on october 16th 1962 every man woman and child disappeared from the town of edmondson kentucky the date is relatively easy to pin down the day before october 15th a traveling salesman named arnold johnson passed through the small town in an unsuccessful attempt to sell an exciting new product the bagless vacuum cleaner during an interview with authorities afterwards johnson said he noticed nothing unusual about edmondson in the day before the disappearances he did however remark that none of the housewives he spoke with during his brief stay seemed remotely interested in his product something he found slightly
surprising compared to the response he typically received when demonstrating the vacuum cleaner to similarly sized towns not only did i not sell a single vacuum cleaner but no one even wanted to see the product in action he said during the interview if you could get in the door and show the women what the vacuum could do you were guaranteed a sale johnson chalked up his failure to the apprehension related to the cuban missile crisis which had begun a day before and had been dominating the airwaves you know it's hard to sell a vacuum cleaner when
your audience thinks there's a possibility there'll be radioactive dust by the end of the week he said johnson left the town of edmondson the evening of october 15th the next town on the sales route clement was 80 miles away he drove all night and didn't think about edmondson until investigators from the federal bureau of investigation knocked on his door two weeks later during the early morning hours of october 17 randall pierce a farmer who sold his produce to the only grocer in edmondson drove into town to discover empty streets and closed storefronts it was eerie
pierce told the county newspaper later usually at seven in the morning that little town was bustling well i thought i had maybe driven up during a holiday pierce lived with his wife and three children on a farm 15 miles outside of edmondson like most farming families in the early 1960s pierce's wife homeschooled their children when they weren't helping their father attend the farm but i couldn't think of any holiday that would close up a town in the middle of october so i started getting a little spooked pierce said i knocked on the doors of a
few houses and i didn't get a response from any of them around oh eight o'clock i realized there wasn't a single soul in edmondson shaken and a little disoriented pierce returned home to his wife and children he told them what he had seen or not seen in edmondson and with nationalistic fears of a communistic invasion running rampant his wife convinced him to drive to clement and report what he had seen to the authorities the pierce family had no phone on their farm pierce arrived in clement shortly afternoon and immediately pulled into the parking lot of
the local police department he told the authorities what he had witnessed in edmondson initially as pierce tells it his story was met with disbelief and ridicule but after multiple calls to edmondson's police chief went unanswered clemens sheriff jonathan ambrose gathered a group of men and traveled to edmondson to investigate pierce's claims sheriff ambrose died of lung cancer in 1968 however in spite of being a veteran of both world war ii and the korean war on his deathbed ambrose said that his visit to edmondson on october 17th was the most disturbing and haunting experience of his
whole entire life and thinking about the events of that day would still turn the blood in his veins to ice according to the most recent census 236 individuals lived in edmondson in 1960. it was a small town nestled between the hills of western kentucky named after a captain who killed during the battle of 1812 edmondson was populated primarily by the ancestors who founded the town in 1825. edmondson had one public school a grocery store a bank a hospital clinic two churches baptist and methodist and a post office most of the men worked small farms like
pierce or ran a trade edmondson like most small communities in rural areas was self-sufficient and self-sustaining every two weeks the grocery store would be restocked and the post office would deliver mail every tuesday for entertainment residents of edmondson would have to visit clement or another nearby town on october 17 1962 clement sheriff ambrose two deputies and the clements primary physician piled into a squad car and followed county farmer randall pierce back into edmondson ambrose carried his service pistol am1911a1 45 acp and ordered his deputies to bring their shotguns browning 12-gauge pump actions the physician alan
cathy was brought along in case a mass casualty event had taken place and before he died in 1968 ambrose recounted the events of october 17th to his older son who transcribed his father's testimony and published it in a men's magazine to little fanfare in 1974. it was a two-hour drive from clement to edmondson we all expected to show up in that little town and find nothing wrong except for a drunk police chief who overslept his shift ambrose said however i couldn't deny the fact that a palatable tension was present in the squad car my two
