7 True Scary Caving Horror Stories From Reddit

[Music] a few years back i was really into caving or to give it a stupid name that no one uses anymore spelunking i really didn't think i'd be into it when i first tried it like i'd have considered myself mildly claustrophobic the kind of guy who always felt a little anxious zipping a sleeping bag up all the way i don't know whether it just woke something up in me or it was the rush of getting over a fear or something to that effect but i took to it like a duck to water you're somewhere you shouldn't be exploring parts of the world that very few people see relying on people truly relying on them to ensure your safety in theirs it's a rush that's for certain but it's not without its dangers so every year my family and a few close friends head out to a national park or something along those lines to spend some time with nature and one particular year i managed to convince them to go out to mammoth cave national park over in kentucky which is home to the more than 400 miles of passageways making it the world's largest known cave system the cave system is located within the green river valley and its winding chambers pools and limestone labyrinths are equal parts beautiful and eerie ten different tours offer guests the opportunity to explore the decorated historic and drip stone areas the cave complex is especially well known for its natural entrance and gothic avenue a passageway filled with historic stone monuments and signatures from 19th century visitors so that was just about enough history and photo ops for my mom and aunts the river could provide hours of fishing for my dad and uncles all the while myself and my cousin could enjoy the caving there all went well with the vacation right up until the second to last day when my cousin and i decided to get a little too explorative during a visit to the caves my cousin was fairly new to caving so for the first few days we didn't go too deep or too far last thing i wanted to do was freak him out before we'd even done anything worth writing home about but as the week drew to a close there was no way i was going home without finding something a little more extreme to traverse so as we were heading back to civilization after an afternoon's caving we found a slit just less than knee-high in the rock wall of a cavern he had to get down on your stomach to fit into such a tight squeeze but if you did it led to a small crawl space that cut through the entire rock after a few meters i noticed that quartz was growing on the passageway ceiling and in the light of our headlamps they glittered in a way that i can't even really describe in words i mean it's like something out of a fairy tale a still from one of those weird jim henson movies it's just magical so we entered one at a time given that the tunnel was only wide enough for one person the old claustrophobic me would have thought this place was a living nightmare for real i'd have straight up had a panic attack and probably died of a heart attack before deprivation never set in every single time you took a breath in some places you'd feel the ceiling of the tunnel on your back it was that narrow but the new me just found it thrilling once you get it into your head that these things can't just up and collapse on you you get this feeling of calm and then one of exhilaration when you realized you were conquering your fears and going places other men dared not tread the deeper inside the tunnel we went the more incredible the scenery became it was like a whole other tiny world tucked away with a solid rock but eventually like most small subterranean tunnels it just kind of petered out at one turn there was a dead end the other was host to all kinds of stalactites and stalagmites those are those like rock spike things that you usually see on the roofs of caves only you get them on the bottom too in most places i'm checking out the styles to see if there's a possibility of us twisting through them to get to the deeper sections of the tunnel when i hear my husband whisper something behind me something that honestly made my blood run cold he said he could feel water on his back something was dripping on him as it turns out while everyone was having a good time outside checking out the statues and whatnot it had started to rain only they neglected to tell us that thanks guys it's also worth noting that the tunnel we were in had sank down into the rock for a little while before sort of flattening out at the bottom and to save you all a little geology lecture i'll get to the point the tunnel we were in was filling up with water granted it was filling up slowly but the position we were in meant that only a few inches of water could effectively drown us and that's a real bad position to be in if you don't own a pair of gills needless to say we turned around as fast as we could which took like the longest time when you factor in how narrow the tunnel was then began the long slow crawl back along the flat part of the tunnel it was absolutely horrific i tried to keep calm as calm and collected as i could but hearing my cousin almost cracking up in front of me as something that still makes me shudder to think about my biggest fear was that he'd just lock up which scared people are prone to do during particularly grueling caving sessions for some reason the brain just decided doesn't want to take the body any further and that's that they can be stuck in the rock for hours before they're calm enough to keep going i was terrified he'd just lock up not move and be the reason we both drowned down there dying while our family laughed and joked in their marquee tents but he didn't that magnificent idiot kept us cool relatively speaking anyway and just pushed on that doesn't mean it didn't get pretty close it