Dudleytown, the cursed hollow

A real abandoned settlement wrapped in curse folklore; trespassing is prosecuted

Dudleytown was never really a town. The name was attached, at some unknown date, to a corner of Cornwall, in Connecticut's north-western hills, where several Dudleys farmed. Thomas Griffis cleared the first land around 1740, Gideon, Abiel and Barzillai Dudley followed, and the families grew flax, wheat and corn on high, thin-soiled ground for generations. When better land opened in the Midwest in the 19th century and the local iron industry wound down, they left, and the clearings emptied. A few cellar holes and stone walls are all that remain, in the woods along an old carriage road called Dark Entry.

Then the place acquired a curse. The story says the settlers descended from Edmund Dudley, the English councillor beheaded for treason in 1510, and from his son John, Duke of Northumberland, who lost his head after trying to put Lady Jane Grey on the throne, and that the family's doom crossed the Atlantic with them. In the telling, Gershon Hollister was murdered in 1792, and his neighbour William Tanner went mad raving about demons; Abiel Dudley lost his fortune and his mind; General Heman Swift's wife was killed by lightning; and Horace Greeley's wife hanged herself there a week before he lost the 1872 presidential election.

Almost none of it holds up. Edward C. Starr's 1926 History of Cornwall carried two pages of these tales, and the Rev. Gary P. Dudley, himself a descendant, later combed the old records and newspapers. Local historians found no link at all between Cornwall's Dudleys and the beheaded noblemen. Hollister fell from a rafter at a barn raising; Abiel Dudley lived to 90; Swift never lived in Dudleytown; Mrs. Greeley died of lung disease in New York City and never set foot in the place. The legend took off in the 1970s, after the self-styled demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren filmed a Halloween special there, and again after The Blair Witch Project in 1999.

The ground itself has had a quieter afterlife. In 1924 a group of New Yorkers formed Dark Entry Forest to reforest the old farms and planted thousands of trees; in the 1930s a New York ski club cut trails there, and children came to riding camps in summer. The hollow's famous silence, its debunkers say, dates from a DDT spraying in the 1960s. Vandalism and trespass by ghost hunters eventually led the private owners to close the land, and in 2011 eight filmmakers shooting a horror film called Dudleytown Curse were arrested and charged with criminal trespass. The only curse, the disbelievers say, is the tourists.