Authorities were notified and a massive search was launched soon after. No one had any illusions about where they had gone, and neighbors saying that they had been seen carrying shovels and a flashlight only further cemented what everyone already knew, that they had gone to explore those caves and had never come out.
When the boys were gone when their parents got home they were furious, but when they failed to return home by dinner time that anger gave way to a certain sense of dread. This would prove to be the last time anyone would ever see them again, and it would seem that their adventure took them right off the face of the earth. They gathered up shovels and a flashlight, and between 4:20 and 5:00 PM the three of them were seen on the south side of Hannibal, headed off rights towards the caves along with their equipment and what seemed to be a makeshift homemade ladder. On May 10, 1967, the Hoag family parents were out of the house shopping, and the brothers took this opportunity to pick up Dowell and make a covert excursion to the caves. The lure of that enigmatic underground world and its unsolved mysteries was irresistible. However, when has this ever stopped a group of boys with the flicker of adventure in their eyes? Explorers do what they do, damned if anyone likes it, and this was no different. Indeed, on the boys were sternly admonished after they were discovered to have gone to the caves, the red mud all over them giving them away, and they were grounded to merely exploring their own yards. The thing is, the blasting by the construction company was sometimes opening up whole new openings into sections of the caverns that the boys had never seen before, and these new areas to explore, mixed with the forbidden excitement of it all, made sure that they continued their intrepid cave expeditions, despite warnings from their parents and constantly being chased away by the construction workers. Yet, the boys made routine excursions into those caves, and no one really thought much of it until a highway construction project came through to work on the adjacent Highway 79, and the risk of a cave collapse caused the parents to forbid the boys from going down there into those dank depths. This would be a lure that would drag them down into the depths of the earth, and swallow these boys up in a baffling mystery that has never been solved.Įxploring caves was by all accounts a pretty common thing to do at the time, although the Hoag family did not approve, thinking it to be far too dangerous. Billy Hoag, 10, his brother Joey Hoag, 13, and their friend Craig Dowell, 14, were three adventurous boys who just so happened to have a subterranean labyrinth of caverns and caves right near their home, called Murphy's Cave, which proved to be irresistible magnets for their adventurous curiosity, and indeed many boys in the area liked to go venturing down into the darkness with their flashlights.
This has made many areas in the state havens for spelunkers and explorers, and back in the 1960s three of these would-be cave explorers lived in the small town of Hannibal, Missouri, about 100 miles northwest of St. state of Missouri is well known for its extensive systems of caves, with thousands of them sprawling out both above and below ground and vast swaths of these worlds of eternal darkness unexplored.