“Peering Down The Abyss of Mel’s Bottomless Hole”

In the heart of Washington state lies a seemingly bottomless pit with a mysterious past, where dead pets allegedly return to life, ice becomes flammable, and even the government might be involved in keeping its true nature hidden.

You know how the Pacific Northwest has a reputation for weird mysteries? Well, buckle yourself in for one of the weirdest stories ever. And while we’re all familiar with Bigfoot and the amazing networks of mushrooms underneath our feet, there’s another mystery just as enthralling, and even more infamous: Mel’s Hole.

Mel Waters phoned in to a late night radio show called Coast to Coast AM and told everyone about this amazing discovery on his property: a hole that appears to go down forever. And he did mean, fooor-rrevv-verrr.

As it turns out, Mel didn’t just happen upon any hole. Local residents and Native American tribes had been aware of it for decades. They described it as a nine-foot-wide opening lined with brick walls that dropped about 15 feet before fading into darkness. Folks in the region nicknamed it “the Devil’s Hole” and, frankly, who could blame them? There wasn’t much warm and fuzzy about it.

The people who lived around Manastash Ridge during those days had a more mundane response to the strange pit – they started using it as a convenient trash dump. At first it was just regular trash, then it was larger items like broken furniture, then broken appliances like washing machines and refrigerators, and even dead pets… but for some reason, no matter how much they tossed in to the hole, it never filled up – not even a little bit, as people could still not see the bottom. They couldn’t even hear the thud of something heavy hitting the bottom.

Mel wasn’t the kind of guy to blindly accept a mysteriously infinite pit and move on. He wanted to see how deep this thing really went. A fisherman by trade, and armed with a ton of nylon fishing line (we’re talking thousands upon thousands of feet of it), he attempted to reach the bottom of the hole. He let down the line, reached the end, and attached another reel of line to the end, and so on until he had let out 80,000 feet of line — roughly 15 miles down — and still hadn’t reached the bottom. The pit was more than 15 miles deep, and still no bottom to be found.

You may have noticed how animals sometimes or see things that we humans can’t. The local wildlife wouldn’t go near the hole – and would freak out if forced near it. Mel’s dogs would literally plant their paws on the ground and refuse to go anywhere close to it. Oddly, birds wouldn’t fly over the hole. And the only evidence of animals near the hole at all, were a few bones strewn around the entrance – maybe or maybe not from the animal carcasses tossed in by townsfolk. Hardly reassuring.

Mel’s experiments only increased the mystery. If you were to shout into a normal hole, if it’s deep enough you’d hear the echo of your voice – but Mel’s Hole apparently never learned of that rule. Shout in, and you hear nothing return. Put a radio close to the hole, and you are no longer hearing local radio stations – you are somehow hearing music from decades past… but not just an Oldies station. All of the broadcasting seemed to come from decades previous, as if you were listening through a time portal.

At another strange hole discovered in Nevada, someone dropped a bucket of ice down about 1,500 feet. When they drew it back up, the ice was not only warm, it could catch fire. How’s that for an oxymoron? Flammable ice.

One of Mel’s neighbors said that he told Mel something amazing: after he had thrown his dead dog into the hole, he had seen the dog again, complete with the dog’s identifiable collar, running through the forest. Although this story was never confirmed by anyone else, it certainly adds another layer of Steven King “Pet Semetary” eeriness to the whole thing.

Apparently the government became interested as well. Mel said they attempted to keep him from being on his own land, by claiming a plane had crashed on it. When that failed, they allegedly offered him $250,000 to not only leave the land, but also leave the country. It was less of an offer though, and more of an offer he couldn’t refuse. Mel claims he accepted the deal and relocated to Australia. When he returned years later, his former property was being protected by black vans and helicopters.

But then the bottom fell out of Mel’s bottomless hole. When radio listeners attempted to fact-check Mel’s story, they found no record of him or the sale of his property. No one named Mel Waters had ever lived there, and there were no tax records for anyone by that name. Was “Mel” using a fake name? Was the whole thing made up?

A geologist, Jack Powell, had listened to Mel’s radio interviews and, at first, imagined the hole could be an old mine shaft he recalled from his childhood. But the alleged depth of 80,000 feet? According to everything we know about geology, that is physically impossible, as a hole that deep would collapse in on itself.

So we have two options remaining: either someone staged an extraordinarily elaborate and entertaining hoax, or some aspect of this location defies conventional scientific understanding. As with many mysteries of the Pacific Northwest, the truth behind Mel’s Hole is hard to nail down — but it’s certainly one hole, er, uh hell of a story.

(Source: Ranker)