Happy end of January everyone! For today’s Curse-O-Meter readings we feed in the story of Mel’s Hole, 10 foot tall Alien vacationers in Brazil, A cursed stone stealing woman, and a vampire museum’s newly cursed acquisition.

Happy end of January, everyone. For today’s Curse-O-Meter readings, we feed in the saga of Mel’s Hole, a 10 foot tall alien vacationers story in Brazil, a cursed stone-stealing woman, and a vampire museum’s newly cursed acquisition. I’m your probably cursed host, Chris.

And I’m Sheryl. I’m looking forward to today’s topic, Mel’s Hole. I’ve known about this for like, ever, from like the first interview on the air. I didn’t realize there was more to the story, but there was a whole lot more than I remember. For those of you who just got your minds into the gutter, get it out of that gutter. It’s not a dirty story in that sense. It’s not about Mel’s personal holes. It’s about Mel’s hole on his property.

Continue getting your mind out of the gutter. But as we do at the start of every episode, we will calibrate our Lord Canarvan Cursometer. We’ll feed it news stories from recent news. Let me just switch it on here. We have it running now. Would you like to start with one of our stories? Yes, I will.

Because I’m currently taking Archeology 226 this semester, I’m going to start with the woman who returned the cursed stones to Pompeii. This article is from January 20th by Trisha Sangupta of the Hindustani Times. I hope I said that correctly.

I’m trying. I think so. A post about a woman returning three stones that she stole from an ancient site of Pompeii was shared on Twitter. In a letter, the woman claimed that the stones had cursed her and also extended her apology for taking the artifacts. Here is what the letter said. Quote, I didn’t know about the curse. I didn’t know that I should not take any rocks within a year. I got a breast cancer. Yep, that’s how she wrote it.

I am a young and healthy female and the doctors told me it was just bad luck. Please accept my apologies with these pieces. Gabriel Zed, whose Twitter bio says he is currently in charge of Archeology Park of Pompeii of Italy, shared a picture of the note that the woman had sent and also the three stolen stones. She included this message with a photo. Dear anonymous sender of this letter, the Pumas stones arrived in Pompeii. Now good luck and fortune in Bocca All Lupo, as we say in Italy.

An Italian idiom meaning good luck. So this story reminds me a lot of the people taking stones from Hawaii. There’s a volcano there, one of the national parks where like when people take home the stones, they believe that they have been cursed and the national park gets like hundreds of letters a year from people returning stones. Their mailman must hate working that route.

100%. Just a big sack of rocks. Yeah, well again, it’s pumice. It’s not rocks, rocks. It’s volcanic rocks. It’s rocks light.

Yes, rocks light. But even still, I’ve always been kind of curious, like, could I steal one of those rocks and what would happen? Would it actually be cursed or are people just associating the bad luck with other things? I hope they have warning signs all around the park that said warning rocks are cursed.

Dump out your shoes before you leave. Sure do. Yeah, I’m pretty sure they have signs saying that the rocks are cursed in Hawaii at least. That’s good. Yeah.

I hope they’re up around Pompeii too now. I mean, you shouldn’t be taking rocks from an archaeological site anyway. I think that’s just common sense.

Could be wrong. I mean, adults are better with rules, but kids love rocks. I wonder how many cursed children there are out there.

I would say adults are worse with rules. You think so? Yes. I think kids are more likely to follow the rules. Maybe not. But I would say that adults are just as bad as kids. We’ll have to hopefully, maybe if we look up on the StatsCan website, we’ll see how many adults fall to these curses versus the children. That’s the end of that one. Moving on to the next story, we’ll enter into the cursometry here. Is haunted doll tucked away in Bucks County barn too creepy even for Vampire Museum? This was written by J.D.

Mulane for Bucks County Courier Times on January 16th. Sometimes a thing is so creepy that even a guy who collects creepy stuff is creeped out. He’s like you and me. We have yet to encounter a creepy, too creepy for us. Although, get in touch with us if you have something that you would like to give us. Such is the case of Ed Crimi and his haunted doll. Oh yeah, this thing’s creepy. I mean real creepy, said Crimi, proprietor of the Vampire Museum and Paranormal Activity in Buckingham.

Even the way Crimi acquired the doll for his museum last week was weird. He runs a high-end European antiques dealership in Bucks County. He received a strange call from a fellow dealer whose first name is Nick, but who asked that his last name not appear in this story. Why not? I guess he didn’t want the free publicity. He never learned that all publicity is good publicity, I guess.

Unfortunate for us. Nick had acquired the doll when he purchased the contents from an estate believed to belong to Robert Thomas, the founder of the farmer’s albinac, Crimi said. I’ve done business with him in the past, and he’s a good guy, but he said get the thing out of here. He wants it out.

