Chilling footage shows entrance to Nutty Putty Cave before it was permanently sealed after man died ‘worst possible death’
The cave in Utah was popular with spelunkers before tragedy struck
Eerie footage reveals what the entrance to the notorious Nutty Putty Cave looked like before it claimed the life of a 26-year-old man in the 'worst possible' way.
Today, if you were to travel north from Elberta, Utah and make your way to the top of the hill which hides Nutty Putty Cave, you'd be met with nothing but a slab of concrete, and a plaque commemorating the life of John Edward Jones.
Before December 2009, however, it was a very different sight.
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Footage shared on the YouTube page CBG shows the entrance to the cave as it looked in 2005, when it was still a popular place for spelunkers up for tackling the cave's narrow passageways.
In the clip, the visitors can be seen approaching the cave which descends down from an ominous hole amid the rocks.
The camera looks down to one of the men already in the cave, who says: "Dude, you're gonna look at this and be like 'holy c**p, can I fit through this small hole?'"
As the cavers descend, they're plunged into darkness as they leave the outside world behind.
Nutty Putty Cave was first explored in 1960, and was named after the soft, putty-like clay found in some of its passages. By 2006, thousands of people were thought to be visiting the cave each year, but many didn't have the experience needed to cope with its tight twists and turns.
A gate was installed in 2006 to prevent people from going in the cave, but it was reopened in 2009 - after which John entered the cave with his brother, Josh.
At six foot tall and 200 pounds, John wiggled his way through the passages as he sought to explore a part of the cave known as the 'Birth Canal'.
However, it turned out he had taken a wrong turn and ended up wedged between the rocks around 400 feet from the cave's entrance.
John became trapped in a space barely 10 inches across and 18 inches high, and when Josh realized he couldn't pull him out, a rescue mission began to try and get John out of the cave.
Rescuers worked for hours to try and extract John, using a pulley system designed to pull him backwards out of the narrow passageway.
They made some progress, but further tragedy struck when one of the anchors on the pulley system broke, and John slid back into the position he'd started in.
Trapped upside down in the cave, John ultimately died from cardiac arrest. Rescuers were forced to leave his body inside the cave, and decided to seal off the entrance to prevent similar tragedies from happening again in the future.
Emily Brown