The log that will not lie down
Crater Lake, Oregon · the Old Man, tracked since 1896
“A thirty foot log has been floating upright for at least a hundred and thirty years. Three feet of it stands above the surface.”
- National Park Service, Crater Lake — The Old Man of the Lake — “a 30-foot mountain hemlock log with three feet exposed above water”, first sighted 1896.
“It is a mountain hemlock, carbon dated beyond four hundred and fifty years old. A geologist named Joseph Diller recorded its position in eighteen ninety-six.”
- NPS — “carbon dated at beyond 450 years old”; “first sighted and tracked in 1896 by geologist Joseph Diller”.
“In nineteen thirty-eight, a study followed it for three months. Between July and October it travelled sixty-two point one miles. An average of about two thirds of a mile a day. Its longest day was three point eight miles, on the sixth of August.”
- NPS — a 1938 study; 62.1 miles; an average of .67 miles/day; “his maximum daily distance of 3.8 miles achieved on August 6th”.
- The narration says “about two thirds of a mile a day”. That is a spoken rounding of the .67 figure and is marked “about”. The two exact numbers are read exactly.
“The Park Service offers two explanations and endorses neither. That years in cold water made the log dense enough to float buoyant and balanced. Or that it once held rocks at its base.”
- NPS — the page gives both theories and endorses neither: cold water increasing density leaving it “buoyant and balanced”, and that the log “once held large rocks at its base which kept it from sinking”.
“Storms blew in. They could not launch the submersible at all. Then it snowed, in August. The scientists very quietly, and under cover of night, released the Old Man back into the lake.”
- NPS — in 1988 researchers “tied him up on the eastern shore of Wizard Island”; then “storms blew in, making it impossible to launch the submersible at all. When this was quickly followed by snow in August, the scientists very quietly (and under cover of night) released the Old Man back into the Lake.”
“The Park Service’s own page ends like this. The Old Man of the Lake is not only surrounded by water, but also mystery.”
- NPS — the closing line of the page, quoted rather than paraphrased. The word “mystery” is the agency’s, not ours.
Corrections made before this episode was published. The first draft asserted that nobody has ever explained why the log floats. That is false — the Park Service offers two buoyancy theories, and they now have a frame of their own. The draft also placed the 3.8-mile day in “an unrecorded year” when it is the 1938 study, and carried three further invented phrases: that Diller “watched it for years”, that the log “then stopped” after its longest day, and that the Park Service “maintains a detailed tracking record”. All were written from a summary rather than from the page itself, and all were cut before release.
The lifeboat that came back
Lake Erie · the Marquette & Bessemer No. 2, 7 December 1909
“Weeks after the ship went missing, a lifeboat was found on Lake Erie, floating half full of water. Inside it were nine frozen men, and the iced-over clothing of a tenth.”
- Ohio Sea Grant, Shipwrecks and Maritime Tales of Lake Erie — Lifeboat No. 4, found roughly 15 miles offshore of Erie, containing nine frozen crew; the boat had held a tenth person.
- The widely repeated account that the tenth man undressed and went over the side is not in that source, and the episode does not say it. It states only that the boat had held a tenth and that he was not in it.
“It came from the Marquette and Bessemer Number Two. A steel railway ferry, built in Cleveland… On the seventh of December, 1909, it left Conneaut, Ohio for Port Stanley, Ontario.”
- Ohio Sea Grant — a railway/car ferry built in Cleveland in 1905, running Conneaut, Ohio to Port Stanley, Ontario; left Conneaut Harbor on 7 December 1909.
“The entire crew of thirty-three and one passenger were lost.”
- This should not have gone out as a flat figure. Ohio Sea Grant does contain the sentence “the entire crew of 33 and one passenger were lost” — but the same page also records that the count is disputed: “Some records say 30, others 36, and yet other reports indicate 33.” The episode took the specific number and left the source’s own caveat behind.
- Our sourcing pass caught this before the script was written and required the line to read “more than thirty”, never a figure. That instruction was missed in the edit. The published episode carries the error, and we are leaving it on the record here rather than removing it quietly.
- Ohio Sea Grant — both the figure and the dispute are on the same page.
“Bodies came ashore for months. The captain was found almost a year later… The wreck has never been located.”