He said he’d pay to have it removed. Crimi, along with a friend, Eric Mintel, a local ghost hunter who documents creepy things on his YouTube channel, traveled into Bucks County, McMansion Territory, near Indian Springs Road in Doylestown. There, behind a massive house, across the field of snow and ice, in a barn-like shed, he’d find the doll. Crimi called Nick to get the doll’s backstory. From what I’m told, it’s from the Robert Thomas estate, Nick said. Why don’t you want it? Crimi asked. It gave me the creeps, he said.

So it gave you the creeps, and you’re giving me $200 to get rid of it? Crimi said, exactly. I’m gonna have to look at it first, Crimi said. Crimi, a devout Catholic who has studied with priest exorcists in the Vatican, believes that paranormal forces, good and evil, permeate our lives. Under certain circumstances, they can attach themselves to inanimate objects like creepy dolls. It’s why he recommends having any item purchased in an antique shop or yard sale cleansed before it’s brought into a house. Oops. Too late for us. Yep.

Holy water works really well, he said. The men arrived at the McMansion, which appeared deserted. A round back, far from the house, was a barn-like shed. The doll was in there, Nick said. As the doors swung open, a blast of freezing wind hit them, and continued blowing.

Inside was lawn equipment, boxes of old newspapers, and furniture covered in sheets. The men searched for the doll. That one, Mintel said, looks like a baby carriage. The cloth was pulled away, revealing a doll seated in a Victorian-era high chair on wheels. Seated in the chair was a doll, old, its body bizarrely impaled, with handmade iron nails. In the doll’s left hand was a carved wooden skull. Embedded in its stomach was a timepiece. Its glass eyes created the illusion of following the men. On the high chair tray was a small volume on occult spirituality, and a page from the 1838 farmers’ almanac. This seems like something that the kid Sid from Toy Story would do.

Nail it with nails, put a timepiece in it. Sounds about right. And then the doll came alive. Just like in Toy Story.

Murdered the guy, and now his estate is being cleansed out. I wonder if he was trying to make his business more successful with this creepy doll? Maybe.

That’s a little ritual. Creamy looked troubled. I don’t like it, he said.

He called Nick. This is the creepiest thing I’ve ever seen, he said. Look, I have the museum, but I don’t like the feeling of it.

Tell me the story of it. Nick wasn’t clear on the doll’s provenance. Not unusual in the antiques trade.

Creamy told him he’d researched the thing before adding it to the vampire museum. Otherwise, it will stay in remote and undisclosed storage. Please get it out of there, Nick pleaded. It’s symbolizing death, Creamy said. The person who created the doll definitely had a purpose.

I don’t know what the purpose is. Mintel noticed sawdust all over the chair. He speculated it was a talisman to keep the doll in check. Sawdust was a talisman?

Yeah, I didn’t understand that point either. I’ve never heard of using sawdust to bind an evil to a doll and keep it from leaking out. Maybe you take a crucifix and run it over a cheese grater to make the sawdust. Oh yeah, I like the way you think. That’d be like a good pepper spray for vampires. Yeah, yeah. Just blow ground up crucifixes in their eyes. Yeah, I think that’s a good idea.

TM TM. We’re going to keep an eye out on the probably cursed Etsy shop for little baggies of sawdust. I bet we could find some wooden crucifixes.

Oh, 100%. Put together a grinder of some sort. So yeah, he speculated the sawdust was a talisman to keep the doll in check. Maybe, Creamy said, he told his employee Robbie Ronkey to place the thing in the museum’s delivery truck. Robbie, whatever you do, keep that sawdust on there, Creamy said. In the wind, I’m going to walk back in the wind and keep the sawdust on it.

Right, Ronkey said. He picked up the chair with the doll, put it in the truck, and drove to the museum. Creamy appeared unsettled.

He felt a heavy and malevolent spiritual presence, so disturbing that he insisted on immediately driving across the Lambertville, New Jersey to St. John the Evangelist Church where he’d say prayers of liberation. That’s an interesting story. So do we know if the doll, I guess it didn’t say in the article, but do we know if the doll actually ended up at the museum? There’s no update. This is only like, forget what was the date on here recently.

Boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. January 16th. Okay. So it’s been about a week.

I guess he’s still deciding maybe. I should have checked the social media for the page. Did the van ever make it back?

Well, the truck they put it in did break down, but they found out it was because there was water in the diesel tank. Which might have been put there by a demon. Yeah, so probably.

Maybe he was worried the truck would be cursed when he put holy water in the tank. That’s true. Yeah. I mean, that’s what you could do. If you don’t want your truck to get cursed, just dump a bunch of holy water in the tank. Or maybe the doll turns diesel fuel into water.

