In the spring of 1923, a surveyor named Renfield Vosburg disappeared into a cave in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri. He was 38 years old, a widower who had settled in the region two years earlier after his wife died of a fever. He made his living doing freelance survey work for landowners who could not afford the county surveyors. In late March of that year, Vosburg was hired by a widow named Permelia Asplin to mark the boundaries of her late husband’s property near a ridge locals called Sorrowback.
On the third day of walking the line, he discovered an opening in the hillside that was not a typical shelter cave. It was a steep, narrow passage descending into the rock, with cold air pouring out of it. He noted in his journal that the cave was not on any of his survey maps and that the air smelled of wet iron and something sweet, like an apple gone soft. Vosburg completed his work for the widow but did not mention the cave in his report.
He believed it might lie on federal land, and therefore no one could tell him not to explore it. In early April, he returned to the cave with carbide lamps, rope, a crowbar, a sketchbook, food, and a revolver that had belonged to his father. His journal records that the first passage descended at a steady angle for roughly 100 feet before opening into a circular chamber. From that chamber, he found three passages.
Two appeared to be natural. The third did not. He described it as a clean, squared opening in the rock, about six feet tall and four feet wide, with straight edges. He wrote that the opening looked like it had been cut, not worn.
He found tool marks along the edges, small and curved, as though the stone had been scraped away in thumbnail-sized arcs over a very long period. He entered the rectangular passage, traveled roughly 200 feet, then turned back and went home. For three days, he made no journal entries. When he resumed writing, he described a recurring dream in which he stood in a long stone hall and knew that if he walked past the figures seated along the walls, they would stand up behind him and follow.
He always woke before walking past them. Vosburg returned to the cave on April 10. This time he went further. He marked his route with chalk every 20 feet.
After roughly a quarter mile, the rectangular passage opened into a second chamber. This room was not natural. The walls were dressed stone fitted so tightly that he could not slide a knife blade between the blocks. The ceiling was vaulted, and the walls contained empty niches at regular intervals.
He noted that the air in this chamber was warmer than the air in the passage, which he found inexplicable. Beyond the second chamber, he found a third. It was roughly 60 feet across, perfectly round, with a domed ceiling covered in carved lines that appeared to be writing, though it was too thin and tangled to read. In the center of the room was a round pit about eight feet across.
He dropped a piece of broken stone into it and counted. He stopped counting at 42 seconds, having never heard the stone hit bottom. Shortly before leaving the chamber, he wrote that with his lamp turned low to conserve fuel, he heard something move at the bottom of the pit. He described it as a long, slow, dragging sound, like a heavy sack being pulled across a wet floor.
He left the cave and came out into the spring sunlight on the morning of April 11. A local trapper named Cassander Brule later said he encountered Vosburg that afternoon sitting on a fallen log about a mile from the cave, pale and shaken. Brule said Vosburg asked whether he had ever heard stories about a place under Sorrowback Ridge that the Osage had warned early settlers about. Brule said his grandfather had once told him, pointing at the ridge, that the mountain was hollow and that he should never go looking for what was hollow about it.
In his journal that night, Vosburg wrote that he planned to leave the cave alone. He wrote that whatever had built those rooms had done so to keep something in, not to let people pass through. He bought 20 sticks of dynamite from a quarry foreman in the next county under a false name. He kept the dynamite at his cabin for a week but never used it.
During that week, he wrote in the middle of a routine entry: “I can still hear the dragging sound. ”
On April 18, Vosburg returned to the cave. He did not take the dynamite. He took his journal, a revolver, a single lamp, and a length of rope.
He left a note on his kitchen table addressed to the postmaster, Othmar Krick, asking him to check on the cabin in two days if he had not returned. The note included a map of the cave’s location. On the morning of April 20, Krick read the note and organized a party. He rode to the cave with a neighbor named Wendell Braille and a Methodist preacher named Ace Quill.
The preacher refused to enter and waited at the entrance. Krick and Braille went in, following Vosburg’s chalk marks. They reached the second chamber but went no further. Before turning back, they called Vosburg’s name.
Krick later wrote that beneath the echo there was another sound, not a voice, but something that had heard them call and seemed to respond in its own way. A search party of 30 men with four hounds entered the cave three days later. The hounds refused to go beyond the round chamber. The men pressed on.
In the third chamber, they found Vosburg’s lamp, its carbide burned out, and his revolver beside it. All six chambers of the revolver had been fired. They found no bullet marks on the walls, ceiling, or floor. They lowered a lantern into the pit on 300 feet of rope and could not see the bottom.
They found no trace of Vosburg. Two weeks later, Vosburg’s journal appeared on the front step of Krick’s post office, wrapped in clean oilcloth with no note and no explanation. No one in town admitted to leaving it. Krick read the journal twice, then placed it in a tin box behind his counter.
He showed it to no one for 19 years. In the fall of 1923, Krick and three other men used the dynamite Vosburg had purchased to collapse the entrance of the cave. The preacher Quill prayed over the opening before the charges were set. The hillside dropped 15 feet, burying the cave mouth under tons of limestone.
The men returned to town and did not discuss it. The widow Asplin sold her land the following spring for half its value and moved to Kansas. She warned the buyer that the deer did not go near the north ridge and that a man should pay attention to where the deer do not go. The cave remained sealed.
The area was logged over in the late 1940s, and the timber company reported nothing unusual. By the early 1960s, no one could locate the entrance. Some believed the story was a fabrication born of grief and isolation. Others believed the mountain had simply taken the place back.
Krick lived until 1961. In his final year, his nephew Wendell cared for him. The nephew reported that Krick sometimes called out names in his sleep, including Vosburg’s name. About a month before he died, Krick sat up in bed, staring at a closed window with the curtain drawn, and said very quietly that he could hear the dragging sound.
He would not explain. He died three weeks later. Going through his uncle’s belongings, the nephew found the tin box. Inside was the journal, wrapped in the same oilcloth, along with a letter written in Krick’s hand.
The letter stated that everything in the journal was real. It said that Krick had heard what Vosburg had heard and had spent the rest of his life trying to forget it. It said the cave was sealed and should stay sealed, and that anyone reading the letter who felt the urge to look for it should pray instead. The nephew gave the journal and letter to a historian named Ovid Clouse, who wrote an article about the case for a regional magazine in 1963.
The magazine went out of print in the late 1960s, and a copy now sits in the Missouri State Archives in a folder marked “Ozarks Folklore Miscellaneous. ” The journal itself remains in private hands and has not been publicly displayed since 1971. In researching his article, Clouse interviewed Cassander Brule, then 91 years old and living in a nursing home in Joplin. Brule confirmed most of the story, but added one detail that had not appeared in Vosburg’s journal.
Brule said that when he met Vosburg on the trail after the second trip into the cave, Vosburg told him that as he sat by the pit in the third chamber, he had looked up at the dome and recognized one shape among the tangled carved lines. He had seen his own name carved into the stone, in a hand that was not his own. Vosburg asked Brule whether a place could know a name before the man arrived to bring it. Brule said he did not know how to answer.
Clouse recorded that detail in a separate notebook, which is also in the Missouri State Archives. As far as is known, no one has entered the cave since 1923.