You've probably seen this map too, right?

I mean, it pops up on Reddit every few months, usually on R-slash creepy or R-slash-map porn.

It shows two images.

One's a map of missing persons, the other is a map of America's subterranean cave system.

The overlap, it's like, it's practically identical.

Caverns match the disappearance as almost one for one.

Most people look at it, they go, huh, that's creepy.

They just scroll past. I used to.

But this time I zoomed in.

I live in a rural stretch of Kentucky deep in the foothills.

I noticed a dense cluster of red dots right in my county, sitting directly on top of a minor cave system called the Blackwood sinkholes. There wasn't a tourist trap like Mammoth Cave. It was a jagged scar in the woods. Even locals didn't really bother with.

Showed to my girlfriend Jess, calling Jess Outdoorsy. That would be putting it lightly. She's the kind of girl who owns three different types of hiking boots.

Things a weekend without dirt under her fingernails is a wasted one.

I'm the opposite, right?

I stay up until 3 a.m. reading about unsolved murders, generally just being a vampire.

It's a match.

See?

I pointed at the screen.

Nobody goes missing here because they get lost.

They fall in or... I wiggle my eyebrows.

Something pulls them in.

Jess rolled her eyes, but grinned.

...