was horrendous feeling the water slowly rising around us seeing little drops turn into trickles each new one causing my heart rate to speed up in my adrenaline to surge by the time the tunnels started to turn upward back towards the main entrance the water was almost up to my lips moving made these splashing noises in both of our sets of clothes were completely soaked through this little incident caused a ton of chaos for the remaining two days my aunt and uncle blamed me for almost getting my cousin killed and they pretty much took it out on my parents for allowing me such a dumb hobby we didn't go back into those caves at all and to be honest it took me a few months before i even thought about caving again it hasn't put me off entirely and i think it did me some good to become a little more safety conscious but you can bet that i check the weather before caving now every single time and if it even looks like it's going to rain don't do it it's just not worth losing your life over no matter how amazing it is [Music] so at my old high school there were these maintenance tunnels that snaked for hundreds of meters underneath the building itself there were the newly built ones and then there were the old ones that the school didn't use anymore my friend katie and i found an entrance to the old tunnels in a classroom that had long since been abandoned we had to bust the lock on an old trapdoor unscrew a round metal top layer and lower ourselves into a square dirty tunnel the main tunnels were about two feet wide by maybe only six feet tall with maybe a few inches of dirty stagnant water flooding the bottom now these tunnels were very dark and very cold with the utterly disgusting stench of stagnant water and old mold it was gross but we began exploring the tunnels a little more every day one time we were in there for maybe 20 minutes tops when katie almost passed out from the smell at least that's what i thought it was turns out that there was some dangerous gases down there what i found out later were methane sinks that were actually pretty dangerous to those without safety equipment i had to pretty much drag her out but the next time we brought respiratory mass waterproof footwear and flashlights then set about mapping out pretty much the entire system all in all we mapped out more than 700 feet of twisting turning tunnels it became something of an underground layer for us they went up down and turned to the sides so much so we had to use chalk to mark the walls so we could find our way back after a particularly long expedition maybe like three hours we headed back to where we came in only to find the opening was actually locked we pushed and turned on the metal cover becoming pretty frightened when we found a wooden budge we were basically trapped inside and realizing that did not feel good at all we pushed through the tunnels trying to open each of the three openings that we had found over time but not a single one of them would open any panic that had been simmering away before had now bubbled to the surface and to say the least we were completely freaking out we ended up rushing down a tunnel we hadn't actually been down before hoping it would lead us to an exit after a while i kept hearing noises behind us i told katie who was crawling in front of me we froze turned off our flashlight and listened sure enough a steady splashing sound was actually following us we just freaked out and just made a run for it now please bear in mind we had absolutely no idea where we were going at this point it was just pure blind panic after what felt like an hour of frenzy dashing through the tunnels tripping over pipes and scraping our knees we emerged into a bigger room we realized it wasn't a room but sort of a down section of a much bigger room as it turned out there was someone doing maintenance down there with us we hid behind some old metal stairs and when the guy left for more tools we scrambled up the stairs out the door and hid in the girls locker rooms for the rest of the day we never did find out who locked us down there or what that splashing noise was but you can bet we never went into those tunnels again [Music] i've told this one before but it's definitely worth retelling especially if i include a bit more detail a long time ago i happened to be on a visit to carlsbad caverns in new mexico with two of my college buddies so this one particular small cave we decided to explore began with a narrow 15-meter belly crawl at the open there was a butt load of cobwebs spread across the cave entrance but they seemed to clear up after a few feet pretty creepy but generally nothing to worry about although i really hate that feeling of them when they touch your face and there are a few dead flies in there or whatever anyway i was the most experienced caver so i went first and did the belly crawl pretty quickly pretty much making myself the human shield for those big clumps of old cobwebs as the tunnel ended i came out in a small domed room about a meter and a half tall and about four or five meters across i had some time before my friends made it so i was describing the room to them whilst dusting the spider webs for my clothes i looked up at the ceiling and gasped a bit i'm not afraid of spiders but the sheer volume of them caught me off guard it must have been a minimum of like a thousand all crawling around each other now that i think about it it was probably more like two or three thousand all hanging from the ceiling with egg sacs all around them i mean they were a legion like there wasn't a speck of rock ceiling to be seen as the entire thing was just a mass of eight-legged crawlies hey guys there's a lot of spiders hanging from the ceiling don't stand up when you get here i called to my friends my friends were considerably more