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Posted: 03-03-2005 00:01 Post subject: Underground Voices

Here's a story I came across looking for more material on the Tape from Hell:

A Muscovite named Stanislav Dolgher and his wife bought a dacha (cottage) lot in a village outside Moscow and began working on its development. Since the nearest water source was 500 m away, they decided that they needed a well. According to their neighbours, the water in that area was 7 m deep. In spring, Stanislav ordered 8 concrete rings and began digging on his own, working on the weekends. Every weekend he would go up to 1 m into the ground and then drive back to the capital so the rings could settle evenly.

Weird things began happening when he got to the sixth ring – 6 m deep into the ground. He began hearing clear voices – male, female and children’s. The language was sharp and reminded German. Stanislav compared the voices to those in a regular household – sometimes everything was quiet, sometimes they were talking at the same time, as if quarrelling and interrupting one another. Suspicions that it was his wife talking to the neighbours weren't confirmed. Stanislav thought there was something wrong with his head but he had to rule out that option: every time he climbed up from the hole, the sound of voices would get weaker and disappear on the ground level – they were not inside his head all the time, he realized. In his own words, the voices were ‘tied up to a specific location’. His wife was much too scared to go down and listen.

Stanislav had another idea – suppose there was a secret bunker or an underground base nearby. But no-one in the village heard of such facility. He even considered the possibility of phone cables leaking sound – but who would dig 6 m deep to lay cable? So Stanislav has come to the only remaining conclusion – that he had been digging right near a residence of gnomes or some other subterranean creatures. He even stopped digging for a while waiting for something bad to happen, but nothing extraordinary took place on his lot or around it. So he resumed his digging which was uneventful – other than a constant animated chatter of invisible voices right above his head. He went one more meter down into the ground and in the evening went back to Moscow. When he returned the following weekend there was already water splashing around in the well. There was nothing unusual about it – regular taste, as a test from a local health lab showed.

Here's the link to this story: http://ddd.kursknet.ru/planet.php?article=156

Posted: 03-03-2005 08:53 Post subject:

Hmmm, the linked site is in Russian and has a picture of the Devil on it.
I can sort of see where this is going. Wink

Posted: 03-03-2005 19:02 Post subject:

Escargot,
The picture has nothing to do with gnomes or whoever was tallking - it's an illustration for the Sounds of Hell tape story in the first part of the article.
And I'd be really interested to know where this is going, in your view? Wink

What do you mean?

Posted: 03-03-2005 19:10 Post subject:

Six meters seems pretty deep for this, but there's all sorts of things in the ground that could conduct sound in strange ways.

Solid rock could lead to weird acoustical paths. Old pipes could serve as a conduit for sound. Possibly the well itself is focusing sound from above in some strange way.

There's plenty of old stories about weird voices coming from underground. I wonder if there's any knowledge among miners about sound travelling strangely underground.

Posted: 04-03-2005 00:24 Post subject:

What exactly is the Tape from Hell? (I asked Google but I don't think it knew)

Posted: 04-03-2005 09:46 Post subject:

Try a google of "drilling to hell", grayalien.

This sort of story reminds me a bit of the old "Toronto Tunnel Monster" story, or that story about the mysterious Hypogeum tunnels in Malta, where allegedly a group of schoolchildren on a tour once vanished without a trace, and all that the rescue party ever recovered was, well, something icky and morbid, I can't remember exactly how the story went. Distant agonized shrieks echoing from the chasms of the abyss, yada yada, that sort of thing.

Posted: 04-03-2005 17:34 Post subject:

Tom Slemen in his Weird World or World Mysteries or something has a story very similar, except it was a team of soviet geologists who has broken into 'hell'.

He suggests that if the story is original then it may have been a type of anti-soviet religious propaganda to try and convince people that Hell does exist.

Anyway, its weird.

Posted: 04-03-2005 18:50 Post subject:

Graylien,

You can see the original newspaper article and download an mp3 file of the Hell tape here (click on the round button in the middle of the page):
http://www.omolenko.com/texts/hell.htm
But I wouldn't do it at bedtime. Shocked

If you are interested in the history of the Sounds of Hell tape, I found this in the original source:
* The event took place in the late 1980s when the U.S.S.R. still existed.
* The drill site is located in the northwest Kola Peninsula, near the port of Murmansk and the Norwegian border.
* The goal of the drilling expedition was to record the sound of lithospheric plate movement. The enormous work started in the 70s. Samples and temperature measurements were taken at each new bed (level) and carefully stored in boxes. The gigantic drilling rig is still there and is reportedly 20 storeys tall.
* The depth where the recording was made apparently was 14 km (according to one source, 14.4 km). According to other sources, the core sample taken in 1991 was from 12,261 m below surface. First time in the history of geology an uninterrupted subcrop of two extremely ancient complexes dating from 3 to 1,6 billion years have been opened.
* The project manager’s last name at the time of the incident was Azzakov. He is quoted saying: "As a Communist, I don’t believe in Heaven or the Bible, but as a scientist, I now believe in the existence of Hell. Needless to say, we were stunned after making this discovery . . . The screams and wails were not those of a single person – they were the screams, wails and moans of millions of people".

rjm wrote: a type of anti-soviet religious propaganda to try and convince people that Hell does exist.
Trust me, rjm, it is highly unlikely, considering the real persons involved such as the existing project manager, his professional position and his party status (you had to be in the CPSU to hold a position like that).

Posted: 04-03-2005 19:13 Post subject:

Well, I can't read Russian (though my sister can) so I had no idea what the page said.

The story sounds like a hoax to me, and that's putting it mildly. Laughing

All sorts of maad stories come out of Russia. Most of them are unverifiable.

It's a place of wild snowy steppes and vodka. Wink

Posted: 04-03-2005 19:24 Post subject:

Wild, snowy what? confused

Posted: 04-03-2005 19:27 Post subject:

You forgot packs of hungry wolves running across the snow chasing a scared bearded peasant in a fur coat and high boots sitting in his horse-drawn sleigh and seeking refuge in a nearby space missile defence station. Wink

Love stereotypes.

Posted: 04-03-2005 20:11 Post subject:

Well go on then!
We were enjoying that! Laughing

What happens when the peasant reaches the space missile defence station?

Posted: 04-03-2005 20:18 Post subject:

i've heard the theory that the "sounds from hell" tape is just people at a shopping mall or amusement park with some echo effects. the only reason why its scary is because you think its going to be. the first time i heard the sound late at night on Art Bell, i was a bit freaked, had trouble sleeping. Later i came across it again on a forum where someone mentioned the shopping mall. On this second listening, my reaction was much different.

as for the well, obviously the sound is coming from somewhere transmitted through the rocks, perhaps there's some previously unknown property of the rock in this part of Europe, i wonder if it can transmit sound both ways, that would make for one very interesting conversation!

Posted: 04-03-2005 20:35 Post subject:

Doesn't sound much like the Toronto Tunnel monster to me at all . . . apart from the fact that both stories include going underground.

And, I was under the impression that the Tapes of Hell story was just made up by the Weekly World News, but I could be totally wrong about that.

-Fitz

Posted: 04-03-2005 20:37 Post subject:

midi

steppes are like the great plains of canada and us