The Tragic Tale of Floyd Collins

and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and that makes this Stuff you should Know part of our continuing sad Kentucky tragic history era that we seem to be in right now. Are we going to point out where this is fifteen times? No, this is this is in the Kentucky that you'd expect it to be in. Okay, we had some funny Instagram comments on that. I know what you're talking about about. Half the people when the supper club fire thing went

to Instagram said where was this again? Jodsh No, I know, I'm just kidding. Okay, I'm just kidding. I'm aware of what goes on on Instagram. Who knows, I don't know you're one of those lurkers. Yeah, totally, I totally am so m speaking of lurking, Chuck Es, if you go to Barron County, Kentucky, okay, one of the things that you might do is a pastime is lurk in a cave. Hey,

look at that transition. It was okay. But the reason why you might do that is because Barron County and neighboring I think Edmonton or Edmondson County our home to the largest cave system in the world, Mammoth Caves. Yeah, we talked about Mammoth and I guess it had to be our caving episode. Certainly, there's no way you can. I mean again, it's enormous, Like, as far as we know, I think something like four hundred miles have been mapped. Yeah,

and I was reading we have a lot. We have an enslaved man back in the eighteen twenties up to the forties to thank for a lot of that, because he was the only one brave enough to crawl over the bottomless pit and keep exploring. So that definitely extended it. But they think also that there's another six hundred miles. By the way, his name is Stephen Bishop. Sorry I meant to say, but they think there's another six hundred miles left to be mapped. So that's a giant old

cave system. Yeah, potentially a thousand miles of gave system stuff. Yes, Now I have a desire to go in almost none of it. Yeah, I know, you know, but I have to say, like Ruby Falls is definitely worth the visit for sure. Yeah. I mean my deal is I did it once and it was really cool. I would go back, but I'm not, you know, dying too. I'm kind of like, you know, I know what it's like now, and that's all I really wanted to know. Yes, I was looking

for a new hobby. The thing is, though, is if you're into caves caving, even if you're not like a caver, but you're, you know, into touring caves, you know that you can stand up in and there's walkways in every short Mammoth cave is an absolute must. It's just like Geological Wonder. After Geological Wonder, it's pretty neat. Yeah, you like your caves to have an energy drink fridge at the bottom of it, that's right, and a moving side one.

It is a National park now since nineteen I think forty one Mammoth is and it was a big like and remains a big tourist attraction, but all the way dating back to the Civil War, and as a result, that whole area became cave central, not just because Mammoth Caves, but there's so many other cave systems around there, and it became like a legitimate sort of roadside not only stop,

but destination for people. And the people that you know was like, Hey, i'll pay me a dollar or fifty cents or whatever and I'll take you down in these caves. They started battling each other more and more of these locals trying to drum up business for caves they had the rights to explore, and that was known as the Kentucky Cave Wars. Yes, and it was basically just entrepreneurs

run amuck in Kentucky. They would burn one another's cars, They would put bowlders on the road to keep tourists from being able to make it to the other cave locations. They would pose as tourists and talk about how terrible one cave was. It was free yelped, so that was their live, live yelping. And then another thing they would do is tell the tourists that they were all the same caves. They were just different entrances. So it's all

the same. Just come to mind, wow, which is sort of true in a way kind of, but I think not really. Yeah, I mean that doesn't mean they're all connected, but oh they are. Well, what I mean is that you can access It's like you can't get there from here kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. And also I think each entrance is like, this is for all intents and purposes,

it is a completely separate cave system. Right, This is my whole which I told you that there's something I thought you were using hole as an adjective now that that was the weirdest thing about when I went caving, and I'll just quickly say it again, is that I expected some big cartoon like thing that you just walk

into and start exploring. I did not realize you could literally walk by a cave entrance in the woods and not notice it because it's a two by two foot hole in the ground, and that makes caves exponentially scarier more sure, you know. Oh yeah, when I saw that thing, I was like, that's where we're going, because that means the people coming to help you could walk right past it too, and it's just I mean, it's just tampering with the pits of Hell. I don't I don't agree

with that. So our story moves on now to one of the great cavers of the region. There were a lot of great cavers, but one was a gentleman named Floyd Collins, who if you look him up, he looks a bit like Crispin Glover and sort of the same way that almost all rural white men in Kentucky in their early nineteen hundreds look like Crispin Glover. Yeah, he just sort of had that generic Kentucky guy look. Well, the cut hairdo, the shemp he had definitely helps a

