Geo Rutherford Ends Spooky Lake Month With 31 Water Videos
The UWM graduate's annual series of lake science videos drew about 45 million views last October.
By Nour Haddad ·
Geo Rutherford will post the final video of her 2026 Spooky Lake Month series on Nov. 1, showing her descending back into a lake until next fall. The month-long project requires her to produce one video about water science each day for 31 days. Her videos cover topics such as Great Lakes shipwrecks and Lake Natron in Tanzania, whose caustic brine calcifies creatures that land on its shores.
Rutherford is a 2026 University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee graduate who studied in the Printmaking and Book Arts program at the Peck School of the Arts. She began posting TikTok videos about lakes during the COVID-19 pandemic while working toward a Master of Fine Arts degree. She had previously taught art at a Michigan high school for five years.
Her thesis project centered on Lake Michigan and required her to visit Milwaukee's Bradford Beach daily for 90 days, regardless of weather, to collect items washed ashore. She assembled the findings into an artist book containing test tubes filled with crinoid fossils, zebra mussels and plastic fragments. The book, titled "On the Threshold of the Great Lakes," is held in UWM's artist book collection.
Rutherford's first TikTok video displayed this book. It received more than one million views. "You either make people really mad, or you make them very confused," she said. "That video went viral because everybody was like, 'Ma'am, that is not a book.'"
Last October, her Spooky Lake Month videos collected approximately 45 million views across Instagram and TikTok. Her videos pair spooky music and imagery with her delivery. Only the upper portion of her face appears on screen. "There's no ghosts, and there's no ghouls," Rutherford said. "It's Mother Nature being spooky all by herself."
Rutherford's growing audience led literary agents to suggest her material could work as books for middle-grade readers. She wrote and illustrated "Spooky Lakes: 25 Strange and Mysterious Lakes That Dot Our Planet." A second volume, "Spooky Rivers: 25 Strange and Mysterious Lakes That Snake Around Our Planet," reached bookstores in September 2026.
She lives on Fish Lake in Sauk City, about 25 miles outside Madison. Water levels there rose rapidly in 2019, flooding several shoreline homes. The structures remain submerged. During Spooky Lake Month 2025, Rutherford filmed herself and her mother kayaking over the houses. "The owners left everything," Rutherford said. "There are Crock-Pots and couches and fans and refrigerators."