Like a reverse Jesus move. Well, on to our third and final story. This is 10 foot tall strange being seen traversing Brazilian island. This alien rumor swirl. This is from January 11th.

And it’s written by Catherine Donlevy for the New York Post. Maybe even aliens needed a tropical vacation. New video shows two giant human like creatures strolling along the foothills of a small Brazilian island in what some believe is proof that aliens are visiting Earth. One of the 10 foot tall beings appears to take in the sights of Iha Domel, an island two miles off the coast of Southeast Brazil.

Another stands closely behind it. Oh, like the Titanic. Footage shows.

I’m king of the planet Earth. They stand confidently on top of the hill, which locals say is difficult to reach with the shrubbery barely reaching their knees. The pair can be seen swinging their arms in an eerie human like manner, but not enough to convince eyewitnesses. They weren’t watching aliens. It’s too big to be a person, one person said in the video, according to a translation by JB Littoral. Look at the way he moves. It’s really weird.

Look at the size of those pasts. It’s very fast. The video generated even more traction once it made its way onto social media. For me, it’s enough to see the speed with which the creature goes up and down the hill. Anyone who’s done those trails on the hills knows that you can’t go down a hill like this in one to two minutes. No, human can.

I think Freddy could do it in one to two minutes. That’s true. He’s got twice as many legs as us. True.

I mean, so you can go twice as fast. That’s true. The way they move reminds me a lot of men in black critters said another. One wrote, One thing I do know, I will never step there again. I bet someone’s up there right now.

Yeah, 100%. Somebody’s gone back to see if they can recreate the video. A bunch of ufologists too, or like with pouring plaster of Paris in the little divots in the ground. Pretty soon we’re gonna see like souvenirs of rocks off that hill being like, It was touched by aliens.

Another, this guy’s after my own heart. Other, more skeptical users through their two cents in claiming that the creepy video was just a result of forced perspective. Even the Brazilian government joined in on the fun, though they notably did not confirm whether the giants were tourists from another country or another planet. If the giants are from here, where would they be from though? Scandinavia.

Scandinavia. They’re made tall there. I’d like to think that of all the places in the universe, aliens are coming to Earth enjoying maybe our unspoiled splendor. To be fair, that’s kind of being ethnocentric in the idea that aliens don’t have more beautiful home planets. I mean, they might have ruined it. I mean, we’re ruining our planet. Yes, yes, we are. Maybe it’s just the way of all things.

Is your civilization grows the worse you make the uncivilized parts? I’m gonna have to track down that footage after the episode and see it. I’ll show it to you. It was on the article that I clipped it out because of podcast.

Yes. Well, we have our three stories for the Curseometer. We will feed in the data right now.

Please stand by. So for the first story of the Pompey Stone, it looks like it turns out is definitely cursed. Don’t take stones from historical sites. Even if you don’t believe in curses, it’s just a bad idea in general. Don’t take artifacts from archaeological sites. You may get the curse of breast cancer or you may get the curse of officials arresting you.

Yes, correct. For our second story of the cursed doll in the vampire museum, the results here say probably cursed. And for the last story of the 10 foot tall aliens in the island in Brazil, the results say probably benign. They’re just harmless. They’re out on vacation. There’s nothing they’re doing. Just walking around enjoying the sea breeze. Hopefully not littering the space litter.

Eating some nice Brazilian food. Well, we have our Curseometer fully calibrated now. Before we dive into our main topic, we’re going to switch gears here and take you over to the probably cursed museum and gift shop. Yeah, I got a special item for you today. This item we picked up at a local antique mall.

Shout out to the Amateur Antique Mall. It is a prayer book. It’s a purple velvet prayer book with what looks like an ivory cross on the top of it.

The book itself is called Key of Heaven and the copyright inside the book is 1892. It’s an oldie. It’s an oldie. And it’s a little fella too. It’s only about like four inches tall. Yeah, it’s got some signs of some wear and tear. But again, keep in mind 1800s copyright.

It’s going to have some wear and tear on it. The Key of Heaven book is a prayer manual that contains such classics as the 30 days prayer, devotions for the sick, preparations for the dead, preparing a departing soul and the prayer for the dead. So for the 30 days prayer, is that a prayer that takes 30 days to complete? You know what?

I’m not sure. The first thing they came to mind was like, you just pray it for 30 days straight, but I’m not sure. Once per day. So not constantly.

