For today’s Cursometer readings, we delve into part two of three of the Mel’s Hole saga. But first, to calibrate our cursometer, we discuss the wolf man of Germany’s Hearts Mountains, the mysterious Alaska snake worm, and the dubious health benefits of putting urine in your eyes.

News stories:

The Wolf Man of Germany

Mysterious Snake Worm of Alaska

Urine Therapy

Hello everyone. For today’s Curse-O-Meter readings, we delve into part two of three of the Mel’s Hole saga. But first, to calibrate our Curse-O-Meter, we discuss the wolf man of Germany’s Harz Mountains, the mysterious Alaska snake worm, and the dubious health benefits of putting urine in your eyes. I’m your Probably Cursed host, Chris. And I’m Sheryl. And I’m gonna say right off the top, this is a re-record.

The manufacturers of my laptop didn’t know that I’d still be using it 14 years later, and it dropped the recording from the first round. So this is a part two recording, but we’ll hopefully keep things nice and spontaneous.

I think it’ll be fine. We’ve had a night to sleep on it.

It’s true. We’ve already forgotten everything we’ve already done. So as we do for every episode, we’re gonna start off by calibrating our Curse-O-Meter, by reading it some recent news, cursed or uncursed, or just strange and bizarre. I’ll switch on the Curse-O-Meter now. Alright, and we’ll feed in the first new story into the Curse-O-Meter.

Okay, although this one is not as recent as some of the other ones, this is the article titled, It’s written by Prisha for WIO News on August 25th, 2023. A mysterious wolf man has been seen roaming around the forests in central Germany’s Harz Mountains by some hikers. The man who said to have lived in the forest for about five years was captured on camera by two hikers. They reported seeing him naked with a piece of cloth on his body, carrying a wooden spear, and sitting at the foot of a ruined castle.

He’s like a full caveman.

I want to know which ruined castle. I feel like that’s the sort of thing that somebody role-playing, larping might engage in. Maybe.

Maybe we look for ruined castle Harz Mountains on Google and it’ll show a street view. Maybe the man will be squatting naked in front of the street view vehicle.

For those of you who are curious, you can actually find this photo, but in the blurry photos, which you can find online if you want to look for it, the man is either looks like he’s covered in dirt or extremely hairy. He’s sitting on the ground and he’s kind of playing in like the dirt or the sand. People have described him as the forest man.

31 year old Gina Weiss and her 38 year old friend Toby were taking a walk in Blackenburg in the state of Saxony, Anhalt on Tuesday evening when they clicked the picture. Speaking to a German newspaper, Bill Weiss said, We reached the sand caves and we saw the wolf man. He stood up high on one of the caves with a wooden stick, like a lance in his arms.

King of the wolf men. That’s his royal scepter.

I’m envisioning kind of like a Tarzan type guy with his long stick, because good old fashioned Disney with him killing the Jaguar with the spear.

Oh yeah. My mind went too mogley from the jungle book because he was raised by wolves. This is also true. And he hung out with bears and jaguars.

The man wouldn’t take his eyes off us and he said nothing. He looked dirty like a stone age man from a history book. Weiss added. The pair stated that they had watched him for 10 minutes. They believed that the wolf man was probably somebody around the age of 40?

Midlife crisis. Midlife wolf man crisis.

This is what happens when you go through a divorce. You just take off to the woods and run around naked with a spear. It’s true. This is not the first time that the wolf man has been spotted in Blankenburg region. Authorities state that multiple reports have been submitted to them over the last half a decade, with someone of someone appearing in a wolf costume or wearing wolf fur in the forest.

Might also be a furry convention in the neighborhood.

My other thought is I don’t even know if Germany still has wolves.

Nope, just wolf men. And the Nazi raccoons.

And the Nazi raccoons.

It’s something you can Google listeners.

Maybe it’s not a wolf costume at all. Maybe it’s a bunch of raccoon pelts sewn together. A head of the Blackburn fire brigade, Alexander Beck, says someone clearly knows how to live in the woods and adapt to the changing seasons. In March, police had received calls from hikers saying, Help, there’s a wolf man running around here. The call was taken seriously by the fire brigade. I don’t know how. And the police and the area was searched. However, all they could find was like old campsites or old fire sites.

I bet there is like a radio code for wolf man in the woods.

I think it’s just, it would be a mental health code if it was my guess. He’s probably had some sort of mental break.

