Mark Twain Cave

A show cave near Hannibal made famous as McDougal's Cave in Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. In the 1840s, St. Louis surgeon Dr. Joseph Nash McDowell used the cave to attempt to petrify his 14-year-old daughter's body in a copper cylinder after she died of pneumonia.

Mark Twain Cave, located just south of Hannibal along the Mississippi River bluffs, has been a source of wonder and terror since it was first discovered in 1819. Samuel Clemens explored these limestone passages as a boy, later immortalizing the cave as the setting for Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher's harrowing underground adventure. But the cave's real history contains a story far more macabre than anything Twain put in his novels -- one involving a mad doctor, a pickled child, and a ghost that some say still wanders the dark passages.

In 1848, Dr. Joseph Nash McDowell, a prominent and deeply eccentric St. Louis surgeon who founded the Missouri Medical College, purchased the cave. McDowell was obsessed with the idea that the cave's constant cool temperature and mineral-rich limestone could preserve human remains indefinitely. When his fourteen-year-old daughter died of pneumonia, the grief-stricken doctor carried out a grotesque experiment: he placed her body in a copper cylinder lined with glass, filled it with alcohol, and suspended it deep within the cave, hoping the conditions would petrify her corpse and preserve her forever.

Local children who explored the cave discovered the cylinder containing the girl's body. In a grim ritual that became a rite of passage, they would gather around the container to tell ghost stories, reportedly pulling the preserved body up by its hair for dramatic effect. When word of the display reached Hannibal's adults, outraged citizens demanded the body be removed. Dr. McDowell eventually retrieved his daughter's remains, but the damage to the cave's reputation -- and perhaps its spiritual equilibrium -- was done. Twain wove the body-snatching element of McDowell's obsession into the plot of Tom Sawyer, transforming the doctor's macabre experiments into the fictional grave-robbing scene involving Injun Joe.

The ghost that haunts Mark Twain Cave is believed to be the spirit of McDowell's daughter, forever searching the dark passages for a way out. Former tour guide Tom Rickey encountered her in the late 1990s during a routine walk through the cave. He described seeing a girl wearing a long, old-fashioned dress with a cape, standing motionless in the shadows before fading into the limestone walls. Other guides and visitors have reported similar sightings over the decades -- a small, lonely figure glimpsed at the edge of lantern light, always retreating deeper into the cave when approached.

The cave maintains a constant temperature of fifty-two degrees, which some visitors attribute to natural geology and others to something less explicable. The sound of small footsteps echoing from empty passages, the sensation of being watched from the darkness, and the occasional glimpse of a pale figure at the edge of visibility continue to be reported by those who venture into the underground world that inspired one of America's greatest authors.