THE GHOST LIGHT OF HOOVEN HOLLOW ©(Part 2)

[Trlewis48]

THE GHOST LIGHT OF HOOVEN HOLLOW ©

By T. R. Lewis

WHICH CAVE?​

The legend points to two different caves, and a searcher needs to keep them apart.

The first is the Anna Bixby Cave in Hooven Hollow. Hooven Hollow is a named feature in the federal Geographic Names Information System. It lies on the Saline Mines topographic quadrangle at about 499 feet of elevation, roughly a mile and a half east-northeast of the Rock Creek community. This is the cave of the ghost light and the treasure.

The second is the great cave at Cave-in-Rock on the Ohio River, about six miles southeast of Rock Creek. Its outlaw history is real. Samuel Mason's gang used it as a base in the late 1790s, and river pirates and counterfeiters were associated with it into the 1830s. Dr. Gale reports that local legend placed Bixby's counterfeiters at Cave-in-Rock and that it came to be called Bixby's Cave. Cave-in-Rock is a state park, the cave has been open to the public for nearly a century, and digging or detecting there is not allowed. It is not where the treasure story places Anna's money.

The outlaw connection is the weakest part of the legend. James Ford was killed in 1833. John A. Murrell was convicted in 1834 and died in 1844. If the attack on Anna took place in the late 1860s, as Foster said, neither man could have had anything to do with her husband. The outlaws of Cave-in-Rock seem to have been borrowed from the region's better-known legends and attached to Anna's story later.

Two details in the Hooven Hollow story also need checking on the ground. The sources say the cave is beside Rock Creek, but the topographic map should be used to confirm that the stream named Rock Creek actually runs through or below Hooven Hollow. And the sources say the cave is near the farm where Hall saw the light, which would make the 1930s owner, Mrs. Walton, a starting point for tracing the property through the deed records.

WHY NO ONE HAS FOUND IT​

Several explanations fit the facts, and they are not equally likely.

The simplest is that there was never much money to find. Without a census figure or a probate inventory, the fortune rests on folklore, and folklore tends to turn modest savings into gold.

The second is that it was found long ago. A cave beside a creek in a settled farming neighborhood would have been explored by every boy for miles around. Anna's children and grandchildren lived nearby. If she had hidden money and told anyone, the most likely person to recover it was a member of her own family, quietly.

The third is that she hid it somewhere other than the cave. The cave is the obvious place, which is exactly why a woman hiding money from a husband who knew the country might have chosen somewhere else. Under a hearthstone, in a field, or in a fence corner near her own house are all as likely as a cave that the husband, if the legend is right, already knew well.

The last is that it is still there. Mrs. Walton's comment suggests that in the 1930s at least one owner of the land believed in it and chose not to look. A cache in a cave floor or a rock crevice could survive many years of casual visitors, especially if it was covered with silt or breakdown.

HOW TO FIND IT: A RESEARCH PLAN​

The Bixby legend can be tested in the records better than most treasure stories, because the people in it were ordinary residents of one small neighborhood. The research should come before any field work.

Find Anna in the federal censuses of 1850, 1860, and 1870 for Hardin County. Record her age, birthplace, household, and the values of her real and personal estate. If she appears in the 1870 census, the 1869 death date is wrong.

Check the 1870 federal mortality schedule for Hardin County, which lists deaths from June 1869 through May 1870. An entry for Anna would settle her death date and may give a cause of death.

Search the Illinois Statewide Marriage Index for the marriage of Anna Hobbs to a man named Bixby, under every spelling of his first name. The date will show whether the attack could have happened in the 1860s.

Look for probate and estate records for Anna. Most early Hardin County records were destroyed when the courthouse burned in 1884, but copies sometimes survive in the Illinois Regional Archives Depository system, whose southern Illinois branch is at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. An estate inventory would show what she owned when she died, and the absence of cash would say a great deal.

Search Missouri jail, court, and newspaper records from the late 1860s for the recapture of a man named Bixby. A record there would confirm the core of the attack story independently of Hardin County.

Read Elihu N. Hall's unpublished manuscripts in the rare book collections at Southern Illinois University, and his 1948 Ballads from the Bluffs. Determine whether the Reverend E. N. Hall of Neely's ghost story is the same man, and whether Hall ever said where he believed the money was hidden.

