Mel's Hole: The Bottomless Pit That Phoned Into a Radio Show

Long after midnight, somewhere on the AM band, a calm voice is telling you about the hole on his property. It has a stone wall around the rim, he says. Locals have dumped their trash and their dead animals into it for generations. He has measured it with fishing line, and he ran out of line before he ran out of hole.

That call happened on February 21, 1997, when a man identifying himself as Mel Waters phoned Art Bell's overnight program Coast to Coast AM, then the natural habitat of the American strange. Waters claimed the hole sat on his land near Ellensburg, in Kittitas County, Washington, up toward Manastash Ridge. It was about nine feet across, old enough that nobody remembered its origin, and apparently bottomless: he said he had spooled roughly eighty thousand feet of fishing line into it, weighted, without ever touching bottom. That figure alone should have ended the story, since it is around fifteen miles, deeper than the deepest borehole ever drilled. Instead it made the story immortal.

What Mel claimed, and when

Over that first call and several follow-ups, the claims compounded in the way radio legends do. A neighbor's dead dog, thrown into the hole, was reportedly seen alive later, trotting through the woods in its old collar. Radios near the hole behaved strangely. Animals refused to go near it. In later calls Waters said armed men had sealed off his land, that he had been paid to lease the property and relocate to Australia, and, by 2002, that he had been shown a second hole on tribal land in Nevada with even stranger properties, including a haul of ice that burned like fuel without being consumed. Bell, to his credit as an entertainer if not as a fact-checker, let the saga run for years.

What the searches found

The debunking was straightforward and, for connoisseurs, part of the fun. Reporters and researchers could find no record of any Mel Waters owning property in Kittitas County, no such name in local directories, and no candidate hole on Manastash Ridge. Jack Powell, a geologist with the Washington Department of Natural Resources who grew up in the area, publicly explained that a shaft of that depth is physically impossible: heat, groundwater and rock pressure close deep voids, and the Kola Superdeep Borehole, humanity's best effort with Soviet-era industrial backing, stopped at about seven and a half miles. The deepest natural pits on Earth are measured in hundreds of meters, not tens of miles. Expeditions organized by enthusiasts, including a group led by a self-described medicine man calling himself Red Elk, went looking anyway. None produced a hole.

What Mel's Hole actually is, almost certainly, is a masterpiece of a specific era: the pre-internet, late-night radio campfire, where a patient voice with good pacing could plant a legend in millions of ears at once. It belongs to the same folklore family as bottomless pits everywhere, from Mimir's well to the Devil's holes that dot rural America, updated with government men and burning ice. Note the folklore label; it is doing honest work in that sentence.

And yet the legend refuses to die politely. Ellensburg has absorbed it into local identity, tips about the hole's true location still circulate, and people who grew up in the valley will tell you, off the record, about pits on old homesteads that took whatever was thrown in and never filled. No one has ever produced Mel, which for believers is somehow the strongest evidence of all.

The jury below inherits the question. Readers have posted their own accounts of holes, shafts and places the ground should not have been able to be, and each account stands for a verdict of True, Fake or Not sure. Cast yours before you next find yourself alone with the radio on.