Mammoth Cave National Park

Dr. Croghan moved TB patients into the cave in 1842. Five died. Explorer Stephen Bishop and trapped caver Floyd Collins haunt the passages.

Dr. John Croghan bought Mammoth Cave for $10,000 in 1839. Three years later, he moved eleven tuberculosis patients into wooden cottages a mile and a half underground, convinced the constant 54-degree air and mineral vapors would cure them. The damp, smoke-filled dark killed them faster. Five died inside the cave. Their bodies were laid out on what's still called Corpse Rock before being carried back to daylight. Visitors on the Violet City Lantern tour have described hearing coughing down there.

The experiment lasted one winter. Croghan himself died of tuberculosis in 1849, seven years after sending his patients underground. The stone huts are still standing. Rangers walk past them on regular tours and most people don't give them a second glance until they're told what they are.

Then there's Stephen Bishop. Bishop was enslaved when Croghan bought the cave, and he became arguably the greatest explorer Mammoth has ever produced. He mapped passages no one else had the nerve to cross, named the Bottomless Pit after being the first person to jump it with a ladder, and charted so much of the system that the 1845 map he drew from memory was accurate enough to guide tourists for decades. He got his freedom in 1856. He died that same year, cause unknown, and was buried in the Old Guide Cemetery above the cave.

Guides who work blackout tours talk about being shoved. Not pushed hard. A playful nudge in the ribs when they're the only person in that section of passage. The common theory among rangers is that it's Bishop, checking on whether the new guides know what they're doing.

Then there's Floyd Collins. Collins owned the nearby Crystal Cave and was squeezing through a tight passage in Sand Cave on January 30, 1925, scouting a new tourist route, when a 27-pound rock pinned his left ankle. He was 55 feet underground in a passage so narrow rescuers couldn't get a drill past his body. The attempt to free him became the third-biggest American news story of the 1920s, with reporters camping at the cave mouth for two weeks. He died of exposure and thirst on February 13, three days before a shaft reached him. His body was later put on display in a glass-topped coffin inside Crystal Cave as a tourist attraction, which is its own separate horror.

Tour guides at Crystal Cave have a tradition of inviting Floyd along before they go into sections where he used to explore. There's a story rangers tell about a group whose lanterns, cameras, and flashlights all cut out at once inside a chamber tied to Collins, then came back on the moment they left. Whether that actually happened or just entered the oral tradition is impossible to verify now, but every cave guide in the park has heard it.

The Melissa story is the one most people want to be true and probably isn't. An 1858 deathbed confession in The Knickerbocker magazine told of a Kentucky planter's daughter who lured her tutor, William Beverleigh, into the cave and left him to die after he spurned her. Her guilt-stricken ghost supposedly still wanders the passages looking for him. It's a good story. It's also fiction, written by the novelist Lillie Devereux Blake after a tourist visit, and no Beverleigh ever vanished in Mammoth Cave. The Skeptical Inquirer ran a whole piece in 2017 tracing the hoax. The legend still shows up on half the ghost-tour sites online.

The cave keeps producing real corpses and real grief and then folding them into 400-plus miles of absolute black. Croghan's patients, Collins, Bishop. The coughing, the shove, the lanterns going out. Take any one on its own and you can shrug it off. Stack them on top of each other, a mile underground with no cell signal and a guide telling you to sit still while she turns off the last flashlight, and the shrug gets harder.