Jumping into the Rabbit Hole Known as Mel's Hole

Mel's Hole has even inspired an IPA from Ellensburg-based Iron Horse Brewery

   It all started with a fax sent to the host of a national radio program. On Friday, February 21, 1997, a man who said his name was Mel Waters transmitted an intriguing message to Art Bell, the famed host of the late-night nationally-syndicated show, “Coast to Coast AM.”

   Bell, who died in 2018, was renowned for his interviews with those who embrace the paranormal, the cryptozoological, or the just plain weird. Part of the reason for his popularity was that he didn’t talk down to his guests or callers no matter how bizarre their beliefs or ideas.

   In his fax, Waters said he owned property located about nine miles west of Ellensburg, adjacent to Manastash Ridge. On this land, he claimed, was a roughly nine-foot-wide hole in which he, his neighbors, and previous owners had thrown their trash for years. Despite having filled it with everything from their household garbage and broken furniture to construction debris and even dead cows, the hole never seemed to fill up, he said.

   Even stranger, when anything was dropped into it, even something as large as a refrigerator, there was no echo or any other noise.

   Waters said he tried to determine the depth of the mystery hole and once lowered three reels of 20-pound fishing line with a weight on the end (Waters claimed he was an avid shark fisherman, which is why he had the fishing line lying around). The line stretched some 1,500 yards and yet it didn’t hit bottom.

   Next, Waters said he bought bulk spools of fishing line and eventually lowered some 80,000 feet of the filament into the hole with 17-to-18 pounds of weight—and still wasn’t able to reach the bottom. After that, he decided to reach out to Bell and his listeners to see if anyone had any other ideas about what to try next.

   Waters also told Bell there was another peculiar thing about the hole, his dogs would not get within 100 feet of it and birds never sat on the stone retaining wall that surrounded the opening, which he kept covered with pieces of corrugated metal.

   After reading the fax to his listeners that night, Bell decided to call Waters to get to the bottom of the story (so to speak).

   “I’ve got Mel on the line. Mel is the guy with the never-ending hole and we are going to ask him about it here in a moment,” Bell told his audience. “First of all, Mel, thank you for answering, what are you doing up at this time in the morning?”

   “Well, after I sent the fax, I’m living in town her now because we had a couple of our buildings out there, cave in after the big snows that we had out here last month,” Waters said.

   In the course of the conversation, Waters revealed another odd detail. One time a hunter tossed his recently-deceased dog into the hole. Sometime later, he was hunting in the area and saw the same dog, wearing the same collar, now alive. The revived dog, however, didn’t recognize the hunter.

   “If you had a fatal disease, Mel, would you jump in the hole?” Bell asked.

   “I would . . . it’s in my will,” Waters said.

   During the rest of the show, Waters and Bell responded to questions and comments from callers. One caller suggested sending a person down into the hole in a protective cage “just in the event there’s some kind of weird subterranean thing eating all of this garbage down there,” while another asked if Waters had ever considered using radar to measure the depth of the hole.

   As if a bottomless hole that might or might not have miraculous restorative powers wasn’t weird enough, Waters, who would appear another four times on Bell’s show, later claimed that the day after revealing the existence of the hole on the radio program, mysterious military people had shown up on his property and blocked his entry.

   “The next day I go back there and I’m driving up to my property, and even before I get anywhere near the property I’m met with uniformed people telling me that there was a plane crash on my property and they have to investigate . . . and they’ll let me know when I can come back,” Waters told Bell.

   “I’m no dummy, I’m looking around and I don’t see any smoke, I don’t smell any smoke,” he continued. “I don’t see any evidence of what would be a plane crash, so I’m pretty believing they’re handing me a bill of goods.”

   From there, Waters’ story began to take a number of strange twists and turns. In one of his later conversations, he said that when he insisted he be allowed onto his land, the military figures began to threaten him, including saying they would frame him for operating a drug lab on the property. However, when they saw he wasn’t going to back down, they offered to lease his property for $250,000 a month, which he accepted.

   Waters said he used the money to relocate to Australia, where he lived from March of 1997 until late 1999. While there, he claimed he opened a wombat rescue sanctuary, in which he invested nearly all of the money he was being paid by the government.

   By 2000, Waters said he was largely broke and back living in Washington state. He said one day he agreed to help his nephew move into a new apartment in Olympia. On a bus trip back to Ellensburg, Waters said there was some type of altercation, during which he was drugged, then severely beaten, and, about two weeks later, dumped in an alley is a seedy part of San Francisco.

   In addition to losing several of his teeth as a result of the beating, Waters said that by that time he had also lost ownership of the Mel’s Hole property due to it being confiscated by the government due to work he allegedly had done illegally on the property, like installing a septic tank.

