09/02/2025
Dead Man's Hole.Dead Man's Hole, located south of Marble Falls in southern Burnet County, is a sink hole or cave developed in the Honeycut Formation of the Ellenburger Group. The cave was developed by the dissolution of limestone, not gas pressure as reported in some references. There is no reliable information on the initial discovery of the feature, and it was originally known as Burnam’s hole until after the Civil War. The cave achieved notoriety during the Civil War as a dumping place for the bodies of Union sympathizers. The remains of several bodies were recovered from the cave in the late 1860s. In the 1950s and 1960s spelunkers from the University of Texas descended into the hole and reported “bad air” in the lower section of the cave. They described Dead Man's Hole as having a 5-foot by 6-foot wide entrance pit, then a 29-foot vertical drop to a sloping ledge, before dropping another 103 feet to a 50-foot long sloping fissure, and then into a 15-foot pit. The total vertical depth is 155 feet, and the total length is approximately 200-feet.
A Texas Historical Marker was erected for the landmark in 1998. The landowner, Ona Lou Roper, deeded Dead Man’s Hole and its surrounding 6.5 acres as a park to Burnet County in 1999.
Source: https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/dead-mans-hole
