It seems as though every generation has it’s own urban legends concerning demons and hell.
People have always been fascinated by depictions of the fiery depths of the underworld,
from Dante’s Inferno all the way up to modern horror films.
One of the more bizarre urban legends tells of a purported Soviet expedition that dug so far
down into the earth that they encountered the fires of hell and the screams of the damned.
It all started in 1989 with an article in a Finnish publication called Ammennusatia
that proclaimed that a group of Soviet geologists led by a Dr. Azzacov had made a strange discovery
in Siberia. They had been digging a hole into the earth that was around 9 miles deep when
their drill bit began to spin wildly, hinting that the core of the earth was in fact hollow.
They lowered an instrument to measure the temperature inside and were shocked that
it was about 1,100 degrees Celsius, or over 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
This was shocking to the scientists but what happened next sent some of them running in fear.
They lowered a supersensitive microphone into the hole to record the earth’s movements at certain
intervals, but at first the mic seemed to only pick up strange high-pitched sounds. When they
adjusted the microphone and listened closely, they seemed to hear a screaming voice quite loudly,
and in the background, thousands, if not millions, of shrieking voices crying out in pain.
The account from the Finnish newspaper was picked up by the Trinity Broadcasting Network,
which was a Christian television network from Southern California and soon the
story was being told all over the world as certifiable proof of the existence of hell.
After the initial story was published, a Norwegian teacher named Åge Rendalen
sent the Trinity Broadcasting Network an article that he claimed contained extra details
that were left out of the original account. According to this article, the scientist not
only heard strange sounds but also witnessed a glowing explosion of gas coming from the borehole.
The gas eventually took the form of a winged demon that flew across the sky.
The story was given a second life in 1998 when broadcaster Art Bell
played an audio clip of the supposed sounds from hell on his show Coast to Coast AM.
It was sent in by a listener that claimed their uncle had kept a copy of the recording.
“Now I’ve got a clean copy of it now and uh, I warn you…Uh, this could scare you.”
The audio recording spread across the internet, where many people
noted that the sound is actually just the same screaming voices looped over and over again.
It is now believed that the sounds are from the 1972 Italian horror film Baron Blood.
Although the story of the Well to Hell became popular among some evangelicals at the time,
it was a complete fabrication. The Finnish journal where the story
first appeared in full wasn’t a respected scientific journal as sometimes claimed,
but instead a newsletter published by a group of Finnish missionaries. In fact,
similar versions of the story had appeared in other Christian newsletters before then.
And as for the supposed Norwegian article that further corroborated the story? It was revealed as
a prank by the teacher from Norway, who confessed years later that he made the whole thing up
after hearing the initial story on the radio. There were also versions of the story
published in the Weekly World News that further helped to popularize the tale.
So where did the original inspiration for the story come from?
It’s possible it was inspired by an article in Scientific American published in December 1984
called “The World’s Deepest Well”. It was written by a Soviet geologist named Y.A. Kozlovksy and
described an experiment in which a hole was drilled more than seven miles into the earth.
It still exists today and at around 7.6 miles deep is in fact the deepest artificial point on earth.
Known as the Kola Superdeep Borehole, it’s located near the Russian border with Norway,
known as the Kola Peninsula, and has provided scientists with a
lot of valuable information in the realm of geophysics.
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