The Seven Gates of Hell

Hellam Township's website asks people to stop hunting the gates. The real Dr. Belknap built exactly one. The rest is flint mill ruins and teen lore.

The official Hellam Township website has a page asking people to stop looking for the Seven Gates of Hell. They had to write it because decades of teenagers kept trespassing on private property in search of gates that don't exist. Start there, before any of the legend.

Here's the legend in both of its popular versions. A 19th-century insane asylum stood deep in the woods off Toad Road, housing the criminally insane. In the late 1800s, a fire broke out, and in the chaos the inmates escaped into the surrounding forest. Seven gates were installed in a line through the woods to contain them. The first gate appears during the day. Gates two through seven only appear after sundown. Anyone who walks through the fifth gate is never seen again. Anyone who reaches the seventh goes to Hell.

The alternative version swaps the asylum for a deranged doctor who built the gates himself, either to keep intruders off his land or to trap his own madness inside, depending on the teller.

The real Dr. Harold Belknap lived on Toad Road and worked at the West Side Sanitarium, which never burned down and is still standing. Belknap did build exactly one gate. He also posted threatening, toad-themed warning signs across his property, which is how Toad Road picked up its name. One gate, built by one grumpy doctor. The rest of the legend doesn't have a historical core.

The "burned asylum" in the legend is almost certainly the stone ruins of a flint mill on Trout Run Road. A teenager in those woods at night could mistake the foundation for something considerably worse. Hurricane Agnes flooded the area in 1972 and Toad Road itself was rerouted and mostly erased. The gates people now hunt for along Range Road are all visible in broad daylight. None of them connect to a fence. None of them lead anywhere.

Matt Lake put the story into "Weird Pennsylvania." Mike Argento of the York Daily Record has covered the phenomenon for years. A 2012 indie horror film called "Toad Road" used the legend as its setup. The property owners out there get the worst of it, which is why the township's website now reads like a restraining order.

Somewhere between a grumpy doctor posting toad signs and a flint mill rotting in the underbrush, one of the most durable urban legends in the Mid-Atlantic got built. Belknap has been dead since the 1960s and the gate he actually built is still on private land along Toad Road, which the owners would very much like you to stop looking for.