceiling. It was very porous when it rained up in old Edinburgh.
01:10:53It rained down here a few hours later.
01:11:03The merchants moved out very quickly.
01:11:07The next people to move into these vaults were the homeless people of old Edinburgh.
01:11:14The reason why the homeless people of Edinburgh came down to dark, stinking vaults
01:11:20was simply because, up above ground, it was completely illegal to be homeless.
01:11:28If you were caught sleeping in the streets of Edinburgh, you would have been killed.
01:11:33Life for the poor was extremely hard.
01:11:37A law passed by King Edward III in 1349 made poverty a crime.
01:11:45In the British Isles, there was a widespread problem of vagrancy.
01:11:52Overpopulation, lack of housing, poverty.
01:11:57Most cities were strewn with vagrants and beggars.
01:12:03At night, having no place to go.
01:12:08Oftentimes, finding themselves harassed and at the mercy of local authorities.
01:12:15The problem of vagrancy was not just a problem of poverty.
01:12:20Oftentimes, finding themselves harassed and at the mercy of local authorities.
01:12:28Punishment for vagrancy ranged from public beatings to imprisonment and even death by hanging.
01:12:41Basically, the homeless were trapped down here with nowhere to go and no way out.
01:12:47It was damp, it was stinking, it was disease-ridden.
01:12:54Legal or not, the homeless of Edinburgh still needed shelter from danger at night.
01:13:01Their only choice was to go underground.
01:13:05You would have got 40 people crammed into that room.
01:13:10It would have been pitch black, they wouldn't have any candles whatsoever.
01:13:14If you could afford a candle back then, you certainly could afford a bed for the night up above ground.
01:13:21You wouldn't see your neighbours, you could sometimes smell them.
01:13:26You would eat down there, sleep down there and go to the toilet wherever you lay.
01:13:32You'd be looking about for scraps of food amongst all the faeces.
01:13:37The air of death would be lingering.
01:13:41It was absolutely horrific.
01:13:44And if life underground wasn't already treacherous enough,
01:13:49in 1827, a pair of infamous serial killers known as Burke and Hare began to make the vaults their hunting ground.
01:13:59They would use the cover of darkness to prey on the weak,
01:14:04selling their victims' bodies to medical schools for dissection.
01:14:09These people down in these vaults had no identity.
01:14:13No one cared for them.
01:14:15This was the perfect place to pick up these bodies.
01:14:19They would have come down here, murdered them, dragged them out
01:14:24and experimented on them.
01:14:28It was the farthest thing from anyone's mind to donate your own body to medical science.
01:14:35This, after all, was still a deeply Christian age.
01:14:41Everyone's aspiration was to have one's remains intact, fully respected
01:14:49and laid to rest in a grave site which would not be disturbed.
01:14:56Stories of the body snatchers gripped the locals and heightened their fear of the dark.
01:15:05A situation made worse when dismembered corpses began to turn up overnight in the city's oldest graveyard,
01:15:14Greyfriars.
01:15:17But in actual fact, Greyfriars used to be a valley.
01:15:20What you are seeing, that's this hill that we're now standing on,
01:15:22is actually simply a mountain of dead people.
01:15:26Author and historian Jan Henderson takes us into this ghoulish den of death.
01:15:37You'll find some of the graves in here are five, six, seven bodies deep.
01:15:42There was no room for coffins, there was no room to put them into the ground with ceremony and with dignity.
01:15:47They were pushed into the ground and they were stamped down and then some earth was thrown on top of them.
01:15:52And that's only a part of Greyfriars' nasty history.
01:15:58Greyfriars and the thousands of graveyards like it around the world have always been scary places, especially at night.
01:16:08Stories of evil spirits rising from the grave have long been part of every human culture.
01:16:15And here at Greyfriars, the nightly hauntings continue to this day.
01:16:38It's just past sundown at Greyfriars, Edinburgh's oldest and some say most haunted graveyard.
01:16:51The perfect place to illustrate our final theory.
01:16:56That you are afraid of the dark because your ancestors feared that the mistreated dead
01:17:03might come back to haunt the living.
01:17:24Greyfriars has the reputation of being a thin place.
01:17:26A thin place is an area where the line between ourselves and other worlds, the worlds of the dead,
01:17:33where the line between them is thinnest, where you can cross over.
01:17:43Visitors to Greyfriars still claim to have actual nighttime encounters with the paranormal.
01:17:50The poltergeist seems to attack people in different ways.
01:17:53You will get people complaining that they've been burned or scratched, bitten, cut.
01:17:59You experience hot spots and cold spots when the temperature suddenly shoots up or goes shooting back down again.
01:18:06And you find dead animals in front of the tombs a lot.
01:18:10The most common occurrence of people going into the tombs is collapses.
01:18:16The poltergeist will attack people in different ways.
01:18:20The poltergeist will attack people as they emerge from the tomb and that's when people will collapse.
01:18:33To see just how fervently our ancestors believed in ghosts and evil spirits
01:18:39and to understand the precautions they took against them at night,
01:18:43we return to Dartmoor, where legendary ghost stories have circulated for generations.