Find the 1935 Hardin County Independent article by Charles L. Foster on newspaper microfilm. Read it in full rather than in summary, and note whether it says anything about money or a cave.

Trace the ownership of the land around Hooven Hollow from the Walton family of the 1930s to the present through the county recorder's deed books and plat maps. The current owner is the person who can grant permission to search.

Interview Hobbs, Ledbetter, and McFarlan descendants in Hardin County. Family stories about Anna's money, or about money that turned up in the family, are the most likely source of the truth.

Visit the Barnerd-Catt Cemetery and record the stones of Isaac Hobbs and the unmarked rock beside it. Do not disturb the graves in any way.

IN THE FIELD​

The cave is on private land, and every source that describes it says so. Nothing should be done there without the landowner's permission, and any search for valuables needs a written agreement with the owner, signed before the search begins, stating how any find will be divided. American courts generally favor the landowner when property was deliberately hidden on his land, and a short consultation with an Illinois attorney is worth the cost.

Large parts of Hardin County belong to the Shawnee National Forest. On federal land, removing artifacts more than a century old is a federal offense under the Archaeological Resources Protection Act, and metal detecting is restricted. The Forest Service has also limited access to caves on the forest to protect bats from white-nose syndrome. A searcher should confirm on a current ownership map that the cave is on private land, and check the forest's current orders before entering any cave nearby.

Illinois also protects caves themselves under its Cave Protection Act, which makes it unlawful to damage cave formations or disturb cave life. Digging in a cave floor can violate that law even on private land, and the landowner should know what is planned.

The hollow is rough country. The Haunted Illinois guide warns of rattlesnakes in summer, and the timber rattlesnake and the copperhead are both native to the Shawnee Hills. Late fall and winter are the safer seasons. Caves beside creeks can flood quickly in heavy rain, and no one should enter one alone or without telling someone where they are going.

Cave floors are poor places for a metal detector because of mineralized rock and tight spaces, but a pinpointer and a small detector can work along ledges, crevices, and the drip line at the entrance, where a person in a hurry might actually have hidden something. Anything found should be photographed in place, with its exact position recorded, before it is moved. Coins should never be cleaned. Dark toning and crust are part of what collectors and museums value, and cleaning can cut a coin's value in half or worse.

Anna's grave is a separate matter. The Illinois Human Skeletal Remains Protection Act protects unregistered graves, and the legend that she was buried with the chain her husband used is no reason to disturb her. Whatever is in that ground belongs to her.

GPS COORDINATES FOR SEARCHERS AND VISITORS​

Location	Latitude	Longitude	Note
Hooven Hollow	37°32′51″ N	88°12′03″ W	GNIS feature; Saline Mines quad; private land
Rock Creek community	37°32′12″ N	88°13′38″ W	Anna's neighborhood
Anna Bixby Trail marker, Elizabethtown	37°26′43″ N	88°18′16″ W	Main and Locust Streets
Cave-in-Rock (state park cave)	37°28′07″ N	88°09′21″ W	Outlaw cave; no digging or detecting

Table 3. Coordinates are gazetteer reference points from the USGS Geographic Names Information System (via TopoZone), Wikipedia, and the Historical Marker Database. They mark the named places, not the cave entrance, which no source locates.​

By these coordinates, Rock Creek lies about seven and a half miles northeast of the Elizabethtown marker, which agrees with the marker's statement that Anna's community was eight miles northeast of town. Hooven Hollow lies about a mile and a half east-northeast of the Rock Creek community, and Cave-in-Rock about six miles southeast of it.

VISITING ANNA'S COUNTRY TODAY​

A visitor can follow Anna's trail without trespassing on anyone. The Anna Bixby Trail marker stands in Elizabethtown at Main and Locust Streets, near the Rose Hotel, which has overlooked the Ohio River since 1812. The marker notes that the trail she used to reach her patients began there and ran to the Rock Creek community. Cave-in-Rock State Park, a short drive east along the river, preserves the outlaw cave and a fine view of the Ohio. Another marker honoring Anna stands at Cave-in-Rock.

In late summer and fall, white snakeroot still blooms in the woods of the Shawnee Hills, a loose cluster of small white flowers on a knee-high plant. It is worth learning to recognize. It is the one part of Anna Bixby's story that anyone can still find.

READER'S CHALLENGE​

The questions below could settle the Bixby legend one way or the other.

