Deep Dive
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Due to the nature of this episode, listener discretion is advised. This episode includes discussions of murder, violence, suicide, and mental illness. Consider this when deciding how and when you'll listen. Today, we're exploring an abandoned New England town. Some call it Owlsberry because it's owl's hoot during the day. The New York Times calls it the Village of the Damned.
But most people call it Dudleytown. It's a region near Cornwall, Connecticut bordering the Dark Entry Forest. With a name like Dark Entry, the Do Not Enter signs are no surprise. As of this recording, visiting Dudleytown is illegal. Everyone seems to agree that you shouldn't go to Dudleytown. What they can't agree on is why.
Welcome to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. I'm Carter Roy. You can find us here every Wednesday and be sure to check us out on Instagram at The Conspiracy Pod. Stay with us.
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Hi there, Carter Roy here. If you're interested in true crime, especially unsolved murders, serial killers, and cold cases, you'll love my brand new show, Murder True Crime Stories. Each episode covers a notorious murder or murders with a special focus on those who were impacted the most. We'll always leave with the knowledge of why these stories need to be heard. You can listen to Murder True Crime Stories wherever you get your podcasts.
Legends say Dudleytown is the victim of a centuries-old curse. Simply living there can lead to a sudden, violent end. And those who survive report cold-handed ghosts and snout-faced demons. But there's also evidence that the Dudleytown Curse is a conspiracy theory. And the legends were designed to benefit a small group of people. To get to the bottom of it,
Let's start with what this alleged curse looks like and some of the lore around Dudleytown. Dudleytown was first settled in the mid-1700s, but by 1880, the Brophy's were the last family standing. One by one, they'd watch their neighbors leave or die. Everyone was moving back to the cities where there weren't any woods for evil to hide in, or to other counties
where a man could grow enough wheat and corn to feed his family, and then some. But for the Brophy's, Dudleytown was home. There was John Patrick, the father, his wife, and their two kids. John was a laborer, the kind of man who worked on other people's farms, but never owned his own. The land in Dudleytown was far too infertile.
Still, John did his best for his family, so they held out together even as the last wagon rolled away through the trees. The Brophy's were survivors. Surely the terrors that had driven their neighbors out of Dudleytown wouldn't come for them. But they did. It started with a cough. John's wife hacked up blood. She grew pale and weak.
John cared for her as best he could, all the while ignoring the lingering thought he was being watched. There was no dark figure in the window. It was just a shadow. It had to be. When his wife passed, John and his children were devastated and scared. But instead of coming together in grief, something pulled them apart. In the wake of their mother's death, John's two children stood up and left the house.
They walked into the woods, step by step away from their father, away from Dudleytown. John spent all night waiting up, but his children never returned. Still, John stayed in the home where his wife had died, hoping for their return. For quite some time he lived alone, though he may not have felt alone. There was a darkness in Dudleytown.
He might have seen orbs floating in the trees or heard clawed creatures circling his home at night. Maybe on the edge of sleep, he felt the cold touch of his wife and children. Eventually, the darkness in Dudleytown came for John, too. One night, his house caught fire. He walked away from the ashes, but he couldn't escape.
John followed the path his children had taken deep into the woods. John Patrick Brophy was never seen again. By 1901, Dudleytown was finally empty. Every settler driven out by death, disease, murder, madness, or the supernatural. The curse of Dudleytown has two alleged origins. One for the old world, one for the new.
The Old World version begins with embezzlement. In the 1400s, the English government was out of funds and needed to raise money fast. So King Henry VII put Edmund Dudley on the job.
You know, the Sheriff of Nottingham from Robin Hood? Edmund Dudley's job was basically that. He was a smooth talker and a bad dude. According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Dudley and his squad rode around England terrorizing citizens into paying fines for crimes, often ones they didn't commit. Over the years, extortion made Dudley filthy rich.
He took his own cut of the fees for marriage licenses, tax increases, and murder pardons. Yeah, he was selling murder pardons, which couldn't have helped his popularity. The embezzlement plot was uncovered in 1509, and at the peak of his wealth, Edmund Dudley was arrested for treason.
