Explorers dropped a GoPro into America's deepest pit, and the footage is giving people chills

For most people, standing at the edge of a dark, subterranean void is the stuff of nightmares. For the @ActionAdventureTwins, it is just a Tuesday.

In a video that has racked up hundreds of thousands of views, the YouTube duo (James and Edward) teamed up with fellow explorers Nate and Ben to capture footage of one of the most intimidating geological features in the United States. They took a GoPro camera, attached it to a long rope, and lowered it into the "Fantastic Pit."

Located inside Ellison's Cave in Northwest Georgia, the Fantastic Pit is not just a hole in the ground. It is the deepest unobstructed underground pit in the contiguous United States, featuring a vertical drop of 586 feet. To put that in perspective, that is nearly twice the height of the Statue of Liberty.

"We're gonna rappel down like, 128 feet, and we're gonna see the deepest cave in America, and we're gonna drop a GoPro down it," one of the twins explained at the start of the video.

After securing their position at the rocky mouth of the pit, surrounded by damp soil and jagged rock, they began the descent.

The resulting footage is a dizzying, claustrophobic journey into the earth. As the camera spins on its tether, it captures dust motes dancing in the beam of the light and the slick, craggy limestone walls passing by. The deeper it goes, the more the audio transforms, shifting from the clear sounds of the surface to a muffled, echoing atmosphere that many viewers found deeply unsettling.

At one point, the camera passes a subterranean waterfall, the water crashing down into the darkness alongside the lens.

A subterranean waterfallCanva

Finally, at a depth of 714 feet below the surface, the camera hits the bottom. It flashes across the bedrock, revealing a mound of stones and pebbles that have fallen from above over the centuries.

The retrieval was just as tense as the drop. As they winched the camera back up, the line nearly became entangled in their drill axle, threatening to leave the GoPro stranded in the abyss forever.

"I don’t know what this footage looks like but I am just surprised we got the GoPro back," one explorer admitted.

The comment section on YouTube reflected the collective anxiety of the internet.

“I’m not going to lie, when it got to the bottom I was anxious for a second. I saw one of those white rocks and was like... omg is that a ghost,” user @bombud1 wrote.

Another user, @trilfiger448, noted the audio specifically: “The muffled descending sound was terrifying! And the spinning...I was just waiting for something to jump-scare me.”

While the footage was enough to scare off most casual viewers, it wasn't enough to scare off the twins. In November 2023, they returned to Ellison's Cave but this time, they didn't just drop a camera. They rappelled down the terrifying pit themselves.

Fantastic Pit, Ellison's Cave, ActionAdventureTwins, GoPro cave video, deepest pit in US, caving, spelunking, viral video, Georgia caves, underground exploration wYouTube

This article originally appeared last year.