It’s the K9 code.

Meanwhile, a volunteer with local fire service said that the most recent reports are nonsense and claim that the photos are a prank.

I still contend that he is the wolf man and he also moonlights on the fire brigade. And he’s like, No, stop looking for the wolf man.

I feel like if you started playing the clap for the wolf man song, you would hear clapping in the woods and that’s where you would know. That’s when you would know where he was. Yep.

Just bring your portable speaker and then just play the one sample. And you just follow the claps.

Well, that’s story one into the Curse-O-Meter.

And nice work finding that story, Sheryl. You found some real, real bangers for this episode. Tried really hard. I think all the weirdness just slows down after Christmas.

Yeah, everyone’s just recovering from their hangovers. They’re missing what’s going on in the world.

All right. So story number two, the mystery snake worm new to science discovered in Alaska in quotation marks X files case. Entitled by Pandora Dewan for Newsweek.com. This is a story from January 16 of 2024. Wildlife experts have been left scratching their heads after a totally new species of insect was discovered in Alaska. The species called Cyara Serpens is a tiny net with a bizarre life cycle. During its larval stage, the net exists as a slimy translucent worm.

But that’s not the strangest thing about it. When these worms get together, they wriggle into a snake like procession made up of hundreds of individuals crawling over each other in a directional frenzy.

So kind of like human centipede? I think so. Worm style?

It also like they mentioned X files in this title. This does remind me of that X files episode where I think it was in Alaska and they brought up an ice core and there was some sort of mysterious organism that infected everybody. The Northern Research Station.

Yeah, I can vaguely remember seeing like worms squirming around in people’s eyes. Yeah.

I bet this is because global warming like some ancient glacier is melted and now the mysterious snake worms are looking for people to crawl into their brains and wriggle around in their eyes.

It’s true. Quote, I learned, I first learned of them during the summer of 2007 when Maggie Billington, a docent at the University of Alaska Museum of the North where I’m the insect curator, brought me specimens and photos and described the bizarre phenomenon. Alaska Insects expert Derek Sykes told Newsweek. It’s a rare day when someone brings me an insect in Alaska that leaves me totally dumbfounded.

I knew they were fly larvae of some kind, but I never heard of the snake worm behavior. I was baffled. A total X-files case. It’s probably not a whole lot of insects you got to learn up in Alaska. It’s so cold.

I also would like to point out that if you say X-files case, does he think they’re aliens?

I think so. Or some unexplained phenomena that the government’s trying to cover up. Snake worm behavior has been previously observed in a few species in North America and Europe. Look out Europe. With sightings dating back to the 1700s. Quote, but we found large genetic differences between our species and the closest apparent of relative in Europe, which also exhibits the snake worm behavior, Sykes said. We also found differences in the male genitalia that supported the hypothesis that we had found an undescribed species.

I would like to know which researcher have the dubious task of inspecting the genitalia of the larvae.

Some like deviant. He’s like, I’ve never seen this sort of genitalia before.

He’s going to get an article published now where he’s going to be talking about fly genitalia, and that will be forever under his name.

The problem is, snake worms are notoriously difficult to study. Snake worm nat adults are rarely encountered, and the phenomena in which thousands of their larvae travel in a long snake-like column is also rare. Very short-lived and unpredictable. Unpredictable people.

Happened at any time. Sykes said, Even experts on these flies had never seen the phenomena in person. It was thrilling to be confronted with a rarely seen entomological mystery of such a dramatic nature. But exactly why they exhibit this unusual behavior is still a mystery.

There are many ideas, which we review in our article, Sykes said. My co-authors and I agree with some others who have published on the phenomena who think the snake worm behavior is primarily a way of avoiding desiccation. The larvae are moist, and normally live in dark, cool, damp leaf litter in the forest. When they encounter a dry open area like a trailer road, they group together to minimize their exposed surface area. This allows them to get across a dry trail without dehydrating. They also happen to look like a snake, sometimes over 3 feet long, which might deter hungry birds from investigating them.

I mean, I guess it would depend on the type of bird. There are birds that do eat snakes. But I would think that the birds that might be interested in worms would see a 3 foot long worm and just think, I could eat that and not have to eat ever again.

Or how mad would you be if you’re a hawk and you swoop down and you’re going to swipe up this tasty looking snake? And it just scatters apart into a million bugs and you’re like, oh no.

It gets all over your feet.