Allegedly, one of Edmund's victims cursed him and his descendants to lose their minds, their reputations, and their riches. They'd die penniless and loathed. And sure enough, in 1510, Edmund Dudley was executed. In the span of a year, he'd lost everything, except his son, John Dudley.
Now, John spent his entire life trying to redeem the Dudley name, and he made a pretty good start.
He rose from the disgraced son of a traitor to a top military general and then earned the title Duke of Northumberland. But the Duke wanted more. He soon became one of the chief advisors to King Edward VI and then arranged for his son to marry the next queen, Jane Grey. Through his machinations, John all but assured a male of the Dudley line would sit on the throne.
He hadn't just saved the Dudleys' wealth and prestige, he'd increased it. Until the Duke followed in his father's cursed footsteps. John's schemes were discovered and he was beheaded for treason. His son and daughter-in-law met the same harsh fate. A Dudley would never sit on the English throne.
On his rise to fame, Duke John Dudley did father at least a dozen children. One was patient zero in a plague that killed thousands. Another was mysteriously dismissed from Queen Elizabeth I's royal court. The curse followed the Dudleys as they crossed the ocean to North America. William Dudley, John's grandson, was among the first settlers in Guilford, Connecticut.
Here's where we get the New World origin of the curse.
It surrounds Massachusetts Bay Colony Governor Thomas Dudley. Now, Thomas may or may not be related to John and Edmund Dudley. His genealogical records mysteriously end with an ancestor named John Dudley, who was born in England the same year as Duke John, but we don't know for sure if it's the same John.
To be fair, if my ancestors were executed for treason, I might try to cover it up too. Either way, Thomas shares a family resemblance with John and Edmund, well, at least when it comes to curses.
According to author Robert David Chase, Governor Thomas Dudley had no qualms about punishing people for crimes they didn't commit. Just like his possible ancestor Edmund, Thomas was a staunch Puritan who hated his Quaker neighbors and he abused his political power to have as many Quakers executed as possible.
Allegedly, one of these Quakers cursed Thomas, the Dudley clan, and the entire surrounding area. So, by the mid-1600s, the American Dudleys were cursed at least once, if not twice. And allegedly, this curse took effect quickly. One day, Thomas Dudley went out into the woods alone.
There, he was, quote, hacked to death by an unknown assailant. His murder was never solved. In 1747, one of the governor's nephews named Abel claimed ownership of that patch of forest. Abel was a veteran of the French and Indian Wars who hoped to become a farmer.
It wasn't easy. The land was tough, the elevation made growing crops hard, and the soil was poor and rocky.
But through hard work, farming became tenable. Flax, wheat, and corn all prospered. Slowly, the community grew. Politicians, professors, and judges all moved into the area. Parts of the dark entry forest were cleared for farmland and housing, and Abel's three brothers and their families moved in too. Since so many Dudleys lived there, they called the area Dudleytown.
And as Dudleytown grew, Abel got rich. But much like the other Dudleys, all his success would be ripped away. As Abel aged, he raved about monsters in the woods and hooved creatures on his property. Soon, his farm stopped turning a profit. Abel's caretaker had to sell off his vast estate piece by piece. He died with nothing to his name.
but the Dudley curse. And here's where the story gets wild. At this point, the curse doesn't just pass to the next member of the Dudley family. It passes to the entire town.
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After Abel Dudley died, something weird happened. His family's curse stayed tied to the town he'd founded. It wasn't officially incorporated, but since the Dudley family held so much sway, everyone just called it Dudleytown. And to be fair, the locals had some pretty big problems distracting them from bureaucracy. I am talking hooded horsemen, killer lightning, man-pigs, and plagues.
Abel's next door neighbor was a man named William Tanner. On one night in 1792, Tanner invited another neighbor, Gershon Hollister, over to visit. By the end of the night, Hollister was dead. Tanner was acquitted of the murder, but not the curse. Like Abel before him, Tanner told his fellow townspeople about monsters stalking through the woods and leering in the shadows.
