Mel's Hole Is Said To Be The Bigfoot Of Weird Holes
Mel's Hole Used To Be Known As The Devil's Hole
Photo: MIchael Hiemstra / Flickr / CC BY 2.0Though Mel Waters (if he ever existed at all) is credited with having brought attention to the pit, the legend itself began long before he came around. Local residents, authorities, and indigenous tribes knew of the hole for decades before Waters bought his property.
As the story goes, the pit was about nine feet in diameter, with walls constructed out of hand-placed bricks stretching 15 feet down before transitioning into dirt and darkness. Known popularly as “the Devil's Hole,” the locals all agreed that there was something rather unsettling about the hole's existence, but no one cared - nor wanted - to think too hard about what that "something" might be.
Manastash Ridge residents instead used the hole as a garbage dump and decided not to question the eerie fact that the pit never appeared to fill up.
If It's Not Bottomless, Mel's Hole Is At Least 80,000 Feet Deep
According to Waters's interview with Coast to Coast AM host Art Bell, once Waters realized that the hole wasn't showing any signs of filling up, he decided to test it. His plan was to bring thousands of feet of fishing line and a sturdy fishing rod out to the hole, add weight to the fishing line, and then measure how far down it went before hitting the bottom.
By the end of his test, Waters got more than he bargained for: The hole had no bottom. And if a bottom does exist, it's deep enough that the weighted line failed to go slack after 80,000 feet. Neither Waters nor anyone else has ever confirmed reaching the bottom.
Animals Generally Avoid It
Photo: smerikal / Flickr / CC BY-SA 2.0Some people who've approached the pit noticed something peculiar about the area's wildlife - or more aptly, the lack thereof. Animals would do their best to stay as far away from it as possible. Waters even reported that his own dogs refused to approach the hole. When he tried to bring them closer to it, they dug their paws into the ground in protest.
Other visitors even took note of the fact that birds avoided flying directly over it and no other small animals ever appeared near it. According to various reports, the only signs of wildlife were piles of bones strewn around the mouth of the pit.
Claims About The Hole Are Weird As Heck
After Waters allegedly lowered 80,000 feet of fishing line into the hole on his property to try and locate the bottom, he suspected that there might be something more sinister about the hole than its depth. Waters began performing a variety of other tests in an attempt to better understand this seemingly endless pit. When he yelled directly into the pit, he heard silence instead of an echo; and if he brought a handheld radio near the hole, it would play music that sounded decades out of date.
Further tests were conducted at a location known as the second Devil's Hole, a pit in Nevada believed to have properties identical to those of the Washington hole. When a bucket of ice was lowered about 1,500 feet down into the hole, the ice was brought back up - it reportedly felt warm, seemed to dry out the air near it, and even became flammable.
Mel Claims A Neighbor Claimed That The Hole Revived Their Dog
Mel Waters's interview with Art Bell on Coast to Coast AM brought the hole into public consciousness, and folks seized on one claim in particular. According to Waters, locals used the hole to get rid of anything from old equipment to cattle remains. But, apparently, throwing something down the hole didn't guarantee that it would stay there. During the interview, Waters claimed that when a neighbor's dogs passed away, his neighbor brought the dog to the hole.
The neighbor then allegedly told Waters that after he'd done so, he later saw his dog running in the forest, alive and well - and still wearing its collar. Of course, this hasn't been indepentedly verified by a neighbor or any other individual.
Some Locals May Believe It Is Haunted
One of the most skin-crawling stories about Mel's Hole details the fate of a sheep that Mel Waters claimed to have lowered into the pit as one of the many experiments he conducted. The sheep, like Waters's dogs and other local animals, was absolutely terrified of the pit and Waters had to tranquilize it in order to get it close enough to the mouth of the hole. Curious after hearing about the strange fate of a bucket of ice that apparently became warm and flammable after being lowered into a similar hole, Waters decided to do the same thing with the sheep. What happened to the sheep, though, was even stranger.
When Waters hoisted the sheep back up out of the hole, it appeared to have been cooked from the inside. Even stranger was that something appeared to be moving inside it, and when it was cut open, Waters saw something that he described as resembling a fetal seal with human eyes staring back at him. He immediately threw the creature back into the hole.
When he told the story to curious neighbors, some said that they too had seen a similar creature around the hole before. Whatever it is, it may be the only thing that can get in and out of Mel's Hole.
There's Another Mel's Hole In Nevada
Photo: Forest and Kim Starr / Flickr / CC BY 2.0Mel Waters's property in Washington is home to the original pit that spawned the legend, but it's not the only one. A hole that displays properties very similar to those attributed to the original Mel's Hole is said to exist in Nevada. According to Waters, he visited the second hole as well, and it was every bit as bizarre and fascinating as the one found on his property.
Birds of an unidentifiable species had been seen circling the Nevada pit, and when Waters attempted to shoot one down for study, he found that the bullets seemed to ricochet right off them. If bulletproof birds are any indication, the Nevada hole is likely hiding just as many supernatural secrets as Mel's Hole is.
Mel Waters Claimed That The Government Bought His Property To Guard The Hole
Photo: Matt / Flickr / CC BY-ND 2.0The alleged interaction between Mel Waters and the US government, if true, means that Mel's Hole is more important than even Waters himself realized. According to Waters's story, government agents attempted to prevent him from entering his own property, claiming that a plane had crashed there. When he refused to believe their story, they abruptly switched tacks and offered to lease his land from him for $250,000 on one condition: If he accepted, he would have to leave the country.
Waters, being in dire straits at the time, accepted. He then moved to Australia and didn't return for several years. When he did, according to Waters, government agents insisted that they had bought his land. Locals then informed Waters that the area around the pit had been guarded by black vans and helicopters since he left.
Mel Waters Might Not Even Be Real
Photo: James Case / Flickr / CC BY 2.0After Mel Waters's first interview on Coast to Coast AM, no one had any reason to question his identity. Then his story started to strike a chord. Coast to Coast listeners were enthralled by stories of the pit, so Waters decided to give a second interview. But the more Waters stepped into the spotlight, the more interesting he - and his story - seemed to become.
He had been featured on Coast to Coast AM several times before followers of the story began to search local records for his name in hopes of determining the exact location of the hole - and they found nothing. No property transfers had been conducted in the area during the time that Waters claimed to have sold the land to the government, and no one named Mel Waters had voted, paid taxes, or even lived there. Whether "Mel" was a hoax or a pseudonym, Mel Waters was ultimately consumed by the mystery of the hole himself.
Mel's Hole Is Geologically Impossible - Or Perhaps It Has Its Own Geology
Photo: Leonora Enking / Flickr / CC BY-SA 2.0Among the Coast to Coast AM listeners who took an interest in the story of Mel's Hole was a geologist named Jack Powell. After hearing Waters describe the characteristics of the pit on the radio, Powell thought he recognized the hole as being an abandoned mine shaft that he was familiar with from his childhood. But when Waters revealed that he had lowered at least 80,000 feet of fishing line into the hole in order to test its depth, Powell realized that the story was much stranger than he had thought - a hole that deep would not be physically possible.
Based on Powell's geological expertise, this can only mean that Waters designed a spectacular hoax - or that among the many mysteries presented by Mel's Hole is a localized geographical anomaly.
