An Account from the Sole Survivor of Crick Cave

In the shadow of an unnamed hill that makes up the Smokey Mountain Range is an opening in the earth where no living thing was meant to go. Millions of people hike these trails each year in search of the sublime views and the feelings of accomplishment that come with summiting these peaks, but most won't even notice the hole, and even fewer think about it for more than a few seconds. A couple of people every year will inevitably wander off trail, and fall into this opening, but the initial drop is only a few feet. Most hike out without injury, while others will need to be rescued due to more severe sprains or the occasional fracture. A small group of West Virginians now know this place as the site of the Crick Cave Disaster. Of the four people who have entered Crick Cave that day, I am the only one who made it out alive. In light of recent events, I have decided it’s time to finally share the true story of what happened those years ago.The narrow entrance of Crick Cave was discovered during a training mission by the Army Core of Engineers over one hundred years ago. No one is sure why they were digging in that spot in particular, but the discovery was noted on a few old maps. For the most part, it was unknown outside of circles of local historians. I learned about Crick Cave while researching unexplored cave systems in our area. I have been caving and spelunking since I was a teenager, but my ambitions were always greater than just being a guy with a passionate interest in a hobby. My dream, like many who came before me, was always to be the first one to explore an unmapped cave, to go somewhere where no one had gone before. There were reasons why Crick Cave had never been explored. Firstly, that unassuming hole in the woods looks, even to a trained eye, like it goes nowhere. Decades of leaf matter have decayed and turned to soil, which covered the true entrance of the cave. Second, below this layer of undisturbed soil, sits a hole only one foot by one foot in size that leads downward into darkness. Most casual cavers wouldn’t attempt a blind entrance into such a narrow passage without some kind of assurance that it was safe, but I thought of myself as above most cavers. We made previous visits by nightfall to fully excavate and inspect the entrance, but then came the day we actually entered the cave. I brought with me three of the most experienced spelunkers I knew: Chelse’s narrow frame held the local squeeze record of 7.5 inches, and she had the intuition of a clairvoyant. We always trusted her judgment, and because of it we haven’t had a serious injury since she joined our crew.Michael was the oldest, and had the wisdom of a sage. He was a bit like the dad of the group. His stoic demeanor and old-fashioned attitude were off-putting at times, but when you really got to know him, you learned he had a heart of gold. Dan, well, Dan’s parents were loaded, and he used his nearly unending funds to supply all the rope, ATC’s, headlamps and other gear you could ever need. He was immature for his age, and sometimes he drove us insane. But in truth, without his trademark childish optimism, the dark would feel a lot more empty. This was my project, so I was the leader. My “super-power” as some referred to it, was that I had a mild form of hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. In another life, I could have been a contortionist in a traveling circus, but in this life it made me the best caver around. The chronic pain it brought raised my pain threshold against the discomfort that drives away most to particularly difficult caves, and I’ve become extremely proficient at setting a dislocated limb. We arrived at night. In the caves, the placement of the sun doesn’t matter anyway, and though it wasn’t strictly illegal to cave here, it was a gray area. The less attention on us, the better. We stood in a circle around the hole and I climbed in. We agreed that I would go in first to scope it out. There was a very real chance that, beyond where our flashlights could penetrate, the cave narrowed or even ended. I prepared myself for the possibility that I was crawling headfirst to my grave. If I got stuck, I might not be able to get unstuck. They may not be able to rescue me before my head flooded with blood and I passed out and died. That thought never left my mind, but I wasn’t scared. Death was just the cost of doing business in caving. We all understood that.The first dozen feet were easy for someone of my skill level. I pulled myself headfirst down the jagged rocks by one hand, sometimes making only inches of progress at a time. The cave was definitely narrowing, but not enough to be concerned about yet. I would sometimes have to blow all the air out of my lungs to pass through particularly narrow bits, but this wasn’t anything I wasn’t used to. Then I saw shadows of an opening ahead. It was impossible to tell yet, but this was the first sign that this cave went much deeper than we had imagined. Then progress slowed to a crawl. Inches became centimeters, which became millimeters. My body was corkscrewing through