Demons Of Dark Entry Forest

It's easy to sympathize. Dark Entry was founded in the 1920s by a doctor from the New York area looking for a place of refuge for himself and his friends. Today the group is reportedly made up of the heirs of the out-of-town physicians, lawyers and nurses who bought the original shares. Try to imagine how you would feel if you drove home tonight to find a bunch of kids parked at a campfire in your backyard, giggling about demons, babbling about murders.

But wait, doesn't Dudleytown have all this sinister history? It's not like any old woods, is it?

Actually, it is.

The tale of Dudleytown is usually told as a ghost story, but it's more like an episode of "Scooby-Doo," with entirely natural explanations for events that are supposed to have otherwordly causes. Those who have bothered to check the historical records will tell you the place was never the site of any mishap or death that defies rational explanation. Not one. Sure, people died there -- because people lived there.

And given that the entire theory of a curse rests on a link between Edmund Dudley and the Connecticut Dudleys, here is more demystifying news: The families apparently aren't related.

"No connection whatsoever," says Gary Dudley, a retired high school teacher and author of "The Legend of Dudleytown." Dudley studied the genealogical evidence -- he had an obvious interest -- and discovered that there are 18 different Dudley lines, and the two in question have no ancestors in common.

"I can't even figure out what is supposed to be cursed," Dudley said on the phone recently. "If it's the name, why am I not cursed? And if it's the place, why did just seven people die in the course of nearly 150 years? It's all just made up."

The hooey, Dudley says, can be traced to "They Found a Way," a 1938 book that dedicated a chapter to the murmurings about Dudleytown. The story languished until the '70s, when "The Exorcist" revived interest in all things satanic. In 1993, Dan Aykroyd called Dudleytown "the most haunted place on Earth" in an interview in Playboy. Other mentions followed.

But the Internet gave this regional legend a national profile, and the mythology has become a virus that nothing can kill. In 2001, Dark Entry released a statement announcing that Dudleytown was closed to visitors, citing a procession of yahoos who were leaving garbage in the woods. This, naturally, was taken by true believers as a sign that something wicked was hidden in the forest.

"I suggested once that Disney open a make-believe Dudleytown in a place where the locals would benefit from it," says Gordon Ridgway, Cornwall's first selectman, a post analogous to mayor, "but that hasn't happened."

Instead, the cars keep coming. On the day that Douglas Kirkpatrick applied that holy water, a group of just-out-of-college-aged kids road-tripping from Vermont came strolling out of the Dudleytown forest. They looked like the cast of a horror movie, just before the guy with a machete shows up.

For one, this was a return trip.

"It was four or five years ago," said Matt Odice. "We heard something in the woods and it was running up the hill with us."

No one in this group knew much about Dudleytown. They had just heard something about a curse. None of them seemed to realize: They are the curse. The idea that Dudleytown is cursed is its curse, and it dooms the place to a never-ending conga line of chuckleheads and six-packs -- which, when you think about it, is nearly as bad as a howling army of the undead.