00:00 The tragic tale of Floyd Collins takes place in Kentucky, home to the largest cave system in the world, Mammoth Caves.

04:55 The Kentucky Cave Wars were a period of intense competition and sabotage among cave entrepreneurs, who would go to great lengths to undermine each other's businesses, such as burning cars, blocking roads, and spreading negative reviews about rival caves.

09:46 Floyd Collins, after facing intense competition and sabotage from other cave entrepreneurs, sets out to find a new cave with a better location and partners with B. Doyle and Ed Estes to explore and develop Sand Cave, a cave that is not as tourist-friendly as others due to loose rock and muddy sand, but he is determined to make it work.

14:44 Floyd Collins becomes trapped in a crack in the cave, alone in the dark, with no one knowing he is down there.

19:49 Floyd Collins becomes trapped in a cave and is not discovered for 25 hours until Jewel Estes goes to check on him.

24:50 Homer Collins rushes to the site and becomes the first person willing to try and rescue Floyd Collins, but his attempts are unsuccessful and other people offer advice and suggestions, including the idea of amputating Floyd's foot, but no professional rescuers are present and it remains a local problem.

29:33 Skeets Miller, a reporter from the Louisville Courier Journal, becomes a star in his own right as he interviews Floyd Collins and writes multiple stories about him, eventually winning a Pulitzer for his reporting, while the story of Floyd Collins becomes a national sensation through newspaper articles and radio broadcasts.

34:28 Floyd Collins is still trapped in the cave, but they were able to clear enough debris for him to move a little bit, although he was still fully trapped, and when a miner named Maddox brought him food, Floyd asked him to take him out and kissed him goodbye, but the heat from the work caused the mud to thaw and he became even more trapped, and eventually the cave collapsed, cutting off any hope of reaching Floyd.

39:39 Despite the efforts of a team of 75 experts who built a five-story shaft into the ground to rescue Floyd Collins, they ultimately found him dead and unable to remove the boulder from his leg, leaving the shaft as his grave.

44:56 After Floyd Collins died, his brother Homer Collins went on the vaudeville stage to raise money for a dig to remove Floyd's body from the cave, and eventually, Floyd's body was put on display in a glass coffin in the Great Crystal Cave before being stolen by grave robbers and later reinterred in the cave, until the National Park Service took over and closed off public access, and finally, in 1989, his body was removed and buried topside.

50:06 The episode concludes with a discussion about the film "Ace in the Hole," a musical called "Floyd Collins," and listener mail.