THE CURSE OF DUDLEYTOWN


In northwestern Connecticut within the town of Cornwall (once Cornwall Bridge), in the shadow of three mountains, lies the remains of Dudleytown. The homes of this once thriving community which seemed - at least for a time - to have all the advantages are long gone, but the land where the town once stood is far from empty. The small hamlet, lost in the pages of time, holds accounts of ghostly tales, demons, unexplained events, and curses coupled with over 400 years of British and American history. Today, only the cellar holes and a few foundations remain. The roads have become forest trails that hikers and ghost hunters traverse, regardless of warnings of evils spirits, and many claim the woods become strangely silent - the birds and bugs that sing and call during a hike up to Dudleytown don’t follow into the hamlet. No wildlife is seen in this area. The surroundings are deathly quiet.

Dudleytown, or at least the area where it was located, was first owned by a man named Thomas Griffis, one of the original settlers of this region, in the early 1740’s. There are no records to say that he ever lived where Dudleytown later stood but he did own half of the land in 1741. A few years later, with the arrival of Gideon Dudley in 1747, the village gained a name. Gideon was followed to the region by two brothers and the Dudleys have become known over the years as the men who brought a curse to this small town – a curse that has allegedly plagued the region ever since.

The first thing that should have been apparent was that Dudleytown was very poorly planned. It was a farming community in an area that was terrible for farming. It got little sun, and the ground was horribly rocky. There was an abundance of trees that had to be hacked down. Besides this, the place just seemed horribly unlucky. Dark forces seemed to be operating in "Owlsbury." Something - some malevolent spirit, some terrible ill-fortune - dogged the village's every step forward, until, in the period following the Civil War, that unknown "something" began to catch up with the little town. None could reverse - or adequately explain - the decline and fall of the once proud village at the end of the nineteenth century.

According to legend, the "curse" had its beginnings in England in 1510. At that time, Edmund Dudley was beheaded for being involved in a plot to overthrow King Henry VIII. Supposedly, a curse was placed on the family at this time, which stated that all of the Dudley descendants would be surrounded by horror and death. Proponents of the curse claim that the Dudley’s then began to experience a rather disquieting run of bad luck.

Edmund’s son, John Dudley, also attempted to control the British throne by arranging for his son, Guilford, to marry Lady Jane Grey, next in line for the crown. After Edward VI died, Lady Jane became the queen for a short time before the plan failed, ending with the execution of Lady Jane and the two Dudley’s. To make matters worse, Guilford’s brother returned from France, and being a military officer, brought home a plague that he spread to his officers and troops. The sickness wiped out massive numbers of British soldiers and eventually spread throughout the country, killing thousands.

John Dudley’s third son, Robert, Earl of Leicester, a favorite of Elizabeth I, wisely decided to leave England and travel to the New World. It would be his somewhat luckier descendant, William, who would settle in Guilford, Connecticut. Three of William’s descendants, Abiel, Barzallai and Gideon, would later buy a plot of land in Cornwall Township.

Records indicate that the land around Dudleytown was once Mohawk Indian tribal grounds but tell us little else before the coming of the first settlers. Here, long before Europeans ever set foot in North America, Mohawk Indians hunted the gentle deer and gathered wild herbs for medicinal teas or a tangy root beer, made in the full moon of May or June. Among the great stands of oak, maple and chestnut, the owls which were to give the lasting nickname of "Owlsbury" to the village, hooted mournfully from the heavy shade of noon to the darkest hours of the night. It is true that there were many Native American tribes who lived in the general vicinity of Dudleytown. Some battles of the French Indian War (1755 – 1763) also took place within 100 miles of Dudleytown. There was fallout from the Native Americans for several years after the war, and one set of Dudleytown residents met their fate at the hands of angered Indians. But not everything that happened at Dudleytown can be explained by angry Indians.

By October of 1737, the Connecticut General Assembly ordered the “Act for the Ordering and Directing the Sale and Settlement of all the Townships in the Western Lands”. The Act stated that 50 private parcels of land from many western Connecticut towns would be divided and auctioned off. The Cornwall auction began at 50 pounds per parcel.

