A woman was found dead on Friday afternoon inside a cave in southwestern Virginia, where authorities say she had fallen roughly 100 feet. The incident is under investigation.
The cave is in Staffordsville, a rural community Giles County. The county sits along the West Virginia border about an hour’s drive from Roanoke. Sheriff’s deputies, fire officials from nearby Pearisburg and a county rescue squad all responded to a 911 call placed at around 4:15 p.m. on Friday, which reported that a woman had fallen within a cave in that area and ultimately led them to her body.
Responders “quickly identified the need for additional specialized resources” when they arrived at the scene, Giles County Emergency Services said Saturday in a news release. Another emergency response crew and a technical rescue cave team then joined the recovery efforts, and they were able to extricate the woman’s body.
The woman was identified as 38-year-old Autumn Nicole Draper, who lived about 30 miles from the cave in Fairlawn, CBS affiliate WDBJ reported. Draper was identified through DMV records, according to the station.
Why Draper was inside the cave, and how she may have fallen from such heights within it, was not immediately clear. The Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation has tracked at least 4,400 caves so far throughout the state, about a dozen of which have been developed as “show caves” and are currently used for tourism.
“Humans are presently the largest animals which visit Virginia caves,” says the state energy department in a pamphlet on geology and mineral resources. “We have used caves for shelter, religious purposes, moonshine production, mining of saltpetre, groundwater, scientific and educational research, recreation, and as commercial attractions.”
There are at least 253 caves in Giles County alone, according to the Virginia Speleological Survey, a volunteer organization that studies caves and owns a nature preserve there. One of the county’s largest caves on record is 718 feet deep, and another is more than 118,000 feet long, although their average length is quite a bit shorter, at 1,287 feet, the organization said.
