Moaning Cavern

Moaning Cavern is the vertical cave — the 165-foot shaft in the Calaveras limestone where the miners found the skeletons in 1851. The moaning was real — the sound the cave made before the entrance was widened, the wailing the Me-Wuk explained with the Che-ha-Jum-che, the cave monster that cried like a baby to lure people in.

The skeletons were the discovery — Trask's 1851 account describes the bones in the lower room, the remains of the people who fell or were put in the shaft over the centuries. The cave's main room is the biggest single chamber in California — 121 feet tall, big enough for the Statue of Liberty — and the spiral staircase that goes down it was built in 1922.

The cave is still moaning's namesake — the tours go down the spiral stair, the rappels go into the vertical fissure, and the bones are still in the archaeological record. The file keeps the cave's double story: the gold miners who found the skeletons instead of gold, and the moaning that made the cave a legend before it was an attraction.

Moaning Cavern is the archive's vertical file — the 1851 skeleton discovery, the 165-foot shaft with the spiral stair, and the moaning sound that the entrance work finally silenced.