Cayuga River was once a dumping ground for dead bodies, according to this article published in 1894.
River Gives Up Its Dead
Cayuga Lake, From Which No Drowned Person Was Ever Recovered
“If they succeed in recovering the bodies of Instructor Merriam and Miss Yeargin from the depths of Cayuga lake by means of electricity, as I see they intend to try to do,” said a gentleman who grew up on the shores of Cayuga lake, “it will be the first time in the history of the lake that the body of any person drowned in its waters was ever seen again. I always had a liking for geological research and indulged it for many years in investigating the bottom of Cayuga lake.
“My experiments satisfied me that the bottom of the lake is a series of large openings and cavities, many of them crater like. Some of these are 100 feet in diameter. These craters, as I believe them to be, lie at different depths, or, rather, their raised edges are of different heights. Their depths are fathomless. They have undoubtedly become the receptacles of the bodies of the hundreds of people who are known to have been drowned in the lake since that country was settled and of the undoubted thousands of people killed in the fierce battles that were frequently waged on the shores of the lake between hostile tribes of warriors during the centuries preceding the coming of the white man.
“It was in Cayuga lake that the fiendish murderer Ruloff lowered the bodies of his wife and child 30 years ago after he had murdered them. The bodies were enclosed in a chest, as he confessed before he was hanged at Binghamton for another murder. The weeks that were spent in dragging the lake for this chest were simply wasted, for it was sunk into the mouth of one of those bottomless openings, and, if it is not sinking yet, is still floating about in those mysterious depths.
“Within half a century more than 100 persons have been drowned in Cayuga lake, to recover the bodies of whom the grappling iron and drag were used industriously, but in vain. If it were possible for one to make the rounds of this lake’s crater like bed, he would, without doubt, encounter hideous charnel houses beyond number – caverns where hosts of grinning skeletons have found sepulcher, submarine catacombs without end. Perhaps the electricians exploring the lake bottom with their intense lights, as they propose doing, may make some such discoveries.”
Source: The Breckenridge news. (Cloverport, Ky.), 20 June 1894.
