Welcome to Ellensburg - The Urban Legends You Should Know

We’ve all been new to Ellensburg at some point. Whether it was recently, years ago, or at birth, at some point we were each introduced to this peculiar town and piece by piece we started learning what it’s all about.

Wind: yep, got it. Plenty of wind always. Wind advisory notices are going to pop up on your phone and at first you’ll probably think that the “50+ miles per hour wind” notification was a mistake or type-o... But did you know that we don’t say “the W word” out loud? It’s our superstition. Saying the W word makes it appear out of thin air every time after it’s been calm for a bit. Pun intended.

The Rodeo! That’s another big one, there are no indifferent feelings towards the Ellensburg Rodeo here. Either your family has been going to it for generations (given it’s been running every Labor Day Weekend for over 100 years now) and you never miss it, OR you purposely skip town because of all the traffic, horse trailers and dust.

But there are less common, more interesting pieces of Ellensburg you’ll pick up over time too. Like Mel’s Hole. The legend of Mel’s Hole “officially” began on February 21, 1997 when a man who identified himself as Mel Waters appeared as a guest on the radio show Coast to Coast AM. He claimed to own rural property in Ellensburg that featured a large and mysterious hole. He tried to measure how deep it was with some fishing line and a weight but apparently he never found the bottom despite going down 80,000 feet. Oh, and he saw his neighbor’s (formerly deceased) dog wandering around, alive and “well,” some time after falling into the hole, suggesting that the hole brought it back to life, kind of like Pet Sematary (Stephen King). 

So there’s a fun urban legend to stick in your back pocket. Mel’s Hole: a magical hole with no bottom that nobody knows the location of (except for a medicine man who had allegedly been visiting the hole since the 60s and some federal agents conducting alien research). Look it up, it’s a fun rabbit hole... There’s another pun.

Maybe you’re new to Ellensburg because you’re starting up at CWU. Congratulations, it’s a great school. It’s also a very old school complete with ghost stories - the most famous among them being the stories of “Lola in Kamola.” The origin stories of Lola vary and we probably shouldn’t go over the disturbing details here, but the most common tale involves Lola, her sweetheart who goes to war, a wedding dress, the attic in Kamola and a tragic ending.

If you ever get the chance to talk to the students, RA’s and staff in Kamola, you’ll hear stories of mysterious footsteps, voices, cries, lights turning on and off, heavy doors shutting by themselves and unexplainable shadows.

On a personal note, I actually had my own Lola experience when I was a student-worker cleaning the dorms one Summer also. I was cleaning the carpets on the top floor with a partner when I felt someone tap me firmly on the shoulder as if to say “hey turn off the machine for a sec.” Startled, I jumped, turned around and saw nothing. My partner was standing in front of me wondering what just happened and why I got so jumpy all of a sudden. He saw nothing.

If that’s not enough, I’ve even gotten the pleasure of hearing about some strange firsthand experiences from friends who worked for the Campus Police Department. They told me about the time they got a call in the middle of the night to go see who was making noise in the top floor of Kamola (which was empty except for a couple of RA’s who moved in to the first floor of the building early).

They went to investigate, heard the noise for themselves and described it to me as a muffled one-sided conversation coming from the attic. They opened the attic door, popped their head up with a flashlight, announced themselves, saw nothing, but then eerily heard the muffled conversation continue at the volume of a whisper. After searching the attic they confirmed nobody was there, and they never could explain why they were hearing that voice in an otherwise empty floor of the residence hall.

So, welcome to Ellensburg. I’ll leave you with these two local urban legends for now and let the locals eventually tell you about what they’ve heard is at the bottom of Carey Lake, and where you can potentially spot Bigfoot, and which fields have been known to collect crop-circles because there are plenty of people with their own firsthand accounts of strange happenings in the area. And who knows, maybe after you’ve spent some time here soaking up all these urban legends you can stop a newcomer from just talking about the wind and instead blow them away with some strange stories... Last pun. I had to end with a pun.

Written by: Riley Schmit