It all began on February 21, 1997, when the popular American paranormal radio Coast to Coast AM received a call from a man claiming to be Mel Waters.
This man began to tell the strange story that an incomprehensible and very deep hole was suddenly discovered on his land near the city of Ellensburg in Washington state. It was lined with bricks and was wider than an ordinary well.
Mel Waters phoned the radio several times and each time brought up new facts about this hole. So, he could not figure out what its depth is, but one day he began to lower the fishing line with a load into it and it kept going down and down until it reeled off … 15 miles. And then Mel's line just ran out.
And then Mel said that his neighbor threw the body of his dead dog into this hole, and after a while … he met him safe and sound, running around nearby. It was exactly his dog, with the same collar as the keychain with his name, with the same spots on the skin. Thus, Mel came to the conclusion that wherever this hole leads, it is capable of reviving the dead.
With each new fact about the hole, this whole story became more unusual and less and less like a regular prank. Mel talked about the hole in all seriousness and with many details. He said that outdated music from other eras and incomprehensible voices sometimes come from it.
At the same time, he flatly refused to say exactly where she is, mentioning only the city and that the hole not far from his house on his private land. He named the Manastash mountain range as the only landmark, supposedly it passes very close to his site.
Mel Waters talked about the hole on the radio from 1997 to 2002, but never called again after a local newspaper investigated in 2002 and pointed out in an article that people named Mel Waters had never lived in the Manastash Ridge area.
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Shortly before that, Mel said that government officials contacted him, paid him a lot of money for a plot with a hole, and asked him to move somewhere farther, for example, to Australia. So the subsequent silence of Mel was not recognized by everyone as the result of exposing the joke. Many people thought that he really just left somewhere and was silent, because he was threatened by the authorities.
Several years have passed and even convinced fans of the paranormal have almost come to terms with the fact that "Mel's Hole" turned out to be a fiction. But in 2008, a shaman from an Indian tribe named Red Elk (in the world of Jerry Osborne) suddenly appeared from somewhere, who stated that he personally saw this strange hole and even conducted experiments with it.
One such experiment involved dropping a basket of ice into a hole, and then a cage with a live sheep. When the ice was lifted, it suddenly turned out to be very hot, although it did not melt at all, and when they raised the sheep, it was dead. An autopsy of the sheep showed that it seemed to be boiled alive from the inside, and something living was found in its intestines, similar in appearance to a baby seal.
All of this was even stranger than Mel's stories, and even for skeptics, it all became so bizarre and unusual that they did not know where to start their exposure.
Now the story with "Mel's Hole" is mostly considered either an urban legend, or some kind of experiment, staged either by very clever pranksters or psychology students. Of course, no real evidence of its existence was found.