Boy Scout Lane

At least six different legends explain why ghosts haunt this unpaved road near Stevens Point, from a murderous scoutmaster to a forest fire to scouts vanishing without a trace. None of the stories check out historically, but visitors keep seeing lantern lights in the trees, hearing footsteps from every direction, and finding childlike handprints on their car windows.

Nobody agrees on how the Boy Scouts died. In one version, the scoutmaster went insane and killed the boys one by one. In another, the bus driver did it. A third has the scouts dropping a lantern at night and burning alive in the resulting forest fire. Different tellings have the bus crashing, catching fire, or the scouts simply vanishing without explanation. One particularly grim variant has two survivors wandering the woods for days before dying of starvation.

None of it happened. There's no historical record of any murder, bus crash, or fire on Boy Scout Lane. There was never even an actual Boy Scout camp there. The Boy Scouts of America owned the surrounding land near Stevens Point and planned to build one, but the camp was never constructed. The name stuck to this 2,500-foot unpaved road running through dense woods between Cemetery Road and Little Chicago Road in the town of Linwood, and sometime in the mid-20th century, the legend attached to it.

The ghost stories don't care about the historical record. Red and white lights bob between the trees at night, moving like lanterns carried by lost scouts trying to find their way out. Visitors describe an overwhelming sense of being watched, with footsteps and snapping branches coming from multiple directions at once. A shadow resembling a body swaying from an elm tree has been reported, tied to a variant where the scoutmaster hanged himself after the killings. The ghostly outline of the bus has been seen traveling the road.

The handprint detail is the most widespread claim: after driving through Boy Scout Lane at night, people find small, childlike handprints on their car windows. Folklorists point out that this exact motif appears in haunted railroad crossing legends from San Antonio, Texas and a 1930s story from Salt Lake City, suggesting Boy Scout Lane is plugged into a larger American paranormal narrative pattern rather than documenting local events.

In July 2005, three young adults from the area drove out with a video camera to test the stories. When they reviewed the footage at home, they found things they hadn't noticed while filming: a heavy whispering breath on the audio right after one of them coughed, a bright ball of light flashing across the frame, and a face pressed against the car window visible in the rearview mirror that didn't match anyone in the vehicle. Two stationary lights appeared in the upper corners of the mirror despite no traffic on the isolated road behind them.

Folklorists call Boy Scout Lane a "legend trip," a dare-based ritual where teenagers drive to a remote location at night to test a local ghost story. The contradictory origin stories, the missing historical event, and the recycled motifs all fit the pattern perfectly. The road shows up on multiple lists of America's most haunted roads anyway. The surrounding land is now privately owned and technically off-limits, which has done absolutely nothing to stop people from making the drive.