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| 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.
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