No. I would like to note, I was trying to see because the book is so old and the pages are delicate. I didn’t want to handle the book that much. So I went online to try see if I could figure out what prayers were in the book because I had looked briefly, but like I didn’t want to handle it too much. If you go look up this book online, the prayers that are contained in that book, if you find it on archive.org where I found it, they are not the same, which led me to believe that I actually think that based on the prayers that are in this book, this book probably belonged to a priest. Preparations for the dead and rituals for the sick and all that sort of thing are typically performed by someone who is clergy. This book has probably been around many on their sick bed or death bed.

Yes. Just keep that in mind. The only one of the pets after we did our pet testing that seemed to react to the book was the bird. I believe on a level of cursiveness, it’s definitely cursed for birds. Keep in mind, we make no promises that any of our stuff is actually cursed. We encourage you to buy it and tell us your cursed experience or uncursed.

Yes. So that’s my disclaimer. We don’t promise that any of the stuff we buy is cursed. It’s probably cursed. Probably cursed. Nothing strange has happened in our house since it came in other than it was one of the first things that we bought.

So it hasn’t really stopped any of the weird stuff happening like the marionettes or shadow people from the basement or the weird orb in the house. If you’re interested in buying things from our Etsy shop, you can check us out at the probably cursed Etsy shop to buy this item. Any of the items that you buy will help support our podcast and allow us to buy more cursed and haunted items. Hopefully one day open our own haunted museum, like the Vampire Museum.

That’s correct. Where you can send us all your creepy and wonderful things. Actually, you can already start sending us all your creepy and wonderful things. Yeah, if you have something horrible that like, let’s say your grandma left you horrible creepy dolls and you’re trying to get rid of them, like what happened to my sister Giselle. You can drop us a line and we’ll help you out with that. Yeah, we’ll find someone to come pick it up from you or whatever you need to get it out of your house and into ours. And like Sheryl was saying, if you are interested in owning a one of our artifacts from our probably cursed store, head on over on the interwebs to probablycursed.etsy.com. And now we move on to today’s topic of Mel’s Hole. Or more accurately, Mel’s holes.

More than one later on. Get your mind out of the gutter people. It’s not that kind of hole. This is not about a mysterious only fans account where paranormal things happen with someone’s private areas. Yes, but that is not, we’re not that type of podcast.

If you are that type of podcast, we’d like to hear about you because I can’t imagine what that would be like. We’ll start off with Mel’s Hole, which is in very short form a bottomless hole, reportedly somewhere in the state of Washington in the US. And the story of Mel’s Hole comes entirely from a series of radio interviews that were on coast to coast AM, coast to coast was and still is it’s still running. A late night Colin radio show that talked about things like the supernatural, the paranormal or just things of interest. The host found fascinating. The show originally was about politics, but he had gotten sick about politics and decided to talk about UFOs and ghost hunting and all sorts of mysteries. So now for our listeners, young Chris was a fan of the show.

Are you still listening to it? No, they had a new host takeover and he was okay at the start, but if you listen to it now, it’s kind of he’s not a good interviewer. He repeats a lot of his questions.

He doesn’t seem to listen to the responses. Ah, okay. Yeah. It used to be much better. So I don’t know, maybe the fame fortune got to him. If you watch some of the paranormal shows I’ve noticed you watching on Discovery Plus, he’s brought in as a commentator on some of them. Oh, okay.

He’s that guy with like the mustache and the eyes with the bags under them. Okay. Yeah.

George Nory. Yeah, fair. But when I was listening to it, it was run by a host named Art Bell and he was like a fantastic interview. Like if you had the wildest, craziest story or you were an awful storyteller, he could interview in a way that still made it like worth listening to. And he’s not one of those hosts, at least from what I can gather that like drank the Kool-Aid and started going down those rabbit holes with the crazy people on the show. That’s right.

Yeah. And in fact, he refused ever to really say if he believed whether or not what his guests were saying on the show. His more focus was on just the storytelling, the whole idea of theater of the mind that you’re listening to his talk show and it I think it started around like 10 or 11pm and go to around 2am. So he’s like, it’s perfect.

It’s dark out. Let’s talk about like creepy things or weird things or fascinating things. So yeah, he was following his bliss with his interviewees since then. He’d interview all sorts of people, legitimate scientists, ancient alien researchers, ghost hunters and often times people with just plain weird stories like Mel Waters. So the story of Mel’s hole. And originally I meant to only tell the story of Mel’s hole. But the more I researched, the more I realized that there was so much more going on than just the original story I had heard. There’s the story of how the hole affected Mel’s life afterwards, and then also the possibility of other mysterious bottomless holes in the world.

The whole Mel’s Hole story is really a saga in three parts. And chapter one that we’ll cover today is just about a weird and mysterious hole in Washington. Chapter two we’ll do in the next episode, and that’s where things get weirder and bizarre.

