The Well to Hell hoax

The "Well to Hell" is a putative borehole in Russia which was purportedly drilled so deep that it broke through into hell, or at least close to it. This urban legend has been circulating on the Internet since at least 1997. It is first attested in English as a 1989 broadcast by Trinity Broadcasting Network.

Legend and basis
The legend holds that a team of Russian scientists purportedly led by someone named "Mr. Azzacov" in an unnamed place in Siberia had drilled a hole that was nine miles (14.5 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 (1,100 °C) — heat from a chamber of fire from which (purportedly) the tormented screams of the damned could be heard. The 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 nearly eight miles deep, the Kola Superdeep Borehole, located not in Siberia but on the Kola Peninsula, which shares borders with Norway and Finland. Upon completing the borehole in 1989, some interesting geological anomalies were found, although they reported no supernatural encounters. Temperatures reached 180 °C (360 °F), making deeper drilling prohibitively expensive.

Propagation
The story was reported to first have been published in 1990 by a Finnish newspaper 'Ammennusatia', a journal published by a group of Christians from Levasjoki. Rich Buhler, who interviewed the editors found, that the story had been based on recollections of a letter printed in the feature section of the newspaper 'Etela Soumen'. 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 'Jewels of Jericho', published by a group of Jewish Christians in California. Here, Buhler stopped tracing the origins further.

United States tabloids soon ran the story, and sound files—recordings of those alleged supplications from the damned—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.

TBN involvement
The story eventually made its way to the American Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN), which broadcast it on the network, claiming it to be "proof" of the literal existence of Hell.

Åge Rendalen, a Norwegian teacher, heard the story on TBN while visiting the United States. Disgusted with what he perceived to be mass gullibility, Rendalen decided to augment the tale at TBN's expense.

Rendalen wrote to the network, originally claiming that he disbelieved the tale but, upon his return to Norway, supposedly read a "factual account" of the story. According to Rendalen, the "story" claimed not only that the cursed well was real, but that a bat-like apparition (a common pictorial representation of demons, such as in Michelangelo's The Torment of Saint Anthony) had risen out of it before blazing a trail across the Russian sky. To perpetuate his hoax, Rendalen deliberately mistranslated a trivial Norwegian article about a local building inspector into the "story", and submitted both the original Norwegian article and the English "translation" to TBN. Rendalen also included his real name, phone number and address, as well as those of a pastor friend who knew about the hoax and had agreed to expose it to anyone who called seeking verification.

However, TBN did nothing to verify Rendalen's claims, and aired the story as proof of the validity of the original story.

Alternate versions
Since its publicity, many alternate 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. Other alternative stories included an alleged story where Jacques Cousteau quit diving after hearing "screams of people in pain" underwater. Additionally, another story told of one of Cousteau's men fainting in terror after hearing screaming voices in a trench in the Bermuda Triangle.

The basis of the urban myth/hoax, was turned into the 'philosophical chiller' movie Nine Miles Down in 2009 by writer/director Anthony Waller, which deals with the penchant of the human mind towards believing superstition over science.