Introducing: ‘Where Did Everyone Go?’ Ukraine’s Secret Catacombs
36:27 Share

Thanks to IP.

Learn more at phrma.org slash IPWorksWonders. Hi, listeners. Today, we wanted to bring you an episode from a brand new podcast from the Like A Shot Network. Where did everyone go? Histories of the abandoned. Hear from historian Sasha Auerbach and comedian Tom Ward as they reveal the incredible stories behind fascinating abandoned places around the world. We hope you enjoy this episode.

So today we're going underground into the largest man-made network of tunnels anywhere on earth. It's so vast and mysterious that no one's managed to successfully map the whole thing. Many people have been lost down there, fatally. And this still happens today. Lewis, our producer, went down there, but unfortunately he returned. And we'll be hearing more from him later because we can't avoid it.

These tunnels have been the scene of some incredible events in history, from the hiding of a solid gold model of the Titanic to one of the most chilling and unbelievable missions of the Second World War. The story about catacombs is amazing. Get it? Amazing? I made it. Yeah, nice. Yeah, very good.

Well, it sounds like a place with a lot of stories to tell. This is Where'd Everyone Go? with me, Sasha Aravak. And me, Tom Ward. A journey into the weird history of abandoned places. So where exactly is it? Well, we're on the banks of the Black Sea in the southern Ukrainian city of Odessa. Okay, and the video is now up so you can see there that Odessa has a lot of grand buildings made of a type of gold-colored stone.

lots of wide boulevards and nice looking lovely looking squares. They're amazing aren't they? They're beautiful. Amazing. Amazing yeah yeah yeah. I'll keep trying that one. I got it the first time. There's a structure that at first glance looks like an unremarkable shed or a garage and inside there are stairs going deep down into this insane underground labyrinth. Yeah and then there's these tunnels that seem to go on forever.

All quite narrow and twisting and turning to who knows where. And there's some clues and artifacts left behind here and there. Some old military helmets. There's also a radioactive sign and gas mask. That can't be a good sign. These are the Odessa Catacombs. A true man-made wonder. Okay, so who originally built these Odessa Catacombs and why? It's an ama... No, I'm not going there again. It's a great story.

The city of Odessa owes its very existence to one of the world's most iconic female leaders, Catherine the Great. She wanted to build a new port city to open up the south of the Russian Empire to commerce. And because with access to the Black Sea, you can also get to the Mediterranean through the Istanbul Strait and then the rest of the world, this was a great place to put that city.

Okay, so this was when Ukraine was under Russian governance. What era are we talking here? Well, the Russian Empire took control of most of the Ukraine through various wars and treaties in the 1700s, and Our Lady, Catherine the Great, oversaw the capture and transformation of Odessa in the year 1794.

Okay, so Putin isn't treading any new ground right now. Well, depends on who you ask about that. It's a bit of revisionist history to say, oh, Ukraine was always part of Russia. I mean, you know, the Russian Empire took it over through military force. Okay. But there was a problem building a city here, a severe lack of trees in the area.

Because a plentiful supply of local wood is very important if you want to build a city back in the 18th century. Most Russian cities were built of wood, which is why, for example, Napoleon could burn down parts of Moscow. Though actually the Muscovites burned down part of Moscow when Napoleon invaded. So with no timber available, they turned to the ground beneath them.

which is a type of limestone that is great for building with. And they go into overdrive, digging it up to build this new city. Okay. And there was I quarried that they wouldn't have the resources to build a city. Okay, I have to admit that one's better than amazing. So you can't just leave holes in the ground. I'm guessing that's not a way to...

to operate? No, no, no. So instead what you end up with is these tunnels with frequent twists and turns because when miners are cutting rock they're chasing the strong sections, right? And if they hit a section with cracks they know that section's weak so they change direction and this happened a lot. There's also fewer straight lines if you look at this because that's much safer when you're digging, less chance of a kind of widespread collapse. And another reason it's such...

maze, I'm not gonna make the pun again, it's a maze down there, is that the digging was unregulated. So anyone could have a dig wherever they wanted. Wow. I mean unregulated digging, you're asking for trouble really aren't you? Yeah. It's not a good system. You always need to have a safety officer and a bunch of regulations and then regulations to regulate the regulations. Yeah, some people with like nasal flat voices coming in. Excuse me there, can I just check that you have permission to create that quarry there? Are you making your own maze?