And chapter three, things are going to turn entirely bonkers. Chapter one, sometime in the early 90s around 93, a man named Mel Waters and his wife purchased a plot of land around 14 kilometers southwest of Ellensburg, Washington. And if you look at the area on Google Street View, it’s kind of foothills, areas, scrubby brushes in some area, a lot of trees and others, lumpy, rugged land. It’s mostly untouched land out there.

It’s very rustic. The property that Mel Waters and his wife purchased had no phone or power, and the only structures that were out there had been severely damaged by heavy snowfall. And when they buy the property, they realize on there is a very, very deep hole. It’s about nine feet, nine inches in diameter with a concrete brick retaining wall, and that wall extends to a depth of about 15 feet into the earth, where it just transitions into bare rocks and dirt as far as the eye can see. And the neighbors know about the hole and they’ve been using it for a garbage dump for as long as anyone can remember. Pretty much everything that they didn’t want was thrown into the hole.

I do want to know, because they purchased this property. The person before, I guess they must have had an agreement with them to just randomly have people come over and dump stuff in the hole, because like, I don’t… If we had a bottomless hole in the backyard and people were just randomly entering there at all hours of the day or night to dump things in there, I would not be okay with that. Maybe it’s a small town thing. It wouldn’t be right neighborly if they wouldn’t let us use that bottomless hole. It just feels like a terrible, terrible idea.

A way for your neighbors to overstep their boundaries. Maybe even like hide things in the hole that they shouldn’t be. Yeah, like how many mob hits are in the bottom of that hole? Yeah, I guess it depends on how big the mafia is in Washington. It’s true.

Washington mob. Also, there was some local lore about the hole. A neighbor whose hunting dog had died through the carcass into the hole, but he saw the dog alive and well running around later that week. But no matter how many times he called to him, the dog wouldn’t come. I mean, our dog’s like that too, so… It’s true.

It’s probably not supernatural. He catches him and throws him back in the hole. Animals were also well known for avoiding going near the hole itself. Melwaters would find that when he took his own dogs to the site, they would dig their feet in and refuse to go near it.

And Mel Waters didn’t live on the lot, but he’d spend time out there often. He was cultivating some plants he had gotten from Northern Nevada that he heard had the ability to cure the flu. And I looked into this and early in the 1900s, the US military did experiment with plants from Northern Nevada because they were trying to reduce the symptoms of the Spanish flu in their own military. And apparently they were successful. Now, did it say that he purchased the property with the specific intention of that? It feels like a random place to buy a plot of land that’s non… like, it’s an arid climate.

No power, no phones. Like, it feels kind of random. They didn’t actually go into why they bought the land. He just did note that because of the climate in the area, it was a good place to grow these plants. So I don’t know if it was his intention all along or he just decided upon it later on. Yeah.

No reason. Maybe the real estate person was like, have you seen the bottomless hole? And they’re like, we got to buy this land, honey. It’s got a gigantic bottomless hole in it. So Mel would also go for walks around the property and he’d occasionally find old bits of metal, random coins on the ground and he’d weld them together into homemade belt buckles that he would sell back in Ellensburg. He also found the hole to be what he called an attractive nuisance. His people would often go out there to look at it. So he installed a big metal cover to keep people from accidentally falling in, which someone falls in.

There’s not going to be really any evidence left, but they were there. No, I think maybe he’s just worried somebody important is going to fall down there and then everyone’s going to be like, hey, where did Andrew go? And to unsolved mystery and then they would have more mysteries on their property.

Over time, Mel grew more and more curious about the hole on the property and he tried convincing his wife to have the local university where she worked to come out and measure it. But they kept declining. They just didn’t see the point in bothering him to look. So he made little experiments on the holes. He found that things he threw in would fall soundlessly away without ever sounding like they hit the bottom. He threw in old tube TVs because, and I found this out from a friend in college when you heave old tube TV and the tubes inside explode. It sounds like a gunshot going off and Mel would do this.

He would shove them into the hole, see if he can hear that gunshot noise and he would get nothing, which at this point, if you’re thinking of heaving your grandpa’s old tube TV off of a high point, the chemicals inside those tubes are pretty darn bad for the environment. So this is this is a no, no. Yeah, this is our PSA. Do not smash your tube TV on purpose. Put it up on Facebook marketplace.

Somebody with an original NES will really badly want your tube TV. He even dropped a refrigerator in at one point. Also made no sound.

It just disappeared into the hole into nothing. Also bad chemicals for the environment. Don’t do that either. It’s true. I can only imagine what was in them in the early 90s. He also once found an old pistol buried on the property and he and a friend kept firing into the hole and they would also never hear the bullets hit the bottom as well. To be fair, I don’t think you often hear bullets hit anyway. The sound of the pop from the fire going off or being fired, you’re more likely to hear. But if it’s hitting a surface other than rock, I don’t think you’re going to hear a sound of a bullet hitting.

