Demons Of Dark Entry Forest
What Evil Made a Team Of Young Scriptwriters Beat A Retreat From Dudleytown?

By David Segal
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 7, 2007

CORNWALL, Conn.

The road is an unpaved one-laner that winds steeply up a mountain and dead-ends near 750 acres of trees, mud and the ruins of a long-abandoned enclave known for centuries as Dudleytown. It looks like a typical patch of forest in northwestern Connecticut, but don't be fooled.

This is home to a vortex of evil. Or it's haunted by demonic forces. Maybe both. It depends on whom you ask.

The place was settled, according to lore, in the 1740s by the cursed offspring of a British nobleman, Edmund Dudley, who was beheaded for alleged acts of treason by King Henry VIII. Today the property is owned by a group called the Dark Entry Forest Inc. and, although that name all but shouts "We dare you to walk through our totally haunted forest," the organization has been trying for years to keep a regular flow of demon-seeking visitors, and their beer cans, away. "No trespassing" signs, with threats of fines, are plastered on every other tree.

The signs don't work.

"I never go in without holy water," says Douglas Kirkpatrick. A 49-year-old lawyer and aspiring filmmaker, Kirkpatrick was standing by the Dudleytown gate one recent afternoon, holding a plastic bottle, festooned with a cross, that he bought for $1.50 at a church. Every time he walks through Dudleytown, he says, he feels a "magnificent energy" that sets his heart palpitating.

It's an experience he plans to bring to a theater near you. Last year, he and his brother David, a Hollywood veteran and former president of Paramount Pictures, teamed up to make a scripted horror movie about Dudleytown. To get started, the brothers attempted what Douglas now calls, a little ruefully, "an experiment."

They hired six writers and installed them in a house rented in nearby Cornwall. Their job was not to flip out and kill each other, though given the inspirational DVDs they were provided -- like "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and the "The Blair Witch Project" -- that is what it sounds like. Their job was to soak up the local atmosphere and write a story about a group of young writers living near a forest of evil who start dying mysteriously and violently.

You hear different versions of what happened in that house from different people. What's not disputed is that after six weeks of cohabitation, all the writers jumped in their cars and took off.

"One guy drove straight to Indiana and checked himself into a mental institution," Kirkpatrick says.

In his telling, the whole episode is a strange case of life anticipating art, with elements of MTV's "The Real World" and "The Shining" tossed in. The truth, of course, is more complicated, but the full story of Dudleytown leads to one inescapable conclusion:

The place is cursed, all right. It's just not cursed in the way you might think.

* * *

Dudleytown isn't easy to find. It's not marked on any reliable maps, and the locals generally won't offer directions. Visitors who find the right road and park their cars on it are often ticketed, and occasionally they are accosted by an unfriendly woman in a red SUV who calls herself a representative of Dark Entry; she usually takes a photograph and calls the police.

When Douglas Kirkpatrick first visited, he thought he had the makings of a new horrorfilm franchise. He describes himself as open-minded on the question of whether the place is actually a phantom-stuffed hamlet of doom -- the result, he explains, of his Catholic upbringing.

"Who am I to say?" he shrugs, when asked about the holy water. "There are certain things you can do to protect yourself, and as long as I maintain my faith in God, that will protect me."

Kirkpatrick has longish, graying hair, vivid blue eyes and the overeager smile of a teenager. He spent years in Los Angeles, doing legal work for filmmakers. In 2004 he and his wife, Melinda, returned to Massachusetts, where he grew up. He started a company called Red Barn Films last year, hoping to break into the world of movie production.

He had a superb connection. David Kirkpatrick worked at the top executive offices at Paramount and Disney, where he helped make millions with teen-friendly fare such as "Grease" and "Top Gun." Kirkpatrick was known as a brusque, hard-living character, reportedly the inspiration for Tim Robbins's character in "The Player." After a few lean years as an independent producer in the '90s, he became a born-again Christian and in 2005 co-founded Good News Holdings, a "spiritainment company," dedicated to spreading the Gospel through mass media.

