Quite a Trip

Travel is on the agenda today in the Cabinet. Enjoy these curious destinations and the tales they tell.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history
is an open book, all of these amazing tales are
right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.
Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. Our imaginations are drawn

(00:38):
to the unknown, whether that's the open expanse of the
night sky or the deepest depths of the ocean. We're
primed to wonder what secret realms lie just beyond our
comfort zone. Those realms are the source of some of
our most potent myths and stories, and few places have
the same enduring mystery as a cave or a well.
It's like a portal into the innards of the planet.

(01:00):
Will refreshing water bubble up from a fissure in the
earth or will it be hot lava? Anything seems possible.
In the nineteen eighties, a curious story emerged from the
frozen reaches of Siberia. People claimed that a Russian research
expedition had made a terrifying discovery. They had drilled a
whole nine miles deep, discovering a strange, hollow pocket of air. Intrigued,

(01:23):
the diggers lowered a heat resistant microphone down into the depths,
and that microphone picked up sounds of agonized screaming, a
chorus of voices wailing in pain. Basically, the reports claimed
that Soviet Russia had discovered a portal to Hell. This was,
of course inaccurate. It was an urban legend spread by
evangelical Christians to credulous tabloid newspapers. The actual story was

(01:48):
far more ordinary. There was a hole that deep in
the Cola Peninsula, but not Siberia, and it produced no
such screams. The inner layers of the Earth are strange
and unsettling, but not satanic as suggested by the tabloids.
The urban legend labeled the story as the well to Hell,
and even without the supernatural element, it's an impressive achievement.

(02:10):
It took the Soviet Union twenty years to dig that deep,
a mission inspired by the global competition of the Cold War,
a sort of inverse space race. Now the borehole can
be used to sample the Earth's mantle and inspire real
geological study. Not a bad end result for an urban legend.
But this is not the only well to Hell on
planet Earth. In fact, it wasn't even the first. The

(02:32):
other is much older and not man made. Viewed from
a bird's eye view, it's a big black hole in
the Middle East.

Speaker 1 (02:38):
Ninety eight feet across.

Speaker 2 (02:40):
The Well of Barhut lies in the eastern corner of Yemen,
and for a millennia it was a fixation of the
local imagination. No tabloid have ever claimed that they heard
screaming from within its depths, but it still earned the
nickname the Well of Hell, and locals were wary of
venturing near it for a very long time. The stories
were first written down sometime around the seventh century, although

(03:01):
they're likely much older than that. They tell various accounts
of the well's origin and purpose. Some ancient king perhaps
carved it out of the earth to hide his treasure. However,
the most enduring theory is that it's a prison to
contain scores of evil gin known as Ephrit, and Aphritz
is many things in Islamic tradition, a shape shifter, a demon,

(03:21):
a trickster spirit. They're the gin who have chosen to
pursue evil and mischief, so naturally, local imagination filled the
Well of.

Speaker 1 (03:30):
Barhut with them.

Speaker 2 (03:31):
The prophet Muhammad even supposedly proclaimed that the water in
the well of Barhut is the worst water on the
face of the earth. It would be poisonous to drink.
Eventually people tested this theory. Many amateur cavers entered Barhut
over the years, but it wasn't until twenty twenty one
that an expedition actually reached the bottom. As villagers gathered
around to watch, a team of professional cavers secured ropes

(03:53):
and repelled into the Well of Hell. They descended almost
four hundred feet into the earth, reaching the boom. What
they found wasn't gin, but waterfalls, cave pearls, and a
unique ecosystem that included birds, toads, lizards, and strange translucent snakes.
The water isn't poisonous, but quite fresh. When the team

(04:13):
came back to the surface, they showed pictures to the
locals and brought up the infamous cave water to sample.
After all those stories and folk myths, I can only
imagine what this must have been.

Speaker 1 (04:23):
Like to witness.

Speaker 2 (04:24):
It's tempting to see science as a force that eradicates
mystery from the world, But the Well of Barhut is
a good example of how one mystery can be replaced
with another. The formation of a strange and miraculous biome underground,
a pocket sized world just beneath the surface.

Speaker 1 (04:40):
Of our own.

