PLEASE NOTE: This is a minimally-edited transcript that originates from a program that uses AI.
Anisa Khalifa: There's a mystery buried deep under the earth in the North Carolina Piedmont. It's made of concrete cables and some conspiracies.
Jay Price: There was a secret government facility in Chatham County is this giant concrete cube on these huge springs.
Anisa Khalifa: An underground bunker out in the country has been a source of speculation amongst residents of Chatham County for decades.
Jay Price: Very secretive. They had armed guards for a long time.
Anisa Khalifa: So what the heck is up with this place? What's it used for? And why isn't anyone allowed inside?
Drew Lasater: You think of it and it makes you feel uneasy. It's like what's in there that the rest of us weren't supposed to know about?
Jay Price: Everybody likes a good mystery, right?
Drew Lasater: Maybe they knew that there were aliens or something like that.
Anisa Khalifa: I'm Anisa Khalifa. This is the broad side where we tell stories from our home. At the crossroads of the South. This week, producer Charlie Shelton, Ormond explores the secrets of the big hole.
Jay Price: The reaction I got from locals when I started doing reporting. Kind of a wink, wink, nod, nod on that. Mm-hmm. You know? Yeah, we know stuff, but we can't talk.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: I was recently talking with my colleague, Jay Price. He's a military reporter at WUNC, and he said kind of offhandedly, you know, there's a secret underground bunker in the middle of Chatham County.
Jay Price: Yeah, it's pretty strange stuff.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: I said, I did not know that, but you have my attention. So we hopped into a studio.
Jay Price: They were pretty secretive. I mean, there's still a fence around the one down there in Chatham County, which was actually owned and run by at t
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Jay. This keeps getting stranger than more we're talking about it.
Jay Price: Yeah, it does get stranger and stranger.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Okay, so here's the deal. Chatham County, it's just west of Raleigh. In the Piedmont, it's full of these lush forests, a beautiful lake, some lovely small towns like Pittsboro, and then down a long private road is a windowless gray building with what looks like a big satellite dish attached to it and a sprawling chain link fence around the property. The facility is known among locals by its nickname. The big hole.
Jay Price: It came from this huge pit that they dug for the facility there. So when you drive up to it, really all you could see is these two kind of 40 foot ish concrete buildings, structures.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: What is it? I mean, what is this facility? It's underground.
Jay Price: No. Um, this was an at and t facility that it maintained on behalf of the government.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Okay. So it's a big bunker for the federal government. Yeah. It's run by at t outta the country. Uh, who is this for exactly?
Jay Price: So, was supposed to be for military and or civilian leaders to survive any sort of nuclear blast and. They would've decamped their and the threat of a nuclear holocaust, a serious nuclear threat.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Now, the threat of nuclear annihilation, thankfully, isn't really top of mind these days, but back when the big hole was built,
Jay Price: you're talking about the early to mid sixties is when this thing was constructed
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: height of Cold War paranoia.
Jay Price: Yeah. Yeah. And the height of Cold war expenditure, right? Yeah. Like they're willing to dump money on. Anything that kind of vaguely seemed to make sense.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Jay's never gotten clearance to go inside the facility. He says at and t stays pretty tight lipped on it, but Jay has gotten a sense from people who've worked there, what it looks like down in the ground.
Jay Price: The walls were concrete and several feet thick. The bottom floors apparently were mounted on springs big enough to support what's essentially a, a pretty large concrete building and absorb shock from fairly close, uh, nuclear weapons strikes. Uh, the toilets and urinals were. Mounted on their own kind of springs and the plumbing for them. There were rubber links so that they could move around without the plumbing shattering. Right. Oh
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: wow. So all the way down to the plumbing and the urinals are supported on these springs. Yeah. I
Jay Price: mean, you gotta eat, you gotta drink. Yeah. You know, nuclear attack, you still have to go to the bathroom.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: The big hole is unique for North Carolina, but it wasn't, the federal government's only getaway. Jay says it was one of five major fallout shelter facilities all on the east coast with very boring inconspicuous names. Project offices.
Jay Price: Yeah, project offices. It's like, eh, you know, nothing going on. Nothing to see here. Keep driving.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: And this is where at t's involvement starts to make sense. These five facilities, these project offices, were all set up with a special communication system.
