People these days often forget just how close the world was to complete and utter annihilation during the Cold War. In those days, the average person was at a heightened state of alert pretty much constantly. And incessant paranoia can make people do some crazy things — things like building enormous bomb shelters into hillsides made from the frames of old school buses. That's exactly what Bruce Beach did. Beach (pictured below) began construction on the Ark Two shelter during the early 1980s in the small Canadian village of Horning's Mills, which is just north of Toronto.

The 10,000-square-foot shelter is designed to sustain up to 500 people for the amount of time it would take for radiation levels following a nuclear strike to reach normal again.

Beach used the frames of 42 school buses and then poured concrete on them to create the interior of the shelter. The whole thing is powered by redundant diesel generators, and it's said to be virtually impenetrable to anything short of a direct nuclear strike.