WHAT is it about caves? We find them in children’s books, always the scene of a mystery to be solved; they are places of romantic adventure, calling out to incipient cavers. As explorers we seek their extremities, study them, revel in their environment. But for others there is no respect—we can find reports released, almost daily, of discoveries of another form—of desecrations, of murders, legends, mysteries and foul misdeeds. All are grist to the media mill in a bid to attract audiences to watch the latest exposé on the ‘right’ channel on television or to buy another publisher’s newspaper.

Paul Steward has documented some of these gory topics, collecting tales of terrible fact from around the world—all of them linked to caves. The theme is often entertainment, rather than to shock, predominantly recording the mysteries that remain rather than merely providing cruel titillation. Other deeds are evil in the extreme, so that if you sit back and think about them too long you might find a shudder running up your spine, such as some of the wartime atrocities, but the text is easy to read so that you generally breeze through the book passing from one story to the next. Only when you recall that they are true, that truth is often stranger and uglier than fiction, that these were real massacres and macabre acts, does the meaning behind them bite.

The book is divided into sections with, for example, collections of tales of murder, of wartime, or suicides and accidents—let alone the ‘unexplained.’ Resident in the USA, Paul has sourced many of the stories from American literature, but others are from further afield—there’s a good spattering from Europe, for example.

Some stories are even closer to home than simply being cave-related. The opening story concerns a murdered man found in Lobelia Saltpeter Cave in West Virginia, which led to a massive FBI hunt for the principle suspect—caver Peter Hauer. His body was eventually found hanging in a tree, and the case was closed. Today, certainly within the caving community, the official verdict of suicide accompanied with a confession is doubted by many and Hauer’s name is commemorated in a speleohistory award given annually by the National Speleological Society.

The cave involvement was almost incidental here; this is properly a caver’s tale. There’s also the one from 1979 when four gunmen took hostages in Carlsbad Caverns, and another from the 1980s and Kenya’s Kitum Cave, linked to the Marburg virus. Or the legend of the cave-dwelling, cannibalistic Beane family in Scotland that murdered their fellow man for food, hanging limbs to cure on the cave walls. Modern and old, documented fact and might-be legend, it’s all in Paul’s book.

The price is right for an entertaining volume, so seek out a copy of True Tales of Terror in the Caves of the World—you’ll also benefit caving through your support of Cave Books, which in turn is part of the Cave Research Foundation that promotes cave conservation and research. Just don’t read it too late at night.