lot too. So he was born in eighteen eighty seven, had a bunch of brothers and sisters from his mom and then a previous marriage that his father had lee. Yeah, and they were really close to the Mammoth Caves about four years old. So from the time he was a little kid, like six years old, he was out there caving and doing his thing like you would when you're six in nineteen o seven or whatever. Yeah, Plus there was not a lot else to do, Like if you were a farmer, you were eking out a really hard

living in this area. Apparently the soil wasn't very helpful because again because astone cave system, right, so it's kind of tough to grow things on bare limestone. And so what Floyd Collins figured out very quickly is that there were a lot of Native American indigenous artifacts, including remains, in these caves, and that he could take these things out of the caves and go to the Mammoth Cave Hotel, this huge hotel that was built expressly for the tourists,

and sell them to those tourists. And he was so profitable that he dropped out of school at age ten to pursue his looting activities full time. Yeah, which, you know, um, I'm not going to judge the guy from here in twenty twenty three for being a ten year old trying to make a living. Yeah neither. Yeah. Ye, surprising word, no, of course, it's surprised to keep everybody on their toes um. So fast forward a bit. It's nineteen seventeen now and

Floyd Collins is still doing his his caving. He's still one of the foremost experts in the region, and he found a new system or at least, no one had discovered this system as far as he knew, and it was really beautiful. It had these almost marble like walls,

is how Dave Ruce put it. Dave helped us with this, and it was just one of the more gorgeous caves on the inside, and so he named it the Great Crystal Cave and told his he said, hey, we need to scrape together what money we have so we can lease this land, because this thing is going to be our meal tickets. It's prettier than any of the other

caves around. Yeah. He went in halfers with his dad, Lee and another man by the last name of Gerard, and they basically developed this Great Crystal Cave, which was a wonderful fine. He was incredibly lucky to have come upon this cave and be able to get the rights to it. There was a huge problem with it though, it never became really financially successful because it was at the other end of the cave system, so by that you really had to know that it was there and

want to go there. If you were just a tourist wandering around visiting caves, there was very little chance you're going to end up there accidentally. And then what with this being the Cave Wars and everybody who was a competitor of his, but also we're probably neighbors and second cousins. By the way, they were doing everything they could to keep those tourists from making their way back to Great Crystal Cave. So it's great a cave as it was,

it just wasn't viable. Yeah, the big city guy came in and said, son, you'd never learned the first rule of business, location, location, location, And Floyd went, why are you saying location three times? Yeah, yeah, it's sad, but true. That's a direct quote everybody, it really is. So now they're in a situation where Floyd says, all right, that this didn't quite work out, But now they're in a situation where they're kind of even more desperate than before

to find some means of revenue. So he set out to find another amazing cave and a better location, and he found one that wasn't quite so amazing as far as is aesthetics go, but it was on Cave City Road before you even got to Mammoth. So that was like, that's the location, location, location that he didn't understand that he needed, but right got it. That's how that's how important it was that you could have a so so cave.

But if the entrance was on the weight of the bigger caves than you had, you had a gym mine even if there were no gems in the cave, because you could lie and say there are right, Say it's the same entrance or the different entrance to the same thing. Right.

So yeah, he went into business with a different guy, a man named B. Doyle Beasley Doyle and another man named ed Estes, and Doyle and Stes went half on their half, and they said that they would give Floyd the other half if he would explore and develop this cave so that they could start taking tourists down in it. And so Floyd Collins is being I haven't seen it expressly written out, but he spent so much time in caves from such a young age, and he had been at it for so long and had become such a

respected caver that I suspect this is the one. Like when he woke up, the one thing he wanted to do was go into caves, like he just loved what he was doing. So this is probably like a dream gig for him too. Yeah, But he started exploring this cave and started to develop it. But he ran into a problem very early. You mentioned that this cave was not so great as far as caves go, right, Yeah,

and we didn't mention it was called sand cave. And it was called sand cave for a reason because it was not solid limestone like you know, most of the rest of these caves, which made it, you know, pretty tourist friendly to walk around, kind of like you would have a ruby falls, let's say, the smooth limestone. Yeah, the good stuff. This is actually loose rock and muddy sand.

