They Said SECRET TUNNELS Don't Exist... So I Went Looking [13:56]

An Invite
[Music] Odd. [Music] Just been invited to the pub to see a secret tunnel. Now, if you know me personally, you'll know I don't drink a lot, and I'm not even very social. So, I am assuming this really is for something underneath the pub. Bring a torch and a crowbar. That sounds ominous. Two odd things about this. Number one, this pub is in my own town. Number two, it's only 200 yd away from my little studio. Okay, so while that pool goes off to the pub to go and look at the secret tunnel, this pool has printed a map because there's something I need to show you first before all of this for a bit of context and very good reason. Okay, so I printed this map of the town. It's from around 1890 to 1900. Now, I've done this because I've heard so many rumors of tunnels in this town over the years since a kid upwards, but are any of them actually true? Let's start plotting a few things on here.

Okay, so this is the pub here, the LardiCake. I know, right? And this is a location of the street that my studio is on. Wait, this is the very street that my studio is in. Now, this street had rumors of a tunnel under the town. And I've got a basement.

[Music] Okay. Well, it's just a basement with a toilet and there's absolutely nothing to see here. A couple of old beams. Okay. Back to this street very soon and back to the pub very shortly as well. You see, every town, every city in this country at one point has had rumors of lost secret tunnels hidden under the streets. Stone in Staferture and the secret passageways, Tim medieval secret tunnels, Guilford's subterranean world, Burton's Templar tunnels, Flowmere in Cambridge. This one even appeared in estate agents' listings.

The appeal of tunnels really is something else. An evocative image of a secret escape tunnel or smugglers doing their thing. And now maybe I can add Andover, the center of the known universe, to that list.
Two maps.
kay, the map here really is key. We have the LardiCake Pub here and we have my street right here. Now, before I embark on the pub trip, I want to mark every rumor on this town, a plot on the map. Let's note the rumors and then apply some logic. Okay. So, I'm going to use two maps. The rumor map and the actual evidenced map of tunnels under this town.
Rumours
Okay. So, the research was probably a bit easier than I first anticipated. Loads of articles, rumors of tunnels under Andover. The local newspaper was full of them. And then everyone was filling in even more gaps than I could possibly imagine. Next up, a car park to my southwest, maybe 200 yards or so. The George Yard car park apparently used to have this building in it. And there was a great article from David Borrett, local historian. And guess what? Rumors used to be there was a tunnel underneath it leading to who knows where. The rumor is now on the map.

So, as I was researching this story, a local counselor got in touch, Chris Donnelly. You may remember him from a previous video and he said that he had experience, firsthand experience of seeing a tunnel under the town. So I asked him to pop in and he brought with him local legend Iris Andersen too. Shades the hairdresser moved in there and there is Chris went down it. I didn't. I stood at the top. So in shade? Yeah, in shade by the time it was going to be repurposed and they were in there. They completely stripped it out bare right back to the bones. And um the we went through because Iris knew one of the guys who was doing it and he said, "Well, come through in the back. I'll show you this hatch in this tunnel." So he opened up this big wooden hatch on the floor and lifted it up and there was a little I think they'd got a ladder and he said, "Look what I found when we were doing this."

And it was just like an earth. Yeah. Um base. And I went I went I You didn't but I went down the top. No, it didn't go very far because I didn't have a torch and it was pitch black, but you could see it going all the way down. Uh, due west, Julie that works at the Heart Foundation, right? One of the managers in there is a cellar as well that goes right down. You can go down through there and I believe it goes the opposite way. Yeah. So, like they're meeting up.

So, I thought we were done there. Quite interesting, of course. But then Iris said this. Well, I know George that runs the shades the hairdresser. Okay. So, if you want me to have a little chat to her and say she did indeed get that invite. More on that very shortly. Okay. So, this is good. We're starting to build a picture of some of these rumors now.

