In Brief
Tour guides at Mark Twain Cave near Hannibal, Missouri keep seeing a young woman in an old-fashioned dress walk into the limestone of one room. It's the room where a 19th-century doctor once suspended his dead daughter's body from the ceiling.
The Full Story
A tour guide named Tom Rickey was working inside Mark Twain Cave in the late 1990s when he looked into one particular room and saw a girl standing in it. Young, pretty, long hair, a long old-fashioned dress. "I saw her standing there as plain as day," he said. Then she left. "She didn't fade away, but there wasn't nowhere to walk. She went through the wall."
The room he was looking into is named McDowell's room, three miles south of Hannibal, Missouri, deep in Missouri's oldest operating show cave. It's named for the man who owned the cave in the 1840s, and it's the room some guides still won't enter alone. The cave holds a flat 52 degrees no matter the season, which is part of why the man who owned it put what he put in there.
Dr. Joseph Nash McDowell was a St. Louis physician who founded the first medical school west of the Mississippi, served later as a Confederate surgeon, and was widely suspected of robbing graves for cadavers. When his teenage daughter died of pneumonia, he didn't bury her. He sealed her body in a copper cylinder lined with glass, filled it with alcohol, and hung it from the ceiling of this cave.
Mark Twain, who explored these passages obsessively as a boy in Hannibal, wrote the thing down in Life on the Mississippi: the lid came off, and local children would make the three-mile walk from town, unscrew it, and drag the dead face up into the light to look at it. The cylinder hung in the dark for about two years while strangers opened the lid. After enough complaints from town, McDowell finally took her down and moved her to the family vault in St. Louis.
That was more than a century before anyone reported the girl in the dress, and Rickey isn't the only one to report her. Susie Shelton, the cave's general manager, has been there roughly 15 years, long enough to hear the same thing over and over. "I've had guides say they've seen somebody," she said. "Some guides don't like to go in there by themselves."
There's no equipment behind any of it, no recording, no investigation, just guides who keep describing the same young woman in the same room. The cave fills with visitors who come for Tom Sawyer and the boy who carved his name in these walls. They walk past McDowell's room and most of them feel nothing. The girl was carried out of it more than a century ago, back to a vault in another city. Whatever the guides keep seeing walks into the wall she was never carried past.
