Mark Twain Cave

Tour guides at Mark Twain Cave have seen a girl in old-fashioned dress walk through the walls of McDowell's room, where Dr. Joseph Nash McDowell suspended his fourteen-year-old daughter Amanda's preserved body in a copper cylinder of alcohol in the 1840s. The cave also held Jesse James, Confederate weapons, and three boys who vanished in 1967.

Tom Rickey was giving a tour through Mark Twain Cave in the late 1990s when he saw a girl standing in McDowell's room. Old-fashioned dress, long cape, dark hair. She didn't fade or flicker. She turned, walked through the cave wall, and was gone.

The cave sits three miles south of Hannibal, Missouri, carved into 350-million-year-old Louisiana Lithographic Limestone. Jack Simms discovered it in the winter of 1819 when his hunting dog chased an animal into a hillside opening. It stretches roughly three miles through 260 passages, holds a constant 52 degrees year-round, and has been giving tours since 1886, making it Missouri's oldest operating show cave.

Mark Twain explored it obsessively as a boy, growing up in Hannibal from 1839 to 1853. The cave shows up in five of his books, most famously as McDougal's Cave in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. His actual signature, written on the cave wall as a child, was rediscovered on July 26, 2019. But the cave's strangest chapter belongs to someone else entirely.

Dr. Joseph Nash McDowell, founder of Missouri Medical College, purchased the cave in the late 1840s and used it as a laboratory for medical research on human corpses, many of which he robbed from graves. When his fourteen-year-old daughter Amanda died of pneumonia, McDowell placed her body in a copper cylinder lined with glass, filled it with alcohol, and suspended it from the cave ceiling. He did not bury her. He visited the cave to communicate with her.

Local children discovered the body. Older kids would lead younger ones three miles out from town with torches, then unscrew the removable top of the cylinder to expose Amanda's preserved face. Twain wrote about it himself: "it was said to be a common thing for the baser order of tourists to drag the dead face into view." After two years of outraged parents and community complaints, McDowell removed Amanda's remains and reinterred them in the family mausoleum in St. Louis. The community had already started threatening to intervene.

The ghost story starts there. Visitors and tour guides have reported seeing a young woman in old-fashioned dress walking through McDowell's room and the surrounding passages. The descriptions match across decades: long dark hair, a cape, a dress from another century. People who see her don't immediately realize anything is wrong. She looks solid. She looks real. Then she walks through a wall, or turns a corner into a dead-end passage, or simply isn't there when you look again.

Cave manager Susie Shelton spent fifteen years at the cave without seeing anything herself, but she confirmed that guides talk about it freely. "Guides say they've seen somebody," she told an interviewer, adding that some "don't like to go in there by themselves." The sightings tend to cluster around McDowell's room, the section of the cave where Amanda's body hung for two years.

McDowell's connection to the cave went beyond his daughter. During the Civil War, the Southern-sympathizing doctor allegedly used the cave as a secret Confederate weapons cache. Jesse James, who had ridden with Quantrill's Raiders and Bloody Bill Anderson through the Little Dixie region southwest of Hannibal, used the cave as a hideout in September 1879, two weeks before robbing a train in Glendale, Missouri. James signed and dated the cave wall with a pencil.

The cave is now owned by Todd and Austin Curry, who purchased it in 2020. It contains roughly 250,000 visitor signatures scrawled across its walls, from Samuel Clemens to Jesse James to generations of schoolchildren. Three boys who entered the cave in 1967, Billy Hoag, Joey Hoag, and Craig Dowell, were never found.

A fourteen-year-old girl suspended in alcohol. A medical school grave robber. An outlaw's penciled signature. Three missing boys. And a figure in a long dress who walks through limestone walls at 52 degrees, year after year, in the dark.