The Vacant City and Other Unusual Tales

10 Strange Urban Legends That Turned Out to Be True On the other hand, here are some forbidden places no one will ever be According to this creepy tale, “Cropsey” lurked beneath the abandoned Willowbrook State.
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They are not good walking grounds. Out of nowhere we saw this man running along the steep incline and he proceeded to speed down the mountain at an incredible speed and leap across the path to the other side of the mountain. This was totally weird. The dog was still barking and we had all stopped in our paths because the distance this man jumped was impossible and the fact of the matter was, he never stopped running. He kept on going, leaping along the way. Somehow we got to a trail which none of us had ever been down before.

We decided to take it, because it is pretty difficult to get lost up there, since you usually end up back at Surprise Lake and from there you can get your bearings. As we walked on, the dog, which had calmed down again, went completely berserk. Ahead of us was an old red barn-like building, which was way past its prime and had scorch marks around its window frames.

As we all got closer, we realized that squatters were probably living in it or had been living in it, because there were remains of garbage and clothes everywhere. The weirdest part about it was the animal pens, which were all empty, and were on both sides of the building. There were no animals, but there were what looked like blood trails all over the dried up grass. There were also burnt candles placed in a circular pattern in the animal pens. We decided to high tail it out of there. We just had this very unwelcoming feeling.

I have never been back there. Over the years though, from growing up in Scotch Plains, which is a town at the foothills of the Watchung Mountains, many stories filtered down about Satanic rituals that occurred up in the mountains. You know, the usual story of crazy teenagers getting into black magic and stuff.

On one occasion about 8 years ago, I was driving around the mountains with my sister and a good friend. As we were leisurely cruising around, we saw flames in the distance as we were rounding about a curve in the road. The enchanted forest was a constant theme of conversation when I was growing up. It was widely rumored that there was a coven of witches that would meet when the moon was full and they would do whatever it is that witches do.

I was never really bothered by the witches story because from what I understand they are just religious people who give praise to the earth and then boil some roots and toads, not really bothersome unless you are Catholic and it runs contrary to your religious beliefs. With this in mind there was one story that always kind of bothered me. It is the human sacrifice that is involved with Satanism that I fear. Anytime one religion interferes with another religion, or the life of humans, I tend to take it a little more seriously, not because I believe in their beliefs, but because their beliefs can cause me death.

It is with this in mind that my ears perked up when I heard about the Satanic rituals that were taking place in the woods known as the Enchanted Forest. A couple of my friends and I had known where it generally was while we were in high school. We decided to explore a little and actually found it one day to see if it was as enchanted as everyone said. So one Saturday afternoon we headed into the woods of the Watchung Reservation where the Enchanted Forest is located. It really is awe-inspiring.

You walk through regular scrub bushes and old growth trees into a wide open area where there are hundreds of trees planted in perfectly straight rows. They are all tall and straight, and there is very little foliage at the trunks. The sun beats down through the tops of the trees in an eerie way that causes streams of sunlight so that it seems to glow off the floor of the forest.

It is truly a unique place to behold. We roamed around the numerous well beaten trails that wind all around through it, looking up at this impressive oddity, when one of my friends said there was someone behind us. We had just reached an area that had been sort of cleared out and well worn logs were placed in a circle around where a fire had recently been. There were a lot of tiny pieces of broken glass and the charred remains of logs. At this point we were sort of spooked and we turned around to leave, only to find that there was no longer anyone behind us.

There are a lot of places around the edge of the forest where people could hide, so we figured that was where this person was. Needless to say, we left pretty quickly. A few months later, after hearing stories about the witches and the Satanic rituals, we decided to take another trip out there. This time we were going to go at night on a weekend with a full moon.

So after needling each other and daring and triple dog daring each other, and more than a few beers each, we decided to go.


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We got to the parking area and began to walk down the path towards the forest. As we got about two thirds of the way down the path we began to hear what sounded like singing, and not very good singing at that. We all kind of stopped and looked at each other as we could see pretty clearly. The singing continued and was very monotone and almost chant like, and it was definitely coming from the area of the Enchanted Forest.

