Mel's Hole

Art Bell’s syndicated late-night radio show, Coast to Coast AM, was like what would happen if you took one of the Lone Gunmen from The X-Files and gave him a microphone, four hours of airtime to kill seven nights a week, and a bunch of phone lines jammed with callers who were even kookier than he was.

Back in the pre-Internet dark ages, dear children, we insomniacs couldn’t just while away our long, lonesome midnights Flickring and LiveJournaling and YouTubing until we finally passed out. But when the bars were closed and all the TV stations had shut down for the night, Art Bell and friends were always there, waiting to tell you about how Bigfoot was actually an escaped laboratory experiment from Area 51. While there were plenty of lost souls who took the show way too seriously, it was also pure catnip to a certain kind of artsy, wiseguy weirdo—parishioners of the Church of the Subgenius, punks with Charles Manson tattoos, Frank Zappa fans, etc.

One of the show's most famous stories began in 1997, when a man calling himself Mel Waters phoned in to Bell’s show, claiming he had discovered a mysterious hole on his Washington property. It was a hole of seemingly infinite depths and it allegedly has all sorts of mysterious properties, including the ability to bring dead animals back to life. As the years passed, Waters called in occasionally to add more astonishing details to his story, until he suddenly vanished from the airwaves in 2002, leaving a nation of night owls aching to learn more.

Bell is now semi-retired, but there is still plenty of interest in Mel's Hole. Last year dozens of art-world anti-heroes gathered in Santa Ana to pay semi-ironic tribute to the radio pioneer who never met a paranoid shut-in he didn’t like. The Grand Central Art Center’s Aspects of Mel’s Hole: Artists Respond to a Paranormal Land Event Occurring in Radiospace featured the work of Jeffrey Vallance, Gary Panter, Jim Shaw and many more. And as unlikely as it all sounds, there have been actual news stories about wannabe Fox Mulders getting lost in the Washington woods, their flashlights pointed down at the dirt as they wandered around in restless circles, wanting to believe.

If you want to learn more, there is plenty of stuff about Mel's Hole online, including a 27-part series of clips on Youtube.



(Parts of this post were originally written for an article in OC Weekly.)

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