So when his younger brother pitched Dudleytown, David Kirkpatrick had in mind a Christian horror flick -- cute young guy defeats evil force, with an assist from God. Not exactly the approach that Douglas imagined, but the brothers looked past their differences when they posted an ad on Craigslist to recruit those writers. "Extremely confidential project deals with horror/demonic/dark side/theological with a worldview -- good v. evil theme," the ad read, in part. "Theological background and local presence a plus."

The successful applicants, chosen largely on writing samples, gathered last August for a brief orientation meeting in their new home in Cornwall. It was a pumpkin-colored house right near a main road. David and Douglas were present and they seemed, even then, to have very different movies in mind.

"I could tell there was going to be a problem," says Connor Timmis, an aspiring actor who'd been through Dudleytown a few times and was asked by Douglas, then his agent, to serve as tour guide for the group. "When I walked in the house, the Good News people were showing this demo reel, which was this lame, non-scary, amateurish trailer. I was like, this is your idea for a Dudleytown movie?"

The Good News crew wasn't taking this demonic possession thing lightly. A woman brought along for the occasion began to recite incantations to rid the house of evil spirits. And when the group headed that day to Dudleytown, the man tapped to direct the film, Greg Michael, refused to enter.

For the writers, this was an unsettling start, but for many it was their first job out of college and the pay -- $1,000 a week -- was excellent. All the writers had to do was brainstorm some ideas for the book, and start typing.

But that never happened.

* * *

As with every good folk legend, there are a dozen different versions of the story of Dudleytown. The most common starts with Edmund Dudley, a onetime chancellor of the exchequer of England who was put to death in 1510, purportedly as a scapegoat for the economic failures of England. His grandson, Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, emigrates from England; his heirs are the founders of Dudleytown.

Maxing out at 26 families, it hardly rated as a town and relied on Cornwall for its church, stores and meetinghouses. What it never lacked, say true believers, was carnage. There's Gershom Hollister, murdered at the home of William Tanner. (Soon after, Tanner goes insane.) A family is scalped by Indians. The children of John Patrick Brophy vanish. Women commit suicide. You get the idea. By 1900 the place is deserted.

The writers recruited by the Kirkpatricks steeped themselves in this legend, but their collaboration yielded nothing. A group that seemed motivated and smart turned listless.

"You drop five or six kids into a house that's two miles from a purported hypercenter of paranormal activity and then you give them serious work to do," Douglas Kirkpatrick says. "It's like telling scary stories around a fire."

The writers have a different take. Almost as soon as they settled in, they say, the brothers started issuing contradictory instructions. The plot changed constantly; characters were ordered into existence, then out of existence. The writers waited for Douglas and David to decide on a single story, and until then, all effort seemed pointless. Far from battling the willies, the writers were bored.

Ultimately, the Kirkpatricks were unable to find common ground, and in September they ended their partnership, citing "spiritual differences," as it said in a Good News press release. David Kirkpatrick did not return calls for this story.

Like children in a noisy divorce, the writers gradually realized that they were in the middle of a fight that they were powerless to stop. That, they say, is why they left.

Today, each Kirkpatrick says he is in the preproduction phase of a Dudleytown movie, "Dudleytown Curse -- the 49th Key" (Douglas) and "Dudleytown" (David). Whether either will ever reach the cineplex isn't clear. Neither has started filming, and "The 49th Key" lacks a cast or funding.

"We're in a race against time," says Douglas, "because we'd like to start filming in New England before the leaves start falling."

Neither production, of course, will film anywhere close to the actual Dudleytown. An attorney for Dark Entry sent a letter to Good News in March threatening a defamation suit if the company so much as mentions Dudleytown in its film. Several Dark Entry shareholders contacted for this story declined to comment, apparently for fear that any publicity would elevate the films' profile and tempt financial backers.

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.