01:18:50Many of the rural people, whilst believing in a religion,
01:18:57also firmly believed in the existence of ghosts, which is an evil spirits,
01:19:03which roamed around their houses during the dark of night.
01:19:07Colin Ridgers has spent decades studying the haunted history of the Moors.
01:19:13To ward off these witches, ghosts and evil spirits,
01:19:19they planted a rowan tree outside their house to ensure safety,
01:19:26not only during the day but also at night when the doors were shut and the windows were barred.
01:19:31But if they had to leave the house at night, they often wore a small cross around their neck
01:19:38made of rowan wood or twigs to ensure protection when they left the house.
01:19:51In Dartmoor, there was one ghost in particular that people feared.
01:19:57A restless poltergeist named Richard Cabell.
01:20:03He was a local squire in the 1600s and was basically classed as an evil man.
01:20:11He liked his gambling, he liked his women and he liked his wine.
01:20:16But worse than that, he'd sold his house.
01:20:20But worse than that, he'd sold his soul to the devil and he'd murdered his wife.
01:20:27When he died in 1677, they laid him to rest in the tomb behind.
01:20:35But because he was such an evil man, they put a huge great granite slab over the top of his grave
01:20:42just to make sure that his spirit couldn't come back.
01:20:46However, that wasn't good enough.
01:20:55That very same night, people reported seeing spectral hounds howling and baying around his tomb.
01:21:06Ever since that occurrence, they could often be seen here nightly
01:21:10or even sometimes they could be seen with the squire haunting the moor at night.
01:21:15So obviously, this was a place back in the early times that people avoided at all costs.
01:21:22Ghosts represented a very deep and genuine source of fear.
01:21:29Virtually every community had at least one or more ghosts.
01:21:36that preyed upon that locality, sometimes for generations on end.
01:21:49But ghosts weren't the only dark figures haunting the moors at night.
01:21:57Tales of other evil spirits that stalked the night,
01:22:01Tales of other evil spirits that stalked the night became ingrained in local folklore.
01:22:08The ultimate evil?
01:22:11The devil himself, still considered a tangible night-time threat in the Middle Ages
01:22:17as it had been in earlier centuries.
01:22:20If you read the Bible, you read about Satan.
01:22:24But here in Britain, it's the devil.
01:22:28And of course, the devil is the epitome of everything evil.
01:22:36In Dartmoor, as it was in so many medieval villages,
01:22:41tales of the devil stalking the night
01:22:46created a fear that couldn't be ignored.
01:22:50Probably one of the greatest fears from the medieval times across the moor
01:22:54was the fear of encountering the devil.
01:22:59The fear was so much that even sometimes people would go to sleep
01:23:04sat upright for fear that if they went to sleep on their backs,
01:23:08their mouth would be open and the devil would enter their bodies.
01:23:14This was instilled in children from a very young age.
01:23:17This was instilled in children from a very early age.
01:23:21So again, it's not difficult to see when these people did come out here
01:23:25and see and hear things that they couldn't explain.
01:23:28The first thing that come to mind was, it's the devil.
01:23:32Stories of the devil became woven into historical fact
01:23:37and it wasn't long before physical evidence of his existence became part of the legend.
01:23:48The thunderstorm of 1638 was such a frightening experience,
01:23:53people immediately connected this to evil and the devil.
01:24:00The legend was that at the back of this church,
01:24:03playing cards was a man by the name of Jan Reynolds
01:24:06who had sold his soul to the devil.
01:24:09And the story goes that a man on a horse
01:24:12stopped at a bar called the Tavistock Inn.
01:24:19He called in for a glass of ale.
01:24:26Those that were drinking at the time thought,
01:24:29good grief, that sizzled as it went down his throat.
01:24:33He poured the ale into a glass,
01:24:35as it went down his throat.
01:24:38He put his glass down on the counter.
01:24:42When they removed the glass,
01:24:45there was a ring on the bar counter, there today to be seen.
01:24:51This is the actual mark allegedly burned into the bar in 1638.
01:24:57He paid with a golden coin
01:25:00and as he went out the door after having his directions,
01:25:02the coin screwed up and turned into a withered leaf.
01:25:07As he went out the door, a couple of the locals said,
01:25:10that man has got cloven feet, it's the devil.
01:25:17He galloped away to Whittacombe,
01:25:20tied his steed up to the pinnacle of the church tower.
01:25:25And after coming into the church and picking up Jan Reynolds,
01:25:29he galloped away in such haste,
01:25:32that he did not undo the horse from the pinnacle
01:25:35and brought the pinnacle crashing down through the church.
01:25:50Throughout history, man has struggled to keep the darkness
01:25:55and all of its dangers at bay.
01:25:58Biologically ill-equipped to see at night,
01:26:02humans have always been at a disadvantage
01:26:06against more powerful animal predators
01:26:09and threats from others,
01:26:12who use the cloak of night to hide their sinister deeds.
01:26:18Artificial light helps us endure the fearsome hours between dusk and dawn
01:26:25and over time has made the night safer.
01:26:31But still, our fear of the dark persists
01:26:35and perhaps that's just exactly how we want it to be.
01:26:54For more UN videos visit www.un.org