Connecticut’s Most Haunted Places
Ghosts Among Us: Villages of the Damned, the Green Lady, Lighthouses and Cemeteries
Halloween is nigh, and that means it’s time for people from all walks of life to aggravate the police by poking around in abandoned buildings and old cemeteries in the dead of night, looking for ghosts. Connecticut, having a long and colonial history, has a lot of haunted sites lurking in hidden places you never knew existed; here are the five most ghostly.
1. Dudleytown
Any list of haunted places in Connecticut has to begin with Dudleytown. Despite the name, Dudleytown wasn’t actually a town— it was an area of Cornwall that at best could be called a township, but being filled primarily with people belonging to the Dudley family earned itself the name of Dudleytown, and has since gained a reputation as a ghost village. Located in the shadow of three mountains (Woodbury Mountain, Bald Mountain, and the Coltsfoot Triplets), Dudleytown is known for its lack of sunlight and unsettling atmosphere, and, most prominently, the curse on one of the original founding families.
The family is where the legend begins. One of the medieval Dudley’s was beheaded for his attempts to overthrow King Henry VIII, and subsequently a curse was said to have been placed on the Dudley family, both present and future. When some of the Dudley’s migrated from England to Cornwall, Connecticut, in the mid-1700s, they became founding members of the small community of Dudleytown, and, as some would have it, the curse began to do its work in earnest.
After the founding of Dudleytown, its residents experienced a series of bizarre and gruesome events, including an epidemic during the late 1700s that killed an entire family, a kidnapping, and death by lightning strike. More followed; the wife of famous editor Horace Greeley committed suicide in 1872. She was a native of Dudleytown. The struggle to farm the rocky land combined with all of the odd deaths that kept occurring seems to have driven most of the residents out a few years later, and by the turn of the century, the town was deserted.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t end there. In 1920, Dr. William Clark moved to Cornwall from New York and founded the Dark Entry Forest Association in order to make the land near Dudleytown a nature preserve. One summer, he was away for a few days, but his wife stayed behind in Connecticut. When Dr. Clark came home a few days later— according to legend— she had gone insane, and spent the rest of her life in an institution. There was no apparent reason as to why she had lost her mind.
Many theories abound as to what exactly happened in Dudleytown. Some say there’s a high concentration of lead in the groundwater, which could have caused the community to be slowly poisoned. Others say that some of the farmers there grew rye, often the cause of hallucinations when the ergot fungus grows on spoiled crops. Whatever the cause, it can’t be denied that were indeed a lot of deaths in Dudleytown.
Today Dudleytown is a hotspot for ghost hunters, paranormal enthusiasts, and teenagers. Visiting is not recommended, as the land is still owned by the Dark Entry Forest Association and No Trespassing signs are posted everywhere. The only two access points are private roads, and police are very enthusiastic about ticketing trespassers. In all honesty, though, you’re not missing much. Like I said before, Dudleytown was never actually a town, so there’s not much there other than a few stone walls and some shallow impressions in the ground where the foundations of houses used to be. There’s plenty of sunlight (contrary to what you may have read elsewhere, there are still animals up there, and the birds do not stop chirping) and plenty of mosquitoes. However, the mysterious history of Dudleytown makes this the most famously haunted place in Connecticut, and it will most likely remain a location of fascination to believers for years to come.
2. New London Ledge Lighthouse
Built in 1909, this lighthouse would be unique even if it weren’t haunted. It’s located off the coast of New London, smack in the middle of the water, and has a distinctive square-sided structure known as French Second Empire style, supposedly built to fit in with the swanky homes along the shore in the early 1900s.
