When I was about 16, my parents decided that we all needed some family bonding time in the form of a couple weeks long road trip/camping vacation. Some time during the second week, they decided to stop to see some cave the billboards had promised would dazzle and amaze. I think it was called Station cave or something like that.
We bummed around the little gift shop until the one tour guide decided it was about time to lead the dozen or so patrons through the cave. It was a pretty standard family friendly cave. A built up path through the cave for us to walk on with lights bolted into the walls to light everything up for us to marvel at the repetitive damp beige walls and stalagmites with their corresponding stalactites.
It was about two miles of walking until we got to the end of the path. The guide told us this was as far as anyone had ever been in that cave. Allegedly when the guy who first discovered the cave and built it up into the modern tourist trap we were standing in, tried to extend the path further, he had gone missing for several days. When he finally emerged, he immediately sold the cave and moved away. Local legend was that his lamp had gone out and he spent days staring into the pitch blackness frozen in a trance before he snapped out of it and fled. Another legend said that he had tried to find the end of the cave, but deep in the cave, he had heard voices urging him to descend deeper and deeper into the abyss.
After an uncomfortably long silent pause to let her ghost story sink in, the guide went over to a box on the wall, and told us she was going to shut off the lights to show how completely dark it was in the back of the cave.
She flipped the switch plunging us into the dark. I remember thinking it was cool at first, just standing there in the cold damp cave air in complete darkness with nothing but the sound of my own breathing. When I held my breath to listen for the sounds of everyone else though, all I could hear were the faint drips from the ceiling. I started to feel pretty awkward after maybe a minute or two. I didn’t want to be the first person to say something, and come off like I was scared of the dark, but after a few more minutes of silence I made some sort of comment along the lines of “I bet it’d be nice to sleep somewhere this dark and quiet”. Hoping someone would respond and break the silence. No one did.
Without moving from where I was standing, I reached towards where my sister had been standing. I told myself I could play it off like I was trying to scare her in the dark, but the truth was I just wanted to see if anyone was actually still standing there. Nothing. I asked out loud how long we were going to stand in the dark, trying to pull off an annoyed tone so no one would hear how nervous I was. Again, nothing.
I tried to wait as long as I could bear before I took out my little keychain flashlight. At first I told myself that I didn’t want to look like I was scared of the dark in front of everyone, but I was lying to myself. I could tell that I was alone in the dark there. The truth was I was scared to turn on the light and confirm that I was alone. When I finally worked up the courage, my lone light revealed what I already knew it would. Everyone was gone. I looked for the switch for the main lights, but it wasn’t where I thought it had been. Looking around, the lights weren’t on the walls either. The only sign of human activity was the square of concrete path I had been standing on, everything else, including the path back to the surface, was gone.
I had lost my sense of direction in the dark. Without the path out, it was a coin toss which way would lead back to the surface, and which would lead me deeper. I tried to remember the way based on the walls of the cave, but they all looked the same, and my light couldn’t really illuminate enough of the cave to really get my bearings.
As I stood there trying to decide which way I should go, I gradually started hearing people talking a long ways off. Still too quiet to make out what they were saying, but distinct.
I looked towards where the voices were coming from. I saw a faint pale light coming from around the bend, and immediately started trying to walk towards it. Pretty quick, I realized it couldn’t have been the way we had gone in. The walls were gradually closing in, and the roof was clearly getting lower. I would have turned back, but it always seemed like I was just around the bend from whoever else was down there. Everytime I rounded a bend in the cave, I was sure that I was just around the corner from the source, but it seemed that no matter how far I went, they were always just around the next curve.
Eventually the passage was so small I was more or less crawling on my stomach, my body pressed against the damp ceiling, barely able to take a full breath. As I dived deeper in, the cool air gradually gave way to warmer air, and then to outright hot air. At first it was a relief, climbing through the cold and damp had sapped my body heat, but pretty quickly it started to become quite uncomfortable. The far off voices started to change too. They weren’t getting any louder, and they still sounded just around the bend, but they started to sound clearer, even if I still couldn’t make out what they were saying. The light had started to seem brighter. Instead of the barely perceptible pale light I had started following, it had gradually become brighter and taken on a distinctly orange hue.