- Ohio Sea Grant — “other bodies continued to wash up onshore for the next few months”; Captain McLeod’s body was found almost a year later; “the M&B#2 has never been found” despite extensive searching.
Held back on purpose. Long-running rumours in the Lake Erie diving community that the wreck was found and kept secret have no named claimant and are not reported here or in the episode. Neither is a count of false discoveries, which we did not verify claim by claim. The $50,000 the passenger was reportedly carrying is sourced only as “reportedly”, and turns the episode into a treasure story.
No such entry, no such log
Flannan Isles, Eilean Mòr · three keepers, December 1900
“Everyone knows the last entry in the lighthouse log. Storm ended, sea calm, God is over all. There is no such entry. There is no such log.”
- National Records of Scotland — “we do not hold the log book for the Flannan Islands Lighthouse. It was not amongst the records deposited with National Records of Scotland by the Commissioners.”
- The famous entries appear nowhere in the official record and are not mentioned in Superintendent Muirhead’s report. The episode quotes the line in order to demolish it, and never presents it as a document.
- We do not name who invented them. The attribution circulating online — a named writer, a year, a pulp magazine — appears only in blogs and aggregators, so it stays off screen until the magazine itself or a scholarly citation is in hand.
“On the twenty-sixth of December, 1900, a relief tender found the lighthouse empty. Three keepers gone. James Ducat, Thomas Marshall, Donald McArthur.”
- Northern Lighthouse Board — James Ducat (Principal), Thomas Marshall (2nd Assistant) and Donald McArthur (Occasional Keeper); discovered “as a result of the routine visit by Lighthouse Tender HESPERUS, on 26 December 1900”. The last entries were noted on 15 December 1900.
“At the west landing, a supply box torn from a crack in the rock. Ropes strewn through the crevices. The iron railings twisted. The sea came up and took them.”
- Superintendent Muirhead’s report, dated 8 January 1901, via the Northern Lighthouse Board — the box “secured in a crevice in the rocks…had been washed away, and the ropes were strewn in the crevices of the rocks near the crane platform”; “the iron railings round the crane platform…were displaced and twisted”.
- The official conclusion is that the men “had all gone down on the afternoon of Saturday, 15 December to the proximity of the West landing…and that an unexpectedly large roller had come up on the Island…had swept them away with resistless force.” The record does not fail to explain this. It explains it, and we give that explanation the weight the record gives it.
Kept out of the episode because it is literature, not record. The uneaten meal and the overturned chair — the most repeated “facts” about this case — come from Wilfrid Wilson Gibson’s 1912 poem Flannan Isle, not from any report. So do the dramatic log entries themselves. No scene detail of the lighthouse interior appears in the episode, because none of it is in the sources we read. No photograph of the keepers or the lighthouse is used: the circulating ones are not verified public domain.
The lake that drained itself
Lake Peigneur, Louisiana · 20 November 1980
“A rig contracted by Texaco was drilling into Lake Peigneur, Louisiana. Underneath it, a working salt mine. The crew expected salt — but not for another hundred feet. Their fourteen-inch drill stuck at twelve hundred and twenty-eight feet.”
- Lake Peigneur and 64 Parishes (Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities) — 20 November 1980; a rig contracted by Texaco; a working Diamond Crystal Salt Company mine beneath; a measurement error, with the drill piercing the mine from above; a 14-inch assembly stuck at 1,228 ft.
“More than fifty men were down there… they queued for the only elevator, in turns, and every one of them got out. Six were later given awards for how calmly it was done.”
- Lake Peigneur — evacuation via the only elevator, in turns; six miners received awards for the orderly evacuation; every man underground escaped.
- “More than fifty” is deliberate. Sources disagree on the headcount — 55 in one, 50 in another — so the episode gives no figure. Every source agrees all of them got out.
“The canal to the Gulf reversed and ran backwards into the crater — the tallest waterfall in Louisiana’s history, pouring the sea into a freshwater lake. A ten-foot lake came back deep, and salt.”
- Lake Peigneur and 64 Parishes — the Delcambre Canal reversed, pulling Gulf water inland, producing the tallest waterfall in Louisiana’s recorded history.
- No height and no final depth are stated, on purpose. Sources give 150 ft and 164 ft for the waterfall, and 200 ft against 1,300 ft for the lake — and we believe the 1,300 ft figure is an error propagating between sources, since it matches the mine level rather than any lake. The superlative is corroborated; the numbers are not.