cautious of the spiders and began to ask a few questions about them how big are they what color are they well how many are there and that kind of thing uh they're not that big they kind of look like black widows but they're not they're the wrong color they're almost seems like they're brown the legs look a little lighter than the body i said studying them as best as i could with my headlamp i was no spider expert but i knew a black widow when i saw one but then a friend of mine who was a big animal expert at the time and actually went on to be a wisconsin dnr warden yelled out really do they have a small pattern on their back sort of like a violin ah yes i replied already getting a really bad feeling in my gut our buddy the dnr warden burst into the room looked up shuddered then forced himself to look at one of the spiders as close as he could manage the color in his face drained out and he hissed get out everyone get out of the cave he didn't say anymore he just rushed to get out of the cave as quickly as he could it took us all about 10 or 15 minutes to get into the room and it took us about a whole two minutes to get all the way out of the cave when we finally got out the other two of us were confused my warden friend told us that what we were looking at was a nest of brown recluse spiders some of the more poisonous arachnids on the entire continent and we had been unlucky enough to stumble across their lair apparently when they bite you you go through excruciating pain for a few days skin necrosis and you could possibly die we didn't go any more caves with cobwebs in them for the rest of the trip [Music] i'm a qualified caving instructor and honestly it's not very often at all that i actually get frightened during a caving trip now it's entirely possible that i've never gotten spooked because i'm simply not claustrophobic nor am i afraid of the dark i mean asking someone who likes caving to describe really scary moments in a cave could but if you ask people who hated caving but were somehow roped into it anyway what was scary about it those stories might prove a little bit more fruitful having said that there's definitely a few caving trips i presided over that haven't exactly gone according to plan i used to do a lot of solo caving and rappelling down vertical caves was one of my favorite parts of the whole process i must have dropped it into a cave maybe 300 times or more last month i took a small group of boy scouts from michigan into a vertical cave being slightly out of practice and not trusting my well-worn gear to keep the kids safe i ended up borrowing one from a buddy of mine it was a slightly smaller bundle slightly narrower in diameter but it was infinitely more flexible than mine was i thought this might prove to be a boon but it turns out i didn't quite think this through and problems that didn't occur to me at the time began to manifest quickly once i was in the cave itself i figured out pretty quickly that i didn't have nearly the amount of control i was used to when repelling i found that i was able to stop but only barely sitting over a 200 foot drop while hardly being able to keep myself from sliding i decided to abort the repel at the first ledge i arrived at which was about 30 feet down i had to lock off my rack and call on those who came with me to help me swing over to the ledge and climb back out imagine that having your life in the hands of a bunch of boy scouts no offense to the little guys they did the job but i was pretty worried for a minute or two i did have climbing gear with me and i suppose i could have switched over to the other rack but that would have been a lot more trouble so i took the easy way out no not that one since i was able to lock off the rack i could simply rest there and think about my situation and the thoughts were not good the boy scouts had their troop leader with them so it wasn't like there wasn't a strong full adult there to add some extra pull but i'll admit that i couldn't help but imagine what would have happened if something went wrong if i were the panicking type i suppose i would have been deathly afraid that i would lose my life right then and there but that doesn't mean the prospect didn't make me feel extremely nervous i was literally dangling like 30 foot into a pit with gear that wasn't right for the rope i was on with absolutely no way to control my descent the only thing is i'm careful enough that when i decided that the repel wasn't a sure thing i chose to call it all entirely rather than risk that i'd have enough controller to send it safely that's the type of care that keeps you alive in caves like that but if you want to hear about something that really has the pucker factor then how about a vertical cave with pull downs you take your rope with you and an unexpected increase in water levels there's a cave out in tennessee where there are three vertical drops of over 100 feet but people typically only take one rope because the bottom of the cave is open and you can pretty much walk out of it unless it's flooded there is always water in the cave anywhere from ankle deep to about 18 inches between the second and the third drop there is a long 400 foot crawl way with low ceilings and high water levels when i ban there was about half a foot of water with about the same amount of air space above it's a really nice crawl through with pretty river petals on the floor and lots of small but clean formations along the walls white calcite formation stalactites stalagmites and soda straws mostly some of the formations are beige yellow or tinge with red showing impurities of course which leads to a lot of vegetation during the 400-foot crawl if for example caver was in a small party who were exploring this particular cave and dropped into it expecting a typical