In Brief
Dudleytown, in the woods above Cornwall, Connecticut, is sealed off and patrolled — state troopers ticket trespassers chasing a curse. The strange part: the curse was invented on two pages of a 1926 town history, and nobody can find a single ghost story older than that book.
The Full Story
There's a stretch of dense forest above Cornwall, Connecticut, called Dark Entry, and people keep breaking into it. The owners welded it shut. State troopers and state environmental officers patrol it. Simple trespass runs a $77 fine, and one trooper recalled writing more than 15 tickets in a single shift. They come for Dudleytown — a cursed ghost town that, in almost every way that matters, never existed.
It was never a town. It's a cluster of cellar holes and stone walls in the trees, what's left of a farming settlement Thomas Griffis started in the early 1740s — some accounts say 1738 — followed by a string of Dudleys. The hill was a poor place to farm: short growing season, bad soil, water far off. So in the mid-1800s, when better Midwestern land opened up and the local iron trade dried up, the families left. Ordinary decline. The "Dark Entry" name just describes how deep the shade gets.
The curse came later, and you can point to exactly where. In 1926, a local historian named Edward C. Starr published his *History of Cornwall*, and in it he "wove together a fanciful and inaccurate two-page account of Dudleytown residents," as the Cornwall Historical Society puts it. The legend goes that the founders descended from an English nobleman beheaded for treason, and the family curse followed them across the ocean — crop failures, madness, violent death.
Then it grew. In the early 1970s, Ed and Lorraine Warren taped a Halloween special there and called the place demonically possessed. In a 1993 Playboy interview, Dan Aykroyd called it the most haunted place on earth. The Blair Witch Project came out in 1999, and the trespassers arrived in waves.
But in that same year, a Dudley descendant — Rev. Gary P. Dudley — went through the records. The woman driven mad by the curse died of lung disease in New York, having never lived in Cornwall. The general who supposedly went insane lived to 81. The man "murdered" by the doom fell from a rafter at a barn raising in 1792.
Every ghost in Dudleytown is younger than the book that wrote them.
