Tunnel Girl

Hi,

When I was a kid I got really obsessed with digging tunnels.

Growing up in New Zealand, this mostly happened at the beach – small tunnels dug in the sand. Small, but big enough so that if I ducked down, no one could see me.

At one point I got more ambitious, digging a tunnel in our backyard, down through the grass and into the dirt, eventually digging under our driveway.

My dad Alistair ended up lending a hand, helping re-enforce the damp soily walls with wood so his child wouldn’t get buried. I just remember loving this feeling of hiding away, under the ground. I remember how cool it was, and the smell and texture of the dirt. Other kids wanted to be up high, in treehouses. Not me. I wanted to be six feet under.

What I don't remember is why I wanted to do this. I rang my mum back in New Zealand to see if she knew. “You were about eight when you tunneled, so quite small,” Pam said. “No reason why. You just wanted to do it.”

I just wanted to do it. As good a reason as any. It’s been 34 years since I dug that tunnel in my backyard in Whangarei, Aotearoa, and I’d mostly forgotten about this particular phase of my childhood.

But it all came flooding back to me when I heard about Kala.

Chapter 1: Tunnel Girl

Kala first turned up on my Instagram feed about two years ago: It was just videos of this woman in a construction hat, who’d started to tunnel under her suburban home in Washington, DC.

She had a very specific, precise way of talking - flat and monotone - and not to stereotype people who dig tunnels, but she just didn’t look like what you'd expect. She often wore dresses and makeup as if she was about to go out to a restaurant - but instead she was digging in dirt and breaking through rock with a pneumatic jackhammer.

Watching Kala's videos, I realised a whole fanbase had built up around her. Millions and millions of people like me who'd become obsessed with her process. Obsessed with her. Back in July I called one of her fans, Monica, just curious why she’d been drawn into these videos.

"I actually can't remember. I feel like I've always just known about her. You know, I live close to her and so maybe some of my friends who live nearby told me about her. And I just - I still don't really know why she's building it."

Monica brings up another aspect of this story that’s also intriguing. Because towards the end of 2023, Kala hit the headlines after announcing she’d never gotten permission to build her tunnel in the first place. 

It was a fact that left many of her fans like Monica shocked. They'd all assumed such an ambitious project was being done by the book.

"The whole fact that she never got a permit! I feel like as a homeowner, I know that in our county you have to get a permit to even change an outlet. And to think that you could dig a hole into your house and not have to ask permission is pretty crazy."

I suppose digging a massive tunnel under your house does raise safety issues. For one thing, you don’t want your entire house collapsing into the ground. There’s also this strange worry for the neighbors, too: What if she’s tunneling under the whole neighborhood? What if she's under my house right now?

The more you think about Kala, the more questions you have.

"So now she's digging deeper and in the latest video, I just watched yesterday, she said she'd had 12 dumpster loads of rock removed recently. So she's down there with jackhammers digging more out, and each dumpster is a couple tons worth of rock!"

As me and Monica kept watching the videos, so did millions of other people all around the world. All just watching this woman tunnel deeper and deeper. Kala calls it her "underground tunnel system" – and as I watched along, I felt the eight-year-old version of me waking up again.

I needed to see this tunnel.

Chapter 2: Layers of Descent

It was a five hour flight of Los Angeles to Washington, DC. I’d reached out to Kala about six months ago, and she'd finally agreed to meet with me. I knew she'd had problems with online harassment and in-person stalkers, so wasn't surprised the process took awhile.

I pulled up to her house at about 11am on a Sunday. The neighborhood was quiet and mellow – lots of small homes built on quarter acre plots with lawns and lazily planted gardens. As always in the US, American flags lazily flapped from a few of the porches. 

Kala’s house was down a long driveway, and as I walked to the front door, there were hints at what lay ahead. Power tools lay strewn on the path, and there were lots and lots of rocks.

And there she is at the door: Kala. She's incredibly composed, wearing a thrifted vintage dress and a small pearl necklace. It's like she's jumped directly out of one of her videos, and that weird parasocial thing happens where I feel like I know her, but of course I don’t.

She welcomes me inside, and gives me a can of flavoured sparkling water for the journey ahead. It’s a fairly normal house, nothing in particular to speak of, besides some diagrams and plans that make little sense to me.

“So this is the older part of the house. It was built in 1973. This is the newer part of the house,” she says in that flat monotone. As we step through a doorway, the style of the house changes.

"This is the newer part of the house. I built everything past this point myself, so I cut into the wall here. So yeah, everything here is completely new and you'll see the style is entirely different."

