In the late 1990s, an obscure story about a seemingly bottomless pit in rural Washington captured the imagination of late-night radio listeners across America. Known simply as “Mel’s Hole,” the bizarre tale combined mystery, folklore, conspiracy theories, and paranormal claims into one of the most memorable stories ever told on late-night radio.

The story first emerged in 1997 on the paranormal-themed radio program Coast to Coast AM, hosted by the legendary broadcaster Art Bell. A caller identifying himself only as “Mel Waters” claimed to own property near the small town of Ellensburg, Washington, where he had discovered something deeply strange: a massive hole in the ground that, according to him, had no measurable bottom.

Mel described the pit as approximately nine feet wide, lined with stone, and long used by locals as an unofficial dumping site. People allegedly threw trash, broken appliances, and even dead animals into it, yet no one ever reported hearing anything hit the bottom. Intrigued, Mel said he attempted to measure the depth himself by lowering fishing line weighted with heavy sinkers.

According to his account, he used thousands of feet of fishing line—far more than seemed possible—without reaching the bottom. In one telling of the story, he claimed to have lowered over 80,000 feet of line into the hole with no result, an astonishing figure considering that would place the pit far deeper than Earth’s crust in that region.

The mystery took an even stranger turn when Mel recounted bizarre stories surrounding the hole. He claimed that animals avoided the area and refused to approach it. More astonishingly, one local allegedly threw a dead dog into the pit, only to later see what appeared to be the same dog alive and wandering nearby. Such claims transformed Mel’s Hole from geological curiosity into something resembling a portal or supernatural anomaly.