Indian Echo Caverns and the Pennsylvania Hermit

 Caves are always fun, and I've collected a modest number of them.  My first was the humble Alabaster Caverns in northwest Oklahoma, about twenty-five years ago.  Then I visited a certain cave known as "Le Trou des Fantômes," in the South Province of Cameroon.  It was little more than a tunnel.  Up in the Allegheny National Forest, I discovered many "tectonic caves," which are merely hollows between boulders and barely worthy of the name "cave."  After that, I visited a spectacular cave in Arkansas called Blanchard Springs Caverns.  Truly, though I'd never heard of it before, it was the coolest cave yet.  Just last summer, I did several tours of Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, and even it didn't compare to the one in Arkansas in terms of shock value and visual grandeur.  I know there are several decent caves in Pennsylvania.  There's one near State College and another on Chestnut Ridge, in the mountains east of Uniontown.  But I've never heard much about either of them.

But Indian Echo Caverns, near Hummelstown, is worth a visit.  It's got some interesting geological features, some large rooms with strangely shaped rocks and 150-year-old graffiti.  It's got all the darkness, and mystery, and unsounded depths of any good cave.  But the main reason I liked it is because the Pennsylvania Hermit once lived there.  In fact, the tour ends in the very room of the cavern where the hermit is known to have lived and where his body and journal--later published as "The Sweets of Solitude"--were discovered.

The hermit's tale is one of tragedy that is better recounted elsewhere.  In brief: He had only one sibling, a sister two years younger than himself, and he adored her.  She was accused of murdering her "illegitimate" twin sons and sentenced to hang.  The hermit believed that she was innocent and fought to secure a pardon for her.  He obtained the pardon, but she was hanged before he could arrive with the document.  In 1785, just after the execution, he wandered westward into the foothills of the mountains and settled in the cave, where he lived a life of religious seclusion, disillusioned by the wickedness of humanity.  His journal is a kind of metaphysical philosophy mingled with earthy transcendentalism.  At the end of the tour, the guide shows you the ledge on which he slept, the crag in which his journal was discovered, and the fire-ring where he cooked.