the tightening walls, finding any movement at all to be a major victory. My breaths grew incredibly shallow. The walls prevented my ribcage from fully expanding.Then I hit a point where I felt stuck, like truly, panic inducingly stuck. Being upside down for an extended period of time causes blood to pool in your face. Decision-making becomes less reliable. The headaches can be skull-splitting. But, in this case, the problem was the swelling. My head was caught between two jutting out points in the wall and wedged completely. Any attempt to move forward was excruciating, and any attempt to back out proved to be fruitless. The sharp rocks dug into my skin, and it felt deep enough to leave score marks in my skull. With one final push, my head was free. Small streams of blood dripped into my eyes, making it impossible to see. In this position, I couldn’t reach my face with my hands to wipe it away so I had to move blindly the last few feet. Luckily, that marked the narrowest point. Progress sped up until I found myself plopping out the other side like a rag doll onto the cold, wet rock below. It always feels amazing to be free and able to move again after a tight squeeze. I desperately wiped at the now congealed blood that crusted my eyes as I called up to the crew that I had made it. I didn’t hear their response, but when the grunting and pained moans began echoing to me, I knew that they were on their way. I splashed water from my bottle to clean my eyes fully, and I could finally see that I was standing on a ledge about the size of a twin bed next to a drop off that my headlamp couldn’t penetrate to the bottom of. By the time it took for a rock to hit the bottom, I estimated the drop to be around 400 feet. It was nearly perfectly cylindrical. I tried not to dwell on how stupid it had been to blindly drop out of the narrow part of the cave. Anything could have been on the other side. One wrong move would have meant a fatal fall. I always had a propensity to let my eagerness get in the way of my safety, but this was dumb even for me.Banishing those thoughts from my brain, I could tell that Chelse was close enough to talk to now. I warned her of the narrow part, but she proceeded past it without any trouble. We knew that Michael and Dan would have a harder time, so she volunteered to head back up a bit and chisel away at the extrusion. When she did, the cave responded by rumbling quietly. I had been in caves as the earth settled before, but this felt different. Earthquakes in this area are rare, but not impossible so we all just ignored it.She successfully returned to the ledge. The chiseling had made it possible for the rest to make it through unscathed. When Dan’s head popped out of the exit, he joked that we should rename this cave Crick Neck Cave, and we all groaned at him. He had likely been saving that one for before we even started descending. Chelse commented that it might be wise to get the gashes on my head checked out before they got infected, but upon further inspection, they were less deep than they looked, so some yellowing old bandages and expired antibiotic ointment at the bottom of my first aid kit were enough to assure her that we could carry on. Dan and Michael talked gear while drilling out holes and setting bolts for the anchor we’d use to rappel. Chelse and I awkwardly sat next to each other waiting for them to finish. Years ago, we had tried to make a relationship work between us, but we learned that adrenaline and adventure aren’t enough to build a life on. We remained friends and swore to never let the breakup drive us apart, but still the scars felt fresh and sensitive, and it was almost difficult to be in each other's presence without a buffer. We each broke the silence with excited musings about the progress so far. Even if this was the furthest we made it, my life’s goal had been achieved. I was standing in a place where no one stood before. Every move deeper was only the icing on the cake. We were both relieved when Dan said we were all set to descend deeper into Crick Cave.Dan and I fought about who would rappel down first, but it was his gear, so I let him win. I always hated rappelling into darkness anyway, even more so not knowing for certain the rope was long enough. Rappelling off the end of the rope has been the end for so many climbers and spelunkers before me. Dan slipped into his harness and jumped into the abyss. The sounds of his wooing and yewing should have been annoying, but it brought a morale boost over the rest of the group, even if it was just to smile and roll our eyes at each other and make a few laughs at Dan’s expense. We saw his headlamp become smaller and smaller until he slipped behind the rocks, and it became difficult to safely watch his descent. Then the rope pulled 3 times and he called up. Michael went next, and then Chelse. I went last.As I hooked up my ATC to the rope and began descending into the darkness, my friends looked like ants beneath me. Dan began singing, which echoed around me in a magical way that raised the hair on the back of my neck. Taken by the mood, I turned my headlamp off and