deputies kept fiddling with their shotguns and kathy wouldn't stop rummaging through his physician's bag it was the same type of behavior i observed among soldiers before we were set to launch a big assault upon arriving in edmondson they immediately realized something was in fact very wrong pierce and ambrose parked their cars in front of the grocery store along the main street it was just as pierce had described it the town seemed completely devoid of life ambrose who personally knew edmondson's police chief and where he lived decided they should check out his home first the five
men set on foot into the residential neighborhood all the men were struck by the silence it was then that one of the deputies realized that not only were there no people in town there were no animals to speak of yards with fences that clearly meant to keep in dogs were notably empty the men arrived at the police chief's home to find the front door unlocked ambrose with his gun drawn entered the house first and was followed by his two shotgun toting deputies i don't know what we're expecting to find ambrose said i honestly thought we'd
find a body maybe poisonous gas had leaked from the ground at some point during the night and killed off the whole town but i think what we found was worse the police chief's house was empty the bed was made up in the bedroom and the fridge still contained bottles of fresh milk the men were baffled maybe they thought the town's people had left to attend a large community picnic but as the hours dragged on and the search continued that possibility grew less likely we searched six other houses in the neighborhood after we canvassed the police
chief's house ambrose said it was always the same story the house seemed fine no sign of forced entry unlocked doors and no occupants however a few similarities began to make themselves apparent as the men made their way from house to house for one there was no luggage to be found anywhere in the homes and it appeared as if a majority of the clothing was missing from drawers and wardrobes pierce the farmer also noticed that much of the food left in the pantries and refrigerators were perishable there were no canned goods ambrose who had just finished
reading cs lewis the great divorce remember thinking it's as if the whole town just packed up their belongings and boarded a bus to heaven some of the discoveries were less benign in the backyard of one home the men discovered a dead labrador retriever one of the deputies stumbled across the animal and thought at first it was sleeping the dog was wearing a collar and was loosely chained to a tree in the backyard it was the first animal they'd seen in edmondson since arriving two hours earlier while the men searched the home kathy the physician performed
an ad hoc autopsy on the animal rigor mortis had recently set in indicating the dog had not been dead for more than a day additionally cafe found raw hamburger meat in the animal stomach hamburger meat that had been prepared with small white pills the dog had been poisoned in another home they found the words revelation 9 1 scrawled on the bathroom mirror in light pink lipstick the men were unfamiliar with the bible verse and this led to the next disquieting discovery they could not find a single bible in the town edmondson had two churches and
it can be deduced that a majority of the township probably attended one or the other in the early 1960s a vast majority of americans considered themselves christian and even those who wouldn't consider themselves very devoted could be expected to at least own a bible however ambrose and his men couldn't locate a bible in any of the homes they searched when they inspected both churches they found only hymnals or books of common prayer in the pews except for the poison dog during their three-hour search of edmondson they found no signs of violence or struggle every home's
interior looked impeccable and running water and electricity appeared to be in working order ambrose was reminded of the model communities the us army had built in new mexico to test the destructive power of the atomic bomb as the sun began to slip beneath the trees and the men's shadows grew longer and dimmer ambrose detected another palpable sense of urgency brewing among members of the group it was obvious the men didn't want to remain in edmonson after sundown ambrose said and i felt it too i somehow sensed that if we stayed in edmondson overnight there'd be
another group of men from clement trying to find us the next afternoon and i didn't think they'd find us before twilight ended the men loaded up in their cars the two deputies kathy and ambrose in the squad car and pierce and his truck and left edmondson even though they knew the town was empty each man reported a creeping sensation that they were being watched from the darkened windows of the homes they passed on their way out of town we didn't talk much on the ride back to clement and well i'd be lying if i said
i was driving with any regard toward the speed limit ambrose said we had to get out of there at that point i was convinced we had stumbled across ground zero of some new communist weapons system something that could vaporize the inhabitants of an entire town without causing any collateral damage but even then i knew that story didn't completely add up after the men arrived back and clement they agreed that ambrose would contact the federal government in the morning none of the men expressed any interest in returning to edmondson that night ambrose retrieved his family's bible
