Cahaba is a town in the center of the state of Alabama. Today, it's a quiet, serene place.

But in Cahaba's heyday, it had three distinct errors.

In the early 1820s, it became the first state capital of Alabama, very wild west-like,

but it was a place with promise in the middle of wilderness.

In the 1850s, it caught a second win. It was one of the wealthiest cities in the state and one of the wealthiest counties in the country. After the Civil War, in the late 1860s,

it was a hub for the formerly enslaved, a place where black people could finally enjoy the fruits

of their labor.

But today, Cahaba is completely deserted, and it's been that way for a while.

Most towns go undevelop and they destroy what was there before.

Here are the footprints of all those buildings, and all those lives are still there.

This is Linda Derry.

She's the site director at the Old Kahaba Archaeological Park.

After almost 40 years of working there, Linda still has a reverence for the scenery that Old Kahaba has to offer.

The southern landscape, especially in Alabama, we have this sort of relic.

You know, if you look closely, you can see pieces of the past, like ruins of old,

um, tenant farmer's shack or, um, oh my gosh, here, every spring, the, the roses and the daffodils that these people brought from the East Coast here to make their yard beautiful.

They bloom again.

These things are planted originally by people that are long dead, but every spring we see, gives me chill, just thinking about it.

So if you just open your eyes to it, you can hear those dead people talking to you through these messages embedded in the landscape. My name is Baudelaire, and this is Atlas Obscira, a celebration of the

world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Today, we go to Kahaba, Alabama, to the old

Kahaba Archaeological Park to visit Alabama's most famous ghost town.

And we hear how it was once the center of life in Alabama until suddenly it wasn't.

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