Do you have a map of it? Where will it lead? Yeah, and you just bribe them with vodka too, so that's not going to improve the quality of digging either. Yeah, I'd like to say thank you for the gift that you gave me there. I'll turn a blind eye on this one occasion, but please try to be careful when milled in colonies. So... But in Russian. But in Russian. Do you think they have middle management nasal-voiced people in Russia, or is that just in English? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Every place has middle managers. How can you run a modern society without the middle arbeiter? Right. So...

Try to take a guess how big these are. Give me a number in like hundreds of miles. I'm going to say 200 miles. Not even close. These catacombs are estimated to be 1500 miles across multiple different levels. Now let me put that into context for you. Paris has catacombs that are about 150 maybe 200 miles.

in length. Rome, a bit longer, maybe 300 miles. So the ones in Odessa are three times the length of the Rome and Paris tunnels combined. That's huge. Yeah. And, you know, if you get bored, don't think you're going to like text your friends because there's no mobile phone connection, no radio communication, no GPS. And to make it better,

pitch dark and absolutely silent. So the infrastructure that these guys came up with was pretty poor not to have any GPS, any signal down there, no light bulbs. Well, you know, what was it like when they were digging these things out in the 19th century? The most sophisticated form of communication is shouting real loud. Or pigeons, which also get lost because it's dark. Yeah, and they probably get a bit scared down there as well, like we would. Yeah, I'd be freaking terrified. Let's ask Lewis what it was like.

It was terrifying, yeah. So I was following this guide, and he's only about two paces in front of me, but if he went round a corner, the light doesn't travel, the sound doesn't travel, and I was lagging behind a bit once.

and I don't know why, I was just looking at something on the walls, and I looked up, and I had that fear, that feeling of, I can't see him, I can't hear him. It was absolutely, but then you turn a corner, you just about see a glimpse of light, but it's that, not being able to hear, it's the sensory deprivation, it's... Why didn't he have a torch? Well, no, we both had torches. I think, oh no, he did play a game once where we all turned our torches off. Right. And experienced absolute darkness, which is again, something that I've never experienced. It was...

It was crazy. But yeah, I learned from that mistake of not staying close to him. Not to that again. Lewis, can I ask a question and I want an honest answer? Did a little weed come out? Or worse? A little of my mind came out just hearing about it. My heart rate went up a little bit. Like, okay, where is he? Where is he? And you just go in one direction and you just see him again or hear him again. And you're like, whew. It does explain Lewis's personality as a kind of...

overly present now, isn't he? Just in case the lights go off. He needs to know where everything is in the room. He always carries a torch now. Where are the light switches? He's not just happy to see us. That's a flashlight in his pocket. Right. Just in case. Nice. Yeah, that sounds absolutely horrific. And what, you say 1,500 miles? 1,500 miles. That's a long way. That's 500 miles further than the Proclaimers were willing to walk for their lady luck. And that was a long way. That's a good pop star reference. I'm impressed.

So, the authorities try to control access to this obviously extremely dangerous locale, but there are apparently over 800 points where you can get into these things. And some of the places are like the garage that we saw in the video at the start. People get down there no matter what you try to do and yeah, some of them died because they can't find their way out. But I'm going to tell you a happier story, something that happened recently.

Three guys decided that they're going to go on a little bender away from the wives. They get a couple of bottles of vodka and some food. They go down into the catacombs. And a few hours later, their wives realize something's wrong. Where are our husbands? So they go out to the pub themselves and no one does anything for a week. Now, actually, they genuinely get upset. And they ring the emergency services and a rescue operation commences.

Now, the air in the catacombs is really clean and fresh. No pollution. But how are they going to find these guys, right? It turns out one of the rescuers had a really keen sense of smell and he sensed the vodka.

And he follows this trail of vodka like a sniffer dog. He tracks them down. He finds one of them lying on the floor, shivering, but crucially alive. Yeah, you can't shiver while you're dead. No, dead people don't shiver. No, as they say, I'll shiver when I'm alive. I'm surprised to hear that the air quality was clean and fresh down there because I would have imagined kind of dank air.

kind of dirty, sewer-y smell for some reason. You expect that when you go underground? You don't expect it to be clear and fresh? You'd think if it was, for example, if it was natural caves, it's more likely they'd be much older and you'd get water coming in. I mean, I can't say for sure. I would guess that there, though, you know, Odessa is on the

shore of the Black Sea my guess is these aren't below the water level because then they would they would flood okay but you know these guys look I mean when you look at look at the images of it these guys knew what they were doing I mean these are solidly built catacombs yeah

So the guy could smell out the vodka. He found the guys. The wives, well, saved their life, basically, which is nice. Would your ex-wife, one of your ex-wives, would they have come looking for you, do you think? I have no doubt they would have left me there to die. Mm-hmm.

