The Seven Gates of Hell

The Seven Gates of Hell are seven gates hidden in the woods of Hellam Township, Pennsylvania, and the story is that if you pass through all seven, you go straight to Hell. Only the first is visible by daylight. The rest appear after dark. And no one, the legend holds, has ever made it past the fifth.

There are two versions of how they got there. In one, an insane asylum caught fire in the woods, the inmates ran loose, and the gates went up to trap them. In the other, a deranged local doctor built the gates himself. For decades, teenagers drove out to Hellam to find them.

Here is the strange part. Almost none of it happened.

There was no asylum. None ever stood on or near the site, so none ever burned. What sits in the woods along Trout Run is the stone ruin of an old flint mill, and a frightened kid finding it at night could easily take it for something far worse. There was a real doctor, Harold Belknap, who lived along the old road into the woods. He practiced at the West Side Sanitarium, which never burned and still stands. And he built exactly one gate, to keep trespassers off his land, posting toad-themed warning signs that locals say gave Toad Road its name. One gate. Some accounts say it still stands on private land; others say it was hauled away years ago, worn out by the same trespassers it was meant to stop.

There were other things out there once that fed the story. Two stone toad sculptures, squat and grotesque, marked the trail into the woods; they vanished in the early 1970s. Then Hurricane Agnes flooded the township in 1972 and effectively wiped the old Toad Road off the map. The place that grew the legend kept losing its own pieces, and the legend grew anyway. One county historian traces it further back still, to the old Wild Cat resorts that ran in these hills around 1900, where, he writes, "a favorite resort pastime was making up ghost stories."

The gates people actually find today sit along Range Road. They're all visible in plain daylight. They connect to no fence and lead nowhere.

So the township put up a page on its official website asking people to stop coming. "No asylum ever existed there," it reads, "and the local doctor had only one gate and that was to keep out trespassers." The land is private, it adds, and trespassers will be prosecuted.

The legend has outlived the doctor, the road, and the truth. A 2012 horror film, *Toad Road*, was built on it. Its lead actress, Sara Anne Jones, died of a heroin overdose that September, weeks after the premiere. The film was dedicated to her. The gates that send you to Hell were never there. People keep arriving anyway.