Throughout their investigation, Sykes and his team were supported by an army of citizen scientists helping to gather data and sightings of this rare phenomena from across the country. In our article, we emphasized how important citizen scientists were to our efforts and had them help us choose the name of the new species, Sykes said.

Everyone has a high quality camera in their pocket, you too listeners, which greatly improves the data quality and quantity for studying such a rare phenomena. We hope the discovery of this new species will prompt more research from citizens to help solve the mysteries of snake worm gnats. So if you see any snake worms on your nature walk, snap a picture, send it in, and you too could be a citizen scientist.

If any of you are interested, you can download the iNaturalist app. It’s an application that you can use to report sightings of wildlife and chupacabras, maybe the odd snake worm or poisonous plant that you find.

Alright, so that is our second story entered into the Curse-O-Meter. Sheryl will wrap up calibration with one more story here.

Woman claims dripping urine in your eyes will cure vision problems. This was written by Spooky for Audity Central on February 16th, 2024. A Spanish woman sparked controversy after claiming that dripping urine in her eyes cured her myopia and astigmatism.

That is a good way to spark controversy. If you want to have your Christmas dinner erupt in arguing, release this little tidbit of your home health remedy.

Urine therapy or ureotherapy is a form of alternative medicine which is popularized by British naturopath John W. Armstrong in the early 20th century. Advocates of this unusual form of therapy promote the application of human urine for medicinal and cosmetic purposes, including massaging one’s skin or gums with someone with their own urine and even drinking it. However, TikTok user and assistant metaphysical counselor, pardon my chuckle.

Assistant, so they’re not the lead. Nope.

Swama Freili claims that urine is also much better at treating eye problems than chemical infused medicine prescribed by most doctors. The woman claims to have dripped urine into her own eyes daily until it cured her astigmatism and myopia.

I wonder how many other things she tried dropping into her eyes until she just skipped forward to trying urine.

It’s interesting to me because urine is salty. I feel like that would sting if you got it in your eyes. Yeah.

Well, I guess your tears are also salty and they don’t sting.

I suppose. But your tears don’t have uric acid in them.

It’s true. I also want to say if someone’s signing you up for ureotherapy, you’re not seeing a therapist from Europe. Run. Run away.

In a TikTok video, Doing the Rounds on Social Media, Swama Freili explains that urine drops work better than conventional drugs in quotations. Since the latter are chemicals that can do more harm than good. To prove the effectiveness of urine as a cure for poor vision, the woman details her personal experience. I feel like this is her just trying to sell her urine online. She’s documenting her personal experience.

But not in like a fetish way.

No. Maybe. Maybe both.

Oh yeah. Maybe she’s got like an only fans account.

Yeah. Psyotosal. I will tell you my experience of pouring urine into my eyes in the morning and at night. It cured me of my astigmatism and myopia, she claims. This is natural. Forget about drugs. They’re chemicals and they have health effects. So does getting syphilis in your eyes.

I don’t know. Isn’t syphilis like a whole body thing? It’s already in your pee. Is it really doing much more harm when you bring it to your eyeballs?

Oh my mistake. I was thinking herpes.

Oh yeah. You don’t want eye herpes.

You don’t want eye herpes. You don’t want herpes at all. No. And you don’t want pee in your eyes. Yes. This is my non-medical advice. Just things from down there should not go in your eyes.

That’s why it’s kept so far from the eyes.

That’s correct. Swamah claims that for urine therapy to have an effect, urine drops must be applied daily in the morning and in the evening. She also mentions that she uses enhanced urine at night, which probably means more concentrated. I suppose so. I feel like it’s vitamin-enriched, full of asparagus and beet juice.

Oh yeah. You can smell the curative effects for a mile away.

I would like to point out to our listeners that the article ends by saying, Currently, there is no scientific evidence to support the beneficial health effects of urine therapy.

Just the anecdotal evidence of some rando on TikTok that you’d never heard about until that person uploaded it before.

Who is an assistant metaphysical counselor? Assistant people.

It sounds like she’s trying to make her way up in the metaphysical world.

To be fair, I don’t know what metaphysical has to do with urine therapy, but I’ll have to look into that a little further. Well, that’s story three into our Curse-O-Meter.

The Curse-O-Meter is tabulated the results and we’re going to let it spit out the results now. Please stand by. People.

Alright, and for the results for the first story of the Wolfman of the Harz Mountains, it looks like the result is Probably Cursed.