That’s true. Although if I think the old Westerns, they always make a cupping when they hit something. Good job, old Westerns.

Mmm. He eventually gave that pistol away to his friend and the pistol will come up again briefly in the next episode. So four years pass and Mel and his wife slowly become estranged and divorced and he spends more and more time out at the property. His wife got the title to the land in the settlement, but she still allows him to use the property as long as he instills no permanent structures. Apparently it was worth it to her because otherwise the land is worthless.

It’s kind of arid just as a bottomless hole on it. I still feel like there’s something behind that divorce that we’re not understanding because I don’t know why she would want to hold on to the property. Just let him have it. Maybe she hopes a condo developer will move in one day. Maybe Ellensburg will become a boom town and swallow up the property. Maybe his wife’s name is Ellen. She wants to start her own cult. She’s like, I need that land. You gotta have that cult compound property and all the non-believers into the hole.

Yep. So with nothing going on in his life, in August of 97, his curiosity inspires him to measure how deep the hole is. And he knows that the locals have been throwing trash into it for decades and wonders how close it is to actually being filled up. His first test is to determine if there’s water at the bottom of the hole. So he ties a roll of lifesavers to about 4,500 feet of fishing line and reasoning that if there’s any water down there, the candy should dissolve. He lowers the entire length in, reels it back out, he sees the lifesavers are dry.

Presumably eats the lifesavers after that. In his next attempt, he ties a lead one pound triangular fishing weight to fishing line to use it as a plum bob and lowers it into the hole. When he gets to the end of the line, he splices it with another spool of fishing line and continues in that fashion, splicing on spool after spool, going down until he can discern if he’s reaching the bottom or not.

I will give him credit for his attempt. He should have A. shot a flare down there because it would light the whole way down or B. attach a flashlight or a light source to the fishing line as he’s lowering it instead of a plum bob. So again, you’ll see the light as it’s going down. That’s a good point. He said he’s only ever pointed a flashlight into it, but yeah.

Yeah. He should have just put it on the end of the string. Yeah, or shot a flare down there. Watch it fall down and down. Maybe it’ll illuminate the face of some horrible monster at the bottom.

That’s what I’m thinking. So he kept lowering more and more line in there and eventually he calculated his combined fishing line is dangling about 80,000 feet into the hole and it still doesn’t feel like it’s hitting the bottom. And to compare that the Mariana’s trench is only about 30,000 feet deep. Mount Everest is around 30,000 feet tall and Mel is stumped on what to do next because this is an impossible depth.

Like when I was telling you the story earlier and you’d brought up the fact like no one else was really dug a hole that deep before. The Earth’s crust is 100 kilometers and the 80,000 feet works out to be approximately 24 kilometers. So that’s about a quarter of the way through the crust.

Like that’s white far. And so he does the only thing he can think of coast to coast AM this radio show that plays all sorts of mysterious content and interviews. He figures they’re going to know what to do with the mysterious bottomless hole. So he sends them a fax. Here’s the fax that he had sent to the radio show and the show’s host Art Bell.

Dear Art, I’m writing to you to see if I could get some help from you or your vast listening audience. I live in rural eastern Washington near the Manastash Ridge. On our property there’s a hole. Like the previous owners and the owners before them, we’ve been throwing our trash into the hole. Apparently the hole has been there for as long as anyone can remember. At first I thought it was an ancient well.

Anyway, the hole is 9 feet 9 inches in diameter. There’s a stone retaining wall around it and we put a steel door on top to keep anyone from falling into it. As I said earlier, people have been throwing their trash into the well for a decade.

Furniture, household trash, dead cows, building debris, you name it. The first thing is, I noticed the hole never filled up. So I got curious.

Actually obsessed. I began trying to measure the depth of the hole. I emptied three fishing reels of about 1500 yards of monofilament trying to determine the depth. Soon I was buying fishing line in bulk. So far I’ve sunk about 80,000 feet of line into the hole without reaching bottom. My wife works at a local university with a geology department. We hope to get some professional scholarly help in determining the depth of the hole.

As far as I can tell, there’s nothing else particularly strange about it except for two other things. Dogs refuse to get within 100 feet of the hole. Birds won’t sit on the retaining wall or metal door. Another strange thing is, there’s no echo when you yell into the hole. Indeed, I’ve never heard anything hit bottom when tossed in. We once tossed in an old refrigerator and we never heard it hit bottom. No splash, crash, or crunch. I hope your listeners can help with possible explanations.

