Tag Archives: dudleytown

Dudleytown, Connecticut

Nationality: White
Age: 54
Occupation: Bank CFO
Residence: New Britain, CT
Performance Date: January 5, 2019
Primary Language: English

Context:

The informant – my dad, RS – is a white man in his early 50s, born and raised in Cheshire, Connecticut, but living in South Florida