The Well to Hell

Summary

Soviet engineers drill fourteen kilometres into the Siberian crust, break through into a cavity at a thousand degrees, lower a heat-resistant microphone, and record the screaming of the damned. The audio still circulates.

The Kola Superdeep Borehole is real, and it is one of the great feats of twentieth-century science. Everything else in the paragraph above is invented, including the location. The screams come from a 1972 horror film. And the man who supplied the most lurid detail did it deliberately, to prove that the broadcaster would not check. The broadcaster did not check.

What is documented

The real borehole. Drilling began on the Kola Peninsula on 24 May 1970, on the arm of Russia that borders Norway and Finland. It is not in Siberia. The deepest shaft, SG-3, reached 12,262 metres in 1989, which remains the deepest artificial point on Earth. The project continued into the 1990s; the hole was kept open until 2005 and is now capped.

What the drilling actually found, which is genuinely surprising. Hot mineralised water was present almost the whole way down, in granite that everyone had expected to be dry. Gases were found throughout the column: helium, hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide produced by microbial life. Temperatures at depth ran far hotter than predicted, around 180 °C, and that heat is why the drilling stopped. The rock at depth behaved plastically rather than as brittle stone.

There was no cavity. There were no screams. The scientists reported none, and no documentation of any recording exists.

The legend. In its standard form, a team led by a "Mr Azzacov", in an unnamed place in Siberia, drills 14.4 kilometres, breaks into an open chamber at 1,000 °C, and lowers a microphone into it.

Where it entered English. The story was broadcast in 1989 by the American Trinity Broadcasting Network, which presented it as proof of the literal existence of Hell.

Where it came from before that. Rich Buhler traced it and interviewed the editors responsible. It had been printed in Ammennusastia, a Finnish newsletter published by a Pentecostal group in Leväsjoki, in the municipality of Siikainen. Their version was based on the recollection of a letter that had appeared in the features section of another Finnish paper. The chain of custody, followed to its source, ends not in a Soviet laboratory but in somebody's memory of a letter.

The deliberate hoax on top of the hoax. Åge Rendalen, a Norwegian teacher, heard the story on Trinity Broadcasting while in the United States. Appalled at what he took for mass credulity, he wrote to the network claiming that he had at first disbelieved the account, and had then found a factual report of it on returning to Norway. He supplied an elaboration: a bat-like apparition rising out of the well. He sent them a Norwegian newspaper article as his evidence, deliberately mistranslated. The article was not about a borehole.

The network broadcast it. They did not have the article checked.

The audio. The recording, roughly seventeen seconds, is a loop assembled from sound effects. It has been repeatedly identified as material from the soundtrack of the 1972 Italian horror film Baron Blood.

Leading explanations

There is nothing to explain about the well. What is worth explaining is the transmission.

A story that people wanted to be true. For the audience it reached first, the claim was not an oddity. It was confirmation. That gave it enormous velocity within a specific network and almost no friction, because friction comes from people who want it to be false.

No verification anywhere in the chain. A remembered letter became a newsletter item, which became a broadcast on national television, which became a tabloid story, which became an internet audio file. At no point did anyone in the chain go back one step. Rendalen proved this deliberately, and his fabrication was aired.

A real anchor. The Kola borehole existed, and was extraordinary, and was Soviet, and was mysterious in the way that all Cold War science was mysterious to Western audiences. A false story attached to a true object is far harder to dislodge than one floating free, because every check on the anchor comes back positive.

Current status

Debunked. The registry keeps this record for one reason, and it is not the screaming.

Åge Rendalen ran a controlled experiment on the credulity of a broadcaster. He handed them a fabrication, supported it with a document he told them was evidence, and knew that they would not read it. They broadcast it to a national audience. He was proving a point about verification, and the point was proved.

Every case in this archive travels the same road that this one did: an account, retold, amplified, cited, believed. The difference between a record and a legend is whether anybody walked back down it.

Last reviewed: July 2026. Records are provisional. Where the evidence changes, the entry changes. Found an error? Tell us.