Pennsylvania home is the entrance to a cave that’s been closed for 70 years
You can only access the cave from the basement of the home and it’s open for business.
This Pennsylvania home is the entrance to a cave.
Have you ever seen something in a movie or online and thought, "That's totally fake," only to find out it's absolutely a real thing? That's sort of how this house in Pennsylvania comes across. It just seems too fantastical to be real, and yet somehow it actually exists.
The home sits between Greencastle and Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, and houses a pretty unique public secret. There's a cave in the basement. Not a man cave or a basement that makes you feel like you're in a cave, but an actual cave that you can't get to unless you go through the house.
Turns out the cave was discovered in the 1830s on the land of John Coffey, according to Uncovering PA, but the story of how it was found is unclear. People would climb down into the cave to explore occasionally until the land was leased about 100 years later and a small structure was built over the cave opening.
The idea was to make it accessible to visitors and use the cave as a tourist attraction, and the small structure was eventually built into a two-story house. But it was closed to the public in 1954 after the land was purchased for limestone mining and it remained closed for nearly 70 years. (In the words of Stephanie Tanner, "How rude.") Sometime during that 70-year closure, the home that contains the cave was purchased by Dara Black, and in 2021, it reopened to the public.
Currently, the home is occupied by Black, but to gain access to the cave you can simply book a tour. The best part about booking a tour is that you only have to make a donation to enter. It's a pay-what-you-can sort of setup, but since someone actually lives in the home, you can't just pop in and ask for a tour. You have to go during the "open house" times available.
According to the Black-Coffey Caverns Facebook page, they treat the tours truly as an open house, complete with snacks and drinks. There's a waiting room area where people can chat and eat their snacks while they wait for the tour to start. They also offer cave yoga once a month. According to Uncovering PA, the tour takes about 45 minutes to complete and there are about 3,000 feet worth of passageways.
Imagine living on top of a cave and just taking strangers on a waltz under your floorboards essentially. It makes me wonder if the house is quiet at night or if you can hear echoes of the cave sounds while you're trying to sleep. From the Facebook page, it appears that the cave doesn't have any lights, but there were pictures with some Christmas lights mounted to the cave walls. Otherwise, you have to use flashlights.
Hopefully, no mischievous children decide to play hide and seek or you just might have to call in a rescue crew. Literally. But what an unbelievable "pics or it didn't happen" kind of story to tell. It's not every day you run into someone that has a door that leads you to an underground cave.
If you want to see what a cave tour looks like starting from the outside of the house, check out the video below:
Billie Eilish says Instagram comments were ruining her life. So she quit reading them. Smart.
Billie Eilish has gone from being a pop star to a superstar over the course of about a year. Her meteoric rise to fame has forced her to reevaluate how she deals with her fans online.
She used to be happy to read the comments on her Instagram feed, but the tone of the posts has become exceedingly negative. So she's decided to stop reading them altogether.
According to psychologists, that's a very good idea.
Eilish admitted she quit reading the comments during an interview with Louise Minchin from the BBC where she was joined by her brother, writer and producer, Finneas.
"Do you still read everything that's on Instagram?" Minchin asked.
"No, no. I stopped like two days ago," Billie responded. "Literally two days ago. I've stopped reading comments fully. Because it was ruining my life. It's weird. The cooler the things you get to do are, the more people hate you. It's crazy."
"How do you make it better?" the interviewer asked.
"The internet is a bunch of trolls. And the problem is that a lot of it is really funny," Billie said.
"Everyone is much braver behind a cell phone screen than they would be if they walked down the street," Finneas added.
"It's way worse than it's ever been right now," Billie admitted.
"It's insane that I even have been reading comments up until this point. I should've stopped long ago, it's just the problem is I've always wanted to stay in touch with the fans and keep talking to them, and people have ruined that for me, and for them. That sucks," she added.
However, the negativity Billie has faced online hasn't affected how she treats her fans in public.
"If I see fans anywhere, I just want to talk to them and be around them, because they're people. They're me! They're like other me's," the "Bad Guy" singer said. "They're like friends of mine, but the internet is ruining my life, so I turned it off."
Reading the comments on social media shouldn't be a huge problem for those of us who post things that are only seen by people we know. But for anyone in the public spotlight, being bombarded by negative comments day in and day out can be damaging.
That's because of a psychological trait called negativity bias.
According to Psycom's Margaret Jaworski, "We're more likely to register an insult or negative event than we are to take in a compliment or recall details of a happy event. The negativity bias can even cause you to dwell on something negative even if something positive is equally or more present."
Research suggests that it takes three positive comments to cancel out the effects of one negative remark.
Billie Eilish is smart to protect her own sanity by staying out of the comment section and not allowing it to affect her art or life. It's fine for the public to have access to her art but there's no reason she should be handing over her sanity as well.