Malheur Cave
Malheur Cave is a lava-tube cave in Harney County, Oregon, located roughly 17 miles east of Crane Hot Springs and about 52 miles east of Burns, Oregon. The site is privately owned by Robert Burns, which is, in the local folklore, believed to have hosted annual invitation-only Masonic meetings inside the cavern since 1938. An underground lake occupies the lower end of the tube, and federal hydrologic records list a “Malheur Cave Lake” monitoring location near Round Mountain. In recent years, online features and listicles have circulated claims portraying the cave as a Masonic “door to Hell,” a venue for “satanic” rites, or a hub within a nationwide tunnel network; mainstream coverage notes such theories as folklore and internet rumor rather than documented history.
Description and geology
Malheur Cave is described by its owners as a “classic” lava tube extending approximately 3,000 feet from a low entrance to higher, more spacious chambers, with roof heights ranging from about eight feet near the mouth to roughly twenty feet deeper within. The tube terminates at an underground lake whose level fluctuates seasonally; at high stands, water can rise to within about 1,000 feet of the entrance. The U.S. Geological Survey maintains a data entry for “Malheur Cave Lake,” situating the subsurface waterbody in Harney County and listing coordinates and site details in federal databases.
Ownership and Masonic use
Robert Burns Lodge No. 97 acquired the cave and developed an annual meeting tradition that began on October 1, 1938, when the lodge—under special dispensation—opened a stated meeting inside the cave and conferred a Master Mason degree by gas lantern light. Lodge histories attribute the idea to Ulysses S. Hackney and Charles W. Loggan and recount growing attendance over subsequent decades, with the “Malheur Cave Event” becoming a fixture of the Oregon Masonic calendar. In fraternal press, Malheur Cave is cited alongside other notable underground venues occasionally used for Masonic ritual, such as Mammoth Cave and Carlsbad Caverns.
Indigenous stories and cultural context
Regional cultural materials and published oral-history collections connect Malheur Cave to the traditions of the Northern Paiute, describing it in creation narratives as an “underworld” or origin-place associated with a subterranean lake. An Oregon nonprofit has reproduced—with permission from Oregon State University Press—an excerpt titled “The Creation Story and the Malheur Cave,” while the press’s volume Legends of the Northern Paiute: As Told by Wilson Wewa compiles the broader corpus of stories from which those accounts are drawn.
Access and conservation
Local reporting notes that, following years of unauthorized visitation, trash, graffiti and damage to interior seating, the owners closed Malheur Cave to general public access in October 2019. The article documented the long-running annual meeting tradition and cited vandalism and safety concerns as the reasons for ending open access.
Legends, rumors and conspiracy theories
The cave’s exclusivity and underground setting have encouraged a modest folklore ecosystem in blogs and social media, where modern rumors portray Malheur Cave as a Masonic “door to Hell,” a site of “satanic” rites, or a node in a clandestine tunnel network. A national roundup by Business Insider summarized those claims and pointed readers to the lodge’s public page as the documented explanation—an annual fraternal gathering inside a privately owned lava tube—while noting that the wilder assertions are unsupported by evidence.