I’m wondering if this, based on my measurements thus far, might be the deepest hole on Earth. Signed, Mel Waters. An art bell receives this fax and he reads it onto the air to his listening audience and they’re immediately captivated. People are calling in with their opinions and advice and art decides that he needs to get Mel on the air for an interview.

And he does. On Friday, February 21st, 1997, Mel is interviewed on air to millions of listeners. He recounts his history with the property, his experiences with the hole and his experiments, and callers call into the show to give advice on how to measure it better, how his experiment might be flawed, and some people are even volunteering to be lowered into the hole just to explore it. With all the garbage and other things down there, it’s not gonna be good and you won’t be able to, if there’s no echo, you won’t be able to tell people you need backup because you’re dying.

That’s true. I guess it depends on the last thing that was thrown into the hole, because if you’re lowered on top of an old refrigerator, that’s fine. But if you’re lowered on top of a dead cow, that’s less fine. Mel also disclosed in that interview that it’s in his will to have his remains to put into the hole when he dies. And this is mostly because of the story he heard of the guy’s hunting dog having come back.

If they’re throwing dead cows and they’re in the dead cows having come back, what makes them think he’s gonna come back like the dog? That’s true. Yeah. Maybe dogs are special.

Yeah. Dogs are special. I mean, dogs are special in the sense that we like to think that they’re valuable to us and therefore we give them special properties. But no one’s gonna bother resurrecting a cow. Yes, not.

I think in terms of paranormal experiences, cows always get the short end of the stick. Depends where you’re from. Yeah.

In India, cows are sacred. I guess that’s true. Yeah. In North America, they’re just chopped up by aliens.

Yes, or eaten by the large quantity at McDonald’s and various other fast food restaurants. So the interview immediately becomes a hit with listeners. An Art Bell is barraged days after with media contacts of people trying to find the hole, other people are writing in about mysterious holes they found themselves on their own property. And the day after his interview, Mel decides to chat up some of the old timers in Ellensburg to find out more about the hole. He finds someone who tells him that around 50 years prior, the hole used to have a ring of columns bordering it, almost like Stonehenge but without crossbeams on top. And as the weekend progresses, he notices a lot of helicopter activity over his property. And he chocks it up to people who listen to the program and are now out trying to find the location of his bottomless hole. Which, I don’t understand, if you got a helicopter and you hear this on the radio and you’re within helicoptering distance, let’s go take a look. 9 feet. It might be a bit hard to spot from the air, but… That’s true. Yeah.

Depending on how close you are to the ground. And also Mel finds that he’s getting contacts from his real estate agent about people wanting to buy the plot of land. He’s getting humongous offers for the location of the hole and to take it off of his hands. I bet one of the calls was probably that guy about skinwalker ranch. See, and this goes back to my whole idea of why is his wife holding onto it.

If somebody came up and offered you $2 million for the plot of land with a bottomless hole that you can’t grow anything on, and the only thing you’re doing is keeping your ex-husband from building structures on there, why not sell it? Yeah. I don’t… He doesn’t go into like why he’s getting the offers to buy the land? I think they just assume that he’s the one who owns it.

Yeah. It’s good old patriarchy, but… That’s true. And he’s the only name that they know, I suppose, because he doesn’t go into what his wife’s name is.

He also, at least based on the facts that was sent in and the timeline that you gave, he was already divorced by that point, so when he’s saying his wife, they don’t know that there’s somebody else’s name on the deed. Yep. And then on Monday, the following Monday, Art Bell receives another fax from Mel Waters. Art, you’re receiving this fax simultaneously with the fax I attempted to send you earlier today. Much is developed since the first fax.

I’ll try to explain as rationally as possible what is transpired since my earlier fax. Around 1pm, I drove to Yakima to shop at the Costco there. On my way back, I decided to stop at the property. When I got there, my access road was blocked by military personnel that were armed. I noticed that several pieces of yellow gear had entered and exited my property, based on the direction of their tread. I asked one of the guards, what’s going on? He said there was a plane crash on the property. I said, well that’s strange, there’s no smoke.

I don’t see any in the distance. He asked who I was and I let him know I owned the property. I then asked to talk to the officer in charge. A non-uniformed man came up to my suburban and let me know that I won’t have access to my property until the crash has been completely investigated. I mentioned the yellow gear and the lack of smoke and that they were on my property.

I was told by this man that it’s not necessarily my property and that it would be very easy to find a drug lab on my property. Well, I got the drift. I asked if I could leave. He said sure, don’t come back until we contact you. I asked if you wanted a way to contact me and he said they know how to contact me. I said, I suppose you don’t want me to talk to anybody about this.

He said nobody would believe it anyway. That’s a bit for now. Oh, and I talked to one of my neighbors earlier today and he told me something very interesting. He said that some time ago he was driving up to the hole at night and thought he saw the most bizarre thing. He said he saw a beam of solid black coming out of the then uncovered hole.