If you’re gonna go through a midlife crisis, don’t strip naked and dress like a wolf and carry a spear in the German mountains.

And if you’re too young for your midlife crisis, think about all the things you should be doing right now to avoid feeling down on yourself later on in life.

It’s true. The joy of leaving everything behind and just isolating yourself somewhere in the middle of nowhere will wear off very, very quickly. And then you’ll just have photos of your naked body all over the internet. You can do that from home. And get paid.

And the results for the second story of the Mystery Snake Worm of Alaska, probably benign.

Yeah, it’s just a worm, doom worm things with other worms.

Until they crawl into someone’s body and start swimming around in their eyes, we can assume that they’re just living their lives.

Yeah, considering that no one has seen them prior to this point, I think it’s safe to say that they haven’t hurt anyone yet. They’re not likely to evolve to hurt people in the future.

Nope, not until they form a snake kaiju. And then they start stomping around. Well, I guess it’s gonna have to stomp for a while to find anyone in Alaska. And the results for our third story of the Miracle P in Your Eyes cure. The results say, definitely cursed. Don’t pee in your eyes, people.

Yeah, don’t put yours or anyone else’s in your eyes on purpose.

If you were supposed to pee in your eyes, your body would have evolved to pee out your eyes. And you haven’t, I’m pretty sure. And if you can, see a doctor.

Or call Ripley’s Believe It or Not. Yes.

Hopefully they do not hang up on you immediately. Well, that completes the calibration phase. Before we skip onto our main topic of part two of the Mel’s Hole saga, we will hop on over to our Probably Cursed museum and gift shop.

I would like to make an announcement for everyone. We just sold our first item from the Probably Cursed museum and gift shop.

The artifact number one of the Shuttered Mirror is on its way to a lucky person in Los Angeles, California.

Shout out to you whoever you are. I hope you listen to our podcast and enjoy it as much as we do.

I’ll put it up somewhere spooky. Start some conversations when your party guests come over.

This week’s item is artifact number five and it is a necklace with a picture of a little boy and it’s kind of in a circle with a glass on either side on the pendant. We found it at an antique sale. I found similar pendants online, obviously not the exact same because ours has a little child. I assume it’s a boy in it, but types of necklaces like this that I found are described as a Victorian photo pendant, usually from France between 1910s and the 1920s. I can confirm that the one we have is French since on the back of the photo there’s some French writing on it.

There’s not enough to know exactly what it says, but there’s enough words for me to tell it’s French. The boy in the photo appears to be dressed in some sort of uniform with like a white frilly collar on the shirt, tie or a bow at his neck and a black hat on. Looks like a fazel must. Yeah, I tried to find information to see if I could figure out what kind of uniform or costume he’s wearing because it’s pretty bizarre looking. You can go take a look on our Etsy page to just kind of see what I’m talking about.

Maybe this is just the French Cub Scout uniform from a hundred years ago.

My thought was a Halloween costume. Oh yeah. We bought the pendant at an antique market in Edmonton and actually while recording our other podcast, shout out to the I went outside today podcast and our other host for that, Sydney. When I saw it, I latched onto it immediately. I knew we had to have it for our collection. So the energy I get off the pendant seems a little bit sad and sometimes I even find that my heart starts racing when I’m looking at it. Not sure why.

Take for that what you will. It’s been sitting on some of our creepy dolls in the Haunted Museum. So hopefully ghost children keeping each other company. Since bringing the pendant to the house, sometimes we hear what sounds like someone climbing the stairs to her top floor. It doesn’t seem ominous. It mostly just weirds me out when I’m home alone. If you think you want a creepy child necklace for your very own or maybe you’d like the sound of someone climbing your stairs to make you feel less lonely on a February night, you can check out our Etsy shop.

Head on over to our Etsy shop at probablycurse.etsy .com. And now on to our main topic for the episode, Mel’s Hole, part two. So if you haven’t heard the previous episode and you absolutely refuse to go back and listen, I’ll give you a bit of a recap here. Mel’s Hole was and maybe still is a bottomless hole on the property owned by a man named Mel Waters in Washington, America. The hole is weird and has bizarre properties. It reportedly brought a dog back to life.