They followed him for the rest of his life. Other Dudleytown neighbors met tragic ends too. After the Revolutionary War, General Herman Swift retired to Dudleytown. He'd grown up in the area, and he and his wife hoped to live out their golden years in peace. But shortly after they moved into their new home, lightning struck his wife, killing her instantly. The grief continued.
or the ghosts, drove the general mad. He spoke of creatures haunting him. This became a pattern in Dudleytown. People experienced sounds and lights they couldn't explain. It felt like they were being watched.
and even reported being touched by invisible ice-cold hands. It didn't help that something was driving owls to hoot during the day. Even the nocturnal birds seemed afraid of the dark.
Over the years, tragedies piled up. Assaults, mass murders and suicides. People abandoned Dudleytown, driven away by fear, illness or crop failure. Eventually, John Patrick Brophy was the only man left. When he walked into the woods around 1901, the curse of Dudleytown stood still, but only for a few decades.
Around the 1920s, Dr. William Clark and his wife needed a change of scenery. Clark was a successful oncologist, and at this point in his life, he wanted peace and privacy. With its tall trees, Dudleytown seemed perfect. So he bought about a thousand acres in the area. But for Mrs. Clark, perfect couldn't have been further from the truth.
The doctor returned home from work one night to find his front door cracked open. As he pushed his way inside, he heard a haunting cackle coming from the second floor. The curse had come for Mrs. Clark. Clark tried to get his wife help, but tragically, she died by suicide. After her death, Dr. Clark helped establish the Dark Entry Forest Preserve.
The hope was to keep the area pristine, to salvage what drew him to Dudleytown, and perhaps protect others from his wife's fate. But telling people to stay out of the forest seemed to have the opposite effect. In the 1930s, the creepy forests and abandoned town became a popular makeout spot for teens.
But the couples found they were in for a completely different adrenaline rush, experiencing the supernatural. One night, a teenage boy left his girlfriend in the car while he relieved himself among the trees. As he walked back, something attacked him.
The thing pinned him to the ground so close he could smell its rotting breath. He managed to fight off the beast, but returned to his girlfriend scratched and bleeding from the monster's claws. Over the next decade, reports flooded into the local sheriff's office. There was something lurking in the woods.
One teacher told the New York Times about her experience in the Dark Entry Forest. She couldn't explain why, but she felt called to the area. So she and her husband ventured into the Dark Entry Forest. While her husband stuck to the trail, she strayed from the path and wound up in an old, overgrown graveyard. Suddenly, she got the feeling that she wasn't alone.
She turned around and saw a dark, hooded figure sitting atop a black horse. The teacher stared, petrified, until she managed to scream her husband's name. But just as he came into the clearing, the hooded horseman disappeared into the ether. Given Dudleytown's history, their next visitors seemed inevitable. Ed and Lorraine Warren.
If those names seem familiar, they're the demonologist and psychic from the Conjuring movie series, which is based on their lives. After investigating Dudleytown, Ed declared: "When you're standing in the area, you do sense some kind of difference, even in broad daylight. On a lovely summer afternoon, you see that things don't quite grow right there, and there's a strange silence to the place.
You've never heard a place so quiet. We can't vouch for the stories of Dudleytown early in its history, but even if there weren't demonic forces at work then, there certainly are now. The Warrens and Robert David Chase profile Dudleytown in their 1989 book Ghost Hunters, describing its cursed history in detail, even if they couldn't verify it.
They also sent a team of psychics they'd personally vetted to assist in a local news special. Dudleytown was already locally known, but the Warrens put it on the map nationally.
Soon, the dark entry forest saw even more trespassers. Not just local teens, but people who treated it like a haunted house. With all the attention, it seemed like someone would finally get to the bottom of what was happening in Dudleytown. And one person put forth a surprising answer. Michael Gannett, the president of the Cornwall Historical Society, told the New York Times
"Go to Dudleytown," they tell you. It's this real ghostly place. But the truth is, Dudleytown's a big fraud. Dudleytown seems tailor-made for ghost stories. There's the abandoned settlement, the history of tragedies, the dark entry forest. And for Ed and Lorraine Warren, it's convenient Connecticut location.
