Mammoth Cave is a natural wonder – the largest known cave system in the world that draws hundreds of thousands of visitors each year. It is a place full of history, from mummified ancient remains to the remnants of a tuberculosis sanatorium.

It is also, by some accounts, a place brimming with mysteries, ghosts – and even a sea monster.

Decades before Mammoth Cave became a national park in 1941, stories of the supernatural were part of the area’s lore. While the site has been reported by some to have had some sort of spiritual or supernatural significance for the region’s Native Americans, there is no historical documentation of that claim.

But what is clear is that Mammoth Cave is a place full of wonders, history and tales of the supernatural.

In the late 1800s, newspapers across the country often repeated the tale of a noted ghost at Mammoth Cave.

The story goes that one of the cave’s most adventurous explorers and first tour guides was a former slave named “Old Lewis.” When he died, he was buried in one of the area’s church graveyards. But the proprietor of the local hotel decided to dig up Old Lewis and place his remains under a monument at the entrance to the cave as a sort of tourist attraction.

Visitors subsequently reported sightings of a ghostly apparition around the cave. One man even reportedly emptied his revolver into the specter, with no impact.

Finally, when Old Lewis’ remains were returned to the graveyard, the sightings stopped.

The ghost stories and other tales of the supernatural related to Mammoth Cave have never abated.

Charles Hanion, a park guide for decades, has always had an interest in the unusual aspects of Mammoth Cave.

In 1996, he co-authored a book called “Scary Stories of Mammoth Cave.”

While some of the supernatural stories related to the area are tongue-in-cheek, others are reported as history.

One such well-known account regards an early guide in the cave whose lantern went out. In the darkness, he saw two red, glowing eyes – they turned out to be “two old grease lamps,” Hanion said.

It’s not uncommon for cave visitors to show Hanion pictures taken on cellphones showing what they perceive to be apparitions.

Many of the supernatural stories regarding the cave have to do with unusual sounds and lights.

In 1839, Louisville’s Dr. John Croghan purchased the cave and 1,600 surrounding acres.

Two years later, he built some huts in the cave to house tuberculosis patients in the belief that the cave air could cure the afflicted. The theory of the healthy cave air apparently came after some noted that the slaves who once worked in the saltpeter mines in Mammoth Cave reported having exceptionally good health.

The theory was soon proven wrong, as the patients generally got sicker the longer they lived in the cave and, inconveniently for Croghan’s enterprise, kept dying. The bodies were placed temporarily on a natural slab now called “corpse rock,” and some visitors have reported the sound of agonized coughing coming from the area.

Croghan himself died from tuberculosis a few years later.

Perhaps the most famous of Mammoth Cave’s reputed ghosts is that of its most famed “modern” explorer, Floyd Collins.

Collins, a local to the area, discovered Crystal Cave in 1917. In 1925, he was exploring nearby Sand Cave. While shimmying through a narrow opening, a large rock fell on his leg, pinning him in the small tunnel.

The efforts to free Collins made national headlines, but they were unsuccessful and Collins was found dead after having been trapped for two weeks.

His body was displayed at various locations as a gruesome tourist attraction until he was interred at his current spot in the Mammoth Cave Baptist Church Cemetery.

Collins’ ghost has been reported in not only the cave system, but at his current grave site. The old wooden Mammoth Cave Baptist Church building, now part of the national park, is also the site of alleged paranormal activity, with reports of mysterious lights in the windows.

Hanion had his own Collins-related experience.

He said it was common for tour guides to “ask Floyd to come along with you,” when exploring areas related to the explorer in the tradition that his spirit still lurked in the cave shadows.

On one such occasion, the group’s lanterns, cameras and flashlights all mysteriously quit working, only to all start working again upon leaving the chamber, Hanion said.

Hanion also had an unusual experience while leading a tour in a cave chamber called the Big Chief with another guide. The chamber features a large rock upon which it was common for guides to throw a torch to illuminate the room during tours. On one such occasion, a visitor asked Hanion who was standing on the rock. Hanion assumed it was his fellow tour guide, only to see him standing at the back of the cave.

On another tour, Hanion saw the apparition himself.

“I could make out a figure – it was not a shadow,” he said.

The figure appeared to be wearing a distinct hat. It was only much later that he discovered that old tour guides commonly wore a “slouched” hat during tours.

There have been several other instances of people seeing a figure on that rock, Hanion said.

After Collins, the most well-known cave spirit is that of a woman named Melissa whose story dates to the 19th century.

Melissa, according to the legend, was in love with her tutor. The tutor, however, was in love with another woman. In a fit of jealousy, Melissa led the tutor deep into the cave and left him there to die.

Now the spirit of Melissa haunts the cave as she searches for her lost love. While Melissa is often touted as a real cave spirit, the entire original story was a piece of fiction published in 1858 in a New York newspaper.

There definitively were, however, many deaths and burials in the cave. A major draw for early tourists were the various preserved remains found in Mammoth Cave. Nitrates in the soil and the dry conditions led to the discovery of several bodies that were described as “mummies.” Some were displayed in the cave, while others were purchased and put on display in other parts of the country.

Above ground, the Mammoth Cave area has also been reported to be the home of a few mysterious creatures.

Newspaper reports from the 1940s recounted people seeing a “monster” in the Green River near Mammoth Cave, especially around Houchins Ferry. The creature was reported to be up to 300 pounds and perhaps 12 feet long. The Green River is known to harbor some large catfish, but the biggest catfish ever caught in the waterway, according to the state Department of Fish & Wildlife Resources, was a measly 97-pounder caught in 1956.

One witness told the Louisville Courier-Journal in 1941 that the creature had “great big fish eyes that scare a fellow just to look at.”

That the story was nothing more than a tongue-in-cheek fish tale could be surmised from what then-Edmonson County Judge-Executive Pleas Sanders told the paper that year. He said when the creature jumps out of the water, the resulting waves were “200 feet high.” And as for his plans to catch the creature:

“I have a steel cable and a hook fashioned out of an iron bar. For bait I am going to use a hog’s head, and if that don’t work, I will use a big groundhog. Pork is entirely too (expensive) to use a common hog,” said Sanders, who apparently was unsuccessful in his quest to catch the creature.

But the Green River beast was again reportedly sighted in 1959. Witness Arnold Clark told the Daily News the creature was “as long as a Jo-boat. It disappeared in the water when I opened the door to my car.”

Another large mystery figure has been reported on the land surrounding Mammoth Cave. Hunters of Bigfoot have been looking for the elusive creature in the woods around Mammoth Cave for years.

One Bigfoot hunter in 2014 told a Daily News reporter he and a group of Girl Scouts had recently seen – and heard – a large creature jump onto a raised walkway. The group quickly retreated.

An alleged Bigfoot encounter at the park also made national headlines more recently.

In 2019, a pair of Western Kentucky University students were camping at the park one night when a man approached them and claimed that something had wrecked his campsite. Minutes later, the man shot a gun into the woods at what he said was a Bigfoot charging at him. The students, who quickly left the park, said they didn’t see anything in the direction that the man was shooting.

Hanion said Bigfoot sightings seem to peak when interest in the alleged creature is the highest.

Bigfoot “has its moments” at such times, he said.

Mammoth Cave, of course, has awe-inspiring wonders that fall into the realm of the natural, if not supernatural. These features and the workings of the human mind are likely the explanation for many tales of the supernatural.

Hanion points to the water running through the echo-enhancing chambers. “If you stand at just the right spot, it sounds like a whole tour group,” he said of the sound of the cave waters.

And when walking alone in the cave, “it almost feels like you are being followed. … it works on your imagination.”

The area’s lore and even names of many cave features – Dante’s Gateway, Devil’s Armchair, River Styx, Devil’s Looking Glass, etc., – lend themselves to stories of the supernatural.

Add to that the fascinating and long history of human activity at the cave and you have the perfect ingredients for claims of the supernatural.

“The longer you have any attraction like Mammoth Cave, the more you are going to have stories,” Hanion said. “It creates that environment when you have all that history.”