Realizing that there was definitely more than one person at some place in or around the forest who were singing we decided to leave, and quickly. We were a bunch of tough guys running, or walking fast, out of the woods like pansies. Once I am dead, of natural causes, do whatever you feel like. The area is an appropriately eerie place for such a thing and I suppose if I was Satanic I would want to kill something there. It has been seventeen years since then and I have been back to the Enchanted Forest numerous times.

I enjoy walking through its trails and hills and its eerie calmness is kind of soothing, but I have only visited during the day. I will not go there at night. I grew up in Summit on the edges of the reservation.


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    • If you follow the trail down past the old Watchung Stables and cross Rt. He suddenly had the urge to leave very strongly, and on the way out we had noticed strange shadows. The shadows were almost like TV fuzz. At this point I just wanted to get the hell out of there even quicker, and my friend had a full out anxiety attack that took him a few hours to get over.

    Not the scariest story to read, but it made me almost crap my pants at the time. The houses are now owned and have been renovated and have occupants, but for years they stood empty. I guess that it was a city that just never took off, and all the people left for the surrounding cities.

    I knew a family that lived there for a period.

    The Deserted Village and Enchanted Forest of the Watchung Reservation

    They said it was haunted as hell in that reservation, but the houses seemed to be weird free. These are the spookiest urban legends from every state in America. The unsubstantiated legend holds that, in , a bus crashed while transferring patients from an asylum in Fairfax County, Virginia. The patients escaped, and all but one were eventually re-captured. Shortly after the bus breakdown, dead bunnies started appearing around the area, many hanging from the Fairfax Station Bridge.

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    What is true is that in , a pair of mysterious and scary incidents occurred in that area involving a man dressed in a bunny suit. Only two weeks later, another Fairfax County man discovered an ax-wielding guy in a bunny suit chopping up the porch of a recently built, unoccupied house. He was gone by the time the police arrived. The name is so popular that even Google Maps uses it. This twentieth-century urban legend haunted residents of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

    The legend had it that a figure with a severely burned face lurked around an abandoned train tunnel at night and made electricity go haywire with his very presence.

    10 Strange Urban Legends That Turned Out to Be True

    Curious teenagers would sneak out to the tunnel to try to catch a glimpse of him. His name was Raymond Robinson , and he had suffered a severe accident involving an electrical line that left him with a disfigured face. Because of this, he became a bit of a recluse, staying inside during the day and only venturing out at night. The game was designed by the government to be a psychological experiment. It functioned like a drug, and it gave its players seizures and nightmares.

    Government officials would come in and extract information about the players through the arcade machine. Though the game was almost certainly not real, there were a few video-game-related happenings that probably spurned the legend.

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    One was the game Tempest , which did cause epileptic reactions and motion sickness among some players when it was released in Here are some more conspiracy theories that turned out to be true. Some of the more outlandish legends claim that New York City, of all places, has a whole colony of gators living beneath its streets. While this is far from the norm, there have been several real accounts of fully grown gators living in sewers, especially in the southern United States. In states like Florida, where alligators live in the wild, storms and flooding can wash full-sized gators into the sewer system.

    And police officers did pull a two-foot-long baby gator from a New York City sewer in Recently, the people of Switzerland began telling stories about a mysterious figure who walked through the Maules Forest wearing camouflage and a gas mask. For ten years, there was no evidence that this figure existed; just a few eyewitness accounts in the newspapers. With no concrete evidence of his existence, the figure remained in the realm of folklore. A few months later, his gas mask and camouflage coat appeared in the woods, along with a mysterious note hinting that he was harmless and could no longer stand being viewed as some kind of monster.

    Whether Le Loyon actually committed suicide or simply abandoned his persona and wandering habits remains unknown. These are some of the most bizarre unsolved mysteries of all time. In , the film Candyman earned its place as one of the scariest movies of all time. In Chicago, a woman named Ruthie McCoy was killed by a group of intruders who entered her apartment through the gap in the wall made for the medicine cabinet. The shabby Grace Abbott housing projects, where McCoy lived, were built with holes in the walls for the medicine cabinets, which provided the only flimsy barrier between adjacent apartments.

    Want some more chilling true stories? These horror movies were inspired by reality.