In fact, they might have just pushed me down there. Yeah. Go and think about what you've done. Sit in the infinite darkness. You ruminate on your sins, young man. You want to know how I feel when I see you when you come home from work? Sash, go into this 1,500-mile room full of darkness. My whole life is a dark, silent catacomb.

Now, here's a funny thing, and I'm sure with your deep knowledge of catacombs, you've already detected the problem with calling them catacombs. Yeah, because that's for burying the dead, isn't it? Skeletons and bones and all that sort of stuff. Exactly, exactly. So technically, these are not catacombs at all. Okay, so why are they called that? Yeah.

What happened was one of the first mayors of Odessa was French. And when he went down into the tunnels, he was like, oh, these are just like the Paris catacombs. And the name stuck. Okay. That's typical French arrogance, isn't it? Well, you know... It looks like something I know. You have to admit that catacombs sounds much more sensational and romantic than, oh, this looks like...

Weird tunnels. Underground series of quarries and... Yeah. Yeah, it doesn't roll off the tongue. Unregulated digging. Yeah. Gone mad. Yeah. If we had called this episode Holes Under Odessa, I don't think many people would be interested, but the Odessa Catacombs. There's a nice ring to it. It does sound nice. It does sound nice. Okay. So...

Would they have been used by smugglers? Is that fair to say? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. They actually had an infamous scam down here involving expensive French perfume.

I mean, isn't all perfume a scam? I thought you were going to say, isn't all perfume expensive? I mean, well, it is. I mean, even a £10 bottle is expensive considering what it is. Have you had a lot of experience buying perfume? I mean, yeah, men's version. Maybe if I had bought my wives more perfume, they wouldn't try to shove me down tunnels. Yeah, maybe. Live and learn, live and learn. Yeah. Well, this scam is actually pretty clever, I think.

The fraudsters would buy expensive French perfumes, take them down to the catacombs, unpack the boxes, and replace them with the exact same weight in stones. They take them back to the seller, claiming that they were now bankrupt and needed to return the boxes of perfume.

A daughter of one of the scammers would distract the merchants, giving the fraudsters time to flee before the fake sellers now realized the perfume was gone and they had just paid once again for boxes full of stones. There's a lot to unpack there, isn't there? Yeah. Ironically. I mean, first of all, why the hell...

Were they not unpacking the perfume before they gave the refund? That's just standard good practice. Open the box, have a little glance. Second of all, what was this distraction technique? I'm assuming the feminine element is relevant there because there's a girl, they've sent a woman in. Yeah. So what, she's just sort of flirting at the desk while they're... I mean... Ah, so when do you knock off? These are French perfume sellers, so they probably all think they're quite Romeos and...

I don't know. You got to keep your mind on your money and your money on your mind. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, absolutely. And also, but claiming to be bankrupt is pretty intense as well. I mean, I don't know if that would work now if you took something back on a Monday. You ever done that thing where you buy a top, but you know you're going to take it back so you keep the label on and you wear it all weekend for a big sesh?

And then on Monday, you just take it back and say, I'm sorry it didn't fit, but it stinks. It's covered in booze. Is that why the thing that I bought most recently at J.Crew smelled so bad? It's actually smelled specifically of Tom. Yeah. You wore it on one of your wild weekends. Oh, yeah. J.Crew is my brand. But yeah, it sounds a bit intense. It sounds all quite sort of slapstick. Can you mark your return labels now so at least I don't end up buying your cast-offs? Yeah, my boozy weekenders.

Now, in all fairness, the authorities did try to fight back. In 1871, a special group made up of over 300 military and police officers was set up to try and police the tunnels. Now, it sounds like a lot, 300 guys, but come on, we're talking about 1,500 miles of tunnels with something like 800 separate entrances. Yeah. They did discover passages that extended out to the sea where the smugglers' boats were moored, and there were thieves' caches hidden under the crypts of a cemetery.