I said, what do you mean? He said he saw something blacker than black coming out of the hole like a searchlight reaching into the sky as far as he could see. So Art gets that fax and immediately contacts Mel by phone. And Mel is, at this point, panicked. But he eventually agrees to do another radio interview. He recounts how his property initially was blocked off by armed military personnel. Were later accompanied by metal barricades as well, completely blocking off the road. Mel states the threat of finding a drug lab had to do with the Nevada plants he had been cultivating on the property. And they were just trying to make him stay away. So it was just an empty threat. Mel also believed that the real estate offers he was getting on his property over the weekend are related to the current military occupation.

So maybe it was somebody in the government trying to purchase the land. And that interview was the last radio interview with Mel for a long time. Later that same week, Mel sends Art a message that he has accepted an offer for the property. Mel’s decided to lease his property containing the whole to an undisclosed party and he is immigrating to Australia. In return, he cannot tell anyone where his property is or speak to the press. He will be told the true nature of the whole but cannot relate that info to anyone.

Art says this sounds like Mel’s swung song. Doesn’t expect to ever hear from him again. And that’s chapter one. Man decides to contact a radio show about a bottomless hole in his property. And a week later his life has completely changed.

Moving to Australia with government cash in his pocket. And at this point I thought that was the end of the story. Just a man with a strange bottomless pit on his property.

But there was a whole lot more that happened after that. That is most of the information there is about the mysterious bottomless hole in Washington. We’ll feed it into the Curse-O-Meter here and determine if Mel’s hole is cursed. Into the Curse-O-Meter you go.

Please stand by. And it looks like the results for the bottomless hole in Washington are probably benign. I mean it brought a dog back to life. It’s a quiet hole. Whatever you throw in there isn’t noisy.

And I guess you’re gonna throw all sorts of things in there and never ever get in trouble. As an environmental scientist though I’d like to argue that the curse is people. People just keep throwing their garbage down there. Who knows what sort of environmental disaster is at that bottom of the hole now. It’s true. Maybe it’s created some sort of noxious goo that reanimates your pets. Yeah. I feel like you’ve got a bottomless hole regardless of how bottomless it is.

Maybe you don’t throw a whole bunch of things in there and cause chemical reactions that could potentially release toxic gases. Just…mhmmm. …Word of advice. Maybe this is how the pet cemetery got started. Yeah.

I mean they did have some weird monuments in the woods so it’s quite probable. Sometimes dead is better. Don’t throw your dead dog into the hole. And every so often it shoots out a beam of pure black into the sky. That’s kind of cool. How often do you see that? Does it only happen at night? Other people have said they’d seen it in like broad daylight.

Like later on Mel does return and he hears more and more stories about people who’ve seen the black beam shoot out into the sky. Fair. Aliens. Aliens. I don’t know if it’s shooting black out into the sky or if it’s sucking light into the hole through like a vertical column. Do you have any theories on how the full hole was formed?

You know not really. In the chapter Mel’s whole chapter three of this whole saga there’s…they kind of allude to how impossibly deep hole gets formed. But I know a lot of people theorize it’s just an old mine shaft.

I don’t know what the volcanic activity is like in Washington but you can get like those lava tubes that are uber super long. If we want to go down this conspiracy theory route it’ll be the aliens from Star Sharks Troopers. Oh the bugs? Yeah. The giant bugs. The dug deep deep holes. Yeah maybe there’s just a giant bug colony at the center of the earth right below Mel’s hole.

They’re sending black beams of light to space to contact their alien insect brethren. Where’s Neo Patrick Harris when you need him? We’ll get him there. We’ll put him in the hole. Put him in a little cage and dangle him straight down.

He’ll use his psychic powers. That’s right. Yeah that’s kind of a cool story and like it caught a lot of people’s attention. It’s like it’s a bottomless hole. How is that possible?

We need to measure this bottomless hole. Sure there’s like better things going on. Like at the time that the episodes that aired like the OJ Simpson trial was all over the news. Hailbop the comet was starting to appear into the sky so that was making a lot of people go crazy. Like just a month after this broadcast was when the heavens gate mass suicide happened. But that about wraps it up for today’s episode. Make sure you listen next month for the continuation. Again if you are looking for some probably cursed artifacts to place into your home make sure you visit our Etsy shop at probablycursed.etsy.com We’ll have new items there every month.

As we also spoke before if you have your own probably cursed items you’re trying to get rid of make sure you email us at probablycursedpodcast.gmail .com We will gladly work with you to take it off your hands. And that wraps it up for today’s episode. And this is your host Chris signing off. This is Sheryl signing off.