I hadn’t realised before now that she’d started building above ground before she’d gone under. “Yeah, so I pretty much started running out of space. So I constructed this,” she said, gesturing to the new part of the house.

"This thing is four stories. There's this one [that we're standing in] that is a partial basement, and then there's a sub-basement under here - and then there's two levels up."

In front of us the floor drops out, a dusty metallic staircase leading town to the sub-basement she’d just mentioned. A smell drifts up that is somehow both dusty and damp.

This is where things start to get surreal. I follow Kala down the staircase that takes us under the floor of her home.

There’s plenty of exposed brick, and just piles and piles of reddish brown rocks piled in the corner. There’s a loud hum, Kala telling me she’s installed a large ventilation system in her tunnel, to remove any dust and dangerous gasses. She learnt how to do all the wiring from scratch.

In another corner, I see what looks like a very industrial wheelbarrow, also piled with fresh rocks.

"So this is the mine cart that I use for getting all the rock out of the mine. It's a pretty powerful machine - this has been used to move 200 tonnes! All of the rubble needs to be removed with a dumpster. Living in such an urban area in Northern Virginia, there is no easy way to get rid of it. 

I work with a dumpster company. The dumpster’s dropped off for two weeks at a time, and I need to fill that 12 cubic yards in two weeks. And then they bring it to a local quarry that's been shut down, and they're filling it in with my rocks."

This whole time Kala's been talking, my eyes have been drawn to a certain part of this underground lair, an opening in the brick that descends down into the earth. This is what I’m here for. This is the tunnel.

"It goes down about 30 feet, and then you reach the antechamber," she says. I have no idea what an antechamber is, so I quickly Google it on my phone. An antechamber is an entryway or a small room that leads into a larger one.

I'm still not sure I know what it means.

Chapter 3: The Tunnel

After handing me a hardhat, Kala takes the lead and walks down towards the antechamber. It's a strange thing, descending down into the darkness of a homemade tunnel. Following its builder, I note this whole thing has been walled in with concrete bricks, somehow giving the feeling of it being 100% safe.

The ground is covered in shallow wooden stairs, so you don’t trip or slide. She’s run power down here, so it’s supermarket-aisle-bright.

We reach the end of this section of tunnel, and Kala shows me a hose system that’s got water coursing through it. Because of course when you dig far enough down, you tend to hit water. The pump system she's created is constantly clearing water from her tunnel system to above ground, where she says it waters her garden.

I turn a corner, and the tunnel keeps descending, much steeper now. I realise Crocs were a bad choice. There’s less brickwork now, and the rocks under her house are laid bare - rock that’s been there for thousands of years. 

I can only imagine how hard it was to tunnel into this. It wasn’t the dirt I’d obsessively dug into as an eight year old - this was hard, hard rock. And then suddenly the space just all just opens up in front of me, as if I've entered a cave.

There's a large, dark pool of water at the bottom, and Kala’s shadow is cast large on the wall of the underground lair in front of me. It's exhilarating, it's weird, and it's a little bit scary.

"You can see the different layers of rocks, which I like very much because I love geology. It is surprising how much dense rock weighs. 150 to 200 pounds per cubic foot," Kala tells me from behind.

It’s peaceful down here - but that’s not to say danger isn’t that far away. I remember one of her videos where she spoke about a fire breaking out - and I realise it was in the space we’re in right now.

"Yeah, it's a very dangerous type of fire to be underground in an enclosed space. Fortunately I did have a fire extinguisher nearby, and I was able to put it out quickly - but it was very terrifying.

I've had a number of malfunctions, or issues, or problems that happened during all of my projects, but the tunnel specifically included a fire that I had underground caused by welding sparks. Also floods caused by failed pump equipment breaking down.

And all of those have been excellent learning opportunities and allow me to improve my safety practices or to improve my process."  

Which brings us back to the why of all this. I wonder if she has a better explanation for her digging than my mother had of mine. Turns out, it's pretty much identical.

"And as a child I definitely was interested in geology and rocks and specimens and mining  - and I used to play games and build little mines, really little tiny mines. And I always liked digging."

She just always liked digging. She tells me her love of tunneling came back in adulthood because of the pandemic.

"I was incredibly bored, and my physical shape started deteriorating because I wasn't really getting a lot of exercise. I developed some arthritis and I was gaining weight, and I was like, ‘I really need a project. I need a big heavy project’.

It's good exercise and that's one of the reasons that I've been doing it is to keep myself physically active. It keeps me young."

Chapter 4: The Epic of Gilgamesh

I would argue that Kala and I are not alone in our love of digging. Historically humans have always toyed with the idea of being under the earth. There’s this book I love called Underground, written by journalist Will Hint.

