Death Song Cave

Somewhere along the Wisconsin River in Richland County, a cave is said to hide one of Wisconsin’s strangest and most unsettling legends. Known as Death Song Cave, or sometimes Big Eagle Cave, the cavern is associated with a Ho-Chunk story about missing hunters who disappeared after entering a mysterious cave. Search parties reportedly followed them inside, only to vanish themselves as a haunting sound echoed from the darkness. The legend describes the sound as a strange, mournful song said to be the “Death Song of an Indian.”

According to Winnebago legend, no one who ventured into the cave returned, except for two boys who said they found a massive cavern filled with “the skeletons of hundreds of Indians, lying face downward with arms outstretched toward a gigantic throne formed in the far wall. The great throne was empty.”

The exact location of the cave was supposedly sealed and forgotten, leaving the location somewhere in the rugged bluffs and ravines near the Wisconsin River, around the area of Gotham and Bogus Bluff.

The mystery took another turn in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when German immigrant and local artifact collector Paul Seifert reportedly claimed to have found the legendary cavern. An account attributed to an Austrian visitor describes descending through narrow passages and underground chambers with Seifert and discovering deep within the cave skulls, bones, weapons and tools of what they believed was an entire lost tribe.

Death Song Cave has never been conclusively found, and significant questions surround the historical account of Seifert’s discovery. Researchers have found no corroborating evidence for the cave in Seifert’s extensive correspondence with Wisconsin Historical Society researcher Charles E. Brown, while the supposed Austrian newspaper account contains questionable details about Seifert and its publication history. That leaves Death Song Cave in the perfect territory between history and folklore: a supposedly ancient burial cavern with a lost indigenous civilization that may still be somewhere beneath the hills of southwestern Wisconsin, or a mere legend passed down through generations with no historical basis.