Columbia, Underground?

I just returned from teaching the University of Kansas Geography Field Camp near Can(y)on City, Colorado. The students there work on research projects in human and physical geography, and this year my cultural group got interested in alternative landscapes in the region, that is, those places that do not conform to and/or are not fully incorporated within the dominant state-capitalist framework. Bishop's Castle near Rye in the Wet Mountains is a great example -- Jim Bishop has constructed a life-size castle there complete with fire-breathing dragon, dungeons, buttresses, and moat. The county has repeatedly tried to shut him down (for insurance primarily - he has none), but he has prevailed thus far, accepting donations only and requiring visitors to sign a release.

Anyway, the students started to look for alternative landscapes in Can(y)on City, and in the process of sifting through all the officially sponsored/sanctioned tourism sites, they stumbled on the legends of a series of underground tunnels in the city. There is only one documented tunnel, an odd one: an underground shopping mall built in the late 1800s under the sidewalk in front of the town's first hotel -- it had a shoeshop, general store, and etc. -- and was illuminated by grates in the sidewalk above with small glass infillings. Apparently it was constructed as a novelty by the hotel's owner. But rumors (and evidence) of other tunnels exist, and most of these appear to be connected, in urban myth anyway, to the town's deep and dark history of conflict between the Ku Klux Klan and the region's (Italian) Catholics (there were no African Americans in the vicinity, so the KKK targeted Catholics). According to many accounts, the KKK built the tunnels to hold secret meetings and escape from meeting places, while the Catholics built tunnels to ferry Catholics (especially nuns) from the town's Abbey to safety across the railroad tracks.

The students weren't able to document/discover any of these other tunnels, although many signs of possible tunnels exist on the landscape: the same glass-inset grates in other places downtown; a sealed-in archway in the basement of a business on Main St., a doorway in the middle school (the KKK built the school in the 1920s) to a pipe room and then a sealed-in doorway beyond that. To me, the interesting thing was that this real-and-possible tunnel landscape -- especially the underground shop -- wasn't advertised or described in official tourism literature or by the staff at the Visitor's Center. It was urban legend of a history connected, in resident narratives at least, to the town's unsavory history of rule by the KKK (from ~1920s - 1950s).

So, I simply wonder: what is Columbia's underground landscape? I'm sure there are tunnels somewhere ... how do people describe/interpret them? Are they significant in local historical narratives? Are they as clandestine as those in Can(y)on City, Colorado? I know, for instance, that Lawrence, Kansas has maps of its underground tunnel networks, readily available to the public. No such maps -- or even willingness to have such maps produced (we asked the Historical Society!) -- exists in Can(y)on City; the burden of (KKK) history is too great, it seems, to unveil and sanitize this "underground" landscape for the public.

What might Columbia's tunnels and underground places reveal?