In the spring of 1887, a mining engineer named Hosea Grimm accepted a surveying job that would follow him for the rest of his life. The request came from Vesper Cain, superintendent of the Red Ash Mining Company in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri. The pay was three times the usual rate, which usually meant something was wrong. Cain told Grimm the company had sealed the east tunnel in February after losing three men to what he initially described as a gas pocket.
The men had gone missing for 16 days. When rescuers found them, they had built a barricade across the tunnel from the inside. They fought the rescuers, refusing to leave. Once brought to the surface, they stopped eating, drinking, and speaking.
Two died within a week. The third was institutionalized in Springfield and never spoke again. When Grimm pressed for more details, Cain admitted the men had not simply died from gas. “They sealed themselves in,” he said.
“From the inside. They didn’t want to come out. ”
The mining camp itself appeared nearly abandoned. Fewer than a dozen workers remained at an operation that would normally require up to a hundred.
The buildings were run-down, the ore carts were rusted, and the cable on the headframe was frayed nearly through. Grimm was told to descend into the tunnel and document whether it was stable enough to reopen. In the engineer’s cabin, Grimm found a map of the mine with markings that were not in the official records. The east tunnel extended 1,600 feet.
Beyond that, a secondary passage descended at a steep angle, drawn in a shaky hand, with no measurements or notes. The line simply stopped. That night, Grimm saw pale blue-green lights moving through the trees near the camp. They appeared to drift without following the wind and seemed to stop directly across from his window.
When the wind shifted, they vanished. The following morning, Grimm descended the main shaft to the 800-foot level. In the east tunnel, he found evidence consistent with Cain’s account. Ore carts had been wedged across the passage.
Sharpened timber stakes had been driven into the floor pointing back toward the entrance. Scratched into the wall were the words “Don’t make us leave. You don’t understand. ”
Further down, the tunnel narrowed and grew warmer.
The air carried a sweet, cloying smell reminiscent of rotting fruit and ancient decay. Grimm’s compass began to spin without finding direction. At 1,600 feet, he reached the secondary passage described on the map: a smooth, polished hole roughly four feet in diameter descending at about a 50-degree angle. Heat radiated from it.
At the limit of his lamplight, he could see the passage level out into another chamber. From below, he heard rhythmic breathing and the sound of many voices singing. The harmonies used intervals outside any music he recognized. Then the voices began shaping English words.
“Come down,” they sang. “Come home. ”
Grimm activated his emergency signal and was pulled to the surface. He later confronted Cain, who confirmed that the three men who had been rescued had gone further than Grimm had.
“When we broke through, they fought us,” Cain said. After their rescue, one was found lying with his hands over his ears, “like he’s trying to block out some sound nobody else can hear. ”
Grimm refused to complete the type of survey required to justify reopening the tunnel. He threatened to leave immediately.
Cain eventually relented and agreed to tell the company the tunnel was too unstable to reopen. Grimm wrote an official report citing structural instability, gas pockets, and inadequate ventilation, then left Red Ash Hollow. The experience changed him. Grimm, who had spent two decades working underground, developed an inability to tolerate deep tunnels and absolute darkness.
He could no longer bear certain smells and reported hearing vibrations in the rock that sounded too regular to be natural. Within two years, he left mining entirely and took a teaching position at a technical college in Ohio. In 1899, a mining trade journal reported that the Red Ash Mining Company had ceased operations. The article noted rhythmic seismic activity in the area during the final year, and that residents of a town approximately 12 miles from the mine had complained of sounds at night, some describing them as singing.
In 1923, near the end of his life, Grimm received a letter from a hospital in Springfield. It was from Luther Vance, one of the three men found in the tunnel. Vance wrote that he had not spoken to anyone in 36 years but was dying and needed to tell someone. He said the sound was still with him, despite being hundreds of miles away from the mine.
“Once you hear it, you’re always hearing it,” he wrote. He described being changed by the experience and said that upon death he believed he would return to Red Ash Hollow. Grimm burned the letter and never spoke of it, but reported dreaming of descending passages and hearing the singing for the rest of his life. Hosea Grimm died in 1924 at age 72, reportedly of a heart condition.
A neighbor said he was awakened that night by sounds from the Grimm apartment he described as singing. When his wife found him, his face was peaceful, but his hands were clenched. She reportedly found fine gray stone dust in his palms, which she cleaned away and never mentioned. The Red Ash camp was demolished in 1931, and the shaft was filled with concrete and sealed.
The land later passed to a timber company and was abandoned. By 1940, the hollow had been reclaimed by forest. Local residents of Thornback Ridge reported that animals avoided the hollow, that trees there grew twisted, and that pale blue-green lights could sometimes be seen moving through the forest. Visitors who searched for the old mine reportedly came back changed, quiet, and distant.
Most eventually left town. In 1963, the Forest Service conducted a geological survey of the area. They found that the concrete seal over the shaft had cracked, with the cracks radiating outward from the center as if pressure had come from below. Surveyors lowered a microphone through the largest crack and recorded six hours of audio.
In the final 20 minutes of the recording, voices can be heard singing. The Forest Service sealed the file, marked the site hazardous, and restricted access. Recommendations to fill the shaft completely were never acted upon due to budget constraints. A surveyor involved in the Red Ash project, Raymond Webb, left the Forest Service three months after the survey and moved far away.
He told colleagues he had heard something in the Ozarks that made him never want to go underground again. On the anniversary of that survey, he reportedly stayed home with his windows closed and the radio turned up loud. The Red Ash shaft remains sealed. The site is overgrown and difficult to locate.
According to the official record, the tunnel was abandoned due to structural instability. No official explanation has ever accounted for the singing recorded in 1963, the words scratched into the tunnel wall, or the three men who sealed themselves in and refused to come out.