Posted by A lot of great campfire stories came from people calling into the open lines of Art Bell’s radio show, Coast to Coast, in the 1990s. Cultural candy like John Titor, and that guy who claimed he was flying over Area 51 come to mind as instances of flavorful modern folklore born from that seminal radio show. It helped me work through my insomnia as a kid (or I suppose made it worse, depending on how you look at it).
But Mel’s Hole is my favorite of them all.
The basic story is that this guy, Mel, found a hole that seemingly has no bottom. He’d throw things in, and those things would just fall. Also, weird noises come out of it. At one point he tried to measure its depth with fishing line, but ran out of fishing line. Eventually Mel just started throwing trash and dead animals into it.
The stories would take a kind of Pet Semetery kind of angle, when they would find that dead things–farm animals like cows, dogs, and the like–would come back. You could imagine the rest—aliens, government coverups, you name it. Like Stefon would say, it’s got everything.
Anyhow, I was watching an old movie the other night, and I think I stumbled onto an antecedent of the basic story 1.
Encounter with the Unknown was a Rod Serling narrated anthology movie, released in on 1973. It featured three pieces: the first one, a tale of ghostly revenge for a childish prank gone wrong, and the last one, some sentimental vaseline lens love montage type stuff going into a Resurrection Mary style ghost passenger story. Pretty standard TV Land kind of fare, at least for these two stories.
But the second one stood out. It took place at the turn of the 1900’s, in which boy loses his dog, and in his search for her, happens upon a hole in the ground. (Incidentally people fell into holes a lot in the past. I guess they still do, now.)
By the way, this hole is fuuucked up. Its presumably really deep, and hellish screams emanate from it.
Although there is a rope sequence, the characters weren’t attempting to measure the hole, as Mel had purportedly attempted to do in the Mel’s Hole story, before ultimately running out of 80,000 feet of fishing line. No, in this story the rope is used to lower someone in, because that’s what you do with a hole, right? Fucking go into it? (I think they were trying to get the dog; I honestly don’t remember) Anyway, when they pulled him out, he was clearly stark raving nuts–running around like a lunatic madman, etc. You get the idea. Whatever was in there was enough to drive a man bonkers.
There’s this belief that if you go farther enough away, or deep enough, you will find a well of pure madness. You can see echoes of this in movies like Event Horizon – go farther enough away, and you find madness; The Descent – go deep enough, and you find monsters. Also for some modern fakelore, see The Devil’s Stairway Incident, as well as the Well to Hell.
Personally, I’m not sure why a deep hole would necessarily be evil 2. I understand the Judeo/Christian idea of hell being subterranean, but frankly, I think a bigger, simpler catalyst might be basic fear of the dark 3.
Anyway, at least with regard to Mel’s Hole, it was neat learning a little about how a beloved piece of cultural arcana might have come to be (assuming, of course, that it wasn’t real to begin with).
Haunted holes!
(source: Tom | Some rights reserved)
1.
Its worth noting that these two people figured it out before I did:
https://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/forum/topic/119556-mels-hole-does-it-exist/?do=findComment&comment=2159994
https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R38EZ2RRL74N7A/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B000B1Q78W
2.
But again, why does the dark (the unknown) have to be necessarily fearful? What if I go down there, and there’s a Victorian bedroom and a version of myself, at a different age, in a space suit? And a giant fetus?
3.
And/or maybe spiders and snakes. Not to mention claustrophobia-inducing fear of structural integrity issues around the hole itself (can I be more boring?)