Waiting for the APOCALYPSE
The village of Ruinerwold lies in what the rest of Holland calls the “forgotten land”, a thinly populated expanse of dark forests and peat bogs, popular with hardcore hikers who provide most of the passing trade at Chris Westerbeek’s main street bar.
The young man who came in for a drink on a quiet evening in October clearly wasn’t a typical customer. “He said he lived locally,” says Chris, “but I know most people here, and I’d never seen him before. There was something strange about him. He had a beer and then another, and then he started telling me things.”
What 25-year-old Jan Zon van Dorsten told the barman would make global headlines. For the past nine years, he said, he had been living with his father and five siblings in an underground room in a secluded farmhouse. They had occasionally come out to grow food and gather fuel, but none of them had ever left the property, until Jan decided to run away.
Why had they spent nine years underground? The van Dorstens had been waiting for the end of the world.
Life in the bunker
Inside the farmhouse police found a staircase, concealed behind cupboard doors, which led down to a dimly lit chamber,