By the time they came across Dudleytown in the 1980s, the Warrens had made New England's curses, ghosts, and demons a booming business. They'd already investigated several famous cases shown in the Conjuring movies, including the haunted Annabelle doll and the Amityville horror. They owned a museum of the occult. They'd started a supernatural investigation society, but they were angling for more.
So when they came across Edward Comfort Starr's book, A History of Cornwall, Connecticut, it was the demonic equivalent of a godsend. Starr wrote his history in the 1920s, shortly after Dr. Clark lost his wife, the latest person apparently driven mad by Dudleytown.
In the text, Starr documents the series of tragedies, the plagues, the suicides, and the dark demise of the Brophies. He also recounts how the town allegedly drove Abel Dudley, General Swift, and William Tanner to visions of creatures and demons. And he connects the town's founders to the Dudleys executed by the British royal court. But in over 500 pages, Starr never once uses the word Brophies.
Curse. That label seemingly originated with the Warrens. In the 1970s, they taped a Halloween special from the ruins of Dudleytown where they declared it cursed. Which brings us to today's conspiracy theory. Ed and Lorraine Warren invented the Dudleytown curse to sell books. The first major piece of evidence is
Much of the famous Dudleytown legend is contested. The stories I've told today are all commonly shared folklore, but there are other explanations. In the late 1990s, Texan Gary P. Dudley started investigating his ancestry, which naturally led him to Dudleytown. He says there's zero family connection between Abel Dudley and Edmund Dudley.
And though Abel Dudley is almost certainly Governor Thomas Dudley's nephew, Thomas's curse is also up for debate. The only source we can find stating the Dudleytown curse originated with Thomas Dudley is the book by Ed and Lorraine Warren.
Even weirder, historical accounts of Thomas Dudley don't mention his murder at all. Usually, if someone was murdered, it gets at least a sentence in their encyclopedia entry. Especially if it's an unsolved murder of a public figure and the victim was violently hacked to pieces.
But for Governor Thomas Dudley, all accounts simply state his date of death, July 31st, 1653. That leaves us with two options. Governor Dudley's murder was covered up or the Warrens invented it.
because every curse needs a good origin story. It's worth noting the Warrens' brand was extremely Catholic, so they were intimately familiar with tales of religious persecution and those persecutors getting their just desserts. And Thomas Dudley being violently murdered after a lifetime of persecuting Quakers fits that bill.
And that's not the only detail that doesn't line up. For example, Dr. William Clark's wife really did suffer from poor mental health and die by suicide. But she died in New York, not Dudleytown. Then there's the death of Gershon Hollister, allegedly murdered by his demon-plagued neighbor, William Tanner. But multiple historical accounts say that Hollister died when he fell off a barn.
And while William Tanner certainly talked about demons, he lived till age 104. It's very likely his madness was a combination of poor eyesight and senility. Same for Abel Dudley, who died in his 90s.
Now, when you're dealing with legends and folklore, details are bound to change in the retelling. Maybe William Tanner was somehow involved in Gershon Hollister's fall. Maybe Governor Dudley's murder really was a massive cover-up.
But this wouldn't be the first or last time Ed and Lorraine Warren put profit in front of facts. Many people go as far as calling them con artists. Ed's long-term mistress claims she helped the Warrens fake evidence of ghosts. And the tales of Amityville Horror and the Snedeker House have both come under fire for exaggerations.
But that didn't stop the Warrens from profiting off of books, interviews, movie rights, and museum tickets. Ed and Lorraine once used a murder trial for their own gain. During a 1981 interview, Lorraine told the Washington Post, quote, "'Will we have a book written about this? Yes, we will. Will we lecture about it? Yes, we will.'" And when the reporter asked if they were seeking a movie deal, Lorraine quipped, "'No, we're not.'"
our agents at the William Morris Agency are. For those unfamiliar with the entertainment industry, the William Morris Agency, now known as WME, is one of the top industry sales agencies. In 2009, they brokered the deal for the first The Conjuring movie. They've made millions off the Warrens since. In short, several people had a financial interest in Dudleytown being haunted.