Occasionally it shoots a black beam into the sky and anything you throw into the hole, it falls and makes no sound. It’s a measurably deep or at least potentially deeper than 80,000 feet, according to Mel’s own attempts at measuring the depth. And Mel Waters originally told this story on a paranormal radio talk show called Coast to Coast AM, which was hosted by Art Bell. And after that initial interview where he was discussing the hole and how amazingly deep it was, the military show up at his property. Mel made a second appearance on the radio show a few days later, explaining about how he’s been chased off his property and made threats to by the military. And afterwards Mel accepts a cash offer from the military to lease the property and he leaves the country for Australia. And the radio show host Art Bell believes Mel is never coming back and Mel isn’t heard from for a long time. And I’m going to insert something here because I forgot, I can’t believe I forgot to mention in previous episode back to the radio show host Art Bell. I actually made graphics for a revival of a show that he had brought about on SiriusXM about 10-ish years ago. So I’m about two steps removed from Mel Waters himself.

Well done. If Art was still with us today, you could reach out to him and be like, hey, hook us up.

It’s true. Just give me his number.

Yeah, we just want to do an interview. It’s fine.

But enough about me. So at this point, Mel’s hole is still obsessed over by listeners of the radio show Coast to Coast AM. It’s replayed from time to time during when the announcers take, you know, their vacations or breaks. They go into reruns.

And this is just one of the big classic episodes for the listeners. Mel’s hole.com, a website forum is started up and people are using it to organize into search parties to go looking for the hole. People find military blocking off some areas in the area that it’s supposed to be in. And the publicly available satellite photos show an area completely blanked out with white squares.

Now is Mel’s hole.com is it still a website?

It’s not a website anymore. There’s a new website called Mel’s hole.org, which sort of has notes about the entire story, but no one’s organizing on it right now. So the original forums are gone. But if you use the wayback machine, you can look on there and you can see people’s posts like, I’m going to be there this summer. Does anyone want to meet up and we’ll go looking together?

Very nice. So but if you if you were to type in Mel’s hole.com now, it’s not going to be porn site, right?

Pretty sure.

Okay. I don’t think anything came up. Good to know.

Don’t look at my internet history. Television crews also will visit Ellensburg trying to find out where the hole is in Washington. Fan made songs about Mel’s hole are played on coast to coast. They email the host with their MP3s of their songs and he’s cool. He plays them.

And local bars around the area have cocktails and aimed after Mel’s hole. So that was back in 1997 when he made the original call. And then two years later in December of 1999, Mel is heard from again. And he contacts the same radio show host Art Bell and he says he’ll be traveling back to the states and art arranges another interview.

People are going wild. Mel hasn’t been back to the hole. So the interview will mainly deal with his life since his last interview. And Art’s running promos because everyone wants to hear what he might know, what might have happened since the last event. And people are going nuts. People just can’t wait for him to come back on the air.

I can’t wait to hear what happens to the medicinal plants he was planting.

That does come up. Okay, good. But the day he’s supposed to air, Mel is a no show. In months pass without word until finally in April of 2000, Mel returns to the paranormal late night talk show, Coast to Coast AM. And they start off the interview with a recap about the original story of Mel’s hole, about the experiments and the military taking over. And Mel explains that he accepted an offer to lease the land for a quarter million dollars a month, which is crazy. I want that to happen to me.

To be fair, from what I can remember the first episode, his ex-wife owned the land. So was he leasing it without permission from her?

He had permission to use the land and he couldn’t develop on it. One point in one of his interviews, he did say he was giving her about 25,000 a month. Okay. So it sounded like she was getting 10% of what he was getting from the government.

Okay. Yeah, he accepted that offer because who wouldn’t accept a quarter million dollars a month? And he packed up and moved to Perth, Australia. And he says his transport, bank accounts, and accommodations were all set up for him. And with all that money, he starts a wombat rescue, one of the things he brings up many, many times. And also builds facilities to grow and study the plants he had been cultivating around the bottomless hole back in the US. He also brings along similar plant from Nevada, which was the original source of his plants. In Mel, he’s incredibly invested in his plant research and claims the plants he brought from around Mel’s hole had remarkable properties compared to the other plants he brought, which should be the same strain more or less.

It doesn’t, if you eat it, turn into urine that can cure your stigmatism, doesn’t?

Uh, no. Kick it. I don’t know if he tried. If he had known. Maybe. If he had a TikTok.

Mel, if you’re still out there, keep it a try.

He must be still around. I don’t think he’s that old. But one of the remarkable properties he says his plants do have is they were given to three advanced HIV patients who were all in hospice and they all fully recovered.

