The Well to Hell: A Siberian Borehole and a Broadcast Hoax

Somewhere in Siberia, the story runs, Soviet scientists drilled the deepest hole in the world — nine miles down, deeper than anyone had ever gone. And at the bottom, the temperature spiked far beyond what their instruments predicted, to a thousand degrees. Curious, the lead scientist — a Dr Azzacov, in most tellings — lowered a heat-resistant microphone into the void to listen to the movement of the rock. What came back was not the groan of the earth. It was screaming. Thousands of voices, human voices, crying out in torment. The scientists had drilled into hell. Some of them, terrified, refused to work again. The Soviet authorities, godless as they were, ordered the recording suppressed — but a tape got out.

It is a lurid story, and unlike most legends it can be dismantled almost completely, because we can identify the real hole it grew around, the specific broadcast that spread it, and even the moment a mistranslation turned a Norwegian teacher’s joke into scripture. The Well to Hell is a rare thing: a legend we can watch being drilled, from bedrock of fact up through the layers of embellishment to the surface where it screamed.

The hole that was really there

The remarkable part is that the deep Siberian borehole exists. It is not the fiction in this story; it is the foundation the fiction was poured onto.

The Kola Superdeep Borehole is real. Beginning in 1970, on the Kola Peninsula in the far north-west of the Soviet Union, near the Norwegian border, Soviet scientists undertook one of the great pure-research projects of the Cold War: to drill as deep into the Earth’s crust as physically possible, purely to see what was down there. It was a scientific counterpart to the space race, a contest of national capability aimed downward instead of up. Over roughly two decades they went further than anyone before or since. The deepest branch of the borehole reached 12,262 metres — a little over 7.6 miles — in 1989. It remains the deepest artificial point on Earth. The project produced real and surprising science: the rock at depth was more fractured and water-saturated than expected, the temperatures climbed faster than models predicted, reaching around 180°C at the bottom, and the hoped-for transition in the rock turned out to be something else entirely. Drilling effectively stopped around 1992 because the heat made further progress impossible; the equipment could not cope.

So the frame of the legend is true. There was a superdeep Soviet borehole. It was in the far north, on the Kola Peninsula in the north-west — a location the legend usually relocates east to central Siberia. The temperature down there really did rise higher and faster than the scientists expected. These genuine, widely reported facts are what gave the hell story its plausibility. A tale about a Soviet hole so deep and so unexpectedly hot that it frightened its own drillers was working with real material — and then it forked hard away from it.

Where it forked, and who pushed it

The departure from the record is total and can be dated. Everything true about Kola concerns rock, heat and instrumentation. Everything supernatural — the thousand-degree spike, the microphone, the screams, the mass resignation of terrified scientists, Dr Azzacov himself — has no basis in the project’s real history. There was no recording of the damned. There was no Dr Azzacov; the name appears nowhere in the genuine record of the Kola work and seems to have been invented for the story.

The legend’s route into the wider world can be traced with unusual clarity. In 1989 the tale of the hell-hole recording appeared in a Finnish newspaper — reportedly a small Christian publication — and from there it was picked up and carried across the Atlantic. Its great amplifier was Trinity Broadcasting Network, the American Christian television empire founded by Paul and Jan Crouch. TBN presented the Well to Hell story to its enormous audience as apparent fact: proof, broadcast into millions of homes, that hell was a real, physical place, that science had accidentally confirmed scripture, and that the atheist Soviet state had literally dug down and heard the screaming of the lost. For a certain audience this was the most thrilling story imaginable — the wall between the material world and the theological one breached by a Soviet drill bit. The broadcast did to the hell-hole what a tabloid campaign did to the crying boy painting: a mass medium took a story its audience wanted to believe and, by repeating it as fact, manufactured the very consensus that made it feel true.

There is a smaller, stranger, and rather beautiful footnote to how the story travelled, and it belongs to a Norwegian schoolteacher named Åge Rendalen. Rendalen, hearing the tale circulating in the American Christian media and irritated by its credulous spread, decided to test just how far a lie would run if you fed it. He wrote to TBN claiming to be a former non-believer who had been so shaken by the Well to Hell that he had converted — and he embellished the story further, adding a lurid detail about a bat-like demonic figure seen rising from the borehole, complete with a fake Norwegian newspaper clipping. The catch, which he freely admitted, was that his supporting “translation” was nonsense: the Norwegian article he attached actually said nothing of the kind. He expected someone to check. No one did. TBN ran his additions too. Rendalen had proven exactly the point he set out to prove — that the story would absorb any embellishment offered to it in good-sounding faith, because its audience wanted it to be true and no one was translating the source.

