Can a family be so cursed that they carry their dark fortunes across an ocean to an entirely different continent? Can the place they settle absorb so much of their bad blood that it forever effects the fates of those who live there? And can that evil follow those unfortunate residents even when they choose to flee this macabre place?
Some swear that there is such a story and such a place. A remote community where the former residents all went mad or succumbed to violent and unnatural deaths. Today, hundreds of years after their passing, it is said that this danger lurks in the woods of northwestern Connecticut. Unexplained orbs of light are seen swirling around in the dark forest where even the local wildlife dares not go. This is the story of Dudleytown—Village of the Damned.
Dear Weird US;
I am twenty-one and have lived my entire life in Cornwall, CT. I’d like to tell you about an experience me and three of my friends had in the woods of Dudleytown about two years ago.
Growing up, we were always warned not to go into the woods around the area where Dudleytown once stood, even though these days there isn’t much that remains of the doomed community aside from some crumbling stone foundations of the early settlers’ homes. But people do still explore the spot, and much strange activity has been reported there by those brave enough to venture in. Many say that strange creatures call the area home. The most frequently reported of these are large black shadowy beings that seem to patrol the woods. Some say these shadows rise out of the foundations of ruined houses. They have been known to chase the curious out of the area. It is almost universally agreed that the Dudleytown evokes negative vibes--people often tell of experiencing a suffocating feeling when exploring in those woods. Rumor has it that the only animals that enter the former village are owls.
I know all of this might sound a bit far-fetched and hard to swallow, but growing up in Cornwall, this is what we heard, and for the most part, people did avoid those Dudleytown woods. As me and my friends got older, and a bit more brazen, we decided we’d see for ourselves just how scary this supposedly “cursed” place really was. We were all about eighteen or nineteen at the time and figured we’d show everyone we knew just what a load of BS the whole Dudleytown legend was. To do this we planned to campout overnight right beside the foundations of the homes of the allegedly “cursed” former residents of Dudleytown.
Hiking into Dudleytown with a bunch of camping gear is no easy task. The Dark Entry Forest is remote and hilly terrain. I think the isolation of the place may have been a contributing factor as to why all of the former residents went mad and started killing themselves. To make things worse, we got a late start and although the afternoon sky was still bright above our heads, no light fell between the mountains that surround Dudleytown.
When we started to see the ruins of rock walls and low foundations we knew we had reached our destination. There really wasn’t much to see really, just some mossy old fieldstone walls around the perimeters of a few shallow depressions where houses once stood. But this was where we had come to spend the night, curse be damned.
The lack of light to work by made setting up camp difficult, to say the least, and we were all pretty on edge with each other by the time darkness fell. After about an hour of arguing about who was supposed to bring what and didn’t, and cursing the damp kindling and rotten firewood, we finally got a campfire started and settled down. It was early autumn at the time and as night fell the temperature dropped considerably. We all huddled around the small fire and passed around our bags of chips as we shivered in the orange glow of the flames. It was then that I realized that aside from the crackle of our little fire and the rustle of the snack bags there was no other sound in the forest. I had always heard this phenomenon about Dudleytown but was too wrapped up in the activity of setting up camp to become conscious of it until that moment.
I pointed out this lack of sounds to my friends and we all shut up for a minute to listen. There were no crickets or frogs or anything, just dead silence. One of my friends said that it was just too late in the year for crickets, though he didn’t seem too confident about this assertion and seemed to be trying to convince himself of this as much as us.
As dark as Dudleytown may be in the day, it is nothing compared to the night. If there was a moon in the sky that night it could not be seen in the hollow where we were camped, and any stars in the sky were shrouded by the treetops swaying over our heads. The light from our little fire didn’t extend far beyond our circle of friends, and seemed to be absorbed by the blackness that had closed in all around us.
We were all still sitting in silence, hoping to hear just one damn bug or raccoon or anything else alive in those woods so that we could breath a little easier. I know we probably sound like a little bunch of pussys for acting like this, but the deafening silence was really starting to freak me out, and I could tell I was not the only one. Although nobody said anything about it, I could tell that we were no longer being quiet just to listen for signs of life, we weren’t talking because we were all a bit petrified. We just sat there staring into the pathetic little fire in absolute silence.
