Boy Scout Lane

A dead-end road outside Stevens Point loaded with ghost legends. The Boy Scouts bought the land for a camp that never got built, and the stories filled the void.

Boy Scout Lane is a 2,500-foot unpaved road running through dense woods near Stevens Point, Wisconsin, situated between Cemetery Road and Little Chicago Road in the town of Linwood. The road's name comes from its straightforward origin: the Boy Scouts of America once owned the surrounding land and planned to build a scout camp there. The camp was never constructed and the land remains woodland, but the name stuck to the road, and over the decades it became the foundation for one of Wisconsin's most persistent and elaborate urban legends.

According to the legend, which emerged sometime in the mid-20th century, a troop of Boy Scouts was killed on or near the road during a camping trip in the 1950s or 1960s. The story has spawned at least six distinct variations, each offering a different cause of death. In some versions, the murderer is the troop's scoutmaster who went insane and killed the boys one by one. In others, the bus driver is the killer. A third variation describes scouts leaving camp at night and accidentally dropping a lantern, starting a forest fire that consumed the entire troop. Other tellings have the scouts' bus crashing or catching fire. One version describes two survivors wandering the woods for days before dying of starvation and exposure. Perhaps the most unsettling variant has the scouts simply vanishing without explanation, never to be found. There is no historical record of a murder, a series of murders, a bus crash, or a forest fire occurring on Boy Scout Lane. Indeed, there was never even an actual Boy Scout camp there.

Yet the paranormal reports persist with remarkable consistency. The most commonly reported phenomenon is spectral lantern lights, red or white, bobbing between the trees as if carried by lost scouts still trying to find their way out of the woods. Visitors describe an overwhelming sense of foreboding and being watched, with mysterious footsteps and the sound of breaking branches coming from multiple directions simultaneously. Some have reported seeing the ghostly outline of the ill-fated bus itself still traveling the road. A shadow resembling a body swaying from an elm tree has been attributed to the scoutmaster suicide variant of the legend. One of the most widespread claims involves childlike handprints appearing on vehicle windows after driving through the area, a detail that mirrors well-known folklore from haunted railroad crossings in San Antonio, Texas and a 1930s legend from Salt Lake City, suggesting Boy Scout Lane's legend follows established paranormal narrative patterns.

In July 2005, three young adults from the area drove to Boy Scout Lane with a video camera to investigate the stories. Upon reviewing their footage at home, they discovered phenomena they had not noticed during filming: a heavy whispering breath captured on audio immediately after one of them coughed, a bright ball of light flashing briefly across the frame, a face pressed against the car window visible in the rearview mirror that did not match anyone in the vehicle, and two stationary lights in the upper corners of the mirror that remained visible despite no traffic behind them on the isolated road.

The legend of Boy Scout Lane follows the classic structure of what folklorists call a "legend trip," a dare-based ritual where teenagers drive to a remote location at night to test a local ghost story. The multiple contradictory origin stories, the lack of any verifiable historical event, and the recurring motifs shared with other haunted road legends across America all point to Boy Scout Lane as folklore rather than documented history. But that distinction has done nothing to diminish its power. The road remains one of Wisconsin's most visited haunted locations and appears on multiple lists of America's most haunted roads. The land surrounding Boy Scout Lane is now privately owned and off-limits to the general public, though this has not stopped generations of thrill-seekers from making the drive.