There's really no end to this riddle, is there? I mean, they're pretty clever smugglers. You gotta give them props for that. Yeah, it's a perfect smuggling location. These aren't like your shirt scam. Like, this is pretty intelligent. Yeah, this is a full-scale operation. Yeah, they're planned. Now, that's all good, but are you ready for a legend about something really valuable that is apparently still hidden in the catacombs somewhere and it's led to hundreds of people over the years going to extreme lengths to find it? I'm not ready. I couldn't give a shit.

I almost want to warn our viewers like please do not buy a ticket to Odessa if you go look for this thing because I'm kind of tempted. It sounds really valuable and just really cool. So what is it? A two, what did you say? Well, I'll tell you. I'll tell you. It is, hold on to your soon to be returned shirt, a solid gold model of the Titanic weighing about four pounds. Okay. Pretty nice. Pretty nice. I mean four pounds of gold alone is worth a lot but now it's a model of the Titanic. Yeah.

So here's the story. Apparently a survivor of the Titanic who lived in Odessa had this model made so that he could be reminded of his good fortune that he survived this terrible accident. But Russian Revolution comes along, the Bolshevik Revolution, and him being a rich person he has to flee and instead of risking it being stolen or confiscated he hides it somewhere in the catacombs.

But, the dumb donkey, when he comes back, he can't remember where he hid it. Yeah. That's a very stupid place to hide a two kilo... What is it? Four? Four pounds. Four pounds. Two kilograms or four pounds for our American listeners. Yeah, that's... Why don't they send the wives down? Or the guy that smelt the men. Maybe there's like a... A gold sniffer? They can smell other stuff. And we're back on My First Wife again.

I smell gold. There must be an AI or something. There must be like an AI that can spot gold. Oh, that's a good point. I mean, trace elements. Oh, see, now you're giving away our ideas, man. I had this plan where we were going to go and we were going to find the statue. Yeah, us two on a heist. Tom, shut up. Series two. Shut up.

We go looking for the gold. I think it's time for the World War II story, don't you? Let's move on. Let's move on. Yeah, let's do it. All right, a bit of background about what's going on in Odessa at the time. In 1941, the Romanian army, with the help of their German allies, attacked Odessa, which was in Soviet hands at the time, and they took it over. They lost about 17,000 troops in this battle, which sounds like a lot, but for World War II, it's really not that many. What followed was pretty bad, though. The Massacre of Odessa.

This was the Romanian army finding and killing just about every Jewish person in the city they could get their hands on. And about 30,000 Ukrainian Jews were murdered across just a few days. So, you know, part of the Holocaust. The Soviet army flee or are killed, but they don't leave entirely. They leave behind some secret special forces.

partisan fighters to make life as difficult as possible for the Romanian and German occupiers. And one of these groups hides beneath the city in the catacombs. And they'd stockpiled water, food, guns, explosives. They're ready for the long. How long were they down there? Two. And they were betrayed.

One woman from a surface team of these resistance fighters, for some reason, we don't know why, told the Romanian army about all of these secret Soviet counter-occupation groups hidden around the city. 13 people above ground were arrested and they blocked all the exits they could find to try to trap the underground team in the catacombs. Oh man, who was this woman?

We don't know any details about her, unfortunately. Was it the same woman that did the perfume heist? Maybe she just switched sides? She just loved a guy in uniform or whoever was looking hot? She might have been available for hire. Yeah, just a scammy, kind of untrustworthy woman. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. Hey, I just want to let you know there's some guys down there you might want to go and get them. What are you doing later? Oh, man. I like your sword. It is pretty villainous. Collaborator.

Now, remember that... We've all had our head turned, haven't we? We've all had our head. Now, remember, these are lightless, silent tunnels. So imagine what it's like being down there. Me and Lewis talked about how it's terrifying even for a few seconds. But these guys are down there for days. The days turn into weeks. The weeks turn into months. And after the ad break, I'll tell you where this all goes. Oof. Oof.

So stuck down in these lightless soundless tunnels no way to tell time going by These guys start to lose their marbles. Yeah, I get a bit odd if I if I'm not out of the house by lunchtime Do you know what I mean? I'll get a bit weird and some days I don't actually talk to anyone until like 5 6 p.m Yeah, and then I'll just ask for a coffee at a shop and I'm like ha ha I don't even know how to speak

let alone total darkness, total silence, you know. - See, obviously I'm a bit of an introvert, kind of shy, and it sounds appealing to me. I might set up camp down there. No one can bother you, no bills.