from their study and flipped to revelation 9 1 and the fifth angel sounded and i saw a star fall from heaven on to the earth and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit hell i didn't know what to make of that ambrose said the next morning ambrose reported what he had seen in edmondson to the governing authorities in frankfurt things began moving very quickly after that while the rest of the world was transfixed by the escalating tensions between cuba and the united states the fbi sent an investigative team to investigate the disappearances
at edmondson fearing a communist plot or as ambrose had suspected the use of a powerful new weapon the fbi shut down access to edmondson on october 19 1962. the strange case of edmondson made its way into a few local papers but it was a story that always ended up buried behind pages of international news now because many of the town's inhabitants were ancestors of the people who founded the town there weren't too many relatives inquiring about the status of their loved ones the roads that passed through edmondson there were very few were rerouted around the
town the fbi finished their investigation in 1967 but by then no one really cared about edmondson anymore in between the town's disappearance in 1962 and the fbi's final report on the incident the nation's attention had been distracted by a number of earth-shattering events the assassination of president kennedy the bergening civil rights movement and the us's involvement in vietnam unfortunately the results of the fbi's investigations were sealed and deemed confidential as the decades progressed nature began to overtake edmondson kentucky no attempt was made to rebuild or resettle the town and edmondson soon became a little-known historical
footnote in kentucky's history while many of the structures collapse due to exposure a handful of homes and one of the churches remain standing enshrouded by thick vines in a thriving deer population in 2002 the official report from the fbi was made public after a local historian placed a freedom of information request dennis miller president and sole member of the edmondson historical society learn the fbi officially declared the reason for the town's spontaneous abandonment as fears related to the possibility of nuclear annihilation an unexplained atmospheric phenomenon led to a panic-induced dispersal of the town well of
course that reasoning was miller said the report doesn't even mention the fact that none of the town's people had ever been accounted for there were no reports of atmospheric phenomenon by anyone in the area however by then a new theory had emerged regarding the fate of edmondson's inhabitants a theory that began circulating after two self-proclaimed backyard adventurers stumbled upon a hatch in the basement of the abandoned first baptist church of edmondson the mammoth cave in kentucky is the world's largest known cave system at least 400 miles have been mapped and some scientists estimate there could
be another 600 miles that are unexplored and have never been seen by human eyes as of 2016 26 entrances into the cave system have been discovered and in 1981 one of those entrances was discovered in the ruins of edmondson kentucky during the late 1970s the abandoned ruins of edmondson attained a cult status among backpackers and hitchhikers in the area with the roads leading to edmondson and disrepair getting to the abandoned town is extremely difficult but every year intrepid amateur adventurers and curious locals would make the trek to one of the country's greatest but forgotten unsolved
mysteries 19 years after the disappearances hikers emilio stevens and julie page parked their vehicles 30 miles outside the edges of the forest that surrounds the abandoned township and began their trek to edmondson we'd visited edmondson two years before that day stevens said to scientific journal afterwards what's creepy as all hell takes about a day and a half to reach town from the trailhead and when you get there you just don't really feel like sticking around most hikers pass through it or camp overnight on the outskirts but that november well julie and i planned on staying
overnight in the church i think it was more about testing our nerves than anything else now the church stevens is talking about is the first baptist church of edmondson it's the largest structure still standing in the town the grocery store and methodist church collapsed in the late 1960s we arrived in edmondson around nightfall on the second day stevens said julie wasn't feeling too hot and it was beginning to sprinkle so we set our tent in the center of the church and prepared for our night i could tell it was going to be a miserable night
though the roof of the church leaked and a lot of the pews had been destroyed by vandals and raccoons as they settled in for the night stevens and paige both couldn't shake a creeping sense of dread even though they had hiked into edmondson before they both felt unprepared for the degree of uneasiness they were experiencing around midnight however exhaustion got the better of the two of them and they fell asleep two hours later stevens awoke to a loud cracking sound at first i thought it was thunder but then the floor slanted and we were falling
stephen said there is nothing more disorienting than waking up in a tent and experiencing the sensation of freefall the floor of the church had collapsed in the middle of the night flinging stevens and paige into an as of yet undiscovered basement luckily both stevens and page survived the fall without any serious injury we were both pretty shaken and frankly a little banged up steven said but in all the time we had spent in and around edmondson we had never heard of a basement in the baptist church we knew we had found something no one else
knew about armed with only their flashlights stevens and paige set exploring the decrepit basement the room hidden beneath the floorboards of the church was small and appeared to have been carved into the bedrock beneath the building's foundation stevens said there wasn't much to see it looked as if the room had been used to store extra tables and chairs presumably for after church socials but then they found the hatch paige found it in the far corner of the basement stevens said it was set flush against the floor of the basement and it was made of four
thick wood planks and the hinges had been bolted into the bedrock on the left side the door had one of those old-fashioned drop ring handles stevens gripped the hold of the drop ring handle and after several tries wrenched the hatch open the square of darkness stared back at him paige activated and dropped the glow stick into the shaft the pale green glow of the stick stopped about five feet from the mouth of the hatch well we had to go down there stephen said it was probably three in the morning and we for sure as hell
weren't going back to sleep steven's tied a climbing rope to his back pants loop and drop down through the hatch page stayed above and metered out the rope as stevens progressed into the darkness now at the bottom of that shaft passageway opened up to my left pointing westward it was obvious by then that i was traveling through a cave tunnel and that it was not man-made stephen said eventually the tunnel tightened and stephen found himself crawling on his hands and knees the roof of the passageway scratched his back and his hands began to get rubbed
raw by the cave's rough floor i'm not claustrophobic but it started getting pretty tight steven said i began to worry about not being able to turn around and get back to the hatch but i started to hear something coming from up ahead of me i mean i should have been freaked out but at that point i figured i had gone too far to bail out after 15 minutes of crawling stevens was straining to push his shoulders through the ever tightening passageway but the eerie noises emanating from a head drove him deeper into the cave however
his adventure had come to an abrupt end the passageway ended at a pile of rocks stephen said each rock looked to be about the size of my head and they were completely blocking any further spelunking but i could hear the noises clearly now could even distinguish words and phrases but my journey was done at that point however right before the passageway terminated at the caven stevens found a couple of objects he put them in his jacket and began backing out it took him 30 minutes to back up out of the tight passageway when he made
it up out of the shafts and back into the church's basement to a relieved page he took out the objects and inspected them i found a pair of eyeglasses like old-fashioned reader's glasses and a woman's shoe with the heels missing stevens said it didn't mean anything to us at the time stevens and paige hiked out of edmondson early the next morning battered and spooked when they reached their car they immediately headed into monmouth national park and reported what they had found to a park ranger in the investigation that followed it was determined that stevens and
paige had discovered an entrance into an unmapped portion of the mammoth cave system unfortunately geologists determined that the cave-in that had stopped steven's progress was at least 100 feet thick unless they used explosives there was no way to investigate further however it was the discovery of the cave entrance coupled with the objects that stevens found that held the disturbing implication for the unsolved mystery of the disappearances in edmondson 20 years prior historians dated the eyeglasses and the woman's shoes to the late 1950s and early 1960s most historians and geological experts are now in near unanimous
agreement about what had happened to the inhabitants of edmondson kentucky in 1962 driven by fears of a first strike by cuba during the missile crisis and religious fanaticism the people of edmondson sought refuge in a secret labyrinth cave system underneath their town unfortunately a cave-in perhaps triggered by their panic influx through the tight passageways trapped every man woman and child deep underground that's deeply unsettling when you realize that at the same time sheriff ambrose and his men were exploring the town that everyone they were searching for was probably about 400 feet underneath their feet said
sam so a ranger at mammoth national park if they had fresh water and food and if the cave had a clean air supply some experts believed that the people of edmondson could have survived for at least six months underground well i reckon it's a pretty good theory stevens said but it still doesn't explain what i heard that night see the reason i dropped down through that hatch and crawled on my hands and knees for 15 minutes it doesn't explain the singing i heard while i was crawling down there i clearly heard voices sing the hymn
come thou font dennis millers started the edmondson historical society in 2001 to raise awareness about the town and the mystery surrounding it he was 12 years old it really is a 20th century roanoke miller said referencing the new england colony that disappeared in 1590 and there's no reason why we shouldn't be able to figure out what happened miller lives in clement and on his days when he's not researching edmondson he runs a small pawn shop many people would consider miller's fascination with edmondson to border on obsession but when they learn about miller's personal history with
the area it begins to make sense during a family camping trip in 1997 miller's father and mother went missing after making camp in the wilderness three miles north of edmondson miller who was seven at the time was with them when they disappeared we camped often and we used the big tent for the three of us miller said that night we went to bed around nine after cooking hot dogs i woke up around one in the morning and realized my parents weren't in the tent anymore and the front flap was open miller spent two days alone
in the woods never straying far from the campsite in case his parents came back after sustaining on hot dog buns and marshmallows he was discovered by another group of campers passing through the area after searching the area for two weeks the police officially concluded that i had been abandoned in the woods by my parents miller said but that's not true my parents loved me i never doubted that and if they had abandoned me why didn't they hike to their car it was found untouched at the trailhead after the investigation closed miller spent the next decade
of his life in and out of foster care driven by a desire to protect his parents reputation and validate their love for him miller began reviewing historical records and libraries and did a sweep of the police records in the surrounding areas some might accuse miller of attempting to connect unrelated dots but some of his data and findings are shocking to say at least for example the three counties that border the location of edmondson have a missing person's rate 17 times higher than similarly sized counties in the united states you see it's an area we sometimes
refer to as the kentucky triangle said fbi agent brittany hooper head of the state's missing person division for some reason a lot of people seem to disappear in those counties some of the disappearances can be attributed to caving accidents the vast swathes of unmapped wilderness and the recent boom of meth operations in rural areas also stevens wasn't the first person to report hearing strange voices and singing in and around the mammoth cave systems some people considered mammoth national park to be the most haunted national park in the united states there have been dozens of accounts
of people hearing strange noises in the woods in caves since the 1970s as well as sightings of a tall humanoid-like creature called the black demon according to unrelated local lore geologists and historians many of these accounts after stevens told authorities he had been following the voices of singing as he made his way through the passageways expert cavers were quick to point out that even if he had heard people singing it could not have come from behind the caved in rocks the cave-in was far too thick for sound to penetrate also because monmouth national park sits
on top of the monmouth cave system it's not unreasonable to assume that a lot of the strange noises and voices are a result of sound bouncing and echoing throughout the caverns caves are after all notorious for their disorienting acoustics but miller has a different theory a theory is macabre as it would be relevatory if it turned out to be true you see i think some of the trapped people of edmondson are still alive miller said i think they're down there in an unmapped portion of the cave system and they have chosen to stay below see
it's been about 70 years since they went in which means the first generation has probably mostly died off and there's an entire second or third generation that only knows life underground as for the disappearances miller has an answer for that as well i think they found other exits and every now and then they come out and take people hikers drifters campers and locals miller said i think that's what happened to my parents and it's been happening years before they were taken and it continues today on his days off you could find miller searching the forest
around edmondson in the outskirts of mammoth national park for additional entrances into the mammoth cave system he carries a gps locator repelling gear multiple flashlights and occult 45 for some reason they don't want to be seen by us miller said i don't know what they do with the people they take but i know what it takes to maintain an underground society it requires food and a fresh gene pool now i don't like thinking about what that meant for my mom and dad but even if the truth is ugly at least i'll know and i'll be
able to do something about it in spite of being armed as soon as the sun begins to slink behind the trees miller makes sure to abandon his search and head back to his vehicle you'll never find me spending the night in those woods again miller said you
