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Tucked up in the hills of northwestern Connecticut is a
ghost town called Dudleytown. Settled in the eighteenth-century the hamlet’s history
is rife with stories of Indian massacres, murder, suicide, fatal accidents,
disappearances, and insanity. So much mysterious calamity plagued Dudleytown—also
nicknamed Dark Entry—that by the nineteenth-century the settlement had been
abandoned. Today, all that remains of Dudleytown are crumbling stone walls, cellar
holes and a few foundations, all hidden in the deep, dark woods.
Some people think that Dudleytown’s trials and tribulations
could be directly tied to a curse that followed the Dudley family. Before any
Dudleys came to America, two of them had already lost their heads to the
executioner’s axe in Merry Old England. Edmund Dudley was executed in 1510 for
supporting a plot to overthrow King Henry VIII—who seemed to be quite fond of
beheading people. Like father, like son, as John, Edmund’s son, also went to
the chopping block years later for again trying to overthrow the crown. Finally
getting the message, John Dudley’s son Robert fled England. Eventually, the
Dudleys arrived in America. Joseph Dudley was born in Saybrook, Connecticut in
1674 and it was three of his sons that brought property in the hills of Cornwall
that became known as Dudleytown.
Other settlers followed the Dudleys into the woods and it
wasn’t long before tragedies began falling upon them like autumn leaves. Some
Dudleytown residents died at the hands of Indians during the French and Indian
War. In 1774, an epidemic wiped out an entire family named Carter. Another
Carter family, relatives, moved to upstate New York, devastated by the loss of
their kin. There, Indians tomahawked to death the head of the family, Nathaniel
Carter, as well as his wife and infant; the Indians kidnapped the other three
Carter children and brought them to Canada.
In 1804, a Revolutionary War veteran, General Herman Swift,
went insane when lightning struck and killed his wife Sarah as she stood on their
front porch. In 1872, Mary Cheney, the wife of the famous journalist Horace
Greely, killed herself; she had been born in Dudleytown.
Toward the end of the nineteenth-century few residents
remained in Dudleytown, but the curse of the Dudleys was still at work. After John
Brophy’s wife died of consumption (tuberculosis), his two children disappeared
into the woods. Brophy then set fire to his house, burning it to the ground, and
walked away from Dudleytown; he was never heard from again.
In 1920, Dr.William Clark from New York City built a summer
home in the now abandoned Dudleytown. With some friends he established the Dark
Entry Forest Association with the intent of maintaining the former settlement
and woods as a nature preserve. A few years later, Dr. Clark was called to the
city on an emergency, leaving his wife alone at their house in Dudleytown. When
he returned home, he found his wife cowering in a corner. She had gone insane and
spent the rest of her life in a mental asylum. No one knows what happened to her
but some people say that “something” from the forest attacked her.
Today, Dudleytown remains part of the Dark Entry preserve.
It is private property and trespassers are prosecuted. Yet, the curious continue
to sneak into the woods to find evidence of the Dudleytown curse . . . or
worse.
Stay tuned to find out what they have discovered.