   Plunging deep into conspiratorial waters (no pun intended), Waters said the reason he was kidnapped and beaten was because he was wearing a belt buckle of his own design that contained an unusual dime he had found on his property. He said the coin was a 1943 Franklin D. Roosevelt dime, which could not have existed because the former president didn’t die until 1945—and the first official Roosevelt dime wasn’t minted until January 1946.

   Pressed to explain how such a coin could exist, Waters said he didn’t know but wanted to mention it because he had found it, and nine others like it, near the hole. He had made belt buckles with the coins and sold all of them, except for the one he had been wearing, which was stolen when he was kidnapped.

   In 2002, Waters also claimed that if listeners would go to Microsoft’s Terra Server website (which contains satellite images from all over the world), the Mel’s Hole property “has been expunged.” He told Bell that when you search for Ellensburg, then zoom out to his property, it only appears as a blank space on the satellite image. Unfortunately, we can’t check this out since the Terra Server site is no longer in operation.

   And with that piece of information, Waters was gone. He never again called into the radio show or made any other kind of public statement.

   In 2001, a Cle Elum man named Gerald Osbourne, who called himself by his spiritual name, Red Elk, called Bell to talk about Mel’s Hole. Red Elk, who wore a piece of metal around his neck (which he said was part of an alien spaceship), told the radio host he had visited the hole as a young man in 1961 and estimated it was between 24 and 28 miles deep.

   About a year later, in April 2002, Red Elk agreed to lead an expedition of 30 people to the site of Mel’s Hole. According to Seattle Times reporter John Zebrowski, Red Elk guided the party along a trail on Manastash Ridge before stopping before a “jumble of tree limbs and stumps off to the right. ‘Dig in,’ he (Red Elk) said. ‘I’m going to take a break.’”

   Zebrowski said other members scrambled over the pile but found nothing. Red Elk, who had abandoned the search, decided to lecture the group about a world he called “Inner Earth,” that was beneath the surface and inhabited, according to the reporter, by “giant lizards that make sex slaves of humans.”

   A few months later, Red Elk, who had been interviewed by a number of Seattle media organizations, announced he was no longer doing interviews about Mel’s Hole. The self-described intertribal medicine man, who died in 2015 at the age of 73, told Seattle radio station KOMO, “It’s far more important to seek your spiritual life. The hole isn’t important. Just stay away from trying to find it,” he said. “The government has it. It’s totally off limits.”

   Since that time, hundreds have listened intently to the Bell interviews, most of which can be found online, to glean clues as to the exact location of the hole and the true identity of Mel Waters (his name has never appeared in any local directories or property records). Some have organized search parties—none of which have been unsuccessful—to try to find the now-famous hole.

   In 2014, the late Mike Johnston, a longtime Ellensburg Daily Record reporter, interviewed a state geologist, Jack Powell, who said it was likely the origin of Mel’s hole could be traced to the presence of a real hole, an abandoned gold mine shaft, northwest of Ellensburg.

   Powell and other geologists also said a hole as deep as the one Waters claimed to have found would be geologically and physically impossible because it would collapse under the tremendous pressure and heat from the surrounding strata.

   In spite of such evidence, the Mel’s Hole story has refused to die. It appears in dozens of books devoted to local myths, legends, and mysteries as well as on even more websites dedicated to exploring paranormal and supernatural topics.

   More recently, Ellensburg’s Iron Horse Brewing Company has released a craft beer entitled, “Mel’s Magic IPA,” which features the image of a deep hole with a cow peering into the opening.

   In his 2014 Daily Record interview, geologist Powell said that a few years after Mel first appeared on the Bell program, he was contacted by a Seattle-based discussion group studying Mel’s Hole. He agreed to talk to the members and take them to the gold mine site outside of Ellensburg.

   Following the field trip, he said, “They thanked me . . . but they wouldn’t let go of the possibility of Mel’s Hole.”

   Given the continuing fascination with the story, it’s obvious they are not alone.

The Giants of Kittitas County

 

   In the 19th and early 20th centuries, hundreds of newspaper articles throughout the U.S. reported about the discovery of the skeletal remains of giants.

   Bones of creatures said to have measured anywhere from 8-feet to 20-feet in height were uncovered in places ranging from Tennessee (the so-called Williamson County Giant) to Nevada (Lovelock Cave’s Red-Headed Giants).

   This giant-mania even reached the Kittitas Valley, where, on May 9, 1912, a man named M.E. Root, who worked for Ellensburg contractor Edward C. Belch, made an unexpected discovery while using dynamite to loosen the hard soil—called “cement rock” in the newspapers—on Craig’s Hill during the construction of a new 24-room apartment house.

   After detonating the explosives, the noticed something white and shiny peeking through the soil. He leaned over to get a better look and was shocked to see a human skull half-buried in the rock.

