I grew up in New England. The American northeast is a hotbed of haunted house stories and haunted places in general. Whether it's Sleepy Hollow, or the Warrens, or Dudleytown (the scariest place I've ever been in person), haunted places abound where I grew up.
Let's start with Dudleytown. It's also sometimes known as Owlsbury or Dudleytown hill, but those names are only for geographers and historians. Everyone who grew up in Northwestern Connecticut, as I did, called it "Dudleytown," so that's what we'll go with.
Dudleytown itself is located in what is now Cornwall, Connecticut, in the part of the Appalachian Mountains that extend through Litchfield County, Connecituct. The three mountains in particular that Dudleytown is located between are the Coltsfoot Triplets, Bald Moutain and Woodbury Mountain. Dudleytown is a ghost town, and it is spooky as hell.
It was first incorporated in 1740, though it had been inhabited for nearly a century before that. Its inhabitants were considered skilled and hard working, but very few were prosperous. Even so, Dudletown boomed to the point that it ended up gaining its own town hall and meeting house by 1800, even though the Mt. Riga ironworks had taxed the area of so much of its natural resources, mostly lumber.
Over the following century, the land in and around Dudleytown was taxed more and more by the local timber and iron industries. Eventually the area was completely stripped, meaning run-off from the moutains ended up washing away crops every spring. Because of that the residents of Dudleytown were less nourished than those of neighboring towns, and they ended up having a lower birthrate than the expected norms. And once the children were born, they had a much lower survival rate as well.
Epidemics such as cholera and smallpox also took their toll. By the 1900s there was virtually no permanent settlement at Dudleytown, as every family had fled for more sustainable land either elsewhere in New England our out west in the great expanse of America.
Dudleytown's addition to the list of haunted places really began in 1940s, when tales of mass hysteria, suicides and ghost sitings began to take hold. Today it has become a popular target of ghost hunters and other paranormal experts, with many claiming hard evidence that Dudleytown is one of America's haunted places. Whether they're correct or not will be up for debate, but I can say I've been there personally, and it's as spooky as hell.
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