“No one died. Three dogs did. Texaco paid about forty-five million dollars — and the hundreds of workers who lost their jobs got none of it.”
- Lake Peigneur — zero human deaths; three dogs reported killed.
- UPI Archives, 7 July 1983 — settlement reached. The figure reconciles rather than conflicts: $32M to Diamond Crystal plus $12.8M to Live Oak Gardens is $44.8M, which is the “$45 million” total the other sources report. The episode says “about forty-five million”.
- 64 Parishes — hundreds of workers lost their jobs and were excluded from the settlement.
Cut for being single-sourced. A fisherman reportedly shouting “the end of the world is coming” is unattributable and is exactly the too-good-to-check line this channel exists to distrust. The maintenance foreman who drove through the mine warning men in the remote sections is named in one source only; the action is corroborated by the heroism awards, so it appears without a name. The count of trucks swallowed, and the “3.5 billion gallons” figure, are likewise single-sourced and are not stated.
The internet gets it half right
Lake Lanier, Georgia · Oscarville, Forsyth County, 1912
“The town under this lake was already empty when the water came. Mobs had emptied it forty years earlier, and the families never got their land back.”
- The popular story is that Lake Lanier drowned a thriving Black town. It did not. Oscarville’s Black residents were driven out in 1912; the lake arrived in the 1950s, more than forty years later, by which time there were no Black residents left to displace. The injustice is the expulsion and the permanent loss of land, not the water.
- Atlanta History Center, “Forsyth 1912: The Truth About Lake Lanier and Oscarville” and WABE, “1912: The Myth of Oscarville”.
- An earlier cut said only that the internet “gets it half right” and never named which half. That does the myth’s work for it, and the line was rewritten to state the correction outright.
“That September, after a white woman was attacked, white mobs burned Black churches and homes and drove out nearly eleven hundred Black residents. Almost every Black family in the county.”
- NPR, “The ‘Racial Cleansing’ That Drove 1,100 Black Residents Out Of Forsyth County” and Atlanta History Center, “Forsyth 1912: A Timeline” — more than 1,000 Black residents expelled over roughly three months; the county remained almost entirely white for decades.
- “After a white woman was attacked” reports the accusation as the trigger without asserting it was true. That neutrality is deliberate and is not to be tightened.
“About seven hundred households were bought out. Twenty cemeteries were moved. Fifty-six thousand acres were purchased, and roughly thirty-eight thousand of them went under. The Corps relocated the marked graves. The unmarked ones were left where they lay.”
- Gwinnett County and Buford Dam — 20 cemeteries relocated; construction began 1950 and the sluice gates closed 1 February 1956.
- “About seven hundred households” rather than families: roughly 700 households sat inside the acquisition area, while another commonly cited figure is 250 actually relocated. Both appear in reputable sources.
- Acquired is not submerged. About 56,000 acres were purchased; the lake’s surface is about 38,000. An earlier cut said “fifty-six thousand acres went under”, which was wrong, and the frame now draws the two as separate bars.
- Oxford American, “The Haunting of Lake Lanier” — structures were left standing and are documented on the bottom.
Corrections made before the published cut. An earlier version of this episode shipped as “corrected” when only its first line had been re-recorded — three sourced fixes existed in the notes but never reached the audio. It was rebuilt from scratch on 8 August 2026 with all five lines re-recorded. Cut for being unsourced: “five hundred boats every summer day”, which was the most quotable line in the old version and had no citation behind it. Also kept out: any drowning or ghost anecdote, which would hand the episode back to the myth it exists to correct.
The triangle that isn’t magic
Lake Michigan · Northwest Flight 2501, 23 June 1950
“1679: the Griffin, the first full-size ship on the Great Lakes, sails into Lake Michigan and is never seen again.”
- Discover Magazine — the first full-size sailing ship on the upper Great Lakes; left Green Bay on 18 September 1679 loaded with furs and was never seen again. Michigan’s state maritime archaeologist has investigated at least 17 Griffon claims since 2002; only two were even ships. “Never seen again” is correct and is not softened.
“1891: the schooner Thomas Hume vanishes in a squall with all hands. The Hume they finally found, in 2006, intact on the bottom.”