Speaker 2 (04:41):
And it's fair to say that is certainly a more
inspiring discovery than a gateway to hell. William Watt huddled

(05:03):
in his four post bed, trembling as the wind howled outside.
At seventy four years old. The layered of Scalehouse had
seen his share of storms. Bad weather was a fact
of life on the Orkney Islands, where his family had
lived for generations. The archipelago lay ten miles off the
coast of Mainland Scotland, exposed to the relentless fury of
the North Atlantic. Over centuries, wind and waves have shaped

(05:27):
the islands, carving cliffs and shifting sand dunes, constantly remaking
the landscape. Watt had lived through more storms than he
could count, but this tempest put them all to shame.
It struck in the winter of eighteen fifty, and it
battered the island for days. Rain lashed the stone walls
of Scalehouse, rattling its windows with such ferocity that Watt

(05:48):
feared they would shatter. He lay awake, listening to the
roof grown, praying that his home would still be standing
when the storm passed. By morning it was over, Watt stepped,
blinking out into the sunshine, bracing himself for what he
might find. The destruction was worse than he feared. Roofs
torn from cottages, farmland flattened, boats scattered and strewn across

(06:11):
the shore. The storm had claimed the lives of some
two hundred people, many of them were fishermen, their bodies
lost to the waves. And yet, as what trudged toward
the Bay of Scale, something else caught his eye. A
low stone wall jutted up from the sand, its precise,
stacked formation too deliberate to be natural. This wasn't more
damage from the storm, but something the storm had uncovered. Curious,

(06:35):
Watts and a few of his farm hands began to dig.
What they discovered astounded them. Beneath the sand lay a
series of interconnected dwellings built with large flat stones. Inside
each one, Watt found evidence of a sophisticated society. There
was stone furniture, tools, and jewelry, even artwork. The more
he unearthed, the more he realized these structures weren't medieval

(06:58):
or even Roman. They weren't hundreds of years old, but thousands.
Archaeologists believed that the site known today as Scarabray was
a thriving pastoral village around three thy two hundred BC.
That means it was built centuries before Stonehenge or the
Great Pyramids of Egypt. It's one of the oldest Neolithic
settlements in Western Europe, Neolithic, meaning that it dates back

(07:20):
to the Late Stone Age, and yet, thanks to the
fact that it was buried in sand for five thousand years,
it's remarkably well preserved. The village consisted of at least
eight houses, constructed a flagstone sourced from the nearby area.
They were connected by a labyrinth of stone tunnels so
that the inhabitants didn't have to brave the elements to
visit one another. There were no windows, which meant that

(07:42):
the interiors were dark and smoky, lit by large central hearts.
The dwellings were covered in a protective insulating mixture of
dung ash, animal bone, and other debris. Grass probably grew
over this top layer, camouflaging the village from prying eyes.
Any seafarers who happened to pass spy would have only
seen a cluster of hills, and considering how long ago

(08:04):
they lived, the people of Scarabray possessed remarkable inventions. Many
of the homes contained a waterproof stone box that might
have been used to store live seafood. They even had
a primitive sewer drain and the world's earliest known indoor toilets,
three thousand years before the Roman latrines would be built.
But for all the site can tell us about the past,
it still holds countless mysteries. The people who lived at

(08:27):
Scarabray didn't keep written records, so much of what we
know about them is cobbled together from inferences and just
best guesses. And one of those mysteries is how seven
separated from the other structures. It's the only building at
Scarabray where the door is barred from the outside. Anthropologists
theorized that it might have been used as a jail,

(08:48):
or possibly for some kind of ritual ceremony.

Speaker 1 (08:51):
But the real mystery the one.

Speaker 2 (08:53):
That's puzzled experts, since what discovered the site is where
everyone went. It seems that Scarabray was abruptly abandoned around
twenty five hundred BC. To this day, no one knows why.
There's no evidence of weapons or unburied human remains at
the site, so it doesn't seem like the inhabitants were
driven off by invaders. It's possible they fled to escape

(09:14):
a storm just like the one that uncovered the village,
or they simply might have relocated somewhere with better weather. Today,
Scarbray is a World Heritage Site visited by thousands of
tourists each year. You can go yourself, weather permitting, and
get a rare glimpse into the lives of Stone Age humans,
but you better hurry. It might not be there much longer.

(09:35):
Experts worry that due to climate change, the site is
at risk of being lost forever. As the sea levels rise,
chances increased that a powerful storm like the one experienced
by William Watt could wipe Scarabray off the face of
the Earth, and to lose it like that would be
both ironic and deeply tragic. Scar Obray was preserved and

(09:55):
hidden by nature for over five thousand years, and if
we're not careful, it could all be gone in an instant.
I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet
of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn
more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com.

(10:17):
The show was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership
with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show
called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show,
and you can learn all about it over at the
Worldoflore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.