It’s the start of the spookiest month of the year, and that’s especially true for educator and content creator Geo Rutherford. The UW-Milwaukee grad and Sauk City based artist celebrates every October with her TikTok series “Spooky Lake Month.”
In it, she explores the world’s most eerie and unusual bodies of water — including some right here in Wisconsin.
Rutherford’s work was featured in this month’s Milwaukee Magazine. She joins Lake Effect’s Joy Powers to talk about the series and what makes water so spooky.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Joy Powers: What is the origin story of this series?
Geo Rutherford: Like many stories these days, the origin is the pandemic. I started to make lake-related content, Milwaukee-related content and grad school-related content kind of all at the same time. I was doing my master's thesis at UWM about lakes, about the Great Lakes.
And when I started making TikToks about lakes, I realized that there was kind of a void on the internet for lakes. It was a niche that had not been explored. And even though I'm an artist and not a limnologist, I decided to go down that rabbit hole myself.
In October of 2020, I had made a few videos about famous lakes of the world. And I realized that there's a lot of really weird lakes, moreso than rivers or even oceans. So I made a TikTok on October 2nd, 2020, about Lake Kaindy, which is a lake in Kazakhstan that was created from a landslide. And all these trees are still perfectly preserved inside of the lake.
That inspired "Spooky Lake Month," and ever since then, we've done 156 topics, I think, and they all fall under this umbrella of non-fiction, real places, real stories, real history, and people really eat it up.
Joy Powers: What are some themes that emerge when you're exploring these spooky waterways?
GR: There's a clear, bullet-point list of things that I try to cover every year. We've got reservoirs that drowned a city. There are thousands of them across the world, whether that's Qiandao Lake in China. Or it's in the United States here, where we've flooded many a city, like in Georgia. There's radioactive bodies of water. That's always really fun. Every year, I talk about mining runoff in some way, shape, or form. Anything that's essentially this man-made pool of poison, I find kind of fascinating.
Every year I do a shipwreck. I love a shipwreck in a lake, so obviously I'm doing a lot of Great Lakes shipwrecks. I also love a saturation-diving topic. That's where people are living in a pressurized environment so they can work very deep areas of the ocean specifically. Every year, I'm trying to fill those slots. And I don't redo topics if I can help it, so I'm always trying to find something new and different that I haven't talked about before.
Joy Powers: I feel like living in Wisconsin is maybe helpful for something like that, because we have so many bodies of water here. When you think about Wisconsin specifically, what would you say are some of our spookiest waterways?
Geo Rutherford: Well, in Door County, we have Death's Door, which is kind of a fascinating place where a lot of ships went aground where they didn't realize it was gonna be so shallow. That's kind of shipwreck haven here in Door County. We have a famous shipwreck, the "Christmas Tree Ship" outside of Manitowoc. There was a man who would take his ship from Chicago up to northern Michigan to get Christmas trees every year. One year when they were coming back, there was a big storm. And the ship wrecked off the coast of Manitowoc, and everybody on board died. Even today if you go down there, there's these Christmas trees that are preserved in that water, because the ship went down with all these Christmas Trees aboard. That one's an interesting one, a very Wisconsin-focused spooky topic.
I also live on a spooky lake: Fish Lake, which is out near Sauk City. This lake is so interesting. It has five houses that are underwater. It's a seepage lake, so over the course of like 20 years, the water was slowly but surely rising. I think the people who owned the houses didn't think it was going to eventually subsume them, but it happened. And so, at least for the last six years, the houses have been fully submerged. You can kayak around them. And they left everything. There's fridges and couches and crockpots in the kitchen and fans on the ceiling. The houses have been slowly but surely disintegrating under this wet environment.
You can listen to Joy Powers' full conversation with Geo Rutherford above.
