Researchers Try Drilling Earth's Deepest Manmade Hole — Then They Heard Horrifying Screams

Stretching for hundreds of miles on the Arctic Circle, the Kola Peninsula is one of the most breathtaking places in Russia. Dubbed "Land of the Snow Queen," it is bordered by dense forests and the White Sea. However, despite being the most surreal beauty of the Russian North, the peninsula is often highlighted as something that usually goes unnoticed. Not too far from the Norway border, sitting in the Pechengsky District of Murmansk is a rusted brown metal cap bolted into the concrete ground of a crumbling building, welded shut. On the other side of this seemingly unfitting relic is the “entrance to hell.”

Beware, because miles deep within this hellhole, one can hear the agonizing and torturous screams of people burning in hell. Named “Kola Superdeep Borehole SG-3,” the mysterious well is an abandoned Soviet scientific research station. On the other side of the huge metal cap is a 7.6-mile-deep well dug in 1989 by Russians to win a race against America by becoming the first nation to delve into the deepest secrets of Earth’s crust and mantle.

Eventually, Russians succeeded in digging the “deepest manmade hole ever.” However, instead of stumbling upon a set of intriguing mysteries in the Earth’s mantle, they came across something that sent chills down their spine. After reaching a certain depth, they realized that they had unknowingly opened a portal to hell and evoked some tortured souls in there who now wailed and screamed in their microphones, per the BBC.  

According to Interesting Engineering, the Russians took nearly 20 years to dig this borehole. Employing a method called “rotary drilling,” they attached a drill to a drill string and a series of drill pipes that provided the rotational force from the surface. The drill bits, made in tungsten, carbide, and diamond, were lubricated with special fluids called “muds” to ease the process. Their goal was to reach a depth of 9 miles, but they had to stop the drill mid-way because their equipment had started melting from the unexpectedly intense heat scorching in the fiery cauldron of the volcanic mantle.

At about 7.5 miles deep, the temperature was a searing 180 C° (356° F) due to which even the 2.7-billion-year-old rocks were behaving more like plastic than rocks, per Scientific American. The rocks also didn’t show the expected transition from granite to basalt, hinting at a seismic disorder running down below. The drilling process was halted forever in 1995, mainly due to a lack of funding, and the deep fiendish portal was padlocked forever. But there was another reason why they capped this long-running tunnel, a horrifying one. 

When the team of engineers was drilling this hole on the instructions of their project manager, Mr. Azzacov, they heard something. Curious to know about these sounds, they lowered sensitive microphones into the well. The microphones recorded about 17 seconds of the terrifying sounds before melting away in the heat. Ever since, people on social media have been posting this 17-second-long sound in videos and audio clips. Many tabloids described these sounds as the screams of tortured souls rising from the hollow center of hell, while many say that it’s just a fabrication of false religious cults and nothing else.

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