My well was "discovered" by dowsing. I found that I I'm not good at it. I'm generally skeptical of anything like this stuff. I am a former skeptic on dowsing.
About 10 years ago, we decided to have a well dug on our rural property. A well driller came out and asked where I wanted it. I picked a place close to the house and he started. At 500 ft., I had a dry hole and a hole in my checkbook. Several other spots were also dry holes. The hole in the check book ran to about $6,000.
So, I decided to try dowsing. I bent a couple of brass rods and started walking. At one spot, one of the rods swung around but the other didn't. I waked back and forth over the spot several times with no repeated results.
I started calling around and located an elderly man who was a reputed dowser. I picked him up and brought him to my place. About the time I was getting started, a local friend, now deceased, showed up. He was the superintendent of an oil drilling company and we ran cattle together. He was, like me, not a believer in a lot of BS ideas.
The old man used a piece of forked willow which we cut about 100 yards from my place. I told him about my experience with the brass rod and we went there. The stick pulled down and we marked the spot. He went several other places and found another spot. He told me that either I had a lot of water down there or it was close to the surface. The average well around me is at 350 to 400 ft.
He handed me the stick and I walked slowly over the spots. NADA!! Then my buddy tried and the stick pulled down very strongly. We went to the second discovered spot and I actually saw him having trouble holding the stick. It was pulling down so strongly that the bark was splitting. I went down the road and cut a couple more sticks. I tried it again and again I got no results. We found that if I touched the stick when they were doing it, the pulling stopped. When these guys went over the dry hole areas, the sticks didn't pull down.
We drilled a well at the first spot and found water at 70 ft. No more was found at 500 ft. It started out pumping 1/10 gpm and I have been told that they increase flow after the initial check. I pump into a 2,500 gallon holding tank which fills, @ 1/10 gpm, at about 144 gallons per day. I've never rechecked it but it does keep up with our needs. We only weekend there so I doubt that we will ever have a problem. We could time my wife's showers by the calendar instead of the clock and, in a short time, the float indicates that it has refilled so I guess that it might be getting more flow that it started out with.
I'm a former skeptic.
