TikTok Creator Posts Spooky Water Stories Each October
With Halloween upon us, we thought our readers might enjoy learning about some spooky water stories that have been circulating on social media this month. While the bodies of water on this planet bring life and joy to many communities, they can also evoke fear. Drawing from her fascination with “haunted hydrology,” artist, author, and educator Geo Rutherford started the now popular “Spooky Lake Month” TikTok video series. Since 2020, on each day in October, Rutherford shares a short, spooky story about a body of water somewhere on Earth. Previous videos have covered the many shipwrecks of Lake Superior, the radioactive Lake Karachay of Russia (which was used as a dumping ground for nuclear waste in the 1950s), several cave diving tragedies in Georgia’s Radium Springs, and the strange ecosystem of Russia’s Lake Baikal, the deepest lake in the world. This month, Rutherford has featured glaciers, graveyard floods, and the Super-K neutrino tank in Japan—a massive, underground, 50,000-ton tank of ultrapure water used to detect neutrinos via Cherenkov radiation (the blue glow produced when charged particles, like electrons, travel faster than the speed of light in a medium, such as water).
“Spooky Lake Month” delves into the hydrological and geological phenomena, historical events, environmental disasters, and other strange happenings in and around lakes and other bodies of water. Rutherford’s personal artistry and mystical narration bring charm to these fascinating videos, in each of which she rates the topic on a scale of one to ten “spookies.” Check out this intriguing series and have a safe and happy Halloween!