And this is back in like 2000 where HIV was more deadly than it is now. But Art Bell ignores all this talk about the plants, possibly trying to avoid discussing potentially bogus medical cures. That’s not what it shows about. And he pushes Mel to explain why he was a no show for their aerodate back in December. And Mel says the purpose for his return to the U.S. was that he was going to help his nephew move to Olympia, Washington.

And at the same time also visit some family. And he arrived in the U.S. As promised, helped his nephew move. And when they were finished with the move, he took their moving truck and return it back to Tacoma. He gets to Tacoma, hops on up. I don’t know if it was a Greyhound bus or some sort of regional transport, doesn’t say. He gets on a bus back to Olympia. And this is the night he’s supposed to appear on the radio. And during his bus ride, there’s an altercation between two passengers and it turns into a fight.

The bus is pulled over and transportation officials arrive to question the other passengers. Which is not the greatest thing you want to have happen to you after you spend all day helping someone move. And Mel is worried about not making it back in time for his radio appearance. And when the transportation officials arrive, they tell him the sooner he can answer their questions about what happened on the bus, the sooner they can take him home. And he agrees.

And that’s the last thing he remembers. For 12 days, there’s a gap. 12 days later, he’s waking up in an alley in San Francisco. Two homeless guys are trying to shake him awake. He says he’s in a bad part of town and he’s still wearing his clothes from helping his nephew move.

But he’s missing his wallet, his keys, and his homemade belt buckle. He had IV tape residue on his arm. And even worse, all of his top and bottom molars were removed. And his gums were still bleeding.

It sounds like somebody got some cheap dental work done in Mexico, potentially.

That or maybe someone was getting it done and they found out that Mel’s teeth would do nicely in this other person’s mouth. You’re gonna have to look long and hard at people’s smiles to tell if they’re wearing your teeth, I guess. Tooth Fairy Mafia got to him. It’s unknown.

We never really learn who stole his teeth or why. And Mel contacts his nephew, who has been frantic about his missing uncle because it’s been like a week and a half. And his nephew buys Mel a Greyhound ticket and he goes back to Olympia. And so Art asks, what happened to all your money?

Which is a fair question. I mean, Mel’s been mugged and suffered an ordeal, but he’s loaded. You can just buy new teeth and a new belt buckle.

Quarter of a million a month from the government, he should have millions of dollars in the bank. Because this is like two years later. Mel explains, when he returned to Olympia, he’s immediately served with legal papers from his ex-wife, stating he broke the conditions of the use of the land around Mel’s hole. Whatever group leased the property had installed septic tanks and paved roads, which violated the terms of his usage of the land. Mel’s being sued for the alterations to the property. Mel also finds his bank accounts are empty. His plant research facilities in Australia have been shuttered. And all of his employees fired and given generous severances from his accounts. Mel is broke.

But then how is he going to eat anything with his molar is all missing?

I mean, maybe he just moves to Alaska and lies down and then swallows up each snakeworm into his belly.

Ooh, or the medicinal plants that he’s got will help him grow teeth like a shark. I hope so. I hope so too.

He could become the shark man of Washington. Even worse, if you remember from the last episode, Mel and his friend found a pistol buried on the Mel’s hole property and were firing it into Mel’s hole because they thought it was weird. It made a no sound. Well, he finds out that friend has gone missing. He became obsessed with the pistol. Mel let him keep that when the pistol was placed next to a radio, the radio would start playing broadcasts from different periods in time. Mel’s final words on this April interview are employing people to help track down his friend. So sometime after that interview, Mel returns to Ellensburg, Washington. He’s unable to contact his ex-wife at all. And likely she’s getting that sweet, sweet government lease money now.

She’s taken the whole pie. Mel doesn’t bother returning to Mel’s hole at all. He suspects there are fences and signs all around the property, but he hasn’t checked. But he does ask around Ellensburg about the hole. And locals tell him they’ve also seen the blackbeam several times.

Mel finds that he’s become a celebrity with truck drivers because truck drivers, they all listen to Coast to Coast AM. And they tell him that a local warehouse has been getting lots of deliveries of scientific lab equipment from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Others have delivered spools and spools of fiber optic cables, and all they can do is speculate. Nothing really comes from that.

I mean, they could just be trying to make a giant fiber optic Christmas tree in the middle of Ellensburg with all the fiber optic cables and the lab equipment. Who knows?

