Boy Scout Lane

Boy Scout Lane is an unpaved town road in Linwood, Portage County, Wisconsin, west of Stevens Point. It leaves West River Drive, runs about half a kilometre north into hardwood forest and stops there. The name records a camp that was never built: the Boy Scouts of America once owned the adjoining land and planned to put a Scout camp on it. A legend that reached print in 2004 holds that a troop and its leader died along the lane in the 1950s or 1960s, by fire, by bus crash, at the hands of the Scoutmaster or the bus driver, or by simply vanishing. The Samoset Council has covered the county since 29 May 1939 and published a chronicle of itself down to 1984 that inventories a four-acre island and a 1921 lease; it never mentions this lane, Linwood, or any death. Drivers report footsteps, swinging lights and handprints on parked cars. The lane is public and the woodland on either side is private, with homes along it.

Boy Scout Lane runs north from West River Drive into woodland in the Town of Linwood, Portage County, Wisconsin, west of Stevens Point. OpenStreetMap carries it as way 5673904, tagged "highway=residential" and inherited from US Census TIGER data, with the postcode 54481 recorded on both sides. Its mapped course runs 508 m, from the junction at 44.468076, -89.608716 to a stop among the trees at 44.472641, -89.608828. Only one end meets the public road network; apart from two driveways, nothing else joins it. Mike Conley, in the Marion (McDowell) News of 23 February 2007, called it "a dead-end road with no outlet". The name records a camp that was never built. Conley wrote that "the road got its name because the land around it was once owned by the Boy Scouts of America, which planned to use the site for a Scout camp", and that "the camp was never built, the name survives to this day". The Stevens Point Journal had published the same origin on 23 April 2005, in a front-page piece by staff reporter Alexander Shaine headed "In search of a real-life ghost story", 857 words on page A.1 of the Local section, which the paper's own abstract summarised as "Intrepid and fearless (he thinks), reporter sets out with experienced paranormal investigator to find the proverbial 'boo!'". Shaine opened at the scene: "Seated in the passenger seat of a Kia station wagon, waiting for the ghosts of a slain Boy Scout Troop to emerge from the woods, I couldn't help but reflect on how I'd arrived in this position." The Scouting body that has covered the county since 1939 published its own history, and it can be read in full. "A Chronicle of the Boy Scouts of America in the Samoset Council. 19 10 - thru - 19 84" is a 19,422-word typescript that the council posts on its own website. Its year-by-year list records "5/ 29/ 39 - Transfer into Council of Portage County." The chronicle inventories holdings down to a four-acre island and an undeveloped nineteen-acre site, and it fixes the Stevens Point properties by date: on 21 June 1921 the Stevens Point Council leased "a piece of land bordering Sunset Lake, for a scout camp", which Mr Nelson deeded to a board of trustees on 31 January 1928; "Other camps for local use are the 36 acre site at Rocky Run, which is southwest of Stevens Point." Boy Scout Lane and Linwood are absent from the whole document. The legend reached print in 2004, in "The Wisconsin Road Guide to Haunted Locations" by Chad Lewis and Terry Fisk (Unexplained Research Publishing Company, ISBN 0-9762099-1-8), which sets the deaths in the 1950s or 1960s and gives the variants: the killer is the Scoutmaster in some tellings and the bus driver in others; a dropped lantern starts a forest fire; a bus crashes or catches fire; the troop vanishes and is never found; two Scouts get away and are lost "in the woods where they die of starvation and/or exposure".

Boy Scout Lane is a public town road, open at all hours, with no gate, permit, ticket or guided tour attached to it. OpenStreetMap way 5673904 carries the plain tag "highway=residential" with no access or barrier restriction. It leaves West River Drive and ends among the trees; Conley's "a dead-end road with no outlet" still describes the layout, so anyone driving in leaves the way they came. The woodland on both sides is private property and people live along the lane. This page prints no house number and no route into the trees. The address that reverse geocoders return for points on the lane is generated from the TIGER address range attached to the road line, and the number it hands back slides steadily downward as the query point travels from the southern junction to the northern end, so none of them identifies a dwelling and no house number appears on this page. The lane carries no facilities of any kind. Nothing marks it as an attraction; there is neither a parking area nor a footpath, and the whole length is unlit. The public photograph of the site, taken by Craig M. Groshek and uploaded on 25 September 2005 under the description "Boy Scout Lane, Linwood, Wisconsin", shows an unpaved two-track between leafless hardwoods, with no gate and no barrier in view.