In February of 1745, Thomas Griffis bought half a parcel of Cornwall land from Eleazer Whittlesey of Wethersfield. Today Dudleytown looks much like it did when Thomas Griffis first walked into the land some 250 years ago. A very thick forest, incredibly rocky terrain, and in the shadow of three mountains: Bald Mountain, Woodbury Mountain, and The Coltsfoot Triplets. Because of the location and the dense, tall woods, the forest was given the ominous name of “Dark Entry Forest." Lying in the shadow of three mountains also meant the town received little sunlight. The land was hard, and living there was even harder. The Cornwall Township was never a good area for farming, as is apparent by the rocks that were used to build the foundations and stone walls that still stand today. Isaac Stiles, who was an early resident of the area eloquently put it best: “Nature out of her boundless Store, Threw Rocks together and did no more.”

Incorporated in 1740 (click on map to enlarge), Dudleytown was inhabited by hard toiling farmers, millers, and an occasional blacksmith, cooper, and tinker. Although Dudleytown’s log cabins eventually gave way to frame buildings and well laid out farms, it still was completely dependant on other Cornwall settlements for nourishment, both physical and spiritual. Dudleytown grew flax as well as wheat, corn, and other foods. Its small streams were dammed to supply power for at least three mills of various types. But it was isolated by its very location. Its spiritual needs were supplied by the Congregational Church in Cornwall Plain, and to a lesser extent, in nearby Warren. When death came to a Dudleytown family, it didn’t reach the burial stage until after an ox cart had carried the departed to the Cornwall cemeteries. For not only has there been no record of any church having been established in Dudleytown, there is no burying ground to be found within its confines. One of the earliest headstones in the Cornwall Plain cemetery bears the name of a Dudleytown resident…at least three miles from the closest Dudleytown home site.

In 1748 Gideon Dudley moved from Saybrook, Connecticut and bought some land from Griffis to start a small farm. By 1753 Gideon's two brothers, Barzillai and Abiel Dudley, from Guilford, Connecticut, also purchased land nearby as the area began blossoming into a hollow. A few years later, a Martin Dudley from Massachusetts also joined the clan. He later married Gideon’s daughter.

Settlers began to trickle into the area. The Tanner family, the Jones’, the Patterson’s, the Dibble’s and the Porter’s all took up residence here. The community grew even larger after iron ore was discovered nearby and farming became a secondary concern. However, there were never any stores, shops, schools or churches in Dudleytown. Provisions had to be purchased in nearby towns and when one died, a trip to Cornwall was necessary. The population of Dudleytown was never large and according to an 1854 map, the peak number of families who lived here only reached 26.

In spite of all of these things, the town did thrive for a time. Dudleytown was noted for its timber, which was burned and used to make wood coal for the nearby Litchfield County Iron Furnaces in Cornwall and other towns. The furnaces later moved closer to the railroads and the more industrial towns though and the lumber was no longer needed. Iron ore was used from the area for a time and there were three water-powered mills in Dudleytown as well. Most of the mills eventually closed because of the long trip down the mountain to deliver their goods.

Despite the outward signs of prosperity though, there were strange deaths and bizarre occurrences at Dudleytown from the beginning. Some historians have attempted to downplay the unusual events in recent years. They will debunk the legends of the town by first stating how few people ever lived there and then will try and downplay the disappearances, cases of insanity and weird deaths, as if such things happen all of the time. And perhaps they do – but why so many unusual happenings in such an isolated area with so few people living in it? The number of deaths that have occurred here would not be such a high number in a larger town but in this small community, one can’t help but wonder what exactly was taking place. There are also an inordinate number of people who went insane in this area, as well as people who simply vanished in addition to those documented here. It’s no wonder that a story soon started about a Dudleytown "curse".