No one asks you to clean up the kitchen. No more lectures. No more lectures. No more of Lewis weeing his pants every time the lights go off. It really sounds pleasant. And those eyes that burn into you. More, more. Those intense red-rimmed eyes. No more. Come on. No lunch break. Next step. Come on. I see them in my dreams, man. It's really starting to get to me. Anyway, these guys start to go absolutely bonkers. They become so paranoid. They set on each other. They kill each other.

Wow. And after a year of this, there's only one guy left. And he spends a year down there by himself before finally he uses explosives to clear one of the blocked exits and get out. That's heroic. I mean, poor guy, first of all. That sounds like...

Very unpleasant year. Yeah, and you know, but he did it for you know for country and loyalty I mean brave dude, right? That's I mean that's a rough time. He's him and his mates have all killed each other Mm-hmm stuck in dark lightless tunnels for for a year over a year over a year He's been betrayed by one of his mates or the his girlfriend or one of his friends sisters or girlfriends and he's managed to find his gunpowder in total darkness and

Light a match. And not blow himself up, but get out somehow. Yeah. Well, he manages to get home, and his wife hides him for another year. Until finally, the Soviet army liberates the city. And then, like a good soldier, he goes straight to the Soviet security forces and tells them everything. He takes them down to the catacombs to show them the body of his comrades. And they shoot him in the back.

those motherfuckers yeah after all that time after all that time after surviving all of that he's shot by his own guys yeah one of the theories and it's a good history and i've got to say we don't have solid evidence about this it's just a theory one of the theories is that the uh soviet soldiers the officers didn't want any witnesses to this terrible story because

propaganda that they needed to tell about these trapped fighters was that they were war heroes. Right. Not that they went insane and killed each other. The real story only became known about 15 years ago when the Ukrainian security services opened some of these classified archives to the public. Yeah. It's just it's so tricky isn't it? War. It's like the rules don't apply normally. I mean when else do you find yourself

in 1500 miles of pitch black with your mates having just been betrayed. You're all killing each other, going a bit mad 'cause you're hallucinating, you're alone. You come out, your wife hides you in a cupboard for another year. Then you try and do the right thing. You go to the relevant people.

And then they've got their own agenda. It's all so messed up, isn't it? On the bright side, he might have volunteered to stay in the cupboard. I mean, it was a familiar environment by now, right? Yeah, he might have wanted that. And he had, you know, at least he had some, what would you call them here? Biscuits? He had some biscuits. Cookies? Cookies. Just push a cookie under the cupboard door every now and again. I feel sorry for this guy.

Yeah, yeah, me too. I feel like he went through a lot. I mean, I know his death was probably quick, but he didn't deserve to die after all that. He deserved to have a kind of second lease on life, didn't he? Be able to tell his story, be able to share that with the world. But that's not the way war works, is it? I just want to eat cake and watch reality TV right now. I just feel like I don't want to know anything else. Yeah. Well...

If you want to hear what happened to the catacombs? Sure, are they still there? They're still there. I mean, 1500 miles of catacombs isn't going anywhere anytime fast. Well, they're not just abandoned after the war. There is one more twist to the story. Remember the radiation signs and the gas masks from the video? Yep. Well, after World War II, we have the Cold War. And what do these tunnels seem perfect for? Being cold. Yeah, definitely that. But also...

shelters against nuclear attack. Okay, yeah, yeah, makes sense. There were about 80 built kind of in among these catacombs. Some of them big enough to house 5,000 people with enough food and water to hide them down there for four months. But not all of them are that fancy. Some of them just have benches and a handful of toilets, so pretty basic facilities.

They're very versatile, these catacombs, aren't they? Yeah, 1,500 miles gives you a lot of options. Yeah, it's like they're like the potato of underground-ness. And a potato is versatile? Yeah, you can bake it, fry it, make it into chips.

I've just been eating them raw. Have I been doing it wrong? You can have it raw. You can mash it. You can fire it out of a gun? Yeah. Potato gun? That's right. Spud gun, we call it. You can cut it very thinly and wear it like a shirt? That's right. Potato shirt? Yeah. It's gloves. Gloves? Oh, yeah. Like one on each finger, like potato hands. Yeah. Or you can use it as a pen holder. A pen holder. That's actually a good idea. Bookmark? Yeah.

Come to think of it, a potato is a very versatile... I'm just going to carry one around all the time now. Yeah, but I think these catacombs are very versatile is what I'm saying. They keep getting re-appropriated for...