- Michigan Shipwreck Research Association — the Hume sailed into a squall, bad enough that the Rouse Simmons, travelling with her, turned back to Chicago. She was located in 2006 in roughly 150 ft of water, almost completely intact.
- “With all hands” is deliberate. The crew count is genuinely contested — six in MSRA’s account, seven in the contemporary maritime record — and cannot be resolved from the open record, so the episode gives no number.
“It lost radio contact on the night of June 23rd, 1950, the deadliest airliner crash in America at the time.”
- Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 2501 — a Douglas DC-4, LaGuardia to Seattle via Minneapolis, 58 aboard (55 passengers, 3 crew). Last contact at about 3,500 ft over the lake, roughly 18 miles north-northwest of Benton Harbor. It was the deadliest US commercial airliner accident at the time.
- The date is the flight, 23 June. Some sources give 24 June, which is the date the loss was confirmed.
“Searchers covered seven hundred square miles of lake bottom. Twenty years, ten thousand hours, half a million dollars. Sonar found nothing. No cause was ever determined.”
- Wisconsin Marine Historical Society, “The Search for Flight 2501 Has Ended” — the search was conducted by sonar over twenty years and was formally ended without finding the main wreckage.
Corrections made before this episode was published. Three errors were caught in the sourcing pass and fixed in both the voiceover and the on-screen text, with lines 1–4 re-recorded and the frames rebuilt to the new timings. The original cut said divers had searched for seventy years — it was twenty years, and by sonar. It described the Thomas Hume as vanishing in calm weather when she sailed into a squall. And it filed the Hume alongside the Griffin as a still-open vanishing, when she was found in 2006. That last correction made the episode better: a ship missing for 115 years until someone found her is a stronger line than one still missing.
The lake that never gives up her dead
Lake Superior · the Edmund Fitzgerald, 10 November 1975
“A seven hundred and twenty nine foot ore freighter sank in a Lake Superior storm with twenty nine men aboard.”
- NTSB Marine Accident Report MAR-78-03 — the federal investigation into the sinking.
- Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society — 729 ft overall; a crew of 29, aged 20 to 63.
“No distress call. No survivors. Not one body was ever recovered.”
- NTSB MAR-78-03 — no distress signal was received by any vessel or shore station.
- The search recovered lifeboats, rafts and debris. None of the crew were recovered. A body was later observed on the lakebed (below) — observed is not recovered, and both statements are true.
“Superior’s deep water holds around thirty four degrees, so cold that the bacteria that normally bring a body to the surface simply can’t work.”
- American Water College — Lake Superior — deep water sits near 34°F (1.1°C) year round.
- Truth or Fiction, “Do bodies float in Lake Superior?” — a body normally resurfaces on bacterial gas; near-freezing water suppresses it.
“The wreck still lies five hundred and thirty feet down near Whitefish Point, protected by law as a grave site. In 1994, a submersible found one crewman near the bow, nineteen years after the sinking, still in his life jacket.”
- NTSB MAR-78-03 — 530 feet (88 fathoms), in Canadian water just north of the international boundary.
- Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society — 17 miles north-north-west of Whitefish Point, Michigan.
- Ontario Heritage Act protection — a 500 m marine archaeological zone designated January 2006; unlicensed survey carries fines up to CA$1 million.
- Expeditions to the Edmund Fitzgerald and Frederick Shannon, “Expedition ’94” — seven dives, 25–27 July 1994, using Delta Oceanographic’s submersible Delta. The crewman was partly dressed in coveralls and wearing a life jacket, alongside the bow.
“Twenty nine names, one bell.”
- Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society — the 200 lb bronze bell was recovered on 4 July 1995 by a joint expedition with the National Geographic Society, the Canadian Navy, Sony and the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians. It is rung 29 times each year, once per crew member. A replica engraved with the 29 names was left on the wreck.
Corrections made before this episode was published. An earlier cut said divers found the crewman in 1994. No one has ever dived this wreck — at 530 feet it is far beyond diver range, and the 1994 survey was made by submersible. The same cut gave the depth as 535 feet, which is the Coast Guard cutter Woodrush’s initial sonar fix rather than the 530 feet in the official report. Both were fixed before release.
Michigan and Huron are one lake
Map post · the Straits of Mackinac
Lake Michigan and Lake Huron are the same lake.
