The "Well to Hell" is a putative borehole in Russia which was purportedly drilled so deep that it

broke through into Hell, traditionally considered to be located underground in Christian lore.
This urban legend has been circulating on the Internet since at least 1997. It is first attested in
English as a 1989 broadcast by a U.S. domestic TV broadcaster, Trinity Broadcasting Network.

Legend and basis

the legend holds that a team of Russian engineers purportedly led by an individual named "Mr.
Azzacov" in an unnamed place in Siberia had drilled a hole that was 9 miles (14 km) deep
before breaking through to a cavity. Intrigued by this unexpected discovery, they lowered an
extremely heat tolerant microphone, along with other sensory equipment, into the well. The
temperature deep within was 2,000 °F (1,090 °C) — heat from a chamber of fire from which
(purportedly) the tormented screams of the damned could be heard. That recording, however,
was later revealed to have been a cleverly remixed portion of the soundtrack of the 1972
movie Baron Blood, with various effects added.

The Soviet Union had, in fact, drilled a hole more than 12 kilometres (7.5 mi) deep, the Kola
Superdeep Borehole, located not in Siberia but on the Kola Peninsula, which shares borders
with Norway and Finland. Upon reaching the depth of 12,262 metres (40,230 ft) in 1989, some
interesting geological anomalies were found, although they reported no supernatural
encounters. Temperatures reached 180 °C (356 °F), making deeper drilling prohibitively
expensive.

Propagation

The story was reported to first have been published in 1990 by a Finnish newspaper
'Ammennusastia', a journal published by a group of Pentecostal Christians from Leväsjoki, a
village in the municipality of Siikainen in Western Finland. Rich Buhler, who interviewed the
editors, found that the story had been based on recollections of a letter printed in the feature
section of a newspaper called 'Etelä Soumen' (possibly the Etelä-Suomen Sanomat). When
contacting the letter's author, Buhler found that he had drawn from a story appearing in a
Finnish Christian newsletter named Vaeltajat, which had printed the story in July 1989. The
newsletter's editor claimed that its origin had been a newsletter called 'Jewels of Jericho',
published by a group of Jewish Christians in California. Here, Buhler stopped tracing the origins
further.[3]

United States tabloids soon ran the story, and sound files began appearing on various sites
across the Internet. The supermarket tabloid Weekly World News may have made the first
American report on the so-called Well to Hell.
Alternate versions

Since its publicity, many alternative versions of the story of the Well to Hell have been
published. In 1992, the US tabloid Weekly World News published an alternative version of the
story, which was set in Alaska where 13 miners were killed after Satan came roaring out of
Hell.[2][5] Other alternative stories included an alleged story where Jacques Cousteau quit
diving after hearing "screams of people in pain" underwater. Another story told of one of
Cousteau's men fainting in terror after hearing screaming voices in a trench in the Bermuda
Triangle.