In it, he writes:

One of humanity's oldest recorded stories, The Epic of Gilgamesh, which was inscribed by the Mesopotamians 4000 years ago on a clay tablet, is a tale of descent. Gilgamesh is travelling to the underworld to find the secret of eternal life. 

To reach the beyond, Gilgamesh, whose name translates to “He Who Sees the Deep”, must travel through a long, dark tunnel. It is an ambiguous tunnel, lacking any concrete detail, leaving us unsure if he’s moving through a dark passage in the earth or a dark passage in the mind.

Hunt continues, getting a little philosophical about it all:

Each time we peer into the mouth of a tunnel, or any other hole in the ground, we feel a flicker of recognition: we’ve seen this space in our dreams, on the edges of our consciousness. 

When we pass through this portal, we know that we’re leaving the clarity of the surface world, withdrawing from the linearity and logic of ordinary consciousness, slipping into the fluidity of the unconscious.

Psychiatrists have also weighed in on this. Anton Tölk teaches at the Sigmund Freud Private University in Vienna, and thinks tunnel digging can be interpreted as a desire to return to the peace and safety of your mother’s womb.

I consider ringing up Pam again to get her take on this, but decide against it. Some things are best left unexplored, even when we’re talking tunnels.

Whatever is going on deep in my psyche, I can hardly believe I'm standing a few stories underground at the bottom of Kala’s tunnel.

It’s cool down here. We’re totally removed from the incessant heat above ground. I inhale the smell of wet earth, and I know this sounds weird, but I remember exactly why I did this as a kid. 

It just feels good to be down a tunnel. 

I don’t know what else to say.

Chapter 5: As Below So Above

Emerging from the tunnel, we trek back through Kala's house to the backyard. On the way back through, I notice how dusty everything is. One of the downsides to having a tunnel under your house, I suppose.

Kala takes me into her backyard. It’s bright and sweaty up here, and bugs are biting my skin. None of these problems existed underground.

“These are my castle building blocks that I mined from a local quarry,” she says, pointing to a carefully stacked pile of very large, brick-like stones.

I realise the absurdity of it all: As she’s been sending her own mined rocks off to a local quarry by the truckload, she’s been bringing other rocks in. 

"Yeah, correct. Most of the rocks that I've been digging out from the tunnel are low-quality siltstone which degrades and weathers easily, so you can't build with it.

And one thing that I would like to eventually do is build a castle facade on the older part of the house.

And I was fortunate that a construction site opened up next to a nearby quarry, and I've been splitting all of the boulders and then breaking them down into small blocks that I'll be able to use for construction. So that's another second major project."

Next to the early stages of her so-called “castle facade”, she shows me the intricate "elevator system" that she’s constructed to get the rocks out of her sub basement.

"Most of the underground projects I'm sure you've seen - they use heavy equipment and hydraulics. So an unusual thing about this one is that I've constructed a lot of smaller, older fashioned equipment to handle the rock."

It strikes me that the throwback to older times sits with her entire image: The vintage dresses, the hairstyles, the pearl necklaces. This whole thing is just so uniquely her.

I still have so many questions, so we grab a couple of plastic chairs out of her garden shed, and go sit under a tree in her backyard. If my sense of direction is correct, her tunnel isn't too far away beneath us.

"Professionally, I am in the IT field. I work as a program manager.

I start working on [the tunnel] immediately after getting home. And I have a good four hours on it every day.

It's not very loud. The electric jackhammers don't put out that much vibration, and it's far enough underground that you don't hear that on the surface at all.

There is noise when I'm dumping the rock from the elevator, but that's like maximum twice a day, during working hours. And it's spread out over months and months and months. So if you came to this neighborhood looking for noise, you'd have to come probably a hundred times before you heard any."

IT by day, tunneler by night. Her job brings her no attention at all – her hobby has made her TikTok famous.

"I do get recognized a lot in public. I just went traveling across Canada a couple weeks ago and I was in the middle of the wilderness. I'd be at the side of the road collecting some rock specimens and someone would be driving down the highway and then they'd stop, pull over and say, ‘Hey are you who I think you are?’

Surprisingly, 40% of my followers on TikTok are not from the US, but I have a very large contingent of followers from Canada, from Australia, and from New Zealand."

I bring up the fact that she’s not your typical social media influencer. For one thing, she’s not doing makeup tutorials - she’s building a tunnel. And her presentation style is incredibly flat and deadpan - not your usual loud American presenter.

"I have always been very shy on camera since being a child, and I hated even having photographs taken, so it was very awkward to develop an on-camera presence.