So sand Cave is is an apt name. And Floyd was like, I've got to make this work, though, Like I'm even more desperate than I was before because now signed onto this thing, and so I'm gonna, like, there's good stuff down there that's deeper. I just have to carve out a passageway that's safe enough to get tourists

in here. And so he did that for weeks and weeks and weeks, working all our days clearing out and it was you know, it was really cold at the time, clearing out this mud and ice and water and rock and trying to build what looked like a legitimate entrance way. Yeah, which I mean I think his premise was that he would if he if he dug enough of this stuff out, he would reach those smooth limestone walls. Eventually. It was just going to take some extra work, right, Yeah, And

he was down to work. He was dtw and you keep making mention like he really needed this. Um. I mean he was able to like make ends meet here or there. I think he and his brother like chopped timber for the railroad ties to the local lines that were built. Like again, Mammoth Caves was such an enormous attraction. There was a special railroad line that was established and built just to take people to this, Right, so there

was some money to be made. But to say that Floyd Collins and his eight siblings were poor as an understatement. I saw a picture of the house that the siblings all lived in with their parents, and the ticket booth for Great Crystal Cave, and the ticket booth is slightly bigger than the house, Like it is like they were they were. Yeah, they live basically hand to mouth to

say the least. Yeah, so this needed to work. That's why you put in all this work painstakingly digging this passage and eventually on January thirty, nineteen twenty five, he said, all right, I've got an opening here, and I believe I can get down to the depths that I so desire. And he did. He got down about fifty feet deep and then came to a ten foot drop that's shaped like a chimney, So it's a ten foot shoot that

he can go down. And at the bottom of this shoot, it kind of makes not the hardest L, but it would like a soft L shape to where it goes horizontal. But that horizontal opening was not very big. It was just enough for Floyd to like get down there on his back, go in kind of feet first, with the top of the the shoot like inches above his face. Yeah, he was in this crack. So the chimney itself was not like exactly like a drop. He had to kind of shimmy down it, but with that crack was like

a whole other thing altogether. He couldn't take a full breath in there. We shoko a warning a trigger warning for people that suffer from claustrophobia, because yeah, I don't even and a lot of this felt like I was about to have a panic attack. Yeah, I have a vague sense of claustrophobia. It takes a lot to trigger it, Like just hearing about the stuff, I'm like, oh my gosh, but I can handle it. But I'll bet there's people out there who sure couldn't even hear this, So way

to go chalk. Yeah, So that CoA and another one, which is when you're dealing with old stories like this, we found that there are a lot of facts that get mixed up depending on what sorts you're using. So yeah,

we're doing our best moving forward. Well, also, like we're in the age where we've really just woken up to the fact that back in the twenties, say, newspapers would print whatever, and we've long been like, well it was in the newspaper, so it's probably well researched, not true, necessarily,

not at all. So he's sliding through this crack and you're probably getting pretty nervous, but hold on to that because he makes it through the crack and on the other side he finds a big I think like fifty foot deep room, a big chamber, and this is what he's been looking for. This is the kind of stuff

tourists want to see. And he starts exploring it. He's repelling down and I think it's I don't even know if he made it to the bottom or not, but his lantern started flickering, and that is a sign if you are exploring a cave for the first time, to go to get out of the cave. So that's what he did. He was a smart guy. He wasn't dumb. He was he was very gutsy, but he didn't like just you know, he wasn't. He didn't gamble with his

life for no reason. Yeah, he knew what he was doing. Yes, So he crawled back up the rope, took his lamp with him, and started to make his way back through the crack. He was oriented the same way that he was going in, so he went in feet first. This time he went in head first. Yeah, and he made it. I believe his head made it out when he kind of kicked into the ground to kind of give himself purchase to push himself the rest of the way through

the crack. When he did that, he moved some some dirt, some sand, and I've seen up to a seven ton boulder, came down from the ceiling and lodged his foot in place firmly. It was not. He was not moving anymore, and he was stuck in this crack hopelessly. Yeah, and that's one great example. I saw seven ton, and then everywhere else I saw twenty six pounds. Big. I mean, could you really not like shimmy a twenty seven pound Maybe not in a crack like that, I mean twenty

six pounds on a foot in a crack. And we should mention too, that his lamp went out while he was in there, and again I saw various things from that. It finally flickered out to he accidentally kicked it out, kicked it over and made it go out. So now he is laying there with his arms by his side, stuck in this crevice, in the complete blackness. And Dave pointed out and I can verify, and if you've ever been caving, it is a blackness like you've never understood