through trip but happened to have a problem during the second 200-foot repel the party could decide to float him through the crawl way and lower him down the final 100 foot repel they could pull down the rope and move him to where the entrance to the crawl is only to discover that the water levels are too high and there is a very small air gap in the crawl but with water that high the movement of the water would be very swift and it may be too much for someone attempting to navigate it to fight their way back upstream that person would have to contend with just a few inches of oxygenated air at the top of a passage that has razor-sharp rocks all along the cave ceiling and at the end of the passage the water jets out over to a drop that's more than almost half a mile down the immense water pressure would try to push them out of the passage and it would take a great amount of strength and effort for a sustained period of time to be able to resist that water pressure and honestly it would not take long to exhaust someone and when they run out of strength and then it's time for the big sleep it's likely that the fall would not kill the caver overnight since the bottom of the drop would be completely flooded he'd hit the bottom and in all likelihood break a bone or sprain an ankle but the water could essentially break his fall potentially saving his life but that's only assuming that he could breathe the whole way down the passage without getting his face torn up by the rocks on the ceiling and as you can imagine that's very very unlikely if there's one thing you take away from this dumb story about caving it's that you never ever go alone and generally speaking you don't try to take an injured person out of the cave with small numbers it's better to leave one person with the injured party and let two people go out and get help that's why the smallest safe party is no less than about four people but with one person staying back and two people trying to make it out of a flooded passage there is the potential for lots of drama i think i can give a good answer to this as i've been caving as a hobby for several years now nothing really supernaturally creepy ever happened during any of my caving events but i have been in some dangerous situations which have either left me questioning my sanity or the sanity of those around me so i used to go caving with a group of people from a university club but i've been out of university a few years and just been doing my own thing well one weekend me and my friend josie decide we should go on a little trip to a cave with these guys you know to see how the old club was doing the club that taught us how to cave and we in turn taught the new guys when we were the old breed so anyway the trip is going according to plan and me and josie go off caving on our own but one evening we decided to join the whole group and cave with them in a tunnel system near to our communal campsite now at the time it was raining a little and i was beginning to feel uneasy about the whole thing but to be honest i never voiced my concerns and just went with it big mistake and so it was that a large group of 12 people arrive at this cave system spending about 20 minutes checking their gear before entry the particular cave system we were exploring is normally just a subterranean river on the inside but it has a few levels of corridors that you can explore high above the water itself the entrance is really tight though and requires you to climb down this tight pipe extremely cautiously using only your feet to feel for stable footholds there is absolutely no way to see what is below you and basically if you lose your footing there is a nasty fall that could leave you seriously injured if you fell victim to it however manage to keep your head together and you'll be fine so much of caving is winning the battle in your own mind so anyways we get to the cave and the guys in the club are doing their thing me and josie are just the old salty veterans coming along to relive the old college days once we're inside we realize that there is this one younger girl who's got herself somehow stuck in the entrance at the very rear of the group turns out it was only her second caving trip ever and for some reason her buddies thought it would be a good idea to bring her into this one even though she had panicked whilst in a much larger easier cave system earlier in the week so one of the team leaders stays behind to help the panic and girl calm down and to get her to advance further into the cave while the rest of us move deeper down some of the long corridors before we can start exploring the cave properly then i went and asked one of the leaders of the group a girl i had taught how to cave just a few years before what time it was and to my absolute shock and horror she straight up tells me that she doesn't know because she's not wearing a watch shocked i ask her how she expects to know what time to leave the cave to be on time for the call out for those that don't know the call out is arguably the most important aspect of serious caving it's where you let someone on the surface know even if it's just a friend who's not even on the trip exactly who is going to be present on a caving trip as well as what time you plan on leaving without a call out if something goes wrong no one will know you are missing for days or even weeks and will then have potentially hundreds of caves to look over in the hopes of finding you and in that time it's entirely possible that you could have died of deprivation by that point remember it takes just around 72 hours without water for a person's heart to just pack up and see speeding anyway the leader of all these sweet innocent beginners tells me that she did not leave a call out or bring any first aid kit or safety