How I navigated that was focusing mostly on the work, not spending a lot of time on camera, but doing voiceovers and showing the work that I'm doing, and then having small clips of myself talking - but maybe five seconds, not much more than that.

At the very beginning, I started developing a small but dedicated follower base of people who were primarily electricians, engineers, or people who are in the mining industry. And I was stunned at how quickly they found my channel and how quickly they were engaging with it. 

As the tunnel got deeper and the project was more sprawling then it started going viral, and that's something I did not expect - where there were people from all swaths of society that were suddenly engaged and interested."

Chapter 6: The World of Hobby Tunnelists

"I probably spent over a year thinking about it before breaking ground, because there are different ways of tunneling," Kala tells me. Before she started her own project, she was deeply aware of others doing exactly what she was doing.

"If you have solid, strong rock like I fortunately have, you can just dig straight into it and you don't need to worry too much about shoring. But if you have a lot of soil or sand or clay, it can be a lot more complicated

If you've seen Colin Furze in the UK, he has a similar approach where he builds it in segments and then he reinforces it with steel. So I was thinking, okay, I might do something similar."

If you’re into tunneling, you will know Colin Furze.

Furze started digging under his home in the UK about 10 years ago. His tunnel is a little too slick for my taste, and watching his videos makes you think you’re watching a home renovation show.

There are a tonne of hobby tunnelists throughout history, way before Colin and Kala came on the scene.

Starting in 1906, William Schmidt spent nearly four decades building a 2000 foot tunnel through straight granite in the El Paso Mountains. It sits on the National Register of Historic Places in California, and you can still visit it.

Seymour Cray, the so-called "the father of supercomputing" who created the Cray supercomputer, was also really into digging tunnels. During the 70s he built a tunnel under his house, saying somewhat whimsically, "While I'm digging in the tunnel, the elves will often come to me with solutions to my problem.”

It’s not all whimsical - sometimes it turns dark.

In 2019, 28-year-old Daniel Beckwitt was sent to prison for nine years, convicted of second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter. 

Daniel had enlisted his 21-year-old victim to help dig a tunnel under his house in Bethesda, Maryland. He’d made his tunnel-digging-slave wear blackout glasses, before driving him to his house where the digging would commence. When a fire broke out in the home, the kid was stuck in the tunnel. He didn't stand a chance.

News reports said the victim had worked in the tunnels for days at a time, eating and sleeping underground.

The simple fact is, hobby tunneling is a dangerous job. I keep thinking about the fire that broke out in Kala's tunnel.

"Primarily, I'm using electric jackhammers. Some layers of the rock are too difficult to break. And I got a tip from one of my followers very early on to use Dexpan expanding grout. And it is like a cement that you can pour into holes, and it will expand. And it acts like a slow, activating dynamite."

Talk of dynamite – however slow – has me thinking about what Monica talked about earlier, and those news reports about Kala being shut down for doing all this without a permit. 

When Kala talked about being an "engineer" in her earlier videos, people assumed "civil" or "mechanical". But as she told me, she's a software engineer with no qualifications to dig, mine or tunnel. I mean, what was she thinking?

Chapter 7: Internet Sleuths

It was 2023 when the internet started to turn on Kala.

"In the fall, the story started to blow up on social media way beyond what I was hoping for, or planning for, and there were people from all over the world very invested in this project. And there were a lot of amateur sleuths or other internet personalities that started digging and trying to find more information about the legality of the project and the permitting status. 

And I did have some people reach out to the neighbors and was like, ‘Are you aware what's going on here?’ And the neighbors are like, ‘Not really. Something is going on, but we're not sure what it is.’ And they were like, ‘Well, you might want to contact the city…’ 

So it was a neighbor who contacted the city, but it was encouraged by online personalities, out of state."

In short - as Kala’s reach grew, so did her popularity. And with popularity came criticism of her project which ultimately led to the city shutting it down.

"When it came out that I was building without a permit, there were a lot of people who came out negatively and there was a tremendous amount of scrutiny. Everybody was calling the city, and the city had to get their legal team involved, and it was just really scary. Everybody was trying to cover themselves because of the extreme negative scrutiny."

I wondered why people were getting so fired up over this. Of all the things to go after – why this one person building a tunnel?

"Building a tunnel I would hope would be apolitical and just something fun to do, but unfortunately the era that we live in now, everything is political and there is a political aspect to building an underground bunker - and especially doing it without appropriate government approvals and permissions."

Kala clarifies that she isn't building a bunker – she has no need for one. This is a tunnel for the sake of a tunnel. But her critics assumed she was a prepper, which came with other assumptions attached.