before in your life. I don't want to understand that. It is the blackest of black. You literally cannot see your hand in front of your face. So he's, you know, literally laying there in pitch blackness, which he's sort of used to because he's I'm sure he's been without a light before in a cave and gotten out of it,

but he was in a bad way. He was, and he wasn't panicking because he knew that he was right almost at the base of that chimney and that if he could get to the chimney, not only could he relight his lamp, he could shimmy up the chimney easily. So he was almost there. But the problem was again that rock, whether it was twenty seven pounds or seven tons, wasn't letting him go. And so Floyd Collins was alone in the dark traps in a crack, and no one knew he was down there. Yeah, and before we go

to break, because I know this where we're headed. The final little cherry on top of danger danger cherry is it's sixteen degrees. Very nice, Chuck, all right, we'll be right back, so Chuck, before we get started again, I

want to shout out a source. There's an article from nineteen seventy six in American Heritage magazine, a great history source by Michael Leasy L. S Y. And he actually was the guy who wrote or compiled Wisconsin Death Trip a few years before he wrote that article, and it's called Dark Carnival, and it is really worth a read. But he got all of his sources directly from newspapers, so basically every word he wrote had been reported in the newspaper somehow or some way. So that is probably

why that's the only source for the seven ton. It was probably misreported, but he's still a pretty good source for facts. He's a professional historian, so he knew what he was doing. But he was also really fascinating too. All Right, so he's down there, no one knows he's there for a while. He was known to disappear for you know, many hours and days exploring these caves, so it's not like the people got too concerned at first.

It would be twenty five hours before anyone even knew anything was going on with him, and that was when the Sun of Sts his name was Jewel, pretty cool name, seventeen year old went to go check. He'd kind of been hanging out with Floyd and caving with him, and I think Floyd even said like, you know, I could die in here to the guy the day or two before. And he's the one who went down there called out for Floyd and heard Floyd call back that he was

hung up and needed help. Right, So this is good, I mean it's been a full day, but at least now somebody knows he's down there. So juel Estes runs back and starts getting help, and I think in very short order, word got to his brother, Homer, who I guess younger brother because I think Floyd was thirty at the time, and I think Homer was twenty two or fourteen, depending on where he can I hadn't seen fourteen, so Homer,

either way, he rushed. I get the impression that he was a man by then, so I'm gonna say twenty two, okay. But he rushed to the site and basically became the first person who was willing to actually go in and try to rescue Floyd. There are other people who had given it a shot before Homer arrived, but they apparently that chimney scared every single one of them off. They were like, I'm sorry, I'm I like Floyd a lot,

but that's I'm not going through that chimney. Yeah. So he shows up, says, Floyd's like, can I get some food first and foremost, so his brother said, sure, here's the worst thing possible you could eat when you're pinned in a cave. Here's some sausage and coffee. Yeah, so let's get that heart rate up ensure that you're gonna have to urinate, and then just the sausage is just a bonus, yeah, just to fill you up. Yeah, and to make that really flow. But he had food. I'm

kind of kidding around here. This is what people ate back then. So he just needed some some calories in his body. And Homer was down there working hard, trying everything he could do to get him loose. Every time he dug rubble out, more rubble would fall down where that rubble was. He brought a crowbar back to try and dislodge some bigger stones. Nothing was working. He's exhausted

and cold. At this point, he's offering up like advice is coming in from around the country by this point, like word had gotten out of like how to do it. He's offering to pay surgeons five hundred dollars to go down there and cut his foot off. And I think one surgeon was actually debating whether or not to do it. Yeah. I think he was sent by the heiress to the International Harvester Fortune. He got sent to the scene. She paid for him to go there. It's nice, yeah, it was.

