In a feature published by Milwaukee Magazine, educator and content creator Geo Rutherford discusses her TikTok series “Spooky Lake Month,” detailing how she curates real-world aquatic anomalies, shipwrecks, and submerged towns every October.
The Pandemic Origins of Spooky Lake Month
The digital series began in October 2020.
Noticing a distinct lack of digital media focused specifically on bodies of water, she launched the project on October 2, 2020. Her video featured Lake Kaindy in Kazakhstan, a lake formed by a landslide that preserves standing underwater trees. To date, the project spans approximately 156 topics.
Taxonomy of Aquatic Eerie History
Rutherford structures each annual series around specific recurring criteria. The recurring inventory relies on non-fiction, real places, real stories, and real history.
- Reservoirs created by flooded municipalities, such as Qiandao Lake in China and various sites across the United States, like in Georgia.
- Radioactive bodies of water and mining runoff.
- Freshwater shipwrecks, with a heavy emphasis on Great Lakes maritime history.
- Saturation diving environments.
Wisconsin Waterways and Submerged Structures
Living in Wisconsin provides abundant raw material for the series. Rutherford highlights several local bodies of water with notable histories.
Door County features Death’s Door, a place where a lot of ships went aground because it was shallow. Near Manitowoc lies the wreck of the “Christmas Tree Ship,” a vessel that sank during a storm while transporting Christmas trees from northern Michigan to Chicago, leaving the cargo preserved underwater alongside the site of the disaster.
Rutherford resides on Fish Lake near Sauk City. This particular body of water is a seepage lake that experienced a sustained rise over a 20-year period.
The rising water eventually subsumed five residential properties. For the past six years, these structures have remained completely submerged, allowing kayakers to paddle above furnished interiors containing intact household items like refrigerators, couches, crockpots, and ceiling fans.
