The year of the tunnel continues — only this time, we’re making our way down south to the sun-soaked country of Brazil.


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According to the Daily Mail, for over a year, a 71-year-old named Joao Pimenta da Silva has been struck with a vision: gold. This vision, which allegedly came to him in a dream, told him that he was very close to incredible fortunes. In fact, all he had to do to find this mystery gold was start digging.


And so, he did. Right through his kitchen floor.



What resulted was a 130-foot hole right in the middle of his living quarters, which he presumably had to navigate around every time he wanted to make himself a bowl of Cheerios. This wasn’t a cheap endeavor, either; he allegedly began the project at a cost of $14.30 per day, a total that rocketed up to over $100 once the hole got too deep to easily remove earth from.



Was it worth it? Well, how much do you like gold? No matter your reply, the answer is no. There are no signs that Silva actually managed to find any gold, and if you were one of the workers carving away at the tunnel, you were subjected to some of the jankiest, MacGyver-ish mining rigs imaginable.




“In the images you can see that it’s all very archaic, homemade, contrived. There's no fixed support structure,” noted local fire brigade second sergeant Luís Filipe de Miranda. “His struts for climbing up don’t have screws in the ground. He was descending on a kind of child’s seesaw, without a belt, without safety.”



The story ended, as one might expect, with Silva falling down the hole. “Local reports said the victim is believed to have slipped and plunged to his death from a wooden platform near the top of the hole as he tried to exit it following work to remove water and mud,” the Daily Mail piece reports.



It looks like the project will end following Silva’s passing. But who knows — maybe he was just a few feet away from gold. I say keep his vision alive and keep diggin’!