The change in the voices and light encouraged me. I pushed through the sweltering heat squirming my way in-between the ceiling and floor as quickly as I could, hoping I could catch up to them. I had to practically hold my breath in order to fit through the tight spots. My lungs burned for air, desperately trying to fully expand so I could catch my breath. Slowly, their desperate pleas were answered as the cave started to open up again.
I found myself in a larger cavern, big enough for me to fully stand up and finally breathe deep. The air was full of this thick pungent odor of rot and decay, but I was so thankful to finally be able to breathe again that I still took deep gasping breaths. The light spilled into the room through a wide passage that took almost a 90 degree turn as soon as it left this main area.
I stood there, leaning up against a wall catching my breath for a few minutes. When I finally felt like I was ready to move on, I turned to continue through the cave when I noticed a large silhouette casting a shadow on the wall of the next passage. I almost shouted at them for joy, glad to finally have found someone else down here who could lead me out, when I noticed that the voices had stopped. Well, the faint chatter of speech I had been following had stopped. In its place were howls and screams. I watched as the shadow of the figure began to move, as if its source was coming around to greet me. I know how this is going to sound, but as the silhouette became more defined, I thought I could make out Horns and the backwards jointed legs of a goat. I heard a deep, and at the same time screeching voice, call out my name.
I had seen enough Saturday morning cartoons to know what was casting that shadow. I turned to flee, darting back into the tight tunnel I had just celebrated leaving. A bright red light flooded into the tunnel behind me, I didn’t dare turn to see its source. I ran until the passage became too narrow, and then crawled as fast as I could. I could hear heavy breathing behind, and felt a searing heat. It felt like something was grabbing onto my legs, pulling me back, but I fought against it as hard as I could, gripping on to the rough rock in front of me to pull myself forwards. I don’t know if it was the force of whatever was pulling me back, but it began to feel more like climbing a cliff face than crawling through a cave. The smell of rot from that chamber I had found my way into followed me, presumably from whatever it was that had followed behind me to drag me deeper in.
My legs felt like they were burning as I pulled against the claws that I could feel sinking into my calves. When the tunnel opened up, I was forced to continue pulling myself along with my arms, unable to stand with whatever it was crushing my legs in its grasp and unwilling to turn and face it. The blinding red light following me illuminated the cavern so brightly I could barely see. Even if I had turned around to see what that thing was, I think it probably would have burned my eyes out of my skull.
As I came to the spot where everything had started, I saw that somehow the entire path had returned, not just my little square where I had stood. I pulled my way with every ounce of strength I had towards the light box that I had been unable to find before. As I grabbed onto the box, I felt a forceful tug, like a last attempt to break my grasp and pull me back into that damned cave. As I felt my grip slipping, I grabbed the large mechanical switch and just as I felt a final tug, flipped the lights back on.
Instantly the heat and pain vanished. I was surrounded by a blinding warm yellow light. As my eyes adjusted, I tried to look around to make out my surroundings. I wasn’t in a cold damp cave, or a searing hot one. I was lying in a bed. It took a minute for my brain to process the sudden change of scenery, but I was laying in a hospital bed in a well lit room, an IV in my arm and one of those monitors rhythmically beeping away.
My mother looked up from a magazine she had been reading, and told me I had given them all quite a fright. Apparently I had passed out when the lights had gone off, and they rushed me to the nearest hospital. I was discharged the next day. They had kept me for observations, but after I had woken up, I seemed perfectly healthy as far as anyone could tell. As I changed out of the hospital gown and back into my regular clothes to leave, I noticed deep silvery scars on my legs. No one remembers me having them before then, but they looked old and faded, so the doctors dismissed our concerns.
I’ve tried to look up that cave, without any success. Only thing I can find is a place somewhere in Ireland with a similar name. Allegedly Saint Patrick told the pagans it was the entrance to hell.