Jay Price: Known as Tropo Scatters as method of communicating with microwave radio signals over long distances.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Jay says This network would in theory, help ensure the continuity of government if the US was well bombed to bits.
Jay Price: These things are all kind of tied together and there're to keep various aspects of the government up and running in the event of a nuclear attack, basically.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: But why put this in Chatham County? The other bunkers are closer to DC offering an easier escape for the likes of congress.
Jay Price: This is by far the most oddly placed, and the theory was that it was aimed at providing continuity by having the military leaders from Fort Bragg, which is the nation's largest army base. The idea being it's just far enough away from the base that maybe if the base itself was attacked, which you would assume it is a target, this facility would survive.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Today, though, there's not much activity happening around the big hole. Jay reported on the facility back in the late two thousands when there were signs that the site was shutting down.
Jay Price: I heard it was closing probably at t was thinking about selling these sorts of sites, you know, so it was kind of winding down pretty clearly, and if you go there now, you know it's, it's essentially abandoned. You might see somebody out there mowing the grass or whatever. On the other hand, I've heard that a periodically, there's stuff going on there that looks beyond maintenance.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Even though it supposedly shut down about 15 years ago, at and t still owns the property. And it continues to be a source of endless amounts of speculation.
Jay Price: You know, it's still secretive, you know, let's just face it. There's, there's something fun about these kind of weird stories. I haven't heard reports of anyone with guns in there in a while, but there have been some strange reports of people in like white outfits, you know, like scientists with clipboards. I don't know how, how apocryphal that is. Probably still under surveillance of some kind, but who knows.
Anisa Khalifa: Okay, so we see little stop signs blocking the road.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: We got some security cameras up there.
So Jay, I'm planning on going to check out the big hole with Anisa. Do you have any tips for when we go?
Jay Price: Just be polite to anybody you see in the yard and. If the gate is open, don't drive in. Probably not a good idea.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Okay.
Anisa Khalifa: Charlie, do we have permission to coincide?
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: We do not.
Anisa Khalifa: Okay.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: When we come back, Anisa and I take a trip to the big hole. We know that this goes. Several stories underground. So there could be somebody,
Anisa Khalifa: right. You just don't underneath can see right now. Yeah. Yeah. How should we should get out?
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Let's get out. Let's check it out. When Anisa and I ventured out to the big hole, our mission was pretty simple. Set Eyes on this mystery building and best case scenario, step inside. There is no activity that I can see.
Anisa Khalifa: It looks completely abandoned.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Our first obstacle, a big black gate blocking the entrance.
Anisa Khalifa: Yeah, I mean, it says private property. No trespassing. Violators will be subject to prosecution.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Okay.
Anisa Khalifa: I hope you have a plan.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: We did not have a plan, so this is an intercom at the front gate. Hello? We've got this big camera that's looking right at us.
Anisa Khalifa: Yeah.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Hello. No answer. They really don't want you to go inside.
Let's check out the other side. We stepped into the woods to see if there was a way through the fence. No luck, but we did find a field and got a closer look at the building.
Anisa Khalifa: Yeah, I mean, it just looks like a nondescript white building among the trees.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: No windows, not a single window and not a single car in the parking lot. It felt unlikely we were gonna get invited inside. I think the only way in is to climb it, but it's got some barbed wire on the top. And what do you think? Anisa, should I climb the fence?
Anisa Khalifa: Don't do it.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: All right. I'm gonna stay safe. So no fence hopping and no trespassing. What's inside the big hole remains a mystery, at least for me.
Drew Lasater: It felt really strange and cold. Very cold.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Drew Lasseter grew up in Chatham County and still lives there today. She says back in the 1970s, she remembers visiting her dad at work
Drew Lasater: and we just kept going down, down, down. And I'm sure that it wasn't that deep, but you know, when you're a child, it feels really like you're going, it just keep going down, down, down in the earth. And then we started going through these tunnels. It just felt like this closed in, but cavernous at the same time.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Drew admits her memories of the inside of the big hole are a little fuzzy because she was very young and those visits, they didn't last for long.
Drew Lasater: Once I was in first grade, they would not let me go in there anymore because once I could read, that was a big no-no. If you didn't work there. And you could read, you couldn't get in there.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: A first grader thwarted from sharing any government secrets. Now, despite the tours, drew says her dad never shared much about his job.