embraced the darkness for a second. Dan saw this and cheered before beginning to sing again.Bliss coursed through me. This was my dream fully realized. So few people accomplish what they set out to do. I had achieved greatness. My name would be in magazines. Interviewers would be knocking at my door. Maybe I’d get a sponsorship and finally quit my dead end day job. Either way, those descending after us would know our names, and the halls of this cave would be forever marked with our presence, and that’s what mattered most to me.I turned my headlamp back on as I reached the floor. The cave opened up to a shocking scale. The walls were lined with quartz which refracted the light from our headlamps beautifully and all the colors of the rainbow danced around us. Michael put his arm around me and joyfully muttered something a bit more emotional than I was used to hearing from him. I knew Chelse long enough to know she had her excitement caged. Like she wanted it to come out and join in resonance with the rest of us, but kept herself guarded. We hadn’t left yet. There were still ever-present dangers that she could not quite let go of. “It’s like the fucking Halls of Moria in here!” Dan exclaimed and we all laughed. The cave split off in a few directions, but one direction called to me, so we began to head that way. One day we’d have to map the entire thing, but that was for future excursions. Right now, this was about pure, unadulterated adventure. But something felt off about the cave as we went deeper. Scar marks on the wall looked like they could be natural, but something about them felt like they were made by digging. There weren’t the signs of human litter that can be found in even the deepest parts of mines, but we couldn’t shake the feeling that this was not entirely naturally formed.The cave got smaller and smaller. Standing turned to crouching. Then we were crawling. It never quite narrowed to levels of what we had just gone through, but it was enough to be uncomfortable. Chelse was the first to vote to turn back, and while I wanted to continue on, I trusted her judgment and agreed. This was our victory lap, there would be time to explore narrow tunnels later. The cave rumbled again, a bit stronger than before. We thought it was just an aftershock. It felt good to stand again, but we walked for several minutes, and it never opened further than just enough to avoid hitting our heads on the ceiling. None of this made any sense. We had just been this way, and the distance we walked should have left us back at our rope by now.We walked for a while before anyone was willing to admit that we were well and truly lost. We must have backed out into another cave system. We turned around to go back the way we came again, but it never narrowed. The tunnel spread out impossibly in both directions.After an hour of walking, morale was falling and even Dan’s jokes had slowed. Most of our gear and water was still back at the main hole, and I was getting thirsty. We began to take turns with our headlamps on to conserve battery. If they all died, any hope of escaping would be lost. Panic set in my stomach, and I felt like I was about to vomit, but I knew better than to let it show, to let the fear win. Small mistakes made under duress are the most common ways cavers die. We had to stay calm and move forward into the deep places where the light won't go. We walked until the second out of our four headlamps blinked off. Things were getting dire. Seeing the worry on Michael’s face was the hardest part. It’s like seeing your dad cry. You know deep down he’s a human just like you, but you also know that if he’s letting his emotion show, something has gone seriously wrong. Dan tried to cheer us up with immature jokes, but no one laughed at those, even in the best of times. Chelse just stared forward, almost unblinking. It was as if she believed that if she just wanted it enough, a door would form into the rocky walls, and she could walk through it and be home again. But she was never leaving this place, and I think a part of her knew that even then. When the third headlamp flickered off, it felt too early. Either time was passing quicker down here, or something was draining the battery. Either way, when it sputtered out, we weren’t left in complete darkness. There was a dull white light emanating from an opening in the cave that hadn’t been there before. Our feet ached from walking, and the idea of running seemed to be a monumental task before now, but once Michael took off towards the light, we all followed after him.I crested the corner to see Michael silhouetted by a blinding light coming from the end of a long cave. We covered our faces and walked towards it, desperately hoping that we found a way out. Dan made a joke about how they typically recommend you don’t go into the light at the end of the tunnel. That actually brought some much-needed levity, even if only briefly. The tunnel ended in a nearly perfect sphere carved out of the rock, and in the middle of it was a floating orb of light. It was impossible to look at it longer than a second, or it burned your retinas like the noon day sun. It radiated a soft heat like a heated blanket swaddling you on a cold winter night. We all looked at each other, unsure what to make of this discovery. Michael offered that it might be a species of bioluminescent cave moss. Dan said it was definitely a UFO. I was speechless. Chelse began to cry. She said we needed to leave now, that she was getting a really bad feeling about all this. Then Dan decided to go into another one of his poorly-timed bits. “Oh great orb of beautiful light. We have been sent by our planet to talk to you, to learn from you! Teach us all you know!”