Story of trapped explorer still draws tourists to Kentucky’s cave country 100 years later
Spirit of the Bluegrass
By: Marvin Bartlett (FOX 56 Lexington, KY) | Mar 5, 2025
CAVE CITY, Ky. (FOX 56) — One grave marker stands out in the cemetery at the 200-year-old Mammoth Cave Baptist Church. It’s covered in coins and stones. Canned goods sometimes surround the base. They are tokens left by visitors as signs of respect for Floyd Collins, whose epitaph calls him “the greatest cave explorer ever known.“
Before the western Kentucky man died 100 years ago, he was a household name throughout the land.
David Foster, President of the American Cave Conservation Association, said Collins was the subject of “one of the first viral news stories in the United States.”
It’s a story that’s retold at the American Cave Museum in Horse Cave, where Foster and other curators are working to find ways to display much of the Floyd Collins’ memorabilia they have in storage, such as a model of the cave explorer, former roadside markers, and old recordings of a folk song about the famous Kentuckian.
In the 1920s, Floyd Collins was a cave explorer for hire, as poor farmers in western Kentucky looked for a way to grab tourist dollars.
“If you had a cave on your property and you could put up a sign for cave tours and people would come and give you money, it was kind of like having a gold mine on your property,” Foster said.
In fact, the beautiful Crystal Cave was on property owned by the Collins family, but it was in a remote location well past Mammoth Cave and others that were open to the public. So, Foster said, it got the least amount of tourist traffic.
Collins wanted to find another cave closer to the main road and went into Sand Cave on January 30, 1925, looking for something big. He thought he might find a connection to Crystal Cave and, if so, it would have an entrance that was closer to Cave City than Mammoth Cave.
Collins had made a deal with the farmer who owned the land where Sand Cave was located that if they could commercialize it, they would split the profits.
He never came back out.
Foster said Collins crawled into a tiny hole that he thought would open into a bigger room, but it was too tight for him to keep going. “After he turned around and was coming out, he dislodged a rock that fell on his foot, wedging him into the tight passage.”
After a few hours, people started missing him and went on a search. They found the entrance to Sand Cave, which had collapsed, and heard Collins faintly calling for help. A group of men got together and started digging, and it didn’t take long for news of the entrapment to spread.
It took four days to make a hole big enough for a small person to crawl into the passage where Collins was trapped. But there was still no way to get past his body and free his foot without risking another collapse.
On Feb. 4, 1925, William “Skeets” Miller, a 21-year-old cub reporter for the Louisville Courier-Journal, was able to crawl into the tunnel and talk to Collins. Miller got his nickname because he was so small, “no bigger than a mosquito.”
People across the country were captivated by the day-to-day drama of the rescue attempts as more reporters camped out near the cave and filed daily stories. Families gathered around their radios each evening for updates, and details were announced on the floor of Congress in Washington, D.C.
Miller was able to get food to Collins and keep him abreast of the rescue efforts. In one article he wrote about Collins’ attitude, saying, “His patience during long hours of agony, his constant hope when life seemed nearing the end, is enough to strengthen the heart of anyone.”
Miller won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from inside Sand Cave.
A week into the search, more of the cave collapsed, and rescuers changed their approach, attempting to dig a shaft to reach Collins. It’s estimated at least ten thousand people flocked to the site on Feb. 8, a day now known as “Carnival Sunday.” Vendors sold hamburgers and hot dogs, preachers delivered sermons, and moonshiners slipped in and out of the crowd. Soldiers kept the crowd away from the cave’s entrance.
When crews finally reached Collins on Feb. 16, he was found dead. The 17-day ordeal had come to an end. The next day, there was a somber funeral on the ground above.
Collins’ family was not satisfied with leaving his body in the cave, so his brother Homer and some friends dug a new tunnel on the opposite side of the cave passage and retrieved the body in April. Collins was buried on the family farm.
Two years later, the Collins family sold the cave to a man who owned two other caves in the region, Hidden River Cave and Mammoth Oynx Cave. The new owner, Dr. Harry Thomas, had Collins’ body exhumed and displayed in a glass-covered coffin inside Crystal Cave. At one point, the body was stolen and found discarded on a riverbank. The remains were placed back inside a casket in a more remote part of the cave. Mammoth Cave National Park purchased Crystal Cave in 1961 and soon closed it to the public. It wasn’t until 1989 that Collins’s body was removed and buried in the cemetery at Mammoth Cave Baptist Church.
The story has always fascinated visitors to Kentucky’s cave country, and many people are hearing it for the first time as the tragedy marks its 100th anniversary.
Kentucky author and filmmaker Michael Crisp understands the appeal. A few years ago, he wrote and directed a one-hour documentary called “The Death of Floyd Collins,” which was well-received. He said a real pleasure was interviewing Collin’s niece, who was just a baby at the time of the entrapment. She was able to identify herself in a newsreel that showed the chaotic scene outside the cave in February 1925.
“I think we all have to admire his adventurous spirit and what he was trying to accomplish,” Crisp said. “We also have to sympathize with his plight.”
“Floyd Collins is remembered more for how he died than how he lived,” Crisp said.
Today, his legacy lives on. Books about Collins sell well throughout the region, and there is merchandise at gift shops related to the rescue. A musical entitled “Floyd Collins” is performed by theater groups around the country and opens March 27 in New York at the Lincoln Center Theater on Broadway, with Jeremy Jordan in the lead role.
Nashville-based folk singer Debra Lyn recently re-recorded “The Death of Floyd Collins” song, first recorded in 1925 by Vernon Dalhart.
There’s no doubt the tragedy boosted tourism in the area. A year after Collins’s death, Congress passed a bill to create Mammoth Cave National Park. Modern-day explorers follow in his footsteps, discovering new underground areas all the time in a three-county area that has more than 400 miles of charted passages. Collins proved it’s still possible to go where no person has gone before.
“Somebody asked me, ‘Do you think if Floyd had been rescued that he would go back into the caves again?’ And my answer is ‘absolutely,’ because that is what this man lived for,” Foster said.
Hidden River Cave & The American Cave Museum are operated by the American Cave Conservation Association,
A National 501 (c) 3 Nonprofit Organization.