The mistranslation at the bottom of the shaft

That detail — nobody translating the source — sits at the very bottom of this legend, and it is the mechanism that let it work.

The whole edifice depended on a chain of retellings across languages: Russian science reporting, a Scandinavian Christian press, Finnish and Norwegian intermediaries, American broadcast. At each handoff the story passed between people who could not read the previous source in its original tongue and were therefore obliged to trust the summary they were handed. A claim about a Russian borehole reaches an American network having passed through Finnish and Norwegian retellings, and by the time it arrives, no one in the chain can go back and check the Russian. The screams entered the story somewhere in that unlit passage between languages, and once they were in, there was no shared original to check them against. Rendalen’s prank worked for exactly this reason: he could attach a Norwegian clipping that said the opposite of what he claimed, confident that his American recipients could not read Norwegian and would not find anyone who could before they broadcast.

This is a specific and underrated way that legends form — in the seams between languages, where a claim can shed its origins and acquire authority it never had. A story that would collapse the instant a Russian speaker read the original Kola reports could travel freely as long as it stayed in translation, each teller citing the last, none able to reach the bedrock. The Well to Hell is, at its foundation, a translation failure dressed as a revelation.

Why the hole had to lead down there

Strip away the drilling and the broadcast mechanics and ask the folklorist’s question: why did this story land so hard, and what did it give the people who spread it?

It arrived at a precise historical moment and spoke directly to it. The late 1980s and early 1990s were the closing years of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. For decades, Western — and especially American evangelical — culture had understood the officially atheist Soviet state as the great godless adversary, a civilisation that had denied heaven and would answer for it. The Well to Hell is a revenge fantasy against that atheism, and a very satisfying one. The godless Soviets, in their arrogance, dig deeper than anyone should, and what they find is proof of the very afterlife their ideology denied. Their own science, the pride of the materialist state, confirms scripture and terrifies them. It is the atheist hoist by his own drill bit. For a believer watching the Soviet system crumble, the story was almost too perfect: the enemy had not merely lost, he had been shown the pit.

It also answered a hunger older than the Cold War, the hunger for physical proof of the immaterial. Faith is difficult precisely because the things it asserts cannot be measured or recorded. The Well to Hell offered the impossible comfort of empirical hell — a place with a temperature, a depth, a recording you could in principle play on a cassette. It made the theological tangible, converting belief into evidence. That is an enormous relief to offer, and it explains why people wanted so badly not to check it. The same craving for the numinous made physical drives a great deal of paranormal legend, from cursed objects to ghosts photographed on old back roads; the Well to Hell simply offered the boldest proof of all, that the oldest and most frightening doctrine of the faith could be picked up on a microphone.

And there is the deep, near-universal mythic logic of down. Nearly every culture puts its underworld below — Sheol, Hades, Naraka, the Christian hell. The idea that digging far enough into the earth will bring you to the realm of the dead is older than any religion that names it. When the Soviets announced they had drilled the deepest hole in human history, they were, in the grammar of myth, drilling toward the underworld whether they meant to or not. The legend did not have to invent the association. It only had to remind people of something they already felt in the oldest part of the imagination: that below us, past the rock, is where the dead are, and that to dig too deep is to risk hearing them.

What the tape actually held

There is no tape, or rather, the “recording of hell” that circulated for years was eventually traced to reworked audio lifted from a horror film soundtrack — the screams were a studio effect, dubbed in whole cloth over a story that never had any real recording behind it. The Kola Superdeep Borehole, meanwhile, sat quietly rusting in the Arctic, its site abandoned in the 1990s, its rusted metal cap now a minor curiosity for the occasional visitor. It reached the deepest point humans have ever made, learned real and unexpected things about the crust of our planet, and heard nothing at all, because there was nothing to hear.

The Well to Hell endures anyway, resurfacing on the internet every few years detached now from TBN and Rendalen and even from Kola, drifting free as a pure creepy artefact. What is worth remembering, when it comes round again, is how honestly the layers stack up: a genuine feat of Cold War science at the bottom, a real and surprising rise in temperature that made exaggeration easy, a chain of translations no one could check, a broadcast network that wanted it true, and a schoolteacher who proved the story would swallow anything. On top of all that sat the oldest wish of all — that if we only dug deep enough, we might get proof of what waits below. The Soviets dug the deepest hole in the world and found rock and heat and water. We supplied the screaming, because we needed the hole to lead somewhere.