(water dripping) (footsteps echoing) (eerie music) - [News Anchor] Good evening.

Tonight we are following a developing story out of Hazelton, where a week of heavy rainfall has led to the unexpected opening of an old mine shaft near an abandoned shopping center.

This incident highlights the ongoing challenges with historical mining operations in the region.

Authorities have not reported any injuries, but the opening of the mine shaft has raised significant safety concerns.

- [Narrator] Imagine walking on streets under which lies a hidden city.

A secret world buried right beneath your feet, where the ground holds more than just dirt and concrete.

It cradles a labyrinth of history, a maze of tunnels, workshops, and echoes of life that once thrived in darkness.

(music continues) - [Justin] These guys spent eight to 12 hours a day down there and they needed the mind to be just like, if you or I were working above ground today.

- [Narrator] This isn't just soil, it's a portal to the past, to the sweat and toil of miners who carved out an existence in the belly of the earth.

Know that beneath your every step lies stories untold, lives unseen, and a city that time forgot.

Welcome to The Secret Beneath Hazelton, a journey into the depths where history whispers from the shadows.

- Come in.

I'm kind of busy, Dave.

Thank you.

(laughs) My name is Justin Emershaw.

I am a mine engineer working in Hazelton and Superintendent over Jetta and Stockton Surface Mines.

So right now we're on our way over to our Evervale office and I'm gonna, I'll take you inside, show you the collection, and show you what one of the original Colliery mine maps looks like.

(soft music) Glad the key works.

All right, come on inside.

So this is the vault right here.

This is where we store all of our old underground mining maps and all of this that you see right here.

This was all drawn in, some of which are over, well over a hundred years ago.

And this is for all the various Collieries that were controlled by Lehigh Valley Coal Company.

So now we'll go and we'll pull out one for Hazelton Shaft.

All right, so here we go.

Buck Mountain vein, Hazelton Shaft.

When you roll these out, you're basically taking a coal seam that could be laying in a U, and you're basically laying it out flat.

An underground mine is a massive complex.

To give you an idea, just like today, where all of us spend the majority of our time at work, so did the miners, and because of that, they needed all their means of support to be located underground.

So everything from mule stables, foreman offices, hospitals, even, it was all located underground.

You can kind of see right here, this is Broad Street drawn.

Here's Wyoming, coal was transported within the Hazelton region in excess of two and a half miles underground to the Hazelton shaft, which was pretty much the heart of the Hazelton Basin to bring the coal out of the ground and to process it.

(music continues) - I've always been a fan of urban exploration.

It's just, I dunno how to explain it exactly, but the mines are such a part of our history.

Ah, there's a bench.

In the past, I've gone through those tours that you can go through and it really is so different to be in something that's been untouched, truly is an experience to be in them.

I'm Shane.

I'm Shane Balliet, urban Explorer.

I like to see history.

I like to film history.

Hi guys.

Today we're gonna learn about the Stockton Mine disaster.

When I first heard about the mine being open, we had heavy rain and the rains had washed out the cap that was there by the Mine authority.

- It was kind of big news when that mine opened, and I remember it was called in as an emergency backfill to fill it, because what happened was, with it opening, there was numerous people that were going down and exploring it.

- So this is, this would've been where it was, at least I'm, yeah, I'm pretty sure, I'm pretty sure this was it that, yeah, that mattress was actually behind it.

I guess they're doing some work back here now, but wow, massive.

This is a one, it's a once in a lifetime opportunity to really see this history.

Wow, this thing's ancient.

I'm gonna put it safely right there next to this block of wood.

It's amazing to see.

It's almost a city underneath the city.

There's, at one point we did find, there's almost street signs down there for, you know, keeping track of where they are in the mine.

These aren't, doctor, these aren't names.

That's East Buck, West Buck.

- [Colleague] Oh yeah.

The tunnel names.

- [Shane] The mines are, they're huge.

They're massive.

Until you look at the map, you know, comparing to the city, the extent, the size, it really is a city under the city down there.

- My favorite thing about this map is the entire city outline is drawn.

If you look, you could see every street, this is Broad running down here, you could see Locust, Vine, Church, Laurel, Wyoming, Pine.

Every street is drawn on this map, and it really gives you an idea of just the insane amount of workings underneath the city.

The slope that Shane went down was a newer rock slope that was open in 1946.

It actually comes down in the Wharton seam, which is the seam above this one.

There is no real modern technology that we could use today that even I could use that's as accurate as these old maps.

- It goes for unbelievable distances.

The area that we made it to, at the bottom, there was an office and a medical room, and with the medical room there was a wooden stretcher and it was just so interesting.

There were log books in the office from late 1800s, early 1900s.

It's really interesting, especially that wooden, the wooden stretcher was probably my favorite thing out of the whole thing.

It was really nothing but the wooden stretcher was my favorite.

- All up truck, I'm just coming down the ramp here.

So, at our Stockton operation, which I'm gonna show you here in a minute, we are mining five coal seams, three of which are virgin and never were mined before.

So we wanna stop out and take a look.

So this is our Stockton operation, and we are in the Stockton Basin, which is the same coal basin, which runs directly through the heart of Hazelton.

If you were to take a knife and slice through Hazelton, you would see the same bottom rock of the mammoth seam, but instead of seeing one row of holes like that, you would see five levels.

If you were to lay out all of the rail infrastructure that was inside of the workings in Hazelton, it would stretch over 150 miles.

(soft music) (glove scraping on metal) - The mines under Hazelton are, they're massive, and just seeing the size of them really shows how important coal was and how, I guess, industrious of a city Hazelton was, to go under and just remove, you know, so much of the earth.

(music continues) After I went in there and experienced it, I couldn't stop thinking about it.

It was... Kind of leaves you, I guess, empty.

Empty knowing that's it.

Pretty cool, huh?

That's it.

It's gone.

At least this entrance of it, this side of it, this portion.

Maybe it'll open again in 50 years, like it did before, but not likely.

It's probably sealed and gone for forever.

- [Justin] You know, if you look back in history, you'll always see that Hazelton was always considered one of the most thriving and beautiful mining towns in the region.

Like a lot of places, you know, people grow up, they move out of the area, and you kind of lose, the city has really lost that deep connection with its true natural resource.

So without that educational stuff, for people that are moving into a region to like maybe even learn about or understand, it's never getting passed on.

To truly educate people so that they know what's under their feet and what generations of immigrants worked hard to build.

(thoughtful music)