Now, I found another article which related to two different tunnels also however under the high street. So, maybe just maybe we can start to piece some of these together. Now, this one is Full Tilt Secret Tunnel. Illegal cargo starting at the now Star and Garter heading all the way up the high street onto the upper high street via a secret tunnel where ill-gotten gains could be unloaded and distributed. This article cites the person went into a basement of Barker Son and Isherwood solicitors and saw two sealed up doors opposing each other.

Okay, so next up, the very street I'm on now. This was said to have a connecting tunnel all the way through it, probably up to the church. This is a really gorgeous old picture of said street. Okay, so here's a shot from the southern end of the street. You can see these two houses here are now gone. You see the lamp post with the lamp post position is still there. Now when they demolished these two houses, they found some tunnels under the street under those houses not roofed just sat with floorboards. Now here are the pictures of said tunnel. I will at this stage let you decide if you think they are secret unroofed tunnels in that all that would have been above them are just floorboards.

Now we have a load more rumors from all kinds of different sources. A lot of people talking about what they heard around the town. Now I'm not going to go into any more detail on those because there is no great detail. So with that in mind and that done, let's head to the pub.
Site 1
Now, I'm going to narrate a little bit of this and maybe fill in some blanks here because when we're at the pub, the music was quite loud and I don't want to get a copyright strike or whatever. So, first up, a huge shout out to the Lard Cake Pub and the landlady Faye. Hugely friendly place, dog friendly, and really welcoming. Link below. Now, Faye the landlady hasn't been there a long time, but she did suggest that the previous occupiers had said there was a tunnel down there in the cellar behind a hatch. So, she took us down into the cellar, some really steep steps and out the back of the main large room. Well, there was a passageway. Now, this led us into a large room. I say large, perhaps sort of a living room size. Now, this had been split into three more recently by these breeze block walls, which they had left slots in between. Now, it seems to have a set of stairs at the back, which would lead to the pub surely by going back up to the roof. Now, we scouted around and found nothing. No hatch, no door, no break in the brickwork. So, we assumed that was just it.

Spoiler alert, it wasn't.

So, I asked Faye about the breeze block and why the room had been split into three. No idea. She said, "I'm new here, but why not speak to Bob, the local up in the bar?" Now, this is Bob, lovely chap. Bob suggested that he had seen the tunnel with his own eyes. Staircase staircase. Yeah, used to be able to go there to the right. That's where the tunnel was. Look at the stairs. You look to the right. How far can you see? Actually become black.

Okay. So, where exactly did we go wrong? So, here's a quick diagram of the cellar and the room downstairs. Now, Bob suggested that the key here was the stairs. Halfway up those stairs and turn right. Now, the stairs went round to the left. That was a secret tunnel right there. Did we somehow miss this? So, we said we'd have a very quick pint and then asked to go back down once again.

Now, whilst we were having that pint, a chap from the pub outside, Phillip, asked what we're up to and gave us pretty much exactly the same account as Bob with regard to details of the tunnel itself. So, I said, "I want absolute evidence. Did you go down that tunnel?" And he said, "Yes, I did. I went 100 150 yards down the tunnel, faced towards the church but was destroyed by the roundabout that is there now. I think it was built in the 1960s." Now, he gave us a load of other rumors around the town that he'd heard about, but this to me was key. His firsthand experience.

Pint complete. Off we go again into the dark. Down the passageway, through the two openings in the new breeze block walls, and a fresh look at those stairs. Now, both accounts, Philip and Bob, suggested that the tunnel went at a 45-degree angle to the stairs as you look at them. Now, as you'll see, absolutely nothing on the face of it. But there was a gap under the floorboards towards the top of the stairs and over the brickwork in that direction. Well, could we see over that brickwork? Maybe this would reveal the secret tunnel. Turns out we could.

