{"id":208503,"date":"2026-06-02T15:59:11","date_gmt":"2026-06-02T15:59:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/208503\/"},"modified":"2026-06-02T15:59:11","modified_gmt":"2026-06-02T15:59:11","slug":"pennsylvania-home-is-the-entrance-to-a-cave-thats-been-closed-for-70-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/208503\/","title":{"rendered":"Pennsylvania home is the entrance to a cave that\u2019s been closed for 70 years"},"content":{"rendered":"

Have you ever seen something in a movie<\/a> or online and thought, \u201cThat\u2019s totally fake,\u201d only to find out it\u2019s absolutely a real thing<\/a>? That\u2019s sort of how this house in Pennsylvania comes across. It just seems too fantastical to be real, and yet, somehow, it actually exists.<\/p>\n

The home sits between Greencastle and Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, and houses a pretty unique public secret<\/a>. There\u2019s a cave in the basement. Not a man cave or a basement that makes you feel like you\u2019re in a cave, but an actual natural cave<\/a> you can\u2019t get to unless you go through the house.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s what a cave tour looks like starting from the outside of the house:<\/p>\n

Turns out the cave was discovered in the 1830s on the land of John Coffey, according to Uncovering PA<\/a>, 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

How a cave becomes someone\u2019s living room<\/p>\n

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. It was closed to the public in 1954 after the land was purchased for limestone mining<\/a> and it remained closed for nearly 70 years. 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 as Black-Coffey Caverns, combining the owner\u2019s surname with that of the original land owner, John Coffey. The cave had previously been known as Baker Caverns during its original 1932\u20131954 operation.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s how you can actually visit it<\/p>\n

Currently, the home is occupied by Black, but to gain access to the cave you can simply book a tour<\/a>. The best part about booking a tour is that you only have to make a donation to enter. It\u2019s a pay-what-you-can sort of setup, but since someone actually lives in the home, you can\u2019t just pop in and ask for a tour. You have to go during the \u201copen house\u201d times available.<\/p>\n

According to the Black-Coffey Caverns Facebook page<\/a>, they treat the tours truly as an open house, complete with snacks and drinks. There\u2019s a waiting room area where people can chat and eat while they wait for the tour to start. They also offer cave yoga<\/a> once a month. According to Uncovering PA<\/a>, the tour takes about an hour to complete and there are about 3,000 feet worth of passageways<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Living above a cave has its quirks<\/p>\n

Imagine living on top of a cave and just taking strangers on a walk 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\u2019re trying to sleep. From the Facebook page, it appears that the cave doesn\u2019t have any lights, but there were pictures with some Christmas lights mounted to the cave walls. Otherwise, you have to use flashlights.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cpics or it didn\u2019t happen\u201d kind of story<\/a> to tell. It\u2019s not every day you run into someone that has a door that leads you to an underground cave.<\/p>\n

This article originally appeared four years ago. It has been updated.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Have you ever seen something in a movie or online and thought, \u201cThat\u2019s totally fake,\u201d only to find…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":208504,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[91620,14394,91621,72211,71890,91622,57391,1084,28,30,29,11346,66833,13274],"class_list":["post-208503","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pennsylvania","tag-baker-cavern","tag-basement","tag-black-coffey-cavern","tag-cave","tag-cavern","tag-caves","tag-hidden-gems","tag-house","tag-pennsylvania","tag-pennsylvania-headlines","tag-pennsylvania-news","tag-tour","tag-tourist-attraction","tag-tours"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208503","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=208503"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208503\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/208504"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=208503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=208503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=208503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}