Someone's next thing. And when you see these shelters, like again, there's a lot of variation. Some of them even had prison cells, which seems like a bit unnecessary given you're already down in this tunnel. What kind of crimes are people committing down there? Except, are we flashing? Stealing someone else's potato? Yeah. There must be a bit of fumbling. Is that probably likely, isn't it? Who was that? Speak! Is that a potato? Um...

Now, you can see the old civil defense posters that instruct the public how to calmly make their way down here in the event of a nuclear war. And one of them includes a picture of a horse...

With a gas mask on. Right. Couldn't look after the animals. Because you've got to... I mean, a horse is a valuable object and you don't want it to perish because of radiation. Yeah. I can't... I have a hard time picturing a horse walking around in these tunnels, but... I can't... How would the horse feel? Would that be an existential thing for them or would they just be like, okay, this is happening? I think it would freak the hell out, quite frankly. Yeah, I don't think they'd like that. The horses are not underground. Though they do use horses and mules in old-time mining, so... Right. I don't know.

I like the idea that the public are being told to stay calm as they shepherd them into the infinite darkness. Yeah. Maybe the horse is like a support animal. Yeah. The horse is to keep you calm. Yeah. Well, the horse needs a support animal of its own from the sounds of it. Maybe the horse has a donkey or a potato. Right. And it just works its way down until there's just one support being that doesn't have any support. Well, there's just the potato left at the end. Right. Screaming. All right. So...

This goes on until about the late 1980s, and then they start to neglect these things. And then when the Soviet Union collapses in 1991, they are properly abandoned. Okay. And that's the Odessa catacombs. Wow. So it's completely abandoned now?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, what are you going to use 1500 miles of kind of dangerous, silent, dark tunnels for? Well, actually, they repurposed in the Ukraine-Russia war. They used these as sort of shelters for bombs that were raining down Odessa from Russia. That makes sense. Right, there you go. I think it's crazy because Odessa, I've never seen it myself, but I hear it's an absolutely beautiful city. Mm.

But to think that underneath all that architectural beauty is this extraordinary structure that has all these crazy stories and somewhere in it a solid gold model of the Titanic. That's not there. Someone's got it and they're just not going on about it. Come on. If you found that, you wouldn't be like ringing the bloody Ukrainian Gazette. Look, I check eBay for solid gold models of the Titanic every week and nothing has come up yet.

I went on eBay last night and I saw there was a McCoy crisp potato chip for one million pounds because it's in the shape of a diamond. Someone found it in their McCoys and they're selling it for one million pounds. That seems ambitious. It's got 59 watches and it hasn't even got a nearest offer. It's a million or nothing. So you're saying you still got a shot at it? I put it in my watch list. We'll see how this series goes. That'll be my little treat to myself.

Embalm it so it doesn't go off. Then you can carry it with you down into the catacombs. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's mine. It's mine. I'll put some little lights around it so it can be mine. The diamond potato chip. My precious. Yeah, a little something down there. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm surprised this... I mean, obviously now it's being used as shelter, but I'm surprised it hasn't been developed. You know, it's very rare for anyone. Maybe I've been living in London too long, but...

Usually everywhere gets developed. Oh, if it was London, they would have broken every one of them into like, you know, flats, an apartment that costs, you know, $5,000 a month. Yeah. No bathroom, no lights. Yeah. No drainage. Yeah. Yeah. And people would be scrambling. They'd be fighting to get them. Exactly. It just seems like I'm so used to every plot of land being colonized. See, I think we're missing the obvious repurposing of these things.

Which is? The world's worst escape room. Yeah. Because they just like throw you in, shut the door and be like, escape! No one can escape. No one escapes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Number of successful escapes in the last month, zero. Yeah, we guarantee that you won't escape all your money. And you know some people will be like, I can do it. I'm a champion escape room guy. Nope. Yeah, just these lightweights. Just chuck them in and chuck a potato after them. Yeah, there you go. Some provisions for you. Enjoy! Yeah.

And are all the Romanians gone? I would assume so, yeah. They weren't allowed to stay after that mess. And what happened to the woman that betrayed the guys? Do we know what happened to her? No idea. She went on to become Lucy Hopkins. Still wandering the tunnels looking for that statue of the Titanic, probably. Ah, yeah, yeah. And that's... That's that. If you enjoyed this Taster episode, please let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Search for Where Did Everyone Go on your favourite podcast platform and be sure to follow for more episodes. You can also follow the link in the episode description. Thanks for listening.