Now, it was really tight, very damp, and extremely dusty. But we got a few shots of what was perhaps another two rooms, but sadly they'd now been filled up to around 5 ft tall. We tried, but we just couldn't find any evidence with our own eyes of the stories from Bob and Phillip. Certainly to say it's not true. That was their own words and their own experience, which is great in itself. I'd just love to have been able to see it with my own eyes and maybe even put it on camera myself. I couldn't.

But now, of course, the big question. What are the tunnels on the high street? [Music]
Site 2
A huge debt of gratitude to Iris. She managed to get us an invite into Abacus Employment Agency at the top of the high street on the corner. And of course, a big thanks to Abacus themselves too for letting us have a poke around. Their basement was huge. So straight away we tried to do a 360 sweep. Now this cellar was interesting. Loads of segregated rooms and lots of alos that just stopped. Nothing immediately that gave us hope of any lost secret tunnels. Maybe apart from this one. We maybe thought this looked like a blocked-up passageway. Not sure. Really difficult to make any sense of it. What do you think?

Okay, so nothing concrete in here once again. So what exactly is going on here? So first of all, do secret tunnels underground actually exist? And I'm not talking about joining cellars. I'm not talking about bunkers or caves or ventilation systems. I'm talking about secret tunnels for sneaky illicit purposes.

At the start, you may remember I gave you a whole bunch of examples and I was a bit sneaky myself there because I did that for a specific reason. Every single one of those tunnels I mentioned at the start from Guilford to Burton and all in between have been thoroughly debunked by Dr. James Wright. You can check out his blog. I'll link it below. None of them, absolutely none of them stack up in the sense that we want them to. Do secret tunnels at town level for illicit purposes really exist at all?

So, Dr. James Wright, bit of a legend there. Buildings archaeologist has spent a lot of time debunking a lot of these claims of secret tunnel here, secret tunnel there. Suffice to say, his parting words to me were as follows. Every single settlement has tunnel rumors, but not a single story has turned out to be true when looked at by archaeologists. Essentially, secret escape tunnels or hidden access passageways are not a thing. Okay, so what about this studio that I'm in right now and the secret tunnel apparently went all the way up this street, East Street. Well, apparently that was quite easy to debunk, too. The pictures that we showed you early on, well, they were from the bottom of the street and they only went one house further north. They didn't go any further. So, it's kind of like one of when you have a set of terrace houses and their loft joins. They didn't even have a roof to that tunnel. It would have just been floorboards above you. So, can you even call it a tunnel? Sadly, not.
However
I had in my head, this is all a big controversy theory, unquestionably. And I just need to highlight the lack of real evidence here in my own town. It really wouldn't be that difficult, surely. But then I started researching this project myself in my own town. And I started talking to the locals in the pub, the counselors, and all of a sudden there's people with actual firsthand experience and their stories from seeing these tunnels. Well, they're hugely compelling and overlap says, well, yeah, it's all over and they collapsed because they built that roundabout and the underpass.

So, I sit here right now and I feel like I've got this decision to make. Forget all the rumors. Forget that my granddad said this, my dad said that. Do I take the evidence from the people at the pub as firsthand evidence? Can we say they exist because of that? Or do we have to say, well, we need to do more. We need to capture these images with our own cameras and our own phones in some form of photographic evidence. I guess perhaps I'll leave that decision with you in the comments below. And with that in mind, have you got tunnels under your town? Or perhaps if you check out Dr. James Wright's website. Maybe, just maybe, those secret tunnels have already been debunked. I've been Paul. I will see you this time next week for maybe more of the same.
YouTube transcript reformatted at textformatter.ai

Lots of words that say really nothing. Kamala approves. The thing about secret tunnels is that they are under the ground. That makes them hard to see. If you want to find them you have to dig. If you don’t find them of course it doesn’t mean they don’t exist. It just means you didn’t dig in the right places. So you have to dig some more.

Leave a comment below if you think there are tunnels under your town, especially if you live right next to the Mexican border or in Gaza. If you like this video, give it a thumbs up. Share it with your friends and subscribe to the channel for more videos as soon as they are released. Check out my merch too! I Dig Tunnels T-shirts are available now.

