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Spooky Burials

There is a wide difference in human interest about caves.

—WALTER B. STEVENS, Missouri: The Center State, 1821–1915

The early settlers of the Ozarks sometimes took shelter in dry caves, which they would occupy until such time as it was possible to build a cabin. In most instances, these settlers were not later buried in the caves, but one named John Wilson was. John Wilson came to the Ozarks in 1810 from Hopkins County, Kentucky. He found a cave in a bluff along the Barren Fork of the Big Tavern Creek, in territory that would eventually become Miller County. He proceeded to set up housekeeping in the big, dry cave with his wife, Nellie (Ray), and their three sons, Alexander, William, and Willis.

Affectionately called “Jack” by most of the people who knew him, John was considered eccentric even in his day. He got along well with the Osage Indians, with whom he traded, and he even learned to speak their language. He and his family resided in the cave for two years before John got around to putting up a cabin. He made his living by hunting, raising hogs, and farming the Tavern Creek bottoms, where he raised Indian corn, beans, and pumpkins.

As John aged, he became increasingly eccentric and more attached to the old cave that had sheltered him and his family for two years. The Wilson cabin stood very near the cave. His wife, however, did not share his sentiments about the cave. When John began to talk about being buried in the cave, his wife objected. She preferred a more conventional burial site. John’s wife preceded him in death and so did their sons Alexander and William. These two sons had married and remained close to home, but the other son, Willis, moved from Miller County after marriage.

John did not bury his wife and two deceased sons in the cave, but alone now and well along in years, he began to dwell upon his own demise and began making preparations for his death and funeral. He built his own coffin. He recorded elaborate plans for how his body was to be prepared after death. His vital organs and entrails were to be removed, and his body cavities packed with salt. He thought this procedure would preserve his body and cause it to petrify. He instructed his two closest friends, Silas Capps and Daniel Cummings, to place his body in the coffin, packed with salt. He wanted his coffin then to be sealed up in a cavity just to the right of the big cave entrance at about cave ceiling height. Two demijohns (large, narrow-necked bottles) of peach brandy were also to be sealed in with him. He wanted his funeral procession to be led by fiddlers playing the “Eighth of January.” After seven years his tomb was to be unsealed, his petrified body propped up inside the cave, and his friends were to drink the peach brandy and have a great party with him present to enjoy the festivities.

John Wilson died August 22, 1856, and his body was prepared for burial just as he wished. Dr. John A. P. Nixdorf Sr. of Eldon and Dr. John Brockman of Tuscumbia prepared his body. The burial procedure that followed was the most unusual interment ever witnessed in Miller County’s early days. Unfortunately, John Wilson did not foresee the Civil War, which began before the seven years expired and brought such disruption that Miller County people forgot all about John Wilson. Legend relates, however, that sometime after the war, some of his old friends remembered him. They visited the cave and discovered that grave robbers had been at work. The tomb was unsealed and the peach brandy was gone, but John’s coffin and body were still there. He was then buried next to his wife and children elsewhere in Miller County.

John Wilson’s belief that his body would petrify after death, if prepared as he instructed, was a fairly common belief held in the 1800s. Petrification—preserving the body by making it rigid or inert like stone—was a topic of much interest to intellectuals. John Wilson may have been living in the backwoods of Miller County, but he was obviously not out of touch with the issues of his day.

Another eccentric individual of Wilson’s time also chose a Missouri cave for an experiment, resulting in one of the most bizarre incidents ever to involve a Missouri cave and a human burial. The man who performed the experiment was Dr. Joseph Nash McDowell, who established one of the first medical colleges west of the Mississippi in 1838 in St. Louis. His school was the original medical department of Kemper College, which was in operation until 1845. After the college closed, McDowell reorganized his school as the Missouri Medical College.