Drew Lasater: It's like he just didn't wanna talk about it. And I'm thinking, well, what is it about it that would make you not want to talk about it?
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Stories like Drew's are a part of the lore surrounding the big hole in Chatham County. She says, most longtime locals know it was made to be a nuclear bunker, but there's still plenty of mystery surrounding it. An eerie readiness of a government building that looks to be abandoned but isn't completely visible from the outside. There's still much more under the surface that we can't see and it's left people wondering,
Drew Lasater: well, how big is it really? How far does it go? Really?
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Yeah. Um, how's the morning treating you so far? Oh, just, just another day. Another day? Yeah. Yeah. Another day. I got an answer to that question. How far down does the big hole really go from somebody who has a lot of firsthand experience?
Bobby White: Well, it was, uh, three stories deep. It's just like a regular telephone office, except it was hardened.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: This is Bobby White. He worked at the Big hole for decades.
Bobby White: Yeah, I worked there for 31 years. Uh, I was basically a technician.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Bobby retired back in 1999 and today he spends a lot of his time as a cattle farmer in Chatham County.
Bobby White: I've had, uh, 18 newborns this year. I gotta get rid of some. I've got too many again. But, uh,
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: I met up with Bobby at his house out in the country, just down the road from the big hole. I wanted to hear about his time working there and hopefully separate fact from fiction. First, Bobby confirmed the facility was made to be a bunker. I.
Bobby White: We were able to basically shut up, button up and live there, and we were also a relocation center for higher ups, whoever they might be.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: He also said it had a communication system set up with the other project offices. But technicians like Bobby weren't just waiting around for a nuclear apocalypse to fire up their equipment.
Bobby White: Our customers would call in when they had a problem. Fort Bragg wanted to call somebody, California or whatever. They would come to us, start switching machine, would route it on to the next area. They would switch it all.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Bobby says he needed top secret security clearance to work there, but he never saw anything too out of the ordinary. Mostly generators and big telephone systems. No secret labs, no alien experiments, but he's heard some of the rumors.
Bobby White: Oh, underground refueling station for submarines or something like that. I've heard that stupid thing
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: for him. It was a steady, well paying job.
Bobby White: Yeah, it was a very good job. Good benefits, good wage for what we did.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Is it still in operation today?
Bobby White: Uh, no. Uh, okay. I think back in, uh, I retired in, uh, 99 and, uh, shortly after that they closed it down. Okay. Buttoned it up.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: When you left in the nineties, did they tell you to be hush hush about anything?
Bobby White: Yeah. At that point in time, uh, we were supposed to not say anything about it as far as what we were doing and all this.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: But Bobby's comfortable these days talking about his old gig. He says, enough time's gone by and there's not much left to keep secret. I asked him if he still has any knickknacks from his time working there. He said he is got some old slots from the switching machine. He. And maybe one more thing
Bobby White: somewhere. I've got a set of keys that, that used to open everything out there. Uh, I'm sure they're not usable now, but, uh,
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: keys or no keys, Bobby still unlocked some parts. The elusive big hole.
Jay Price: Who knows? You know, everybody likes a good mystery, right?
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Back in the studio, my colleague Jay Price, and I considered what could be next for the big hole. I reached out to at and t for this episode, but didn't hear back, so no official word on what the future holds for the facility. But if the company isn't using it anymore, why is it still there? According to Jay, the answer might not be so top secret.
Jay Price: What do you do with something like that? Right, right. Like the dank, you would have to like probably run pumps to keep the water out. Yeah. Dehumidifiers. But, uh, former judge down in Chatham who helped build the thing when he was in college told me, he's like, well, you know, make a heck of a wine cellar.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: That's a lot of wine. I mean, that's the thing is like for a bunker that's made with that specific purpose, you can't, you know, easily turn that into an Airbnb in Chatham County.
Jay Price: No.
Anisa Khalifa: This episode of The Broadside was produced by Charlie Shelton Ormond. It was edited by Jared Walker. Our executive producer is Wilson Ser. The Broadside is a production of w UNC North Carolina Public Radio and is part of the NPR network. You can email us at broadside@wunc.org if you enjoyed the show. Leave us a rating, a review, or share it with a friend. I'm Anisa Khalifa. Thanks for listening, y'all. We'll be back next week.