equipment i'm literally furious that she's put us in the situation but i hold my cool long enough because i don't want the others to panic because the panic in a cave system is a straight-up death sentence on occasion but still i tell her quietly that i am now the call out and tope out of the cave by 1 30 pm i reluctantly give her my watch trying not to snap and straight up call her reckless and dumb before i start back towards the cave entrance back near the entranceway the other leader guy was sitting with a girl who got stuck earlier the same one who managed to get her into the cave turns out she just couldn't handle it and they'd abandoned the attempt entirely i go through the situation with them and tell them i'm leaving the cave to be the call out guy they asked me to go get an srt kit basically just ropes and harness in case any of the other caving club needed it to climb back up so i do just that a little while later i head back with gear which they didn't have all of and i had to borrow off of other cavers who were luckily at the same campsite i get back to the cave and the others are leaving albeit rather slowly as it is a difficult entrance and climbing out is incredibly harder than climbing in they all managed to get out but lo and behold the panicking girl gets stuck and with the two leaders trapped below her she is blocking the entrance we harness her up and i rig up an anchor to try and secure her in a rope in case she falls but she is wedged in there tight and it isn't in the right frame of mind to get moving then i get the news from the others below that the cave is starting to fill because of rain after what seems like eternity of them nicely talking to this panicking girl telling her that she's doing great and she'll be fine she's getting worse at this stage i freak out i shouted her that she needs to get herself together and get out of the cave because two others are stuck behind her it kind of works and she nearly stops having a panic attack not entirely but stops hyperventilating which just makes her more stuck she still won't climb out though so against all common sense i lie down into the hole and grab her by the harness and pull her up and out of the cave after that i told the club that they needed to get their stuff together and stop being cowboys but i haven't gone back to them since because their foolishness straight up nearly got two team leaders killed my name is tom kinsky and i'm the vice chair of the boston grotto a caving club affiliated with the national speleological society we meet the first wednesday of every month on mit campus and regularly send out open invitations in the hopes of attracting new members there are always people who show up interested i'd like to think this wasn't just due to the pizza we ordered and from the upper crust on charles street but who am i kidding everyone loves pizza the boston grotto also organizes yearly caving trips to some fascinating far-flung places last summer we planned a deep cave expedition in the karstic limestone plateau of southern turkey and we actually helped to map out the lower reaches of the cave system extending the depth of the morca cave from negative 919 meters to negative 1240 meters is now officially the third deepest cave in turkey all thanks to our hard work and dedication it's a very very fulfilling hobby but caving is neither easy nor is it really relaxing in fact on occasion caving can be hazardous terrifying or even fatal i have plenty of stories detailing brushes with danger and death but the one i'm about to tell you is the one that sticks with me the most so a few years back a ranger from the glacial national park in montana got in touch with the nss regarding a previously unexplored cave system christy starr the office manager of the nss then referred the ranger to us due to our expertise in mapping out unexplored sections of cave systems the ranger then got in touch with the boston grotto and then basically offered us an all-expenses paid caving trip to the glacier national park needless to say we were ecstatic you see whether we're talking about francis dark magellan or even lewis and clark we can conclude that most if not all of the earth's surface has been roughly thoroughly documented and mapped out there is very little in the way of land left to explore but the same cannot be said for what lies beneath our feet the national speleological society alone estimates that only 10 to 15 percent of the world's cave systems have been documented and mapped out and i'm not sure people realize just what an opportunity that presents people like us we have the chance to explore places that no man or woman has ever stepped foot in before to truly be the next generation of explorers carrying the torch and places of ancient sailors 19th century african adventurers or even the space-faring astronauts of the 60s and 70s i mean there's the very real possibility of being able to name something the kinsky caves or or something along those lines the very real possibility that some of us could be immortalized in the way that stanley or abbott had been giving their names to port stanley in africa or abadabad in british india and so it was that myself and two other members of the boston grotto ended up driving all the way out to montana and a van filled with caving gear snacks and beer given that the drive took a couple of days we made something of a road trip out of it stopping off at chicago to stretch our legs and take in the sights of the windy city accompanying me on the trip was paul hutch hutchinson coordinator of experience based training here at boston university and another member of the grotto nestor ramos previously employed by lynchburg college virginia hutch had expanded the outdoor leadership group to include backpacking rock climbing horizontal caving vertical caving and canoeing as well as creating an academic minor in outdoor recreation to others caving and other outdoor activities were just a hobby but for hutch it was more of a vocation something he was compelled to do something that was in his blood and he brought that same passion to almost everything he did nestor on the other hand was a relatively newer member of the grotto but what he lacked in raw experience he made up for an enthusiasm and competence he was a natural in ways that made the younger me very envious indeed after almost five whole days worth of driving we finally made it out to browning montana we stopped to get a bite to eat and then headed further down highway two until we reached where we'd be staying the traveler's rest lodge a set of log cabins that were every bit as charming as rustic as i imagined we slept like the dead that night and after sleeping in a van for four nights i had never been so appreciative of the divine human invention that is the mattress the next morning came the trip out to glacier national park itself we packed up our gear which included our very specialized helmets light thin comfortable with a four-point suspension that will stay on in a fall as well as being safe to mount batteries flashlights and brackets to we threw extra batteries and flashlights into small utilitarian backpacks along with extra layers of warm clothing as well as food and water but then came perhaps the coolest part of the trip so far given that the glacier national park is pretty much inaccessible to anyone but experienced hikers the rangers out there had planned something a little special for us to save us exhausting ourselves before the expiration even began a helicopter ride into the park itself we were told to be in a certain field at a certain time which we were and seeing that chopper coming in from a distance the thudding of its rotor blades shattering the early morning tranquility it was just incredible i'm a huge fan of old war movies and if it wasn't so chilly that morning it might have felt like we were back in vietnam or something special force guys being airlifted behind enemy lines or something despite being very deep into the national park via helicopter finding a safe place to drop us off was another thing entirely we landed about a miles hike from the cave system itself with one of the park rangers guiding us up a set of steep paths which led to the tiny restrictive entrance on the mountainside we arranged to call out time for 20 30 that evening enough time for us to get out of the cave and back down the mountain to the landing site before sunset after that the park ranger left us to hike back down to the chopper and our journey began in earnest i immediately understood why the cave system was previously unexplored the entrance was barely traversable even to us experience cavers and more than once i had to completely exhale to make my torso fit through the narrower gaps hutch was the pointman as he headed in and each little cranny he had to shimmy through was probably assessed for danger a larger man might have become stuck stuck to suffer the same fate as that guy in utah about 10 years earlier something i wouldn't wish upon my worst enemy after about a half hour serious anxiety that verged on claustrophobia the tunnels begin to open up a little and i really do mean a little they were still narrow enough that we could do nothing but crawl on our hands and knees occasionally just our bellies in order to get deeper inside a place that apparently no man or woman had tread before it was terrifying but thrilling in a way that i don't think i could put into words it's like one burst of adrenaline and knowing you're the vanguard of subterranean exploration and you can almost feel it buzzing in your fingertips so the last thing i was expecting when we found ourselves crawling into a larger more open cave was to hear hutch's disappointment as you can imagine you can't make loud noises in the cave system and you have to be as quiet as possible given the reverberations and echoes can quite easily cause a cave in if the rock isn't of a certain density so at first i couldn't quite make out what hutch was getting at i mean i seriously thought he was injured or something at first he started hissing and whispering curses bawling his fists in frustration at something he'd seen illuminated by the lamp on his helmet after he crawled through i watched him sit down leaning back against a cave wall with his face obscured by his hands i asked him what the matter was but he just shook his head a melancholy to his body language that i'd barely seen before as he pointed over toward the opposite side of the cave there lying on the cold stone floor was a burlap sack a small leather-bound notebook sitting just nearby only then did i join him against the cave wall sorely lamenting the fact that this wasn't going to be the virgin expedition that we'd imagine it to be but that didn't mean that we were about ready to give up not by a long shot whoever had been down in this place previously had obviously never officially recorded their findings so the door for us to map out and name the place was still very much a possibility before we pushed on we decided to search the burlap sack and inspect the small book for clues as to what we might be up against as we move deeper as i kicked open the sack i could see there were the remains of some old food container along with an old style water flask both of which were empty they looked old extremely old and i hurried to inspect the small books so to see if it had any trace of date inside the thing fell apart in my hands moisture and time have long eroded the pages bindings but we did find a page where the date was partially legible it read 1860 something the last number completely worn away by the damp cave air the book had been sitting down there for the better part of 200 years and although we couldn't read a single full sentence of what was written in it i'd have given anything to know what the cavers of yore thought of their subterranean experiences as we advanced further into the cave system i couldn't help but wonder just what would cause an explorer to just abandon their notebook like that but we soon discovered the reason two caves over we found them hutch called it out as soon as the beam of headlamp passed over the dome of rib bones that jutted out from the rock it was nothing short terrifying knowing they'd come down here one day never to return never to see their loved ones again and all the while their reasoning for being down here eluded us after that here were three things we saw before we turned tail and got out of there the first were the skeletons finger bones basically a person's finger bone is divided up into three distinct sections known as phalanges the smallest sections being in a person's fingertip these have a really distinct shape go ahead and google it and you'll see what i mean so so it was pretty evident to us that something traumatic had occurred that wore the tips of the bones away it felt intensely creepy speculating on how this guy had potentially lost his way in the caves probably going mad in the darkness and began to scratch at the walls of the cave until his fingers were worn down to the bone and even then he hadn't stopped scratching but we couldn't find any sections of the cave wall that bore the marks he would have made which led us to the second thing we saw before we got out of there it was a skull there were scratch marks on his skull right around the orbital sockets none of us said a thing about it as we studied the yellowing bone under his headlamps before it was obvious what had occurred down in the dark almost 200 years before he had scratched out his own eyes we were already backing into the cave at that point praying we wouldn't get lost on the way back as this poor soul had obviously done i tried not to think about the moment that poor soul's lamplight had run out condemning him to spend what little time he had left in absolute darkness i tried to show hutch and nestor but they weren't in the least bit interested in hanging around any longer and to be honest i totally understand why as we sat around the open field we'd landed at waiting for our helicopter taxi to arrive we agreed not to talk about what we'd seen until we got back there was a good chance that if we told the rangers what we'd seen they'd ask us to go back in to retrieve the body of the old caver something none of us were particularly keen to do and as much as we agreed not to talk about it until we got back home there never did come a time when we discussed what we'd seen down there ever i mean when the rangers asked us how the caving had gone we just told them that it was unsafe to be down there and there was no chance of turning the cave system into a tourist trap let alone a place for experienced cavers to go when they wanted a challenge i suppose i've waited long enough to get this whole thing off my chest so now i suppose everyone knows about the body down there in the caves of glacier national park there was nothing john edward jones loved more than caving with his beloved family along with his younger brother josh his father often brought him along on caving expeditions in the state of utah when they were just young children from an early age the jones boys grew to adore the subterranean depths and their shadowy otherworldly beauty but unfortunately for john his first trip into the nutty putty cave southwest of lake utah in about 60 miles from salt lake city would be his last john entered the nutty putty cave just after 8 pm mountain standard time on the evening of the 24th of november 2009 not long before thanksgiving john was 26 years old at the time of the incident along with nine other friends and members of his family decided to explore a nutty party cave as a way to build bonds with each other ahead of the holidays being in his mid-20s john was without a doubt in the prime of his life he was recently married had an 18 month old daughter and was in the process of attending medical school in virginia with a view to becoming a certified medical doctor and like most years he had headed back home to utah to spend some quality holiday time with his family and friends yet a seemingly routine caving trip was to turn into an outright nightmare it had been many years since john had been caving and at 200 pounds and six feet tall he wasn't the same small child that used to accompany his father after about an hour of exploring the vast caverns and tunnels of the nutty party cave john decided to find the formation called the birth canal an extremely tight passage that cavers must crawl through carefully if they're feeling brave enough john located what he assumed was the birth canal and began to inch his way into the restrictive tunnel head first shimmying forward using his stomach muscles hip flexors and fingers to grip but it only took a minute or so before he realized he'd made a horrible error of judgment josh jones john's younger brother by three years was the first person to find him that way josh tried desperately to get a grip of his brother's calves so he could pull him out of the tunnel but had little success in fact josh only succeeded in allowing his older brother to slide down further into the passageway meaning he was trapped even worse than his previous predicament john's arms were now pinned beneath his chest and he couldn't move an inch in any direction the jones family were and still are devoutly religious and at this point both john and josh began to pray lord guide us as we work through this john prayed please save me for the sake of my wife and kids before long josh had rushed back into the direction of the cave's entrance in search of help but even once assistance arrived john was still trapped more than 400 feet below the earth's surface getting equipment supplies and personnel down that far took more than an hour to accomplish susie matolo was the first rescuer to reach john arriving at just after midnight on the 25th of november by this point john had been stuck inside the tunnel for more than three and a half hours susie said hi to john and introduced herself as a rescue worker even though all she could see of him was a pair of darkly colored sneakers hi susie thanks for coming but i really really want to get out john is reported to have said and so over the course of the following 24 hours more than a hundred rescue volunteers worked tirelessly to free john from his rock prison from records and eyewitness reports the method they were banking on involved a system of pulleys and ropes to try to pull john free from his dangerous predicament one of the rescuers on the scene a man by the name of sean roundy explained the difficulties facing anyone who went into nutty putty cave even those with lots of previous caving experiences most of the passages were dangerously narrow even at the entrance where warning signs had been placed warning signs that jon jones had apparently ignored or simply failed to notice but this was not the first incident of this nature that the cave system had seen five years earlier in 2004 two members of a local boy scout troop had almost lost their lives in separate instances in the exact same area of the cave that jon was trapped in two boy scouts had become stuck in the nutty putty caves within just a week of each other and in one of the cases rescue worker crews took over 12 hours to free the 16 year old scout who was much smaller than john using a complex series of pulleys it is interesting to note that the cave had only been reopened for six months in 2009 when john and his family made their caving trip officials had closed the nutty putty cave system back in 2004 soon after the incidents with the boy scouts the place had been closed off to the public for five whole years after a risk assessment had concluded that the caves were simply not safe for unguided exploration but for some reason be it political or environmental the caves were reopened to the public with only a few warning signs posted around to clue people into the danger that they faced but now with john trapped inside a cave that he arguably should not have been afforded access to time was rapidly running out the downward facing position at which john was trapped was putting immense stress on his body this was due to being in a position which requires the heart to work ferociously hard to continually pump blood out of the brain as when the body is right side up gravity does the work and the heart doesn't have to shoulder that load much like the boy scout rescued five years earlier volunteers tied a rope around john which was in turn connected to a series of pulleys when everything was in place the rescue volunteers then pulled as hard as they could but suddenly without warning one of the pulleys catastrophically malfunctioned sean roundy the man leading the rescue operation believed that a pulley came loose at its anchor point in the cave wall which contained a large amount of loose clay the rope and pulley operation was a complete failure the rescuers had no other feasible schemes to get the trapped man out of there essentially john was doomed even years after the incident roundy had confessed to mentally revisiting the rescue over and over in his head torturing himself with his own greatest failure i reviewed the whole mission he's reported to have said wishing we'd have done this tiny detail differently or done a little sooner but it's no use second guessing things we did our best with all hopes of rescue dashed in his heart having suffered hours upon hours of strain due to his downward position john was pronounced dead of cardiac arrest shortly before midnight on the evening of november the 25th 2009 rescuers had spent just over 24 hours trying to save his life but to no avail and in a show of emotional strength that i could not imagine having personally john's family actually thanked rescuers for their help even if their failure meant his untimely demise nutty putty cave lived up to its reputation on the night of john's death no one will ever go in the cave again state officials sealed off nutty putty cave permanently just a week after john's death they never recovered his body which remains inside to this day for fear of more deaths that might result from such an operation now sealed up nutty putty cave serves as a natural memorial and grave site to john edward jones hi friends thanks for listening and be sure to subscribe and click that notification bell to be alerted of all future narrations and if you got a story be sure to submit them to my subreddit our let's read official and give and receive 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Channel: Lets Read!

Views: 98,772

Rating: 4.9090428 out of 5

Keywords: caving, caving stories, scary caving stories, spelunking stories, true scary stories, scary stories, scary true stories, true horror stories, horror stories, true stories, stories from reddit, asmr reading, lets not meet, true creepy stories, scary horror stories, reddit, true scary stories from reddit, true horror stories from reddit, subscriber submissions, reddit scary true stories, lets read, asmr sleep, ASMR, creepy stories

Id: W1qgHAk6mfE

Length: 50min 46sec (3046 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 03 2020