We have tunnels all over our town. it sets adjacent to Mexicali Baja California Mex. and they keep discovering new ones all the time. Active tunnels from Mexico under the Border Wall sometimes a mile into the U.S..

I have a secret tunnel of sorts in my own house.

It leads out of the basement/bomb shelter down a concrete tube (quite large; a person under 6 feet can stand up) to a heavy metal door that opens inward and then a set of stairs and essentially a set of metal storm doors well beyond the barn, probably 50 yards that can’t be opened from the outside.

Not particularly concealed, although it looks like an entrance to a root cellar or something.

The basement is huge and has tons of fluorescent lights and water.

My assumption is this was a “grow room” for marijuna. Or it could have just been an alternative exit if the house was destroyed.

I’ve heard that some of them are quite nice — conduit power for lighting, air conditioning, smooth concrete floor, the works.

Wow, what a find! Most modern tunnels (and probably the old ones as well) were built for some important purpose (like the steam tunnel system that heats the Michigan State U campus) and are not particularly decorative, but still interesting.

I crossed the entire campus west-to-east, and a good bit of the north-south distance, completely underground one night with some D and D masterminds. We weren't the first, there was student graffiti down there in spots.

My crappy GPA remains a mystery.

Ya gotta admit though that his use of a tommy gun to destroy that old poster of Aristotle made the whole thing worthwhile. It's not as if he destroyed his journalism career that night, he'd have to have been a journalist in the first place for that to have happened.

Geraldo really raised the bar for journalism that night and it’s been downhill ever since.

One of the chief drivers of England’s secret passageways, tunnels, hidden rooms etc. was the persecution of the Catholic Church that began in the 16th century under the Tudors. Priests and mass-goers had to operate in stealth or face severe punishment up to and including death. In the kiddie history books, Henry VIII and his daughter Elizabeth switched the country to protestantism, and that was that. But one of the great bits of “lost history” is the extent to which the general public didn’t comply... but because the noncompliance was mostly underground, it largely went unrecorded. Archaeologists have been stunned when they open up graves in colonies like Jamestown and find overtly Catholic artifacts despite such places having ZERO official history of 17th century Catholicism.

We have tunnels under the downtown main street of the Arizona town I live in. The town was established by Mormon settlers in the late 1800’s so it was supposed to be a dry town. The wild West being what it was, enterprising business owners built tunnels to secretly store and carry alcohol and other contraband back and forth across the street. I’ve seen the entrances to some of these in basements of the old buildings, but they’re mostly all walled up now.

No indication from the summary of WHERE we are talking about “my local town” made me think it was one of those made up stories. When I hear Andover, I think Connecticut. When I went to YouTube, it appeared that we are talking about England.

lol at GPA.

It wasn’t so much as a “find” as the realtor showed us. The builder of the house was odd. We are relatively near White Sands NM, so my assumption is it is an exit if the house was blown up and you couldn’t get out the normal exits.

Wife is convinced it was an exit if the DEA raided the place. Well made and has lights and doesn’t fill with water so I don’t care. Basically impossible to enter the house from that direction unless someone opened it from the inside, which was my other concern.

His accent and reference to ‘pub’ in the transcript served as a dead giveaway, imho.

"Here sleeps in peace a Hampshire Grenadier, Who caught his death by drinking cold small Beer, Soldiers be wise from his untimely fall And when ye're hot drink Strong or none at all" -- epitaph of Thomas Thetcher

"in case the house was blown up," 😀😁😆😄😅😂🤣

You laugh, but just watch our skies out here.

It’s not implausible. I’ve been seeing craft suddenly change direction (like 90 turns or spin and reverse) for a decade.

And some absolutely massive things that blot out large parts of the night sky and don’t make noise.

Given the acceleration, the energy at impact would probably leave a crater where everything on the lot had been. See, that’s why they call me Mister Sunshine! 😊