It was very nice. I mean, she was very concerned, and apparently he was one of the best surgeons in America and he ended up becoming one of the medical advisors during this time. But he did not go down and cut his foot off because he couldn't reach his foot anyway, there's no way. But they were saying, well, we could also put ropes around him and pull him out and just cut his foot off like that. Yeah, not a good idea, and they didn't actually do it,

but that was definitely on the table for a while. Yeah, And they were also you know, this is a really sort of sad part of this is there were people that were volunteering to go down and bring him blankets and food and stuff, and they would go down and come back and say, his season, good spirits, he's got

the food and blankets. And then later when other people would go down to check things out, they would find that food and blankets to sort of cast aside and stuffed and cracks, and that people were too scared to go down there, and I guess too scared to admit it. Yeah, so there you go. There's there's a couple of things that we've just hit upon. I think bear pointing out one is that people are taking blankets down and then not actually doing it, so we don't actually have any

like professional rescuers right now. And then secondly, like his brother is the first person who's willing to get down there and give him some food. And if you take a step back, you realize, like this is a it's a big problem for Floyd Collins. But at this point, and for a really shockingly long time, it was basically a local problem. The people who were in charge of rescuing Floyd were the same people who were um his competitors in the cave tourism business. It was just locals

trying to figure out what to do. Yeah, and didn't the I'm sorry, the son of one of the former partners who was a good trusted friend he got involved as well, right, Juel Estes was the son, not Jules the Burnette. I didn't see him. Yeah, Johnny Burnette put heat factored in pretty heavily as far as because he was a trusted person to Floyd. So Floyd told him like, you're the only person I like trust to get me out of here. Oh okay, wow, so so um yeah.

So so there were people who were like really trying to do this. They had the best intentions, they just didn't necessarily know what to do. And the upshot of it is there was a distinct lack of expertise. He's in that kind of thing for a very long time, for the first several days of Floyd's encounter, Right, and

I guess we should introduce Skeets Huh. Yes, Now this is the first time somebody comes outside with no expertise but has the guts to be like, this man needs to get out of there, and I'm gonna do what I can. Right, Yeah, this is Skeets Miller. This is three days into this debacle. He was a young kid. He was well, he was twenty young to me, that was like sixty back then, I guess probably so. He was a reporter came down to Cave City on assignment

from the Louisville Courier Journal to cover this story. He was a little guy. The joke was that he'd looked like a mosquito. He was five five, weighed barely over one hundred and ten pounds. So he was a little guy, like you said, that had a lot of guts and also, which is key, small enough to get into some of these places that some of the larger dudes could not get into. But he was a reporter and he was

going after the story, at least as at first. So when he first went down there, he was going down there to interview Floyd. And the reason why he decided to do that was because he had tried to interview Homer, who said something like, if you want information, there's the hole right over there. You can go down and find

out for yourself. And so Skeet said, I'll take that as permission, and he went down and interviewed Floyd Collins himself, and in very short order, over the course of the time Floyd was in this hole or in this cave, Skeet just kept writing more and more stories, interviewing him multiple times, and ended up winning a Pulitzer for his reporting.

He became as much a star as Floyd Collins did in this saga because of his writing and because he was basically doing gonzo journalism with a trapped man in a cave. Yeah, and he also was the one saying like he's in bad shape down there, right, Like these reports of him being in good spirits aren't super accurate because he's he looks like a guy that's been trapped in a cave for three days. Right, That's what I

wanted to say. Like he started out going after the story, but once he encountered Floyd in real life, he became an actual rescuer as well. Yeah, he wanted to get him out of there. He did things like developed a bucket brigade system to get stuff out of there. He brought a light down, well, he lit a lot of the cave just so they could see better, but he brought a light down to Floyd to keep him warm, like a lightbulb, like legit electricity, to help keep him

on a little bit. Because remember it's freezing cold down there. Man, I can't imagine sixteen degrees. Yeah, and this it was over now a couple of weeks, like seventeen days. Little Skeets Miller is getting down in that cave and trying to rescue along with Homer and along with some other people, like really dedicated to getting him out of there. Right.

So the thing is is Skeets writing these dispatches for the Louisville Courier Journal, and it's starting to get picked up by the Associated Press and the Associated presses sending these out to newspapers all over the country, and all of a sudden, Floyd Collins went from, as Dave puts it, like this poor schmuck who was like trapped in a cave to a national interests or human interest story that

just gripped the nation. And one of the reasons why it was able to grip the nation was not just because of the ap picking up skeets writing, but also because radio was becoming a thing at the time. Not everybody had a radio this early on, but enough people did that there were like radio broadcasts done from the cave site that were reaching people's homes all over the country. So between the newspapers and the radio, it was just

the whole nation was enthralled with Floyd collins plight. Yeah, it became it became a not only a media sensation, but a local sort of carnival atmosphere. Like there were thousands of people there that came to through the town at least to see what was going on. I think there were at least two thousand people at the cave site. There's this website, this guy that had pictures of, you know, of the scene at the cave entrance of the grounds of the people in the cars, of people selling hot

dogs and hamburgers and balloons that said sand cave. And it's it's crazy to see these black, old, black and white photos of just how like, um, how crowded it got in rural Kentucky by this cave entrance. Yeah, by by all estimates, tens of thousands of people ended up showing up over the course of this these couple weeks that Floyd Collins ended up being stuck in the in the ground. I saw ten thousand, I saw sixty thousand.