However, its architecture isn’t what interests most people— the ghost is. Sometime in the 1920s or 1930s, one of the lighthouse keepers (named Ernie, or Randolph, or possibly John Randolph) found out that his wife had left him and run off with the captain of the Block Island ferry. He either jumped or fell off the roof and died, and now his ghost is said to haunt the lighthouse. Doors open and close on their own, TVs turn on and off, and, according to www.lighthouse.cc/newlondonledge/, decks have “swabbed themselves.” In 1987, on the day before Ledge Light became fully automated, one of the Coast Guard men on duty wrote a strange entry in the log: Rock of slow torture. Ernie’s domain. Hell on earth — may New London Ledge’s light shine on forever because I’m through. I will watch it from afar while drinking a brew.
3. Fairfield Hills State Hospital
It’s kind of a law that abandoned mental institutions end up being considered haunted, even if there are no specific examples of ghosts. Newtown’s Fairfield Hills is one such hospital. Opened in 1933, it housed over 4,000 psychiatric patients in its heyday, but closed in 1995 after an increased emphasis on replacing institutionalization with shorter-term, more local healthcare.
The large campus contains around twenty buildings, most of which have the classic asylum look of red brick and white columns, and is famous for its network of underground tunnels. It’s also well-known for the techniques used during its years of operation: patient seclusion, shock therapy, and frontal lobotomies. Rumors of mistreatment abound, although these could just be urban legend, which does tend to pop up around treatment centers for the mentally ill.
According to a friend who’s visited the hospital, the architecture of the buildings is beautiful, but creepy. The grounds are open, and apparently people regularly walk there; there are even hiking trails in the area. The buildings themselves are closed. Most of the windows are broken, and although no ghosts were spotted, my friend was mystified by the fact that even though it was the middle of summer and there was (obviously) no air conditioning in the abandoned buildings, there was still a freezing cold draft wafting out of the windows. A glimpse through one of these open windows revealed that they were still full of equipment, furniture, and folders with papers still spread out on desks: “It was literally like one day everyone just got up and left.”
4. Seventh Day Baptist Cemetery, aka Green Lady Cemetery
Nobody knows exactly who the Green Lady is, but the common consensus seems to be that she is the ghost of Elisabeth Palmiter, a young woman who, one day around the year 1800, went out to look for her missing husband in a snowstorm and drowned to death in a swamp. Either that or she was killed by her husband and thrown into the swamp so he wouldn’t get caught.
The former story is a little more romantic than the latter, but regardless of what happened, there is now a green mist that occasionally appears in the Burlington cemetery, resolves into the figure of a woman in a green dress, smiles, and dematerializes. Sometimes there are also mysterious lights.
The cemetery itself, located on Upson Road, is not all that impressive. Most of the gravestones are gone, and what’s left are only tiny little stubs. There was a large stone marking the grave of Elisabeth Palmiter— erected in the 1970s as a replacement for the vandalized original—, but it has since been stolen, so the only real attraction in this cemetery is the Green Lady herself, if you’re lucky enough to see her.
5. Union Cemetery
Very, very old cemeteries are clearly the best spots for solid hauntings. Union Cemetery, in the town of Easton, dates from the 1600s, and is famous for the White Lady, who has been photographed, recorded, and otherwise documented by innocent bystanders and professional paranormal investigators alike. Her identity is unknown, but there are several stories concerning her death, most of which involve murder.
The apparition is said to have long, dark hair and wear a white gown. She appears in the middle of Routes 59 and 111, makes drivers think they’ve hit her with their car, and then disappears. There are also stories of a white mist that floats through the cemetery, as well as red eyes that sometimes appear in the middle of the night (a separate spirit called, appropriately enough, “Red Eyes”).
Union Cemetery is open to the public during daylight hours, but is closed after sunset; as with most haunted locations, police do not encourage trespassing. The grounds are much less dilapidated than the Green Lady Cemetery, however, and should provide a suitably creepy atmosphere for ghost-hunters even if the White Lady doesn’t put in an appearance.
–Sarah Alender is a Contributor to The Free George.
The Free George is the online magazine and visitors’ guide of Upstate NY, covering things from Albany to Lake Placid, including Saratoga, the Lake George region and the Adirondacks. Check out our City Blogs section for our extended coverage areas as well.
