Wiki Wormhole digs deep with these hobbyists who tunnel for tunneling's sake

We explore some of Wikipedia’s oddities in our 6,941,015-part monthly series, Wiki Wormhole.

This week’s entry: Hobby Tunneling

What it’s about: An old-fashioned hole diggin’! By gar, it’s been a while. Since antiquity, men (and occasionally women) would rather burrow through the earth than go to therapy, as evidenced by the long history of hobby tunnelers who seem motivated by neither fun nor profit, but some compulsion to keep digging, usually without any sort of specialized equipment or outside help. Yet it seems to be a source of immense satisfaction. (Construction worker Elton McDonald was found to have dug tunnels in a Toronto park in 2015, and said in his defense, “Honestly, I loved it so much. I don’t know why I loved it.”)

Biggest controversy: Health and safety generally isn’t foremost in hobby tunnelers’ minds. William Lyttle dug a wine cellar on his property and having, “found a taste for the thing,” continued digging for 40 years. After a sinkhole and power outages, authorities discovered tunnels in several directions as long as 60′ long. Lyttle was evicted and the tunnels were filled with concrete.

Strangest fact: Even when hobby tunnelers have a stated motivation, their justification often shifts to allow them to keep working. In 1902, William “Burro” Schmidt began tunneling through solid granite to build a shortcut from his mining operation to a smelter. A new road rendered his shortcut obsolete, but he continued to work for 38 years regardless. 

Austrian Michael Altmann dug a cooling cellar for a café he was planning on opening, but when permits were denied, he kept digging, claiming he was now working on a fallout shelter. But even as the Cold War ended, Altman continued, even getting an explosives handling permit and designing his own drilling machine. He only stopped after 50 years, when he reached a block of solid granite and decided he was too old to blast through it.

Thing we were happiest to learn: Sometimes digging tunnels is therapy. Supercomputer architect Seymour Cray said building a tunnel under his house helped him think, and while digging, “the elves will often come to me with solutions to my problem.”

We were also happy to learn that some of these tunnels found a purpose. The wonderfully named Sicilian-American Baldassare Forestiere bought a plot of land in Fresno intending to plant fruit trees, but the soil was water-resistant hardpan and planting was impossible. He started digging tunnels in the hard soil to escape the summer heat, and discovered if he let in a little light, he could plant the fruit trees after all. Forestiere Underground Gardens still exists and is on the National Register of Historic Places.

Thing we were unhappiest to learn: The rich pay other people to work out their issues and don’t lift a finger themselves. At least, that was the case with John Bentinck, the 5th Duke of Portland, who hired workmen to build an extended underground complex under his Welbeck Abbey estate, including a ballroom, billiards room, library, and a 900-meter tunnel from the mansion to the riding house, just in case you didn’t have enough seething class resentment. One might suggest this was more of a case of expensive home renovation than hobby tunneling, but the Duke was a recluse who rarely saw people, meaning the ballroom stood unused, and the tunnels were mostly used so he could move around the property unseen. If this was all done for Bentinck’s own sake and no grander purpose, we think it counts.

Best link to elsewhere on Wikipedia: It takes a lot to stand out as eccentric among the hobby tunneling crowd, but Harrison Gray Dyar Jr. manages. Having inherited a small fortune, he spent his life pursuing his own interests, writing ghost stories, and studying insects. He was successful enough as an entomologist that the U.S. Army granted him the rank of captain in the Sanitary Department of the Reserves for his work on mosquitoes. He was also passionate enough about the subject that he was infamous for a “protracted, spectacularly belligerent feud with fellow entomologists.” Insects weren’t the only thing he was passionate about — he married music teacher Zella Peabody in 1889 and they had two children, but unbeknownst to her, he also married kindergarten Wellesca Pollock in 1906 and had three children with her. (He remarried Pollock legally after Peabody left him in 1920.) And that may not have been his biggest scandal—a truck fell into one of his tunnels in 1924, unearthing a collection of wartime German newspapers that led to suspicions that Dyar sympathized with the Kaiser. (Wikipedia doesn’t settle the matter, but Dyar defended his tunneling as a form of exercise: “Some men play golf, I dig tunnels.”)

Further down the Wormhole: Hobby tunneling has, perhaps unsurprisingly, spawned many urban legends and hoaxes, including an apocryphal story of a man who dug a tunnel from his bedroom to a local pub without his wife noticing. We at Wiki Wormhole love a good hoax, as the art of fooling some of the people some of the time invariably results in a good story, especially when the hoax involves an impostor. Convincing large numbers of people you’re someone you aren’t is nigh impossible in the age of digital records, but it used to simply be a matter of confidence and persuasion, and no one used the two to greater effect than Šćepan Mali, who bluffed his way into ruling Montenegro. We’ll visit his unlikely reign next month.