In January nineteen twenty-five, Kentucky cave explorer Floyd Collins crawled into Sand Cave alone and dislodged a twenty-seven-pound rock that pinned his leg in a passage too tight to work in. He was alive. People could reach him. Food and water were passed down. And then the story became national news — reporters arrived, then crowds, then vendors selling food, until thousands of people gathered on the hill above while one man lay trapped in the cold below, slowly dying.

In this episode of 5 Minute Strange, we cover the two-week rescue operation that became America's first modern media spectacle — the reporter who crawled into the cave repeatedly and won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage, the hand-dug vertical shaft that reached Floyd Collins on February sixteenth, and the discovery that he had already been dead for more than a day. The cave was still too unstable to recover his body quickly. Sand Cave kept him for a while longer too.

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