- NOAA Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory, Straits of Mackinac — “Due to the unique flow of the Straits, the two lakes are considered to be one (Lake Michigan-Huron)”, “forming the largest lake in the world by surface area and the fourth largest by volume.”
The current in the Straits reverses about every day and a half.
- NOAA GLERL — the overall flow runs from Michigan to Huron, but “it also oscillates (moves back and forth) and changes direction on an average of once every 1.5 days.”
- No width is given for the Straits, deliberately. No NOAA, USGS or EPA page states one, and the widely repeated “five miles” traces to tourism sites rather than an agency.
45,300 square miles. Superior is 31,700.
- EPA, Physical Features of the Great Lakes — Superior 31,700 sq mi, Huron 23,000, Michigan 22,300.
- 45,300 is our own addition of EPA’s two figures (23,000 + 22,300). It is arithmetic on agency data rather than a number the EPA prints, so it is only ever said alongside Superior’s 31,700, which keeps the comparison checkable.
- Superior remains the largest lake by volume (2,900 cubic miles against Michigan-Huron’s 2,030) and the largest single lake. The surface-area title changes hands only when Michigan-Huron is counted as one — which is how NOAA treats it.
The rest of the map posts
Every episode above is sourced line by line. The remaining single-fact map posts carry their source in the caption, and their full sourcing is published here as each is checked.
- Crater Lake is the deepest lake in the United States
- Four things about Lake Tahoe
- Lake Superior could hold every other Great Lake
The town that drowned on purpose
Lake of the Ozarks · Linn Creek, Missouri, 1931
“In 1931 the state of Missouri drowned its own county seat on purpose.”
- Linn Creek, Missouri — the Camden County seat, condemned and flooded for Bagnell Dam.
- KCUR — how the lake was made, and what it cost the valley.
- St. Louis Post-Dispatch — Bagnell Dam completed 1931.
Two million people, eight communities.
- These two figures are repeated widely but we have not tied either to a primary source. They are flagged here rather than quietly left alone. If a source does not turn up, they come out of the episode.
- Memories of the Prairie — a list of the flooded communities.
A dive that never happened
Lake Tahoe · and Fallen Leaf Lake, next door
“Jacques Cousteau never dove Lake Tahoe. No interview, no expedition, no footage.”
- Moonshine Ink — traces the “world is not ready” quote and finds no expedition behind it.
- KQED — rumour versus record at Tahoe.
“Drowned stumps still stand rooted in Tahoe’s shallows … And in Fallen Leaf Lake, next door, whole trees are still standing underwater.”
- UC Davis TERC — the upright submerged forest is Fallen Leaf Lake’s, killed by a medieval drought.
- High Country News — the megadrought record.
- Correction: an earlier cut placed the standing forest in Tahoe and dated it to two thousand years. Tahoe has rooted stumps from roughly five thousand years ago; Fallen Leaf’s trees are 9th–12th century. Fixed before the episode was published.
“Robots have reached the bottom now, sixteen hundred feet down.”
- California Diver — the surveys were remotely operated vehicles.
- Correction: an earlier cut said “month-long dives with submersibles.” They were ROVs, not crewed dives.
A town nobody clocked out of
Lake Norman · East Monbo and Long Island, North Carolina
“In 1959, Duke Power closed both mills to make way for the water.”
- Levine Museum of the New South — the Lake Norman digital archive.
- Our State — Long Island Cotton Mill closed 3 October 1959; East Monbo the same year.
“The gates closed in 1962, and by the following June the valley was gone. Thirty two thousand acres under water.”
- Cowans Ford Hydroelectric Station — water began flowing in 1962; the lake was full by 1 June 1963.
- Duke Energy — about 32,475 acres.
- Correction: an earlier cut said the gates closed in 1963. They closed in 1962 and the valley filled into 1963. Fixed before publication.
“Two hundred families lived in the villages around them.”
- This number should not have gone out. The Davidson archives document roughly 50 families in the Long Island village; the figure of 200 appears in no source we have found, and it was flagged in our own sourcing pass before publication and then missed in the edit.
- The published episode carries it. We are leaving the error on the record here rather than removing the line quietly.
- Levine Museum of the New South — the village amenities (homes, stores, post office, churches, cemeteries) are confirmed; the family count is not.
“Five hundred and twenty miles of shoreline.”
- Duke Energy publishes 520 miles; other sources say 538. We used the utility’s own figure.