Riverdale Road

Riverdale Road is an 11-mile stretch of straight asphalt between Thornton and Brighton, Colorado, running the west bank of the South Platte through horse pastures and cottonwoods. Ask anyone who grew up driving it at night and the list pours out, because people call this the most haunted road in America.

A jogger waits on a rise some put near 120th Avenue, said to announce himself with a heartbeat too loud to be a man's. The legend goes that if he reaches your driver's-side window, you die. A Camaro with one working headlight chases cars and vanishes. A woman in white stands at the shoulder with her thumb out. There's a tree where, the story goes, women accused of witchcraft were hanged centuries ago, and somewhere out here, depending on who's telling it, the Gates of Hell.

Almost none of it can be sourced. Fact-checkers find no record of a Camaro crash, no name behind the jogger, no historical basis for the hanging tree, no evidence the Gates of Hell ever existed. The Camaro story even lines up with Stephen King's *Christine*, a killer car from 1983.

The one thing that did happen is a fire. At roughly 1 a.m. on November 28, 1975, a two-story brick farmhouse at 9190 Riverdale Road burned down. It was empty. Nobody was hurt. It was the old David Wolpert place, and Wolpert was an ordinary farmer who came west in 1859, married Catherine Henderson in 1864, and died in 1909. Catherine died in 1915. They lived long, plain lives, which leaves nothing for the popular story about a madman who burned his family alive.

So the road keeps its danger, just not the kind people drive out to find. By September 2019 it had logged more than 30 injury accidents and several fatal crashes. Thornton Police know the legends. A spokesman, Matt Barnes, said the department had never been able to locate "any calls for service worth mentioning."