Living in Dudleytown was never easy. Many things went wrong for the people and for the land. Were all of the events unexplainable? Was there a high lead content in the drinking water? Did Native Americans sneak into the hollow and wreak havoc? Or did the Dudleys carry a centuries-old curse into the village? The rocks in and around Dudleytown do contain a high level of iron and other metals. It is possible there was some lead in the drinking water on the hillside. This theory could explain some of the dementia that area residents experienced, but continued lead poisoning is always fatal and for more than a century people lived in Dudleytown. If the water was bad, residents would have moved away sooner. The sheer number of unusual deaths and mental conditions in such an isolated area more than suggests that something out of the ordinary was occurring in the little town.

In August of 1774, an unidentified epidemic struck the Adoniram Carter household in Dudleytown and killed the entire family. A second Dudleytown Carter family, The Nathaniel Carters, distraught from the loss, moved near Binghamton, New York where Indians took the life of Nathaniel, his wife, and their infant by tomahawk. The Carters’ other three children were kidnapped to Canada where two daughters were ransomed with the help of some British officials, and returned to Connecticut. However, neither ever recovered from their terrible ordeal. According to historical annals, Sarah was "a stark mad thing until her death," while her sister eventually married, but remained a semi-invalid for the rest of her life. It just went to show, they say, that whether people remained in the village for a brief period or a lifetime, there was no escaping the Dudleytown curse.

The son, however, David Carter, remained with his captors, married an Indian girl, and eventually returned to the United States for formal education. David escaped the curse of Dudleytown and eventually went on to become an editor, jurist, advocate of Indian rights, and eventually a Supreme Court judge.

Three of the original Dudleys moved out of the region and lived long and full lives, dying of natural causes and forever diminishing any possibilities of a curse. Only Abiel Dudley remained in town and after a series of reverses, lost his entire fortune – and his mind. Abiel died in 1799 at the age of 90 and when he was no longer able to pay his debts, the town took his property, sold it and then made him a ward of the town. Toward the end, Abiel was senile and insane and would not be the last to suffer from this affliction.

In 1792, seven years before Abiel Dudley passed away, his good friend and neighbor, Gershon Hollister, was killed while building a barn at the home of William Tanner, Abiel’s closest neighbor. There were tales that he was murdered, but they are unsubstantiated and thought to be a result of the legend of Dudleytown. William Tanner himself was under suspicion, but never convicted of anything. He was said to have gone mad, rambling about demons and such. Tanner eventually went insane, although likely from old age and senility rather than from supernatural influences. He lived to the age of 104 and according to records was "slightly demented" at the time of his death. There have been stories that have circulated claiming that Tanner told other villages of "strange creatures" that came out of the woods at night. If this is true, there is no way for us to know if these "creatures" were products of the unexplained or of Tanner’s feeble mind.

Another bizarre tragedy affected one of the most famous residents of the region, General Herman Swift, who had served in the Revolutionary War under George Washington. In 1804, his wife, Sarah Faye, was struck by lightning while standing on the front porch of their home near Dudleytown. She was killed instantly. The General went insane and died soon after. Many have dismissed this incident as not being connected to the other unusual events, saying that Swift did not actually live in Dudleytown but on Bald Mountain Road (where his house remains today) and that he only went insane when he became old and senile. But in an area this sparsely populated, the records indicated three people to have gone insane in the space of less than a half century – could this be mere coincidence? And does a person being struck by lightning while standing on their front porch qualify as being "unusual"?


Through the early years of the nineteenth century, the jinx continued to take its toll in the unfortunate town. An epidemic in 1813 was far worse than the one that struck down the Carters, with fatalities numbering in the dozens, including several in the pioneering Jones family.

Horace Greeley, editor and founder of the New York Tribune and most famous for his quote, "Go West, young man," married Mary Cheney, who was born in Dudleytown. The two met in a vegetarian boarding house, and their union ended when Mary Cheney took her own life in 1872, one week before Horace Greeley lost his bid for the presidency of the United States.

