American cavers appear to be a race apart.  Paul’s hobby is collecting ghastly stories of disasters in caves. His book is divided up into five parts: Murder and Mayhem, Cowboys and Indians, The Spoils of War, Suicides and Accidents and Weirdness and the Unexplained. The British Isles and Ireland are quite well represented with a description of Sawney Bean and his family who lived in a cave and who are reputed to have killed and eaten over a thousand travelers in the 16th century. Although recent authors have poured scorn on this story, the Ordnance Survey has marked the cave on the Explorer 317 map of Scotland, so it must be true. Massacre Cave on the Isle of Eigg is better documented. Here 398 people died when a rival clan lit a fire in the cave entrance.

Dunmore Cave in Ireland was the setting for mayhem in AD 928 when Viking raiders were ransacking the country. More than a thousand people hid in the cave and like those who perished in Massacre Cave, they were suffocated by fires at the entrance.

No all disasters have occurred inside the caves. Every year pilgrims travel to Amarnath Cave in India to worship the Lingam, a five foot high ice stalagmite. In August 1996, 150,000 pilgrims started the 28 mile hike to the entrance. A violent snow storm and freezing temperatures claimed the lives of 80,000 people.

The book has been very carefully researched and Paul has listed all his sources. Many, to my surprise, are from the world wide web. What a quick way to write a book.

As Paul mentions in his Preface, “For as long as caves exist, someone will use them for places of unspeakable horror.