Hannibal and Mark Twain - ghosts, missing boys, and grave robbery
There are over 6,500 caves in Missouri but there is one particular cave that stands out – Mark Twain Cave. It comes with a lot of history from a mad doctor, a ghost girl, and three missing boys.
The earliest documentation of these caves being discovered were in 1819 when a local hunter chased his escaping dog into a small hillside opening. When he and his brothers decided to investigate they realized this opening led to a massive underground honeycomb of caves.
In the mid-19th century Hannibal residents would explore the caves and because of its location between river bluffs, they also became a popular site for family picnics and outings.
The dark history to this particular cave though starts with a man named Joseph Nash McDowell. He purchased the cave in 1840 and used it as a secret laboratory for his experiments on human corpses, a lot of which he robbed from graves. McDowell was mostly a very influential and respected doctor. In his time, it was frowned upon to use cadavers to study on, which is why McDowell would take them from graves and do his studying in secret. He was adamant that studying cadavers would move medicine forward, so much so that he required his students to perform at least one human dissection before they could graduate.
The town around him did not support what he was rumored to be doing with his students and the dead bodies and so he earned the nickname “Mad Doctor McDowell”.
He had a young daughter named Amanda who passed away from pneumonia when she was 14. McDowell held strong spiritual beliefs and believed that communication between the living and the dead was possible. He believed he had seen his dead mother multiple times. Due to this, he preserved his daughter’s body by filling a container with alcohol and placing her body inside. He then hung this container from the ceiling of the cave so he could continue to communicate with her.
Two years later, her tiny body was removed by citizens. Children still continued to sneak into the caves, especially now there was this legend of a dead girl floating in a tube. When their parents found out what their children were up to, they confronted McDowell and laid her to rest.
Not only did McDowell use the caves as a hidden place for his experiments, it’s rumored he also kept a secret stash of Confederate weapons down there during the Civil War. He was an ardent supporter of the South and stockpiled guns and bullets for the rebels.
There’s also folklore that says the outlaw Jesse James had knowledge of the caves and hid there during 1879 after robbing a train.
Mark Twain also wrote about the caves, hence why they are named after him. He included them in his novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Twain spent the ages of 4 to 17 living in Hannibal so he experienced the caves for himself on adventures when he was a boy as well as McDowell’s sinister deeds. In the book he calls the cave MacDougal’s Cave. When his book was published, tourists started to flock to Hannibal to see these crazy caves for themselves. A local farmer John East charged tourists a dime to see some of the places mentioned in the book.
In 1923 the cave was purchased by Judge E.T. Cameron and in 1939 electric lights were added into the cave as the Cameron family began to turn it into a functioning tourist spot. He was most likely the person who coined the naming of the cave, Mark Twain Cave.
To this day, the cave is still owned by descendants of the Cameron family but there’s been much more additions: a campground, gift shop, candle shop, visitors center and there’s a lot more fanfare and celebration around it, mostly focusing on Mark Twain.
Folks claim that Amanda haunts the caves and the main street of the town. Many people report witnessing a full specter of a young woman wearing an old-fashioned dress with a cape. She had long dark hair and was very pretty. Her appearance was so real that a lot of people who witnessed her at first thought she was a real alive girl and tried to talk to her, only to watch her vanish or walk away, fading.
In 1967 there was another mystery surrounding the caves – three missing boys.
Billy Hoag (10), Joey Hoag (13) and Craig Dowell (14). On March 10th, 1967, the three boys set off with flashlights and a shovel to go on an adventure, but sadly to never return home. There was a massive search for the kids that drew national attention, but ultimately, they’ve never been found.
A local saw the boys headed towards the caves around 4:30 PM and so the rescue mostly focused on the cave system and involved spelunkers. On the third day, the town began to lose hope. This is a massive cave system that still hasn’t been fully explored even to this day. The search expanded and brought in the National Guard to search outside the cave system, along the river. The search became more and more extensive as tips poured in across the country, psychics helped out, every abandoned house was searched but no speck of evidence was found. After ten days, the search was ended.
It seemed that the Hoag brothers had already visited the cave the night before as they came home covered in red clay mud. So realistically it would’ve made sense that they asked their friend to come see what they were looking at the next day. At that same time, workers were blasting through the ground to build a new highway, Route 79, which left big holes in the hillside and new entrances to the cave system. This could’ve been the reason for the cave visit the next day – new exciting entrances that hadn’t been explored yet. A kid’s dream adventure.
The mystery continues to this day but realistically, those boys perished in the caves. Anything can happen in a cave system, and can happen quickly – from a small tunnel collapse, to flooding, to getting turned around and lost. Especially with explosions going off nearby as the highway continued to be built. It’s a sad story that will most likely never be finished.
You can visit Mark Twain Cave still and there’s lots of great guided tours as well as a ghost walking tour that you can participate in. Hannibal has fully embraced the legend of these caves and who knows what is yet to still be discovered down there!
(Big shout out to my Mom for telling me this story and leading me to research the history. Love you Mom!)
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