After the Civil War, Dudleytown began to die and many of the villagers simply packed up and moved away. The demise of the town itself is hardly surprising, whether you believe in the so-called "curse" or not. There was little chance that a good crop would ever grow and sustain life in the village. The winters were harsh here and even the hardy apple trees were stunted from months of cold. As mentioned already, the soil was rocky and the area was plagued by almost too much water. It pooled into tepid swamps and seeped into the earth, creating a damp morass. Today, one finds stone walls running through swamps, which means that these swampy areas were either used as pastures, and therefore seasonally dry, or that these boggy places were non-existent in the 1700’s.



By the time the Chestnut blight hit Connecticut in the early 1900’s, there wasn’t a soul left to claim permanent residency in Dudleytown. A sawmill moved in temporarily to salvage the dead and dying Chestnut timber. A farmer ran sheep for a few years, and charcoalers continued to ply their trade to some extent, but no one really cared to live in the area, for it was impossible to scratch a living from the shallow, rocky soil. The curse had run its course...it had killed a New England town.





By the turn of the century there was very little left of Dudleytown for the malevolent curse to work on. Nevertheless, it had a few gasps left. One of the last people to feel its sting was a solitary farmer, an immigrant from Poland, who saw in the abandoned farmland and deteriorating homestead of the former Rogers estate an opportunity to make good in his adopted country. He worked hard at pasturing sheep, but within a few years, they say, he became discouraged, gave up the farm and went elsewhere to seek his fortune.

This next series of inexplicable events occurred in 1901, at a time when the population of Dudleytown had dwindled away to almost nothing. One of the last residents of the town was a man named John Patrick Brophy, an Irish laborer with a wife and two sons. Tragedy visited swiftly and in several blows. First, his wife died of consumption, which was not uncommon in those days and there was nothing strange about her ailment, as she had been suffering from it for years. This did not lessen Brophy’s grief however, but he was soon further stricken when his two children vanished into the forest just a short time after the funeral. And while their disappearance could have been voluntary (they had been accused of stealing sleigh blankets, a minor offense), there is nothing to indicate that it was. They vanished and were never found. Shortly after, the Brophy’s house burned to the ground in an unexplained fire. Some have speculated that it was John Brophy himself who set the blaze. Not long after, Brophy himself vanished into the forest never to be seen again.

By the early 1900’s, Dudleytown was completely deserted. The remaining homes began to fall into disrepair and ruin, and soon, the forest began to reclaim the village that had been carved out of it. But there was still one other death that proponents of the "curse" have connected to Dudleytown and while the curse may be unlikely, it does mark one additional case of insanity for an isolated region that was already riddled with them.

Around 1900, Dr. William Clarke came to Cornwall and fell in love with the forest and the quiet country life. Clarke had been born in 1877 and grew up on a farm in Tenafly, New Jersey. He later became a professor of surgery and taught at Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, as well as earning a reputation as the leading cancer specialist in New York. He purchased 1,000 acres of land in the wilds of Connecticut, which included Dudleytown, and began construction of a summer and vacation home here. Dr. Clark bought a great tract of land hard by Dark Entry Road, cleared a pleasant lot on a shady hillside, laid pipe to an icy, ever-flowing spring at the crest of the hill and built a rustic cabin from the hemlock he had cleared from this land. Although he may have wondered why he was unable to employ any local labor to assist him in constructing his dream hideaway, Dr. Clark enjoyed the hard physical labor, and never asked questions. Over the next number of years, he and his wife, Harriet Bank Clarke, visited the house on weekends and during the summer until it was completed. After that, it became mostly a holiday house for short trips in the summer and for Thanksgiving. Together, they maintained an idyllic second life near Dudleytown until 1918.

One summer weekend, Dr. Clarke was called away to New York on an emergency. His wife stayed behind and according to the story as he and his wife waited at the station for the train which would take him away, Mrs. Clark clung to him tightly, begging him to return to her at the earliest possible moment. Witnesses reported that as the train pulled out, the doctor's wife stood for a very long time, looking down the track toward the departing train, before slowly moving to return to her lonely "Owlsbury" cottage.

