The "Well to Hell" is an urban legend regarding a putative borehole in Russia which was purportedly drilled so deep that it broke through into Hell. It is first attested in English as a 1989 broadcast by a U.S. domestic religion-based TV broadcaster, Trinity Broadcasting Network. Legend and basis The legend holds that a team of Soviet engineers purportedly led by an individual named "Mr. Azakov" in an unnamed place in Siberia had drilled a hole that was 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 —heat from a chamber of fire from which the tormented screams of the damned could be heard. The Soviet Union had, in fact, drilled a hole more than 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 in 1989, some interesting geological anomalies were found, although they reported no supernatural encounters. The recording of "tormented screams" was later found to be looped together from various sound effects, sometimes identified as the soundtrack of the 1972 movie Baron Blood. Propagation The story was reported to first have been published by the Finnish newspaper Ammennusastia, a journal published by a group of Pentecostal Christians from , 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 Suomen (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 Messianic Jews in California. Here, Buhler stopped tracing the origins any further. American tabloids soon ran the story, and sound files began appearing on various sites across the Internet. Sensationalistic retellings of the legend can be found on YouTube, usually featuring the aforementioned Baron Blood sound effects. TBN involvement The story eventually made its way to the American Christian Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN), which broadcast it on the network, claiming it to be proof of the literal