“Shut the fuck up, Dan!” I screamed at him, seeing the pain that this was putting Chelse through. Dan didn’t even acknowledge me and continued his monologue through childish giggles. “Now that we have made contact, I have some questions for you.” The ball of light almost imperceptibly brightened in response. It was as if Dan had gotten its attention. “I will ask my question, and you will answer them, for I command thee!”Dan looked back as if he was an actor in a play, requesting his next line. I scowled at him. He continued on. “Answer this question, great sphere… How do we get out of this place?” Suddenly Dan froze completely, all his muscles tightened, and he stood completely straight. Then the same happened to Michael. I looked over at Chelse as if she could offer any explanation, but then her eyes rolled behind her head and her hair shot out as if she was being electrocuted. Her muscles all tensed up, and she stood before me, almost floating above the cave floor, blood trickling out of her eyes and flowing from her nose. Then everything went white.I saw myself die through my eyes, like watching a movie projected directly into my retinas, only I felt every movement be made for me involuntarily. My muscles tensing up, my chest rising and falling, the pain, the thoughts racing through my head; they were not my own, at least not yet. When I regained consciousness, I was laying on the floor and my head was killing me. Michael had turned his headlamp on just long enough to reveal the others rubbing their heads and wiping the crusted blood from their face. He turned it off to conserve the battery of our last headlamp, and we were thrust into darkness again.“Did I just die?” Chelse said. We all swapped stories of what the light revealed to us. They were all visions of our own deaths. Dan saw his rope snap before he fell to the bottom of the cave, and lived long enough to feel every bone in his body break as it hit the floor. Michael felt every painful inch of stalactite crash through his helmet, giving only a slight delay before it cracked through his skull, killing him on impact. Chelse saw herself twisted and contorted into inhuman shapes in the narrow parts of a cave. She breathed out, and the rocky wall replaced where her chest once was, not allowing her to take a breath back in. She suffocated as her body fought to expand the lungs, but just couldn’t do it.When it came my turn to share my story, all I could mutter was, “we’re all going to die in this cave, aren't we?” We sat in the pitch black darkness for a while. Faceless sobs ebbed and flowed from different directions as we all came to terms with our own mortality. We all knew the risks we took climbing into that cave. We all knew that people died doing what we did. But, when you’re faced with the real thing, death no longer feels like just the cost of doing business. I wondered if that’s how so many others felt, facing their final moments in caves just like this one. But there were no caves just like this one.Finally, Michael stood up and turned on the headlamp. My eyes had been attempting to adjust to pitch black darkness for so long, that this dim source of light shone like the sun, and reminded me too soon of that orb. The perfect sphere cut into the rock was still there, but the orb was gone. Michael sauntered forward wordlessly for a few steps back down the cave before muttering how he won’t die of starvation sitting around in this cave. We all followed him, but no one spoke. Dan’s jokes were omnipresent when you were with him. Sometimes you just wished that dude would learn to shut up, but the absence of these jokes felt uncanny at that moment. Suddenly, the cave began to feel oddly familiar. The repeating patterns on the wall weren’t noticeably different, but they felt like we knew them. The scar marks were absent, and the cave looked organic again. Then it began to narrow, just as it did when we found our way into this mess. We crawled on our hands and knees and felt a collective sense of relief wash over us. The mind plays tricks on you in the deep. We all have experienced strange sensations. Flashes of light. Hearing voices. These were an expected side effect of being in a cave for too long. You learned to ignore them. Could this have been a collective hallucination? Some weird joke our brains had played on us? Were we just lost and hungry and dehydrated and imagined that light? Maybe we had all fallen asleep and dreamed up the worst case scenario. Maybe those visions were just our deep seeded nightmares, our