The Strange Story Of Oklahoma’s ‘Well From Hell’

There’s a story about a well in western Oklahoma that sounds like somebody was trying way too hard to come up with a scary campfire story.

It starts with a company drilling a really deep well, and when they find molten sulfur, they dub it "The Well From Hell."

The Bertha Rogers Well Near Burns Flat

Now, it is a true story, but it's less creepy and more interesting than you'd think.

This is the story of Bertha Rogers No. 1-27 well near Burns Flat, Oklahoma. And for a hot minute, it was the deepest well ever drilled.

It's almost unfathomable to think we can drill more than five miles into the earth. Or, at least it was back in the 70s. They reached a depth of thirty-one thousand feet, and that's when the Hell Well stories started.

During drilling, the well ran into serious trouble in 1974. There was a kick, pressures got extremely high, sour gas eventually reached the surface pushing sulfur out of the hole. The drill string was damaged, and thousands of feet of it were lost down the hole when it plugged.

That could have been the end of the story, but Burns Flat has another one of those Oklahoma twists.

Infinity One Oklahoma Spaceport

Today, the area is home to what is now called Infinity One Oklahoma Spaceport.

Yes, Oklahoma has a spaceport.

The facility sits on the old Clinton-Sherman Air Force Base, which started life as a World War II naval air station. The military eventually left, it was designated a landing strip for the old space shuttle program before it was retired, and with so much available space, the state turned it into a spaceflight facility.

The runway alone is ridiculous. It's wide enough to land smaller aircrafts sideways across it, and stretches more than 13,500 feet.

That is such an Oklahoma chain of events, and the irony of going from trying to figure out what’s underneath the ground to figuring out how to get to space above it is also a neat footnote.

The next time somebody tells you there’s nothing interesting out around Burns Flat, now you have the Hell Well in addition to Oklahoma's Spaceport... One and the same.