This one is a hotly debated mystery with a delicious storyline. A hole in the ground that is bottomless and magical.
In 1997, a man with a rural property Ellensburg, Washington calling himself Mel Waters was on Coast to Coast radio show claiming he had a hole on his property that was bottomless.
Mel claimed he took a weight and fishing line and lowered into the hole to inspect the depth. He supposedly used 80,000 feet of fishing line. Another claim Mel made was that a neighbor's dog died and he threw the body down the hole and later on the dog was seen alive and well.
The story gets a bit more convoluted as Mel told the Coast to Coast's Art Bell that the federal government learned about the magic hole and seized the property, sending him off to Australia to shut up.
Repeatedly, Mel was called back to Coast to Coast and the audience couldn't get enough of the mystery.
To add more mystery to this, deep research showed no one could locate the supposed hole and no one named Mel Waters lived in that county. Geologists said that such a hole in that area would collapse on itself.
Inspired by this legend, a scif show called "Outer Range" was created and is on Amazon Prime. It had two seasons and starred Josh Brolin.
Did Mel's Hole exist? I have a researcher/explorer friend who claims he found it back in the 70s and that nowadays the military put fencing around it. Of course, like many legends, it's better not really having answers so we can continue to roll it around in our minds.
Although this site is generally believed to be fiction, it has posed an interesting question - what if an almost bottomless hole existed?
I could imagine the echo effects and the hard walls of a hole might bring some strange reverberations, but the conclusion hell is deep in the earth doesn't really make any logical sense to modern man. I could see, like fear of eclipses, ancient man might have considered that dead bodies go in the earth and hell must be in a dark and lonely place such as that.
The deeper into the earth, the more likely there are noxious gases, so the healing powers of Mel's Hole probably doesn't equate.
The Russians dug the deepest hole in the earth. Called the Kola Superdeep Borehole, it was dug in 1989 and went down over 40,000 feet (over 7 miles). They found hot mineralized water, some newly discovered microfossils, rock formations they didn't expect, and lots of gases.
Am I a believer of Mel's Hole? Nope. But, wow, I enjoyed the "what if?" implications.