Dr. Clark completed his business in New York in short order, returning to Cornwall within thirty-six hours. But when nobody met him at the station, he hurriedly walked to the opening at Dark Entry Road and plunged into the shadowy woods. Except for the hooting of owls, all was quiet as he entered the clearing where his summer cottage stood. No sign of life greeted him as he ran, terrified, across the lawn to the cabin. But as he pushed open the front door, which had been left slightly ajar, he heard a sound that he would never forget. From an upstairs room came the maniacal, uncontrolled laughter of one who had taken leave of her senses. During his absence, his wife had gone quite mad, just as a number of previous residents of the village had done. She told of strange creatures that came out of the forest and attacked her. She committed suicide soon after.

While undoubtedly shattered by his wife’s suicide, Dr. Clarke continued to maintain his house in Dudleytown and continued to visit. A number of years later, he remarried and returned to stay at his summer house until a larger home was completed nearby in 1930. In 1924, he and his second wife, Carita, as well as other doctors, friends and interested landowners formed the "Dark Entry Forest Association". It was designed to act as forest preserve so that the land around Dudleytown would remain "forever wild". “The Dark Entry Forest Association was formed as a nature preserve,” explains Dr. John F. Leich, former president and a current shareholder of the DEF. “Dr. Clark wanted a place where he could bring his children and grandchildren in the summers.” The original charter stated the land would remain a nature preserve for its members to enjoy. They held their first meeting in 1926 with 41 members. Dr. Clarke died in Cornwall Bridge in February 1943 and Carita passed away five years later. A number of their children and family members still reside in the area.


Gradually, however, the descendants of the original settlers moved away or died, often under tragic circumstances. With no new families moving in to occupy the abandoned homesteads, the houses that had stood for a hundred years crumbled, their massive, hand-hewn beams collapsing into dank cellar-holes, to decay among the shattered remains of a once living town, beneath protective blankets of wild tiger lilies. Untrimmed brush and vines turned Dark Entry and Dudleytown Roads into little more than tangled hiking trails.

Some seventy years have passed since Dr. Clark put a padlock on the last inhabited house in Dudleytown and returned to the city. No one today remembers the exact location of the old farmhouses or the graves where so many heroes and victims lie buried. An occasional curiosity-seeker will make his or her way along the overgrown rocks that mark the last vestige of Dark Entry Road, poke around in some cellar holes full of decaying debris, and perhaps take a few snapshots that somehow never come out, because even at high noon on a sunny day it is too dark in Dudleytown. But the folks who live in the shadow of the ghost town on the hill know that the only thing permanent about the place are specters from the past, the mourning owls, and, of course, the legend of the Dudleytown curse.



Today Dudleytown is mostly deserted, except for curiosity-seekers and tourists, who come looking for thrills. The Dark Forest Entry Association still owns most of the land the village once stood on. There are a group of homes on Bald Mountain Road that are very secluded from the main roads and they belong to the closest residents. These locals maintain that nothing supernatural takes place in this region and perhaps they are right. It seems unlikely that the "curse" on Dudleytown ever really existed but on the other hand, there is something strange about such a small area with so many disappearances, unusual deaths, suicides and cases of insanity.





As far as we know, the ghostly tales began to surface in the 1940’s. It was at this time that visitors to the ruins of the village began to speak of strange incidents and wispy apparitions in the woods. Even today, those who have visited the place boast of paranormal photographs, overwhelming feelings of terror, mysterious lights, sights and sounds and even of being touched, pushed and scratched by unseen hands. Some researchers refer to the area as a "negative power spot", or a place where entities enter this world from the other side. They say this may explain the strange events in Dudleytown’s history, like the eerie reports, the strange creatures and perhaps even the outbreaks of insanity and madness. The place is often thought of as "tainted" in some way, as if the ground has somehow spoiled here, or perhaps was sour all along. An open-minded look at some of the things that have happened do seem to show this is a strange place and one that has been an enigma from the earliest days of its history.