Then, all of a sudden, we heard a noise and we all jumped up. I for one practically jumped right out of my skin! My heart was racing as we all looked off into the dark forest waiting to hear the sound again. When we did it was a low muffled tone coming from somewhere off in blackness. As best as I can describe it, it sounded like a plaintive moan.
“Owl,” someone said, “it’s just a fucking owl! That’s all it is.”
We all stood around our dying little fire with our backs to the flames staring off into the woods and listening. The glow of the fire cast our long shadows away from us and right onto the walls of the old house foundations. Suddenly a breeze kicked up that gave the dwindling fire new life. Now our shadows seemed to take on a life of their own, and danced across the rock walls and in and out of the cellar pits. It was the eeriest goddamned thing I had ever seen. I was just about to say something about it to my mesmerized friends when all of a sudden the “owl” sound shattered the silence once again, only this time it was so loud and close it sounded like a shriek, and we all let out a startled scream simultaneously.
At just that moment the fire went out. I don’t mean that the flames dwindled down, flickered and then died--it just went OUT! It was as if somebody flicked a light switch off and extinguished it, leaving us standing there in the absolute blackness. I swear, I felt as if I’d just gone blind--I couldn’t see my hand right in front of my face!
We all stood there for one long moment breathing heavily and not saying a word. All of sudden the forest was not so quiet anymore. The owl (or whatever it was) was sounding off repeatedly and at close range, and there seemed to be a rustling in the leaves all around us. I for one definitely felt a presence of some kind out there in the darkness and it was EVERYWHERE!
“That’s it,” someone finally spoke up, “I’m outta here!”
With that, we all started groping around haplessly on our hands and knees in search of our flashlights. Not one of us bothered to roll up their sleeping bag, we each just scrambled to gather up any belongings we could find then threw our packs on our backs and started walking away--fast! The forest seemed to be alive with sounds now as we trampled through the dry leaves, tripping over rocks and branches all the way. We all just stared down and the dim flashlight beams before us as we beat a hasty retreat out of the Dark Entry Forest. The rustling in the woods around us seemed to follow us on all sides, getting louder and closer, but we never looked back or said a word about it to each other. We just walked faster and faster and tripped and fell time and time again. It was every man for himself as we raced to a fever pace down the rocky trail. We all just wanted to get the hell out of Dudleytown.
We were all breathing a bit easier when we finally reached civilization again. It was only about midnight when we emerged from the woods, and life was going on in Cornwall just as normal. People wandered in and out of convenience stores and bars, and cars were gassing up at the all night service station. It all seemed strange to me that everything was so business-as-usual here in town when just a few miles away in the woods of Dudleytown everything seemed anything but usual! It was almost as if Cornwall existed in a different reality, the modern day world, while off in the woods just outside of town there was something much older, darker and weirder. And there definitely seemed to be a presence there that wanted to keep things that way.
We returned from our foray to Dudleytown with about half as much equipment as we had left with, but we brought back a strange and unexplainable feeling with us. Perhaps we were just a bunch of lame-ass wimps scared by our own shadows, but that’s not how it felt to us at the time. Though no one said it, we all knew that none of us would be going back to retrieve our abandoned gear anytime soon. As far as I know (or care) it is still there to this day.
– Ryan M.
In July of 1998, my fiance and I, as well as two other friends, went up there to check out the so-called “curse.” We pulled up Bald Mountain Road around 11:30 PM and parked our car next to the entrance to one of the trails leading into Dudleytown. We all got out of the car, grabbed the flashlights and cameras, and started walking toward the trail entrance. We heard nothing. Dead silence. No wind, no animals...nothing. We walked only a few feet and heard this noise. The sound is difficult to describe, but it sounded like a huge metal dumpster dragging against asphalt. At this point we were freaking out, but we kept going.
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