Dr. Joseph Nash McDowell, a surgeon who founded the Missouri Medical College, liked to perform grisly and questionable science experiments. He conducted these experiments in what is now called the Mark Twain Cave.

McDowell was trying to discover how to petrify a human body when his 14 year-old daughter died of pneumonia. Rumor has it that the doctor filled a glass-lined copper cylinder with an alcohol mixture. He put his daughter into the cylinder, and then hung it from the ceiling in a cave room.

The citizens of Hannibal were horrified. Yet some would go to the cave to drag the poor girl’s body into view so they could gawk at it. Eventually McDowell was forced to remove his daughter’s body from the cave, but her spirit still haunts the cave.