McDowell, born in Lexington, Kentucky, April 1, 1805, followed the family tradition and became a medical doctor. His formal education was at Transylvania College in Kentucky, where he studied under Dr. Samuel Brown, the school’s professor of chemistry and medical subjects. Brown was an authority on saltpeter and the saltpeter caves of Kentucky, and he not only conducted experiments with saltpeter but also encouraged his students to do so. Brown thought the preservative qualities of saltpeter had promising medical uses.

In McDowell’s time, obtaining a cadaver (a dead body intended for dissection for medical research) was nearly impossible. So he did business with “resurrectionists”—men who were considered ghouls because they would steal newly buried bodies from graveyards to sell on the black market for medical experimentation. It was this activity, coupled with McDowell’s belief in spiritualism and ghosts, that revealed the darker side of his character.

In 1827, McDowell married Amanda Virginia Drake of Mason County, Kentucky. She bore him ten children. More than one child did not survive childhood diseases, and because bodies were so difficult to obtain, McDowell dissected and performed experiments on his own dead children. Seeking a place where he could establish an underground laboratory for experiments, he heard about a cave just south of Hannibal, Missouri, called Saltpeter Cave. He visited the site and was so impressed that he bought the cave. This was in the late 1840s at the time when Samuel Clemens was growing up in Hannibal. Sam and his buddies were familiar with Saltpeter Cave in Cave Hollow. It was where the local youths often spent their free time playing in the cave’s confusing maze of tunnels. But McDowell did not know this.

In later years, after Samuel Clemens became the celebrated author Mark Twain and used the cave for a setting in some of his books, he commented upon McDowell’s purchase of the cave. In Life on the Mississippi, Twain said: “In my time the person who owned it [the cave] turned it into a mausoleum for his daughter, age fourteen. The body of this poor child was put in a copper cylinder filled with alcohol, and this suspended in one of the dismal avenues of the cave.” McDowell had placed a stout door over the main entrance to the cave to keep people out but was unaware that it had other, lesser-known, entrances. Twain told of how local “rowdies” would sneak into the cave and drag the girl’s body up by her hair to look at her.

In Missouri: The Center State, Walter B. Stevens also gave an account of McDowell’s strange experiment:

 

He had very strange ideas about the disposition of the dead. . . . A child of Dr. McDowell died. . . . The coffin was lined with metal. The body was placed in the coffin. All space remaining was filled with alcohol and the coffin was tightly sealed. A year or so later the body of the child was removed from the coffin and placed in a large copper case. This was McDowell’s method of treating the bodies of his children. No religious service of any kind was performed. The copper cases were carried at night attended by a procession formed by the medical students and friends of the family. Each person carried a torch. The place of disposition was a vault in the rear of the residence. The thought of a natural cave as a final resting place was a favorite one. Dr. McDowell bought the cave near Hannibal. . . . The vase or case containing one of the children was taken from St. Louis to this cave and suspended from the roof.

 

The girl’s body hung in the cave for two years, but the youths who sneaked into the cave to view her bragged about it to their friends, and ugly rumors spread through Hannibal about the weird activities of McDowell in Cave Hollow. Alarmed, local men stormed the place, broke down the door, and took a look for themselves. McDowell was then forced to remove the body of the girl from the cave and to cease using the cave for such experiments.

Saltpeter Cave became known as McDowell’s Cave during McDowell’s ownership. After Mark Twain’s books about the adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn became popular, people began calling it Mark Twain Cave. The popularity of Twain’s books also brought public demands for access to the cave, and it was commercialized in 1886. It is the oldest show cave operation west of the Mississippi River. The remote area within Mark Twain Cave where McDowell’s strange experiment took place more than 120 years ago is not regularly shown to the touring public today, but it was briefly part of the cave’s evening candlelight tours in the mid-1970s. The eerie underground location and the telling of the story was always a spooky highlight of the tours for children and adults alike.

Missouri caves abound in seldom-told tales and unsolved mysteries. Many subjects related to their history have seen very little research, partially because documentation is difficult to come by. A good example is the saltpeter and gunpowder enterprises that occurred in and were associated with Missouri caves between 1720 and 1820.