Now, to be clear, we're not saying the Warrens invented the Dudleytown legend's whole cloth. One local interviewed by the New York Times alleged that Connecticut locals routinely told the dark tales of Dudleytown to entertain out-of-town visitors. So the Warrens were drawing from real local lore. They just added the curse of Thomas Dudley to the mix. And to be fair, in the final paragraphs of their coverage, the Warrens said,
the Warrens explicitly tell readers to avoid Dudleytown. But for a certain type of person, that's basically rolling out the welcome mat.
Local architect William Killam had been living on 40 acres near Dudleytown since 1938, enjoying the wilderness and solitude. But after the Warrens started publicizing the curse in the 1980s, he witnessed a transformation. Suddenly, there were tour buses driving along Dark Entry Road. People were touring the ruins of Dudleytown and paying $25 a ticket.
Once again, the curse was lucrative. According to the New York Times, people started calling Killam "the hermit of Dudleytown," which only added to the mystique and anger. In addition to the noise and pollution from tour buses, tourists tended to litter, harming wildlife in a dedicated nature preserve.
Another resident, Harriet Clark, who can trace her ancestors back to the original settlement, said: "Today's owners and taxpayers of Dudleytown are professional people who live there for privacy and seclusion. They do not welcome tourists or those seeking tales of chilling or wild experiences. Please do not come. There are no ghosts, no spirits, and no curse."
Pretty quickly, the roads leading to the old abandoned settlement were closed off with gates and fences. But trespassers still came. According to one officer in the early 2000s, the local police responded to 79 trespassing complaints in a single year. Though not all calls come from the neighboring property owners. Once, a group of teenagers got lost in the woods while looking for evidence of the paranormal.
But in the pitch black of the night, they couldn't find their way out. Terrified, the kids called 911. The authorities sent out a full rescue squad. State troopers, firemen, search dogs, even a helicopter. They found the horrified ghost hunters. But that's not all. They also found six more teens lost in the woods. A completely separate ghost hunting group.
The neighbors upped their efforts to keep people out and Dudleytown was legally closed to the public. But as recently as 2011, filmmakers were arrested for trespassing in the Dudleytown woods. Dudleytown ghost sightings still happen as recently as 2023.
And despite the public statements, the rumors only grow stronger. Dudleytown isn't closed off because paranormal tourists cause problems. It's because the town is too cursed to visit. So the story persists. It could be because something really is haunting the Dudleys, and by extension, Dudleytown. Or maybe the area was simply a bad place to live.
Crops don't grow well, and many farms failed. At a time when farming was most people's livelihoods, that was a catastrophe. It might as well have been a curse. Locals passed down the stories for generations, first as a warning, then as entertainment. After decades, the Warrens borrowed the stories and passed them to the broader public, who ate the tales up. After all, who doesn't love a spooky story?
Thank you for listening to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. We're here with a new episode every Wednesday, and be sure to check us out on Instagram at TheConspiracyPod. For more information on Dudleytown, we found coverage by National Geographic and The New York Times.
as well as Edward C. Starr's book, A History of Cornwall, Connecticut, and Ghost Hunters, True Stories from the World's Most Famous Demonologists by Robert David Chase and Ed and Lorraine Warren, extremely helpful to our research. Do you have a personal relationship to the stories we tell? Send a short audio recording telling your story to conspiracystoriesatspotify.com. Until next time, remember...
The truth isn't always the best story, and the official story isn't always the truth. Conspiracy Theories is a Spotify podcast. This episode was written by Jesse Harris and Maggie Admire, edited by Chelsea Wood, researched and fact-checked by Chelsea Wood, and sound designed by Spencer Howard. Our head of programming is Julian Boisreau. Our head of production is Nick Johnson, and Spencer Howard is our post-production supervisor.
I'm your host, Carter Roy. This episode is brought to you by Hills Pet Nutrition. When you feed your pet Hills, you help feed a shelter pet, providing dogs and cats in need with science-led nutrition that helps make them happy, healthy, and ready to be adopted.
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