YAKIMA — Ellensburg has multiple claims to fame.
It was a contender for the state capital, as well as home to Central Washington University and the Ellensburg Rodeo.
But since the mid-1990s, it has also gained notoriety as the location of an otherworldly portal going into the bowels of the earth.
Mel’s Hole, as it is known, has inspired conspiracy theories and urban legends, as well as an art show in southern California and a beer.
And it all started with a phone call.
From 1989 to 2007, Art Bell’s “Coast to Coast” was a staple of late-night AM radio, with Bell fielding calls to his studio in Pahrump, Nev. People called about UFOs, occult activity, conspiracy theories and the paranormal. It was a relatively innocent time when conspiracy theories were entertainment and not existential threats to democracy.
On Feb. 21, 1997, Bell had a man on the line who identified himself as “Mel Waters” who lived near Ellensburg. He said there was a hole on his property southwest of the city that was “unusual.” Waters told Bell that people had used the hole to dump assorted garbage, including a car, through the years but the hole never seemed to fill up.
But that wasn’t the only strange thing about the hole.
Waters claimed that people had seen a beam of “black light” shine from the hole. A hunter dumped his dead dog in the abyss, only to see it alive in the woods a few days later, he said.
The hole, Waters told Bell, was 9 1/2 feet wide with smooth walls as far as he could see. He tied a roll of Life Savers candy to a fishing line and attempted to plumb the depths.
He eventually added 80,000 feet — slightly more than 15 miles — of line to the weight and still hadn’t hit bottom.
And this is where the story starts getting weird.
Waters told Bell and his audience of millions of night owls that he found a World War II-era German pistol in the dirt by the hole that didn’t make any sound when it fired but would cause a radio to receive broadcasts from the past when put near it.
There was also a red envelope on the ground near the hole that contained 1943 Roosevelt dimes that bore a “B” mint mark.
A few days later, Waters called back and said he had been away from home, and upon his return he found his driveway barricaded, with soldiers standing guard who told him that there had been a plane crash on the ridge above his property. Waters said he was leaving for Australia, where he planned to grow medicinal plants and start a wombat preserve.
Waters resurfaced on “Coast to Coast” in April 2000, telling Bell’s audience that he had leased the property for $3 million a year in perpetuity to an unnamed person in 1997, and that as part of the deal he had to stay in Australia. But Waters broke the agreement and returned to the U.S. in 1999, he said, only to be lured off a bus near Olympia, taken into custody and waking up 12 days later in San Francisco with an IV scar and surgical tape residue on his arm.
Waters said his rear molar teeth, his wallet and belt buckle, which he said was made with three of the Roosevelt dimes he claimed he found near the hole, were taken. He also believed the government placed a tracking device in his teeth.
This story was proving too much for some of Bell’s fans, who pointed out that Roosevelt’s likeness did not appear on the dime until 1946, a year after his death. And there is no “B” mint mark, which is stamped on coins to show which mint produced it.
(Fun fact: FDR’s likeness was placed on dimes for his support of polio research, particularly having people send a dime to the White House to help fund the work. That led to the creation of the March of Dimes.)
Waters posited that the gun and the dimes were from a parallel universe where Roosevelt died before 1943, the Germans won World War II and the dimes were struck at a mint in Berlin.
But there were other holes in Waters’ stories that were apparently bigger than the one he said was on his property.
First, there is no record of anyone named Mel Waters living anywhere in Kittitas County. Also, people have scoured Manastash Ridge and never found the hole.
Jack Powell, at the time a geologist with the state Department of Natural Resources, told the Ellensburg Daily Record in 2012 that he thought he knew where the supposed hole was. Northwest of Ellensburg, he said, there was an old gold mine shaft in a field, but that shaft might go 300 feet deep at the most. Powell theorized that whoever Waters was may have known about that hole on private property.
He was highly skeptical of the assertions. A Seattle-based discussion group that would eventually form the Seattle Paranormal Society contacted Powell in 2001 about Mel’s Hole, and Powell took them out to what he believed to be the inspiration for the story and told them about the local geology and why a bottomless hole was impossible.
Stephen Reidel, a retired geology professor at Washington State University, also visited the shaft that was the purported inspiration for Mel’s Hole. Like Powell, Reidel said a hole of the depth Waters described was physically impossible.
“The earth’s pressure would have sealed it off in no time at all,” Reidel said. “The whole area is under north-south pressure, and we have the ridges because of that.”
The deepest hole on record is the 40,229-foot Kola Superdeep Borehole in northwest Russia, which took 20 years and specialized equipment to drill.
But the legend lives on.
In 2008, the Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana, Calif., hosted “Aspects of Mel’s Hole: Artists respond to a Paranormal Land Event Occurring in Radiospace” featuring art inspired by the story of Mel’s Hole.
Locally, PUNCH Projects in Thorp has artists’ depictions of Mel’s Hole on display, and the Iron Horse Brewery in Ellensburg has a beer called Mel’s Magic IPA. The “unclear beer matches the myth that precedes it,” the advertising copy reads.