That’s true. This is middle of the year. You do want to start that project early if you’re going to build a giant Christmas tree. If you were from Ellensburg, message us and let us know if you’ve seen a giant. A bar optic Christmas tree.

Yeah. So at some point Mel runs into a stranger and he recognizes the stranger is wearing one of his homemade belt buckles, the ones he was making and selling when he was still living there back in 97. They get to talking about the belt buckles and what they’re made from. And they notice that the markings and dates on the coins welded onto the buckle are not the ones they should be.

The dates and markings don’t make sense. Now if you remember from the previous episode, Mel has been making these belt buckles from random bits of metal he’s been finding around Mel’s hole. There seems to be all sorts of stuff buried out there.

I mean people keep throwing stuff in the hole. It’s inevitable that little pieces of metal would break off and end up everywhere.

That’s true. It’s probably burping things up like that mysterious cloud monster and nope.

Oh that’s what the black beam is. Oh yeah. It’s burping up pieces of metal.

If you see a black beam in the sky just know what it is in otherworldly creature burping. Afterwards this man contacts a coin collector to get some more information about the weird markings on these coins and they can’t explain the markings but the man has offered a huge sum of money for it but he declines it and later the treasury department has tracked him down and confiscates it entirely. Dude should have taken the money.

What does the… Sorry what was the treasury?

The treasury department. So the group responsible for minting coins.

What does the treasury department want with somebody’s belt buckle? How do they know that like Mel didn’t just engrave the markings himself?

You know it doesn’t quite say and Mel just sort of says that they showed up and confiscated from the man directly. Like there is such a thing called I think they’re called hobo pennies where it’s just basically art on coins people will just hammer a coin into like different shapes they’ll turn uh I forget who’s on the back of their coin but they’ll turn that into like a skull or whatever so it’s not like people don’t deface coins.

I feel like that’s a good way to go door to door and get a bunch of money is just be like I’m from the treasury department I need to confiscate your money.

Do you have any weird coins? Let me see them. Yes. Goodbye I’m taking this. So Mel hears us from the friend who had the belt buckle and the dots now start connecting in his mind. Mel remembers that the strange coins on the buckle were all collected from around the hole. He also recalls the plants he grew around the hole had special properties as well. He thinks of the gun and he starts realizing anything to do with the hole must have some strange importance. That might be why his research facilities in Australia were shuttered and his belt buckle was stolen. Unfortunately the only conclusion he can draw at this point is that anything to do with the hole is just weird. More time passes and he manages to find a dentist who fixes up his missing teeth. So I guess he doesn’t become the shark man of Washington.

No although from somebody who’s had some missing teeth repaired it’s expensive so somebody must have given him a little something something so he could get his teeth fixed.

It’s true yeah they didn’t have GoFundMe back then. Nope. Maybe he did have some of those remaining coins and tracked down the coin dealer. At some point he moves to the Pacific Northwest and then in August of 2001 his life takes a downturn when he is diagnosed with an untreatable esophageal cancer and he’s told he has about six months to live. And that’s where we’ll leave off before our next episode for the third and final part of the Mel’s Hole saga.

Don’t feel too bad about Mel yet. There’s going to be some surprises. Underlined surprises in the next one. Things get really bizarre but for now we’ll feed this story into the Curse-O-Meter.

Please stand by.

And determining on whether Mel Waters himself is cursed. The Curse-O-Meter says probably benign. This is just random misfortunes that could happen to most people. People get kidnapped off of buses. And their teeth stolen. It might also be a case of the real curses people because I don’t think a hole would come after you and take your teeth.

I mean it might if it’s burping metal.

It’s true. It sounds like a creepypasta. I guess that leaves it for now for the Mel’s Hole saga. Definitely listen to us next month for the finale of this bizarre bizarre tale of a man and his hole. Another hole happens in the next episode. Another hole and a half I’d say.

For those of you who are interested in items once again from our cursed museum and Etsy shop go check out Probably Cursed Etsy. And if you have any of your own mysterious items or things that you don’t want in your house that could be potentially cursed send them to us.

Get in touch with us if you have one of those dolls that every time you throw them away or set on fire they’re sitting on your fireplace mantel the next day. We’ll take it off your hands.

Give it a nice home at our place.

And until next month this is your host Chris signing off.

This is Sheryl saying have a good night.