THE GHOST LIGHT OF HOOVEN HOLLOW

[Trlewis48]

THE GHOST LIGHT OF HOOVEN HOLLOW ©

Dr. Anna Bixby and the Fortune in the Rock Creek Cave

By T. R. Lewis

BEFORE THE TRAIL​

I grew up in Illinois, and I have been chasing treasure stories since the fourth grade, when I first read about outlaws who buried their loot and never came back for it. Southern Illinois was full of those tales, and the river country around Cave-in-Rock had more than its share. Somehow, I never managed to put my own boots on the ground in Hardin County. So, I do what I have always done with a story I cannot chase myself. I run down every source I can find and list them at the end, so that a reader with better luck, or a shorter drive, can pick up the trail where I left it.

Anna Bixby's story caught hold of me for a different reason. The more I read, the more false assumptions I found stacked on top of one another: outlaws who were dead before the crime, a learned doctor who signed her name with an X, and a ghost story and a ballad that seem to come from the same pen. Strip all of that away, though, and one simple idea still stands. Anna worked as a midwife for more than twenty years in a place with no bank. Suppose she set aside just one gold piece a year. Twenty double eagles, the twenty-dollar gold coins first struck in 1850, would weigh nearly twenty ounces, and the gold alone would be worth close to $100,000 today. Twenty years from 1850 brings you to 1869, one of the years given for her death. That is a modest habit for a careful widow, and it adds up to a fortune worth looking for.

Fall is the season for it. The leaves are coming down to open up the bluffs, and the rattlesnakes are drawing back toward their winter dens. A word of warning on that last point: those dens are usually in rocky bluffs and crevices, exactly the ground a searcher will be climbing, so watch where you put your hands until a hard frost settles the matter. Get the landowner's permission and bring a friend. And if you see a ball of light the size of a washtub drifting along the bluff, you will know you are close.

A LIGHT ON THE BLUFF​

Some years before 1938, a preacher named E. N. Hall and a friend named Hobbs were out after dark in the hill country of Hardin County, Illinois, in the far southeastern corner of the state. Near a farm in the Rock Creek neighborhood they saw what Hall later described as a ball of fire about the size of a washtub. It moved along the face of a bluff, among the trees and rocks, and then it was gone.

Hall told the story to the folklorist Charles Neely, who printed it in 1938 in Tales and Songs of Southern Illinois. Neely also recorded what the local people made of it. The farmer on the place, a Mr. Patten, called it a mineral light and left it at that. The owner of the farm, Mrs. Walton, had a different explanation. The light, she said, was the ghost of Granny Bixby coming back to look after her money, and it always disappeared into the same cave.

Asked why she had never gone into the cave after the money herself, Mrs. Walton gave the answer that has followed the story ever since. She would, she said, if she thought Granny Bixby wanted her to have it.

Granny Bixby was Anna Bixby, a midwife and herb doctor who had lived and practiced in the Rock Creek neighborhood in the middle of the nineteenth century. She is remembered in southern Illinois for two very different things. Medical historians’ credit her with discovering the cause of milk sickness, one of the deadliest diseases of the frontier. Treasure hunters remember her for a fortune she is said to have hidden in a cave beside Rock Creek to keep it out of the hands of a husband who tried to kill her for it.

The first story has a solid core of fact behind it. The second does not, or at least not yet. The records that could test the second story exist, and most of them have never been checked.

THE WOMAN BEHIND THE LEGEND​

Almost every fact about Anna's early life is disputed. Her maiden name is given as Pierce. Some accounts say she was born in Philadelphia and came west with her parents as a girl. Others say she was a midwife from Tennessee. Her Find a Grave memorial gives her birth as 1802 in Lincoln County, Tennessee, while other sources give 1808, 1812, or simply about 1810. Her death is given as 1869 in some sources and 1873 in others.

The family links on her Find a Grave memorial favor the earlier birth date. They list three children with her first husband, Isaac Hobbs: Susan Catherine Hobbs Ledbetter, born 1820; William C. Hobbs, born 1824; and Matilda Hobbs McFarlan, born 1826. A woman born in 1812 could not have had a child in 1820. A woman born in 1802 could. Find a Grave is compiled by volunteers and is not a primary record, but if those birth dates hold up in the census, the Philadelphia-born schoolgirl of the later accounts becomes hard to fit to the facts.

The accounts that make her a trained physician say her parents settled near Rock Creek in 1828, that she went back to Philadelphia to study midwifery and dentistry, and that she returned as the first medical practitioner in Hardin County. Some writers have called her the first woman doctor in Illinois. One document cuts against that picture. According to a feature on Anna published by The Southern Illinoisan, a legal document from 1866 identifies her as a midwife, and she signed it with an X rather than her name.

