TikToker hosts 31 days of 'haunted hydrology' with super-popular 'spooky lakes' series: 'We all have a fear of the unknown'
Each year, approximately 15 million people visit Lake Tahoe — a popular vacation spot tucked in the mountains between California and Nevada that is known for its sprawling beaches and ski trails. But few people probably know that the freezing temperatures below the lake’s surface make it hard for decomposition to take place.
Allegedly, the remains of around 200 people sit at the bottom of Lake Tahoe, and that’s why it can be classified — at least according to one TikToker — as a “spooky lake.”
Wisconsin-based artist and teacher Geo Rutherford has been ranking so-called spooky lakes in an ongoing series on her TikTok account for the past several years. Every October, she teaches her 1.6 million followers “haunted hydrology” lessons about various bodies of water around the world.
Rutherford will recap a brief history and explanation of a different body of water and its “spooky” elements — like the “blue holes” off of Andros Island in the Bahamas or the geothermal activity near New Zealand. Then Rutherford concludes the episode with a score between 1 and 10 “spookies.”
Viewers are hooked. They’ve turned Rutherford’s improvised video greeting — “um yes, hello” — into a catchphrase for the series, and they count down to the next October in the comments.
“I think we all have a fear of the unknown and what’s beneath the surface,” Rutherford explained to In The Know by Yahoo about her series’ success. “Lakes are such a perfect example of that. A lot of lakes conceal, or they all conceal, something beneath the surface, and you don’t know what that is.”
Rutherford doesn’t have a background in science — she calls herself a “hobby limnologist,” which is someone who studies freshwater systems. She sources a lot of her information from National Geographic and Smithsonian articles.
“My mother has a PhD in geology, and I spent a lot of my childhood immersed in science, but I was intimidated by the math factor going into college,” she said. “[But] I did my [master of fine arts] degree on the Great Lakes, which essentially gave me an excuse to do this deep dive into the Great Lakes.”
Rutherford was living in Milwaukee at the time and had easy access to the Great Lakes, which ended up inspiring some of her pieces for her MFA. She said she spent around three years studying the Great Lakes, with a focus on environmental issues within the area, for her projects.
When the pandemic hit, she said she felt like “all this information [was] brimming at the top of my mind,” so she started posting her art on TikTok while providing scientific and historical context around the Great Lakes.
Following the success of her videos, she decided to expand to “inherently spooky” lakes or bodies of water where “something spooky happened.” But she’s made it very clear that she’s not looking to cover true crime (even if some of the stories mention death) or conspiracies (regardless of whether an element of her story can be properly explained), because she wants the series to be focused on educating viewers about the environment and hydrology.
“True crime stuff kind of gives me the ick,” she said. “I don’t want to be contributing to that conversation if I can help it. But I acknowledge that a few of my topics get a little close to potentially unethical applications of spooky lake phenomena, you know?
“I’m not as interested in murder mysteries or any supernatural stuff,” she added, “despite the slightly misleading name of the whole series.”
Rutherford also pointed out that she knows a lot of her audience is pretty young. She’s gotten multiple messages from science teachers who have shared that they show her videos to their middle school classes. Her audience is something she has started to keep in mind more when she decides which topic she’ll cover next, and she said she’ll avoid covering anything too gross or too morbid.
The scoring system she’s implemented is based on a very specific factor: If you’re standing on the shore and you know the history of the surrounding area, how spooky is it?
“Some of these places are just not as inherently spooky if you don’t know the history of it or what caused it or how it happened or so on and so forth,” she explained. “I try to aim the rating to make sure that [the audience] knows I’m not rating these people’s lives or the lives that were lost, and [that it’s] more about the location of what it stands for.”
Rutherford is currently about halfway through her Spooky Lakes October series and told In The Know that she felt more at ease this year than in previous ones — last year she had just inked the deal for her upcoming illustrated book, Spooky Lakes — although she said she felt more pressure for the videos to do well.
“It’s very stressful; it’s very intense. I don’t do anything but eat, breathe and sleep spooky lakes,” she said. “But I went in definitely less nervous this year and just kind of having fun and letting it flow, knowing that it’s a very chaotic month.”
While she said she feels more “whatever happens, happens” about Spooky Lakes month this year, the process still never gets easier. Though she makes an extensive list of topics she wants to research and talk about months in advance, she admitted that she still films and edits every video the same day it goes up.
“At this point, it’s a tradition for me to be a chaos monger and to make the video the day of,” Rutherford joked. “I get excited, and I want to share this weird thing that I discovered that I did all this research on.”
One of the lakes Rutherford did a video on last year was right outside her own home. By chance, she moved to a lakeside house in Wisconsin that happened to have its own spooky history, worthy of a video.
“What are the chances that I ended up living on a spooky lake?” she said, laughing. “It’s just weird. Sometimes I’m like, Is this a matrix? Where am I living? It’s fate.”
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