Some historians and debunkers dismiss such reports and theories and maintain that just because the so-called "Curse of Dudleytown" doesn’t exist, then nothing strange has ever occurred here either. Dr. John F. Leich, a resident of the Dark Entry Forest since 1952, claims that in his almost 50 years of experience in and around Dudleytown, there is absolutely nothing odd or paranormal about the place. “My wife and I have been spending summers here since 1952,” Dr. Leich said. “There are approximately 50 shareholders in the Dark Entry Forest Association and about 20 houses, and none of us have seen anything strange or supernatural.”

Reverend Gary Dudley, a Dudley family genealogist, believes there is no family connection between Joseph Dudley of Saybrook, Connecticut, and the cursed Edmund Dudley. “Edmund Dudley’s son, Robert, Earl of Leicester had two sons, and one was illegitimate,” Rev. Dudley said. “The legitimate son of Robert died too young to marry, and the other moved to Italy where he and his three children remained—there is no lineage between Robert and the Dudleys who eventually settled in Cornwall.”

Rev. Dudley believes Dudleytown’s “ghosts” may have been the work of human error: “The town produced a little flax and some rye, which is interesting because if rye is left to decay, the resulting mold is a hallucinogen. This makes me wonder if the ‘demons’ were the result of bad bread as opposed to actually being the devil’s work.” “Dudleytown became a town that was just trying to survive as opposed to grow and thrive,” Rev. Dudley concluded.

Ed Warren, noted demonologist and ghost hunter, believes Dudleytown was definitely cursed. “The Dudleys had an ancestor in England who was a judge and condemned many people to death for witchcraft,” Mr. Warren said. “The curse in Dudleytown started after the village became a thriving town. People went mad and reported seeing monstrosities in the forest—things that were unnatural. Dudleytown is cursed in that it is a tract of land with an aura of disaster”.

Nancy Zeigler, co-author of the book “Deadleytown”, said, “The people living in the Dark Entry Forest have a vested interest in saying there is nothing up there. Well, if there’s nothing up there, then why do we get strange things on our photographs? I’ve been slapped across the face and scratched with no one standing there.”

Okay, so what about "haunted Dudleytown" today? One of the more famous and publicized recent events is a TV camera crew's experience. Supposedly, they saw a huge black shadow emerge from one of the cellars, followed by an overpowering feeling of being suffocated. The team had to abandon their filming objectives when their equipment failed to work. Strange lights and sounds have been reported. People claim to feel oppressed or "not right" when visiting the grounds. There have been claims of seeing green glowing unknown animals and lights in the forest.

The Dark Entry Forest Association members have forbidden trespassing on their property. In 1999, they announced that they would no longer allow hikers on the land. In spite of this, many still go – now daring not only the spirits, but the authorities as well. Regardless of whether there was ever a curse or not, Satanists and black witches are performing rituals in the area that was Dudleytown. Robin “Boston” Barron, a ghost hunter and Dudleytown historian, said, “I once saw the bloody spine of a cow lying in one of the cellar holes in Dudleytown. It was definitely part of some ritual.” Some rocks lying along the trails have been painted or carved with symbols, and several people have been arrested for lighting fires or trespassing in the area.

Unfortunately, the ruins of Dudleytown have been vandalized in recent years and the constant streams of trespassers have had a negative effect on the ecology of the area. Just as unfortunate is the fact that the forbidden quality of Dudleytown is what brings so many curiosity-seekers to the vicinity. One waits until methods can be devised to better preserve the wilderness here and until this unsettled corner of New England can be opened to the public again. The area that was Dudleytown is quiet once again for the third time in its historic and colorful life, awaiting… what? A new chapter? The owls which gave Dudleytown the nickname “Owlsbury” still hoot in the tree tops; wildcats still growl from the rocky ledges, and in the winter, the only creatures who disturb the silence are the woodsy ones who live there. If nothing more, Dudleytown deserves to remain as is…silent, remote, completely peaceful. This, if nothing more, as a tribute to those hardy pioneers who did their best to tame the wild and rocky Connecticut wilderness…and failed.