That X matters for the treasure story as much as for her medical career. Much of the Anna Bixby legend rests on her diary. The story of her discovery is said to come from her journal, and the story of her husband's attack is said to have been drawn from a diary that the writer Elihu N. Hall claimed to have seen. A woman who signed her name with an X in 1866 may have kept a diary, or had someone keep one for her, but the point needs to be settled before the diary is treated as evidence of anything.

THE MILK SICKNESS​

Whatever her education, Anna's place in medical history is secure. Milk sickness killed thousands of settlers in Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana, and Illinois in the early nineteenth century. Victims suffered weakness, vomiting, and trembling that often ended in coma and death. Cattle suffered the same way, and the disease in animals was called the trembles. Nancy Hanks Lincoln, the mother of Abraham Lincoln, died in Indiana in 1818 of what was almost certainly milk sickness.

The cause is white snakeroot, Ageratina altissima, a common woodland plant of the Ohio Valley. Cattle that grazed on it in late summer and fall passed a poison in their milk and meat. The toxin is usually identified as tremetol, though a 2015 study suggested other compounds may be involved as well.

According to the accounts collected by William Snively and Louanna Furbee for the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1966, Anna lost her mother and a sister-in-law to the disease. She noticed that it came in the late summer and fall and stopped after frost, and that people who drank the milk of sheep and goats did not get it. She concluded that cattle were eating something in the woods. In the fall of 1834, the story goes, an elderly Shawnee woman whom the settlers called Aunt Shawnee showed her the plant. Anna fed it to a calf, watched the calf develop the trembles, and organized her neighbors to pull the plant out of their pastures.

Her findings did not spread beyond southeastern Illinois. Other investigators reached the same conclusion independently, among them John Rowe, whose experiments date to 1839. The U.S. Department of Agriculture published its chemical analysis of white snakeroot in 1927 without mentioning her, and medical writers generally date scientific confirmation of the cause to 1928. Anna's role was revived by Snively and Furbee in the 1960s. In 2023 Smithsonian Magazine retold her story under the title How an 1800s Midwife Solved a Poisonous Mystery.

Even here the details shift from one telling to another. Smithsonian, following Snively, credits an elderly Shawnee woman. The Southern Illinoisan feature, following Snively and Hall, describes a Native American medicine man. One modern website says Anna identified milkweed. A historical marker in Elizabethtown and every medical source says white snakeroot. The essential claim, that a frontier midwife in Hardin County worked out the cause of milk sickness decades before the medical establishment did, is accepted by historians. The colorful details around it are less certain.

TWO HUSBANDS​

Anna's first husband was Isaac Hobbs. Find a Grave gives his dates as 1801 to 1845, and Smithsonian reports that he died of pneumonia. The Southern Illinoisan feature, drawing on Hall, calls him a childhood playmate.

Her second husband is the villain of the legend. His first name appears as Eson, Enos, Eason, and Edson, and Hall called him a roving Irishman. Smithsonian describes him as an irredeemable ne'er-do-well. Most accounts make him an outlaw from the Cave-in-Rock country on the Ohio River, and the wilder versions connect him to counterfeiters, whiskey stills, and the gang of John A. Murrell.

No marriage date for Anna and her second husband appears in any source consulted for this chapter. The Illinois Statewide Marriage Index, maintained by the Illinois State Archives, should show it if the marriage took place in Illinois. Until that record is found, even the year she became Anna Bixby is unknown.

THE NIGHT OF THE STORM​

The attack that turns Anna's life into a treasure legend survives in two main versions, and they do not agree.

The version usually treated as the more reliable appeared in the Hardin County Independent in 1935, written by Charles L. Foster, who was born in 1863 and grew up near Anna in the Rock Creek neighborhood. Foster dated the attack to the late 1860s. In his account a rider came to Anna's house during a thunderstorm with word that someone needed a doctor. He had brought a second horse, and she rode out with him into the dark. A flash of lightning showed her that the rider was her husband. He bound and gagged her, and when she heard him taking chains from his saddlebags she broke away and ran into the woods. She fell over a bluff, breaking her bonds and some of her bones, and hid behind a fallen tree while he searched for her with a torch. He gave up and rode away. At sunrise she reached the farmhouse of a friend only a few houses from her own.

The second version comes from Elihu N. Hall, a Hardin County writer whose ballad of Anna's life was published in 1948 as Ballads from the Bluffs. Some modern websites credit the ballads to a Judge W. M. Hall, but the bibliography in Anna's Wikipedia entry lists Elihu Nicholas Hall as the author, with unpublished manuscripts held in the rare book collections at Southern Illinois University. In Hall's telling, her husband kidnapped her and held her in a cave, demanding to know where her money was. Rather than let her gold be gambled and drunk away, she jumped from a cliff about sixty feet high. Trees broke her fall. He tried to burn her out of the woods, rain put the fire out, and white-robed spirits led her to safety.