"That activates the libertarians that are like, ‘Yay this is great, stick it to the man’ and then the other side is like, ‘No, this is endangering the community and this is inappropriate and it needs to be stopped and it needs to be punished.’ 

So it becomes very political, and everyone is trying to scrutinize every single comment I've ever made to try to determine my political affiliation. 

I'm not very active on Twitter, but I liked two or three Trump tweets before, because I thought they were funny, and they made that into ‘I'm a hardcore right-wing extremist’.  

And that's another dark side of the internet that I found, is that in today's climate if somebody has the wrong political beliefs, they are no longer human. And it doesn't matter what bad thing happens to them. And so people will go after you really hard and they'll be like, ‘Well, it doesn't matter because this person is evil.’"

I asked Kala what her political beliefs are. She tells me she doesn't feel strongly about either political party in the United States. It's clear she wants to move on from this point.

A reporter reached out to some of Kala's neighbours, alleging that because many of them were immigrants and from low income backgrounds, they may have been hesitant to complain to the authorities about Kala’s tunnel.

"I do live in a predominantly minority neighborhood, and so there was this whole line of logic that this is a racist project. That it is being done purposefully in a minority neighborhood where people are not likely to contact the authorities, and it's putting all of their lives at risk. That it is creating these environmental health hazards. 

And then from that, it became a rumor that I was threatening to have people deported. And that never happened, but that was a rumor that went around and that got millions and millions of views. And I got so many hate comments, and hate mail, and people coming around and taking pictures of the house with bad intentions.

It was terrifying."

Kala hunkered down for a few weeks, distraught. Webworm has viewed some of the forums and Reddit posts about her project, and while there were some valid criticisms (she should have got a permit), some veer off into incredibly disturbing territory, attacking Kala's appearance and scrutinizing her gender.

While that was going on, Kala did what she always tends to do: She started on the logistics of getting a permit to keep building her tunnel. She did the maths, crunched the physics, drew up the plans, and worked with an architect on the final touches.

Upstairs, she takes me into a room strewn with gear and equipment. She grabs a big roll of papers in the corner and unfurls them – proudly showing me her recently approved plans.

Chapter 8: When Does A Tunnel End?

Now that Kala's current tunnel is above board, she's refining certain aspects before she gets stuck into "Phase Two". That will need a whole new set of plans, as Kala faces the challenges of digging deeper, and further out from her house.

I find myself wondering when all this will end. 

"At this point it's an open-ended project with a few closed ends. So I have a current permit that goes to the extent where I'm at right now. I'm going to finish that space and it's going to be complete. Then I plan to extend it with Phase Two. 

How far I extend it is open-ended at this point, because to me it is the process that is more interesting. The journey is more interesting than the destination. And I enjoy these projects very much, and I don't really yearn for them to be completed."

I tell her that beyond a basement, most home owners don't consider how deep they own the ground under their feet. She does.

"Theoretically there's no end. But practically you're not getting anywhere close to the [earth's] core due to the cost and the heat, and there becomes more and more hazards and complexity as you mine deeper. 

Water will be more of a problem. Toxic gasses may be a problem, and pressure in the rock. Stresses that are built up in the rocks become more dangerous at a very deep depth. 

And then, of course, there's all the ventilation, and the electrical becomes more complicated to get it very deep. Mine is a very shallow depth mine. It's only 32 feet in depth, and there aren't many of those hard rock mining hazards at that depth. But if I do go significantly deeper it becomes more complex."

Her initial plan is to extend the tunnel into her backyard, and go a little deeper. Kala pauses for a bit, and I think she's going to tell me more about Phase 2, or maybe Phase 3. But it turns out she has another thing on her mind, too.

"One thing that I would like to build is a tower, which I think is a perfect complement for a tunnel. You have a tunnel underground. You have tower up in the air. And I could do experiments up in the tower. Electrical experiments."

She laughs when she says "electrical experiments", but I'm not sure she's joking.

Before I leave, Kala takes me upstairs into a small room where she's been smoothing and polishing rocks mined from her tunnel. She sends them out to her fans, complete with a certificate of authenticity, a custom serial number, and her signature.

For someone who's built up a large following online – where currency is measured in likes and shares – there's something wonderfully joyous about sending fans a rock.

She selects a piece of stone and fills in my certificate, care of "Kala's Mining Co." She stamps the rock with a serial number, before carefully signing it, "Kala".

As I publish this piece, the cube sits quietly on my desk, and the eight-year-old in me stares at it, transfixed.

"No reason why. You just wanted to do it."