   “No effort was made to molest the balance of the skeleton till later in the afternoon, when the small son of contractor Belch was told by his father of the discovery,” the Yakima Herald reported two days later. “With the aid of a pick, he uncovered the perfect skeleton.”

   According to news accounts, the younger Belch removed the bones so they could later be studied and identified.

   Word of the astounding discovery soon reached John P. Munson, a professor of biological sciences at the Washington State Normal School (now known as Central Washington University).

   A dapper man with a full beard and thick hair, Munson was a Norwegian-American zoologist and educator who had written a textbook, Education Through Natural Study, and served as head of the school’s department of biology.

   Eager to see the bones for himself, he visited the discovery site and while poking around in the soil, “unearthed [another] skull that was broken up by the pick,” according to the newspaper. He studied the bones and pronounced that they were clearly those of a prehistoric Native American.

   Munson noted the teeth had a “peculiar formation” and indicated he thought it was because of “eating uncooked foods, as was the habit of primitive people.” He noted the bones were “perfectly dry” and beneath a strata of shale rock that had preserved them. He estimated they were “many hundreds of years” in age.

   The newspaper said the bones were uncovered 20 feet beneath the surface of the hill and the gravesites had apparently been tunneled into the hillside.

   Dr. B.J. Moss, a local physician and the city health officer for Ellensburg, told the Herald that since the femur of the largest of the two skeletons was nearly 20 inches, that meant the prehistoric man was about 80 inches tall—or six-feet, eight-inches—because a man’s height is generally four times the length of the femur.

   The article also said that one of the skulls was unusually large and had an upper jaw with two complete and distinct rows of teeth in front, each set being perfectly formed. This was regarded as highly unusual by Munson, who told the newspaper that “he did not regard the two rows of teeth as a racial attribute, but rather as a freak of nature.”

   The Herald story was quickly reprinted and repackaged by dozens of other newspapers across the country. And like a game of telephone, the story was exaggerated at nearly each retelling.

   For example, The Morning Olympian noted, “At Ellensburg they have unearthed a primeval man skeleton with two rows of teeth, what an opportunity for the old-time dentists,” while the Washington Standard, also published in Olympia, noted, “The jaw bone, which broke apart when removed, is so large that it will go around the face of the man of to-day. The other bones are also much larger than that of ordinary men.”

   The Ottawa, Kansas Evening Herald published a follow-up story with the flippant headline, “Old Timer Must Have Been A Big Fellow.” The Herald article also quoted L.L. Sharp, chief of the General Land Office Field Division in Portland, Oregon, who said, “I just returned from Ellensburg, where I had an opportunity to view the bones. The skull jawbone, thigh, and other parts of the largest skeleton indicated a man to my mind at least eight feet high. A man of his stature and massive frame would weigh fully 300 pounds at the least.”

   Sharp noted that he was convinced the bones were of a prehistoric race of giants who inhabited the region prior to the arrival of Native Americans.

   Perhaps not surprisingly, the number of skeletons uncovered also grew in subsequent stories. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported that eleven skeletons of primitive men, all with sloping foreheads and two rows of teeth, had been discovered in Ellensburg. The story also said their jawbones were so large they would wrap around the face of a modern-day man.

   Anthropological archaeologist Andy White, who frequently debunks anthropological hoaxes and untruths, noted in a 2014 blog post that one problem with the Ellensburg Giant story is how the femur bone was measured.

   “If we assume that the femur measurement of 20 inches [as reported at the time] is accurate, it is possible to estimate the height of the individual using equations that are based on much more data than were available in the early 1900s,” he wrote. “It is reasonable to conclude that the original estimate of 6’8” was too high, as was the ‘to my mind’ estimate of 8’ provided by L.L. Sharp. The actual height of the individual was probably closer to 6’ or less.”

   Additionally, White said the double row of teeth may simply have been teeth worn down by grinding: “The phrase ‘double teeth all around’ was commonly used in the nineteenth century to describe individuals with such a high degree of tooth wear that it appeared as if all the teeth in the mouth were molars.”

   His conclusion was that while the Ellensburg remains were probably those of a “relatively large individual,” it was not a giant.

    “The individual may have had some ‘extra’ anterior teeth, but more likely simply had a high degree of wear on his entire dentition. This was not unusual among prehistoric Native Americans,” he added.

   Munson, who was a well-respected academic who taught at the Normal School from 1899 to 1928 (and was the namesake for Munson Hall), was present for the initial discovery, but it’s noteworthy that while he thought the teeth were unusual, at no time was he quoted saying the uncovered bones were from a race of prehistoric giants nor did he indicate that 11 skeletons were found. Those “facts” largely appeared in later accounts.

   As for the final resting place of the remains, that’s one detail none of the media accounts shared.