The tow truck raced past Graham Cave, the world’s most bypassed state park. Within spittin’ distance of I-70, the cave entrance resembles Mick Jagger’s lips. For eons, folks took shelter beneath this stiff upper lip and sat around ancient cook fires drumming the ancestral syncopations to “Sympathy for the Devil.” Once, around a roaring campfire voices told me the story of people who lived here before us.

A century ago a farmer was feeding his hogs in the cave when he noticed ancient artifacts. Eventually University of Missouri archaeologists excavated the cave, and it became America’s first archaeological site to be named a National Historic Landmark. Now it’s a state park, and under the giant bur oaks and the Kentucky coffeetrees the most prevalent artifacts are beer cans and Cheetos bags. Send in the goats. The end is near.

People who say they’ve figured out how the world will end generally include caves, those fissures from which evil seeps. Many caves were named by people who were obsessed with Hell. The art director for the judgment day, Hieronymus Bosch, painted vivid vignettes depicting the pits of Hell. Dante mapped the nether regions and warns, “All hope abandon, ye who enter in!” Plato describes the cave as a prison. Early Roman Christians buried their dead in the Catacombs, the scariest place this side of the Book of Revelations.

Poe and Twain used caves to trap heroes and villains. Vincent Price used caves to give bats a bad name. Several caves became Ku Klux Klan hangouts.

Ozarks settlers named caves after the Devil and creatures they didn’t like: Devil’s Well, Snake Pit Cave, and ten holes in the ground named Bushwhacker.

–from Souls Along The Road