Find Anna in the 1850, 1860, and 1870 censuses of Hardin County and report the value of her real and personal estate.

Determine whether Anna died in 1869 or 1873, and whether she was born closer to 1802 or 1812.

Find the date of Anna's marriage to her second husband and the correct spelling of his first name.

Find any Missouri record of the arrest or escape of a man named Bixby in the late 1860s.

Establish whether the Reverend E. N. Hall of Charles Neely's ghost story is Elihu N. Hall, author of Ballads from the Bluffs.

Find the full text of Charles L. Foster's 1935 account in the Hardin County Independent.

Identify the 1866 document that Anna signed with an X, and find out what it was for.

Trace the farm where Mrs. Walton lived in the 1930s and determine whether the Anna Bixby Cave is on it.

Confirm on the Saline Mines topographic map whether Rock Creek runs through Hooven Hollow.

AUTHOR'S NOTE​

This chapter is shorter than most in this series because the record is thin, and I chose not to fill the gaps with invention. Anna Bixby was real, her work on milk sickness is accepted by historians, and the attack by her second husband is reported by a man who grew up in her neighborhood. The treasure is another matter. No source consulted for this chapter states an amount, explains how anyone knew she hid it, or reports any part of it found. The earliest documented link between Anna and the cave is a ghost story recorded in 1938, and its witness appears to be the same man who wrote the romantic ballad of her life.

Where the sources disagree, as on her birth and death dates, her education, the name of her second husband, and the details of the attack, the versions are reported side by side rather than resolved. The dollar values in Table 2 are illustrations, not estimates. Coordinates are reference points for named places, not the location of the cave or of any cache.

SOURCES CONSULTED​

Historical and Medical Sources

McCarthy, Will. "How an 1800s Midwife Solved a Poisonous Mystery." Smithsonian Magazine, 2023. smithsonianmag.com.

Snively, William D., and Louanna Furbee. "Discoverer of the Cause of Milk Sickness." Journal of the American Medical Association, June 1966. (Cited in secondary sources; not consulted directly.)

Gale, Neil. "Anna Pierce Hobbs Bixby (1812-1873) was a midwife, frontier doctor, dentist, herbologist, and scientist in southern Illinois." Digital Research Library of Illinois History Journal, March 15, 2019. drloihjournal.blogspot.com.

The Southern Illinoisan. "Anna Bixby: The story, the woman, the legend." Reprinted from Legacies of Little Egypt. thesouthern.com.

University of Texas Medical Branch. "Frontier Illness Solved by Mid-Wife." Medical Discovery News. utmb.edu.

Folklore and Legend Sources

Neely, Charles. Tales and Songs of Southern Illinois. 1938. Reprinted in the Shawnee Classics series, 1998.

Hall, Elihu N. Ballads from the Bluffs. 1948. Unpublished manuscripts held in the rare book collections, Southern Illinois University. (Cited in secondary sources; not consulted directly.)

Foster, Charles L. Account of Anna Bixby's escape. Hardin County Independent, Elizabethtown, Ill., 1935. (Cited in secondary sources; not consulted directly.)

Taylor, Troy. "Anna Bixby Cave." HauntedIllinois.com. m.hauntedillinois.com.

TreasureNet. "Anna Bixby and Her Lost Treasure Cave." treasurenet.com.

Place and Record Sources

Historical Marker Database. "Anna Bixby Trail/Historic Rose Hotel." Elizabethtown, Illinois. hmdb.org.

Find a Grave. "Dr Anna Pierce Hobbs Bixby." Memorial 14601655, Barnerd-Catt Cemetery, Rock Creek, Hardin County, Illinois. findagrave.com.

TopoZone. "Hooven Hollow, Hardin County, Illinois." USGS GNIS data, Saline Mines quadrangle. topozone.com.

Mindat.org. "Hooven Hollow, Hardin County, Illinois, United States." mindat.org.

Reference Sources

Wikipedia. "Anna Pierce Hobbs Bixby." en.wikipedia.org.

Wikipedia. "Milk sickness." en.wikipedia.org.

Wikipedia. "Rock Creek, Hardin County, Illinois." en.wikipedia.org.

Wikipedia. "Cave-in-Rock State Park." en.wikipedia.org.

Wikipedia. "Hardin County Courthouse (Illinois)." en.wikipedia.org.