If you hear “um, yes, hello,” you’re about to learn some haunted hydrology. That’s how Sauk City-based artist and content creator Geo Rutherford begins each of her videos explaining weird happenings in Mother Nature’s waters, like moving mud puddles in California and zombie wells in Texas.
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She posts daily during October on TikTok and Instagram (@geodesaurus) for a smash-hit series called Spooky Lake Month. “It’s not about ghouls or ghosts,” she says. “It’s about the natural world being spooky all by herself.” The videos also aren’t just limited to lakes. Subjects include all bodies of water and tales of natural disasters like the Great Lakes hurricanes, manmade catastrophes like radioactive pollution, bizarre phenomenon like boiling rivers, or even just “humans doing stupid things.” Rutherford jokes that “anything wet could qualify.”
Her interest in waterways started while she was pursuing a Master of Fine Arts at UW-Milwaukee. She chose the Great Lakes as the subject of her graduate project. “I knew Bradford Beach like the back of my hand; I went there every day for 90 days in 2019,” she says.
During this time, the pandemic hit, and she decided out of boredom to record educational videos about various lakes. Soon, the first Spooky Lake Month took shape in October 2020, but Rutherford says it wasn’t until 2021 that the series became truly polished – and viral.
More than 200 videos later, close to 3 million followers across her accounts await each October fervently. Rutherford keeps a spreadsheet of ideas and researches topics ahead of time, but she often records and edits videos entirely by herself on the day they post. “It’s a marathon for the month of October,” she says. “I don’t leave the house; I don’t go anywhere. I truly just film videos for the entire month.”
She thinks the popularity of the videos stems from people being fascinated with the strange and creepy and wanting to truly learn. “These are educational while also being things that you wouldn’t see in a textbook,” she says. Scarcity is also a factor; the videos only come one month of the year, and their annual return is a comfort for many.
If Rutherford had to pick her favorite spooky lake, it’d be the one she lives on: Fish Lake in Sauk City. Its water levels had been steadily rising for decades before a surge of floods made the lake overtake an adjacent street. Now, four abandoned houses peek above the surface. “Their couches are still in there – there’s crock pots, there’s hangers in the closets. It’s very eerie and kind of strange,” Rutherford says. “I literally wake up in the morning and look out my window like, ‘Oh, there are my little sunken houses.’”
Riding the wave of success, the UWM graduate wrote and illustrated a Spooky Lakes book in 2024. Its sequel, Spooky Rivers, is out now, and Rutherford will talk about the strange streams when Spooky Lake Month sets sail again on Oct. 1.