Hall himself did not claim to be writing history. In his introduction, as quoted by The Southern Illinoisan, he described the ballad as neither fiction nor strict history but a romance built on what truthful pioneers had told him.

Both versions agree on what happened next. Her husband was arrested and jailed in Elizabethtown, the county seat. He escaped, was recaptured in Missouri, escaped again, and was never seen in Hardin County again.

Some later versions add a darker ending. In them Anna died suddenly not long after the attack and was buried with the rope and chain her husband had used, under a headstone carved only with the letter A. Dr. Neil Gale, writing in the Digital Research Library of Illinois History Journal, places her grave in the Rock Creek neighborhood beside Isaac Hobbs. Find a Grave places it in the Barnerd-Catt Cemetery at Rock Creek, where a contributor photographed a plain rock next to Isaac Hobbs's stone that is said to mark her grave. The contributor found no letter or other mark on it.

WHERE THE TREASURE COMES IN​

Neither the 1935 newspaper account nor the core of Hall's ballad, as summarized in the sources consulted here, is a story about buried treasure. They are stories about a husband who wanted his wife's money. The treasure enters the legend through a single idea: that Anna, knowing what her husband intended, hid her money in a cave beside Rock Creek before he could take it, and that she died before she recovered it.

The cave is placed in Hooven Hollow, along the bluff beside Rock Creek, near the old Rock Creek community. It is now called the Anna Bixby Cave. Troy Taylor's Haunted Illinois guide, which describes the site, says it is on private property and that the hollow is infested with rattlesnakes in summer. No source gives an amount for the treasure. No source says how anyone knew she had hidden it there, and no source reports any part of it ever being found.

The ghost light is the oldest documented link between Anna and that particular cave. It comes from Neely's 1938 book, and Neely's informant was the Reverend E. N. Hall. The initials match those of Elihu N. Hall, the author of the ballads. If they are the same man, and it appears likely that they are, then the attack in the cave, the jump from the cliff, the white-robed spirits, and the light that vanishes into the treasure cave all trace back to one storyteller. That does not make the story false. It does mean the legend has fewer independent witnesses than it seems to have at first.

Hall's companion on the night of the light is identified only as Hobbs. Anna's son William C. Hobbs lived until 1903, according to Find a Grave, and Hobbs descendants may well have stayed in the neighborhood. Whether Hall's companion was one of Anna's grandchildren is not known, but a family connection would explain how the story of her money stayed attached to that bluff.

Smithsonian Magazine was blunt about the treasure. Its 2023 article called the tale of the cash buried in a cave near the Ohio River probably apocryphal.

HOW MUCH MONEY COULD SHE HAVE HAD?​

No version of the legend says how much Anna hid, and the word fortune can mean very different things. A country midwife paid in coin, produce, and favors would not have been rich by city standards. On the other hand, a careful widow with a farm, a practice, and no bank nearby could have put by a meaningful sum over twenty years, and the legend insists that her money was in gold.

There is a way to measure what she actually owned. The federal censuses of 1850, 1860, and 1870 recorded the value of each household's real estate, and the 1860 and 1870 censuses also recorded the value of personal property, which included cash. A searcher who finds Anna in those schedules will know, within the limits of what a census taker was told, whether she had a fortune worth hiding.

Until then, the best that can be done is to show what different amounts would be worth. United States gold coins before 1933 contained 0.04837 troy ounces of fine gold for every dollar of face value. At the gold price of $5,000 per ounce used throughout this series, each dollar in gold coin is worth about $241.90 today as metal. By consumer prices, a dollar of the late 1860s bought roughly what twenty to twenty-five dollars buy now, though that figure is only an approximation.

Amount hidden (face value)	Gold content	Metal value at $5,000/oz	Note
$100 in gold coin	4.84 oz	about $24,190	A plausible midwife's savings
$500 in gold coin	24.2 oz	about $120,950	A substantial rural savings
$1,000 in gold coin	48.4 oz	about $241,900	A true fortune for Hardin County
$2,000 in gold coin	96.7 oz	about $483,800	Upper limit of what is plausible

Table 2. Illustrative values only. No source states the amount, and these figures are not estimates of what the cave holds. Coins from the 1830s to 1860s in good condition would usually be worth more to collectors than their metal value.​

Two cautions belong with that table. First, during and after the Civil War most Americans used paper greenbacks, and gold coins disappeared from ordinary circulation in 1862. If Anna's money was in paper, it would have rotted long ago in a damp cave. Second, any coins found would be worth far more if left uncleaned and properly documented, for reasons covered later in this chapter.