There was just a ton of people, and they came from all over at a time when it wasn't that easy to travel, but they were coming from out of state. And I say, Chuck, we take a little break and come back to this carn well that's growing up around Floyd's hapless situation. Let's do it all right. So Floyd is still trapped, They're getting some food down to him. He is not doing well. There's a carnival atmosphere, like

we mentioned, kind of all over the place. And eventually they did make a little bit of progress in the with his buge bucket brigade, and that they cleared out enough for him to be able to to move a little bit for the first time. It cleared his arms, it cleared his legs because stuff had collapsed beyond just that either twenty six pound or seven ton boulder that was on his foot. So he was, you know, fully trapped for a long time, and then finally he was

able to move around a little bit. They he said that he was freed at one point like that his foot was even I guess he was delirious or miscommunicating, because that foot was definitely not free. And the last guy to bring him food was a minor named Maddox, who brought him food that he ate. And he was Floyd's delirious at this point and said, Maddox, get me out. Why don't you take me out? Kiss me goodbye. I'm going And apparently Maddox kissed him goodbye, which was a

very empathetic, sweet thing to do. And you know, heat from all this work had thawed this frozen mud that basically was acting like a mortar, and he just he got more entangled and trapped than he was before. And Maddox came out saying like he's dying, like very very soon. Imagine being Maddox waking up in the middle of the night for the next fifty years to Floyd Collins's voice saying, Maddox,

why don't you get me out? Yeah, that's awful, man, especially to somebody that empathetic too, you know, sure so right so, um as as after Maddox makes it out, I don't believe anybody was any anywhere near the inside of Saint Cave with Floyd at the time. But the cave finally just collapsed in the way to get to Floyd was now cut off hopelessly, and they had no idea what had happened to Floyd. Was he covered up in the cave in was it just cutting off their

their you know, their passage between them and him. They just didn't know. And now finally, this is about day five of poor Floyd Collins, already being a national American media sensation. Um, finally, the governor of Kentucky's like, maybe we should do something. And now the experts start to show up. But they show up like just hopelessly too late.

Despite that, despite him being in there for five days and him being totally cut off now with no access to food or water or anything, they decided that they were still going to do everything they could to get him out, and the idea that was put forth that everybody agreed on was to construct a shaft directly down to him, I think, to his feet, and to get him out that way, to get the bowlder off of his foot, and to pull him back through the crack

one way or another. But the problem was chucked. This was solid limestone and they couldn't use dynamite, right, Yeah, they couldn't use dynamite. Dave said they couldn't use heavy machinery at all. But I saw something that said that they brought in to steam shovels, like ten thousand dollars steam shovels. And at one point someone said, I think, in a not too happy way, it's going to cost one hundred thousand dollars to dig out a dead body, because I think the writing was on the wall at

that point. But at any rate, they did dig. A team of seventy five experts this time, built a five story shaft into the ground. And you know, these guys weren't in great shape either doing this hard work, right, But they eventually get down there and what they find is a dead Voyd Collins. Yeah, sadly, this was I think day fifteen, maybe when they finally reached him. I think eighteen days later is what it says, okay, And he had gotten caved in on day four or five.

So there was a lot of people out there who were like, yes, he's he's already dead, but we should get him anyway, and some people were like, there's a chance, you know, but there there wasn't. Just there weren't high hopes for reaching him, and those hopes were not fulfilled anyway.

When they found him the corner I believe said that he had he had died just three days before they reached him, but that esteemed doctor that the heiress to the International Harvester Fortune sent calculated more like five based on the condition of Floyd's body. Yeah, but they had the same problem that they had before, even in death.

They couldn't get that boulder off of his leg, and they apparently it was enough of a problem to get him out that they all agreed that they should basically leave him down there, that this shaft or this this crevice that he was stuck in was now his grave. We bury people in the ground anyway. This was the ground burying him prematurely. Essentially, is I guess what the

Kentucky reasoning was so um they everybody basically left. The media circus was over, the news reports kind of moved on to some other stuff, and the world just kind of they didn't forget about Floyd Collins, but they had

other things that suddenly grabbed their immediate interest. Yeah, and you know, as a sort of a sidebar, before they found his dead body, there were rumors that started to circulate because again people were printing things that weren't quite accurate, and rumors started to circulate that that why am I saying circulate? Weird? That's so weird? Circulate I'll saying circulate. I like it. That's a new way to say it.

I think you're just evolving the English language. Anyway, the rumors were that this was all a stunt to get people there to go to his cave. That Floyd was not trapped at all was sort of the main rumor, and that he was orchestrating a hoax to drive people

there to pay money to go into the caves. There were other rumors that abounded that maybe people blocked access to the tunnel to delay the rescue, to kill him so that they could get that real estate for the cave because these cave wars were still going on, and this all culmanated and eventually a a court, a military tribunal even convene to see if this was in fact a hoax. And I think this is all going on

before they finished the rescue. Yeah, I think this was happening while they were digging that limestone shaft by hand, essentially so, and they had plenty of time to do it and no new news. Right, there was nobody talking to Floyd anymore. So the newspapers were just printing whatever they could get their hands on that had anything to do with it, whether it was factual or not, which has made our efforts that much harder. Thank you, old

timing newspapers. Right. Yeah, So B Doyle, who was the guy that he went into business with, put up a roadside sign that said, you know, two hundred yards away is the body of Floyd Collins, imprisoned in Sand Cave. And he would charge people fifty cents just to go down and stand at the mouth of the cave above the tomb. And I guess either pay their respects or just gaulk or whatever draw a picture of it. Whatever you did back then, as a tourist, right, Homer, And

this was admirable and sad. He hit the road on the vaudeville stage to tell this story. And before like, when I first saw that, I was like, it didn't sound like a Homer Collins move right, seems like that's not the Homer I know. Yeah, he seems like a stand up either fourteen or twenty two year old. And he was doing it to raise money to get him out of there. He was like, I don't think that should be his final resting place, so I'm gonna do whatever I can to make enough money to fund a dig. Yeah.

The way I thought was that he had vowed to Floyd that he would get him out of there, and even though Floyd died, that didn't that didn't release him from that vow in his mind. So that is pretty neat, you know, especially because I think that the public idea, or the later idea of him was that he had been doing it for just money and fame or whatever.

But it worked, right, it did work. A couple months later, he was able to pay for his brother to be removed from that crevice, and so, as people do, they put Floyd back in the ground. But at this time, they put Floyd back in the ground in a much more appropriate place, the family cemetery, and they actually used to stalag tight or Mike, I can't remember as a headstone form, which is super neat and appropriate for a Floyd Collins headstone. I couldn't figure that out because I

saw the headstone. Did they just crush it and make it into a headstone? I don't think that's the original headstone that you saw. If it was, if it was a color photo, I think that was the one that came later, Okay, But how would they make a headstone out of a stalactite anyway? Hey, those Kentucky people are industrious. They can do anything they put their minds to, except for get Floyd Collins out of the ground. Oh boy. So tourists kind of stopped coming around because a lot

of the reason was because of this story. They were like this champion caver or died down there, Like, maybe we shouldn't spend our spring break caving in Kentucky anymore. And so they sold the Great His family sold the Great Crystal Cave, that initial cave that was gorgeous to a dentist named Harry Thomas, who said throwing an extra ten grand and that's a that's a lot of money back then, Yeah, especially if like you, Yeah, your ticket

booth is bigger than your house. Yeah, so just keep that in mind before you prejudge the family for what they agreed to. He said, for an extra ten grand, if you'll let me exume his body and put it on display in a glass coffin in that cave in a you know, respectful way, then we got a deal. And they needed the money and they said yes. Yeah. So for more than sixty years Floyd Collins was in

a glass coffin in the Great Crystal Cave. Beneath I believe that salagtite or slagmite headstone with the engraving greatest cave explorer ever known. And for the first at least fifteen year. I think if you're a tourist and you went to the Mammoth Caves, you probably made an extra trip to the Great Crystal Cave to go see Floyd collins super embalmed corpse through the glass window in his in his um casket right just playing there in the in the I think a chamber of the Great Crystal

Cave and actually slight in show correction. The body did not stay there for that long uninterrupted. Okay. In March of nineteen twenty nine, his body was stolen by grave robbers. Apparently their intent was to toss it in the East River, or I'm sorry, the Green River. They're gonna drive to New York, toss it in the East River. Yeah, they're gonna hit Cramer swimming. But it got caught in some underbrush and they couldn't get the body out. Doctor Thomas

recovered the body in a field. Sal's leg so the leg that was trapped was no longer there and I don't think anyone knows where that leg ended up. But then he doctor Thomas reinterred it, this time in a chain locked up casket back in the cave. Yeah, and that's where he stayed for decades. The thing is, the National Park Service came in and bought the place in nineteen sixty one. So yeah, for about thirty years you could go visit Floyd Collins body in the Great Crystal Cave.

But once the MPs took over, they honored the family's wishes not by removing him from the cave, but by closing off public access to the cave. So for all intentsive purposes. He was no longer something for tourists to gawk at, even though he was still down in this cave, and the family didn't want him in there anymore. So it wasn't until nineteen eighty nine that I believe a court ordered his body to be removed and finally interred once again in the ground top side, and that's where

he remains today. And I believe, Chuck that they put him in the ground on March twenty fourth, nineteen eighty nine, which is right around the anniversary of that internment, when this episode's coming out, I think, and right after my eighteenth birthday senior year of high school. Awesome, man, I'm surprised I didn't hear the news. Oh yeah, your birthday is coming up, isn't it IDEs of March it is. I'll never forget Chuck. So that's the story they ended up.

Billy Wilder, famous film director and writer. I made a film called Ace in the Whole that basically was an indictment on the media surrounding this event, starring a youngish Kirk Douglas as the as not skeeter as as a bad newspaper reporter. Two things have you ever seen Witness for the Prosecution, written by Billy Wilder. I think I have, but it's been a long time. I just saw it for the first time the other day. It's one of the best movies I've ever seen. He's I mean, he's

one of the best. You ever seen The Apartment, I haven't. I have seen Sunset Bolivard plenty of times. It's a great movie. To the Apartment's amazing. And that was Scott Ackerman's movie Crush Pick Oh, okay. And then the second thing, Chuck, is that there was actually a musical that was made. I think it first was put on in nineteen ninety six. It's called Floyd Collins. I'm surprised to see that. I have an impression it was in the same vein as that musical that the um how the South Park creators

came up with about the cannibal in Colorado. Oh, the Book of Mormon, No, this was a different one. It was before Book of Mormon. I thought this was like a respectful thing. I didn't know it was a communic it was. It was, That's what I was gonna say. It was much more respectful, but it was. There was a lot of I think the basis of it was a comedy musical. Oh interesting, what's funny about this? I

don't know. But the cool thing is is the guy who wrote them, the words and lyrics, I think the whole thing basically he got an hour in the cave. It was. It was opened up for him specially, and he did a lot of research and actually an analysis of the play by Scott Miller informed some of this episode. It was one of the sources we used. He did that much research on it. I think they were the ones that said his brother was fourteen. So I take

a show. Really, you know, I'm conflicted. Who knows? I mean? But back then the difference between fourteen and twenty two is, well, it's half your life. Actually, I guess you got anything else? I got nothing else? R I p Floyd Collins. We're sorry that that happened to you, Floyd. And since Chuck says he's got nothing else, it means his time for listener mail. I'm gonna call this great naming convention. Hey guys,

a longtime listener to the show. I'm finishing my masters in a couple of months, and I want to say thank you for keeping me entertained. Through a move to a new state, long hours of tedious work in my community campus. Every day. I had to stop listening in the library because I laughed out loud every episode. I really enjoyed your nap episode. My brother has been an advocate for coffee naps for years and coined a term that I think is pretty great. Did you see this?

You're ready for this? No, I haven't seen that one yet. I'm not ready. No, the nappaccino, Oh that is good? How great is that? Not a napper myself, but I think everyone should use this term. That is from Madison Madison. Whoever your brother is, need to name your brother, but just tell him that that's pretty great. A pretty great title it is. It definitely beats the two I was working on, the flat nap yeah or the napata. Neither one of those is nearly as good as nappuccino. I'll

tell you that the No. Number one. You know, what would happened? What would happen, Chuck? If Alpaccino took a nappuccino, you would say that was a great nap. Okay, If you want to get in touch with us like who Madison Madison did with some great information about your sibling. We want to hear it. You can email to us at stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should

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