Dudleytown, Connecticut

The curse story has a fixed shape: the Dudleys of Cornwall are said to descend from the English Dudleys of the Tudor court, executed for treason, and to have brought a curse with them that went on to strike their neighbours, among them a man who went mad, a death at a barn raising, a woman killed by lightning on her porch, a family that vanished, and Mary Cheney Greeley, the wife of Horace Greeley, who is said to have hanged herself in Dudleytown in 1872. The New York Times set out most of that list in 1989, and National Geographic News gathered it again in 2002, both as what the legend says. The genealogy is the first link to fail: Gary Dudley, a Dudley family genealogist and author of The Legend of Dudleytown: Solving Legends through Genealogical and Historical Research (Heritage Books, 2001), found no genealogical link between the Cornwall Dudleys and Edmund Dudley, according to National Geographic's account of his work. The victims fare no better against the record: Mary Cheney, Gary Dudley writes, was born in Litchfield on 20 October 1811, citing the town's vital records, and died in New York City on 30 October 1872 of a lung disease she had suffered for twenty years; National Geographic reports his finding that she never set foot in Dudleytown. The death at the barn raising was Gershon Hollister's, in 1792, a fall from an unfinished frame. William Tanner, the neighbour later said to have gone mad after it, appears in Gold's history as "Great Tanner", a big man who moved to Dudleytown and whom Gold remembered seeing "in his extreme old age". The Carters were killed in 1763 at the Forks of the Delaware, more than a hundred miles away, months after they had sold their house and left. General Heman Swift's wife, the woman struck by lightning, lived in the general's house across from the foot of Bald Mountain Road, at the bottom of the hill, according to Gary Dudley. And the wife of Dr Clarke, whose madness closes most versions, died in New York City in 1917 or 1918 after years of chronic illness; none of her descendants, he says, spoke of madness. Clarke went on to found Dark Entry Forest on the spot and lived in Cornwall until his death in 1943. What the record does show is a decline shared with the rest of Cornwall and, in the twentieth century, landowners worn down by visitors. In 1989 the president of the Cornwall Historical Society, Michael Gannett, told the Times that "Dudleytown's a big fraud", and the society was preparing a booklet by Harriet Clark, a former president whose ancestors had lived there, which ended: "There are no ghosts, no spirits and no curse." In 1999, after the release of The Blair Witch Project, the members of Dark Entry Forest, Inc. closed Dudleytown to visitors, citing drinking parties, campfires, litter, disorderly conduct and vandalism; their news release said that "law enforcement officers have been summoned 79 times" in a single year. The age of the legend is less certain than its debunking. Walter Kilham, an architect who had lived in Dudleytown since 1938, told the Times in 1989 that the stories were started in the 1920s by local residents. The Cornwall Historical Society, in 2014, traces the curse to Edward C. Starr's A History of Cornwall (1926), whose two pages on Dudleytown, it says, strung together anecdotes of misfortune without alluding to anything supernatural; the society found no account of the supernatural there before the book.