brains’ shining a light on the things that scared us the most. I still try and tell myself that to this day, even though I know it’s not true.The cave continued to tighten around us. We were now crawling on our stomachs. It narrowed to points where it felt impossible to continue on. It must have been reaching the upper limit of what the human body could take. I wondered if we were giving Chelse’s record a run for its money. But just when we thought we couldn’t make it, it began widening quickly. We once again were able to crawl on our hands and knees to carry forward. Michael was the first to notice the headlamp’s light catching our rope hanging in the distance. The exit was so close. We were going to make it out of here, but when Michael shined his light back at Dan and me, we realized Chelse was missing. I grabbed the last working headlamp and scrambled back into the narrow tunnel behind me, screaming for Chelse to respond, but my cries fell on deaf ears. The cave began rumbling again, this time I could see the rocks constricting around me, shifting like the walls of a labyrinth. It was no longer possible to safely continue, but I forced myself anyway. I pushed forward until the upper limit of my flexibility had hit a wall and my left arm dislocated. The pain shot through my body and I screamed as I felt the tendons being pulled as tight as piano wire, but it gave me that little bit of room that I needed to see Chelse staring back at me, her face frozen in pain. What I could see of her body was just as she described in her vision. Contorted impossibly, as if the walls had changed their size and shape and stretched her out. I tried to grab her, but she was beyond the point of saving. Her eyes moved to look at me before all the muscles in her face relaxed. Chelse was dead.I crawled back out with tears streaming down my face. When I finally made it back, they asked where Chelse was, but I couldn’t respond through the violent sobbing and hyperventilating. That told them everything they needed to know. I set my arm into its socket with a pop, a click, and a scream that was less about the physical pain and more about the emotional trauma of seeing someone I loved so much die in such a brutal manner. Once I regained my composure enough to move, we carried forward. The cave opened up, and we were able to stand again. We ran towards the rope with reckless abandon. Then we heard a rumble, followed by a loud crack, and then an explosive crash. Dan and I turned around to find Michael standing, impaled through his head by a small stalactite no longer than my arm. Blood squirted from the hole in his helmet in spurts. He looked at us wide-eyed and panicked. His mouth moved, trying to talk, but his brain could no longer send the right signals. Blood began to flow down his head in sheets, and he collapsed to the ground in front of us. Dan propped his lifeless body up and pulled out the pointed rock as if it would do anything to save him, but he wasn’t thinking. He was grieving. He held Michael in his arms, and I held Dan in mine, and we both cried.We had to get out of here, now. I began to rig my ascender to the rope, but Dan didn’t move. Then it hit me that Dan foresaw his death on that rope. “Listen, Dan. We’re getting out of here, I promise you that. This rope can survive a force of 18 kilonewtons. You could hang an elephant on it, and it wouldn’t snap. Forget what you saw, we need to at least try.”Dan said nothing, just shook his head. His eyes glazed over with the kind of terror you only see in movies, or maybe it was the hopelessness of someone who knows they are about to die. I outlined my hastily made plan to him. “Here’s what I’m going to do: I’m going to ascend this rope with the headlamp, and I’m going to inspect every inch of it. If there’s any point on it that even looks like it will snap, I will yell down to you to stay there, and I’ll bring back help. If it looks good and holds my weight, I will lower the headlamp back down to you and you will ascend. Got it?” Dan stared forward at nothing. “Got it?!” I repeated with urgency. He nodded solemnlyI ascended the rope at an extremely deliberate and careful pace. I inspected every strand in that rope. It was new, and top of the line, like everything Dan purchased. He only used the best, tried and true gear. Human error has caused problems, but Dan’s gear had never failed us in any way on our countless previous expeditions. I reached the top and scrambled onto that twin bed sized ledge. The light from my headlamp lingered on the way out. Horrible thoughts flooded my mind of me taking the last source of light and leaving Dan to die in the darkness alone, but I shook them off. I tied the headlamp to the rope and lowered it down to Dan. For a while, the headlamp didn’t move, and I began to wonder if he had finally snapped. The brain can only take so much stress before it just breaks. But then I saw the light move, and the rope tightened as it bore weight. I kept peeking dangerously over the edge to see his progress. He was taking so long, but he was making his way up the rope. When he was close enough for me to see his face, it was totally devoid of emotion. For the first time, I actually believe he would survive this. That what we saw in that cave was just some fucked up coincidence. That we would be traumatized, but at least we would be alive. Then the cave rumbled violently again, and the rope snapped.The rope burst under the weight of Dan, and his echoing scream reverberated through the walls before ending in a final splat. I subconsciously timed the fall in my head, this was something I had done hundreds of times without thinking about it. It was something every caver knew how to do. Dan was screaming for ten full seconds. If my math was correct, the fall was consistent with a 600-foot drop. I tried not to think of the gory details he shared after the orb of light showed him how he’d die, or how he had to experience it twice.Dan was wearing the last headlamp. I was thrust into total darkness, standing alone on a ledge no larger than a twin sized bed that sloped downward into the abyss. I felt around as carefully as I possibly could for the opening in the cave that would lead me away from this place. One wrong step and I would meet my final moments with Dan and Michael and Chelse at the bottom of this cave. I had to escape, for them. For me. Then I found it. I crawled out slowly and painfully. My body was running on pure adrenaline. Part of me didn’t believe that I would ever see the sun again, but then I saw the light emanating from the end of the long tunnel. I emerged out of the hole broken and battered. It was midday, and the nearby trail had become crowded with hikers, who watched in stunned silence as I limped my way to them and collapsed.My next memory was waking in a hospital bed, surrounded by worried family and friends. The hardest part was telling their family’s that I had survived, but the others didn’t.Our misadventure brought the fame and fortune I so desperately thought I wanted. Not the kind that gets you recognized on the street, but the kind that a few people might look twice at you, jogging their brain for why you look familiar to them, before ultimately moving on. Gear brands did come with their sponsorship offers, but I turned them all down. I could never enter another cave again. Interviews just reopened the wounds, so I stopped giving them. I became paradoxically agoraphobic. I can’t stand open spaces or bright lights anymore, and I only feel safe leaving my house for short grocery runs by the cover of night. No one recovered the bodies as it was deemed too risky. They sealed the mouth of the cave. No one will ever enter Crick Cave again, and that might be the closest thing to a happy ending you’ll get in this story.The news cycled moved on, and now the story is mostly forgotten. Tragedies in the wilderness happen all the time. I’ve heard that local high school students share some folklore distortion of what happened to scare each other on late nights by a fire. The occasional YouTube video will pop up now and then to retell the story, but they never get the details correct. How could they? I've never shared the real story with anyone. I was told by doctors that I wasn’t just lucky to escape that cave alive, but that I was also lucky that the hospital visit and subsequent tests caught the tumor early. They told me my chances of survival were strong and that technology had come a long way, but I knew my fate long before the diagnosis.I haven’t responded well to any of the treatments. My health has declined, and I’m now dying in a hospital bed. Facing my own mortality, I feel compelled to share my story, to warn people of the things slumbering in the dark. I know most won’t believe me, but if one person stays out of a cave because I wrote this, it will be worth it. There’s one last confession I have to make before I die. It’s not the survivor’s guilt alone that plagues my nightmares. I never told the others what that odd ball of light showed me. Everyone saw their final moments inside that cave, but I didn’t see blood, or darkness, or walls of rock. I saw fluorescent lights, a hospital bed, and an IV in my arm. I also saw a painting hanging on the wall of a lighthouse with waves crashing around it. The same painting is hanging in the hospital room to my left as I write this. I knew the whole time that I was going to make it out of there. That something else would be my downfall. I knew the others would die, and I said nothing. I acted purely out of self-interest, making sure that I would survive. That isn’t who I am. Those actions didn’t feel entirely my own. But maybe that’s just what I tell myself to feel better about what happened. Still, I can’t help but wonder why the cave let me leave that day, while it took the lives of everyone else. Sometimes I get this strange feeling that I never escaped that cave, or that perhaps a part of it escaped with me. That this tumor in my brain isn’t cancer. That the fear of the sun isn’t my own.That I am just a vessel waiting to rupture.I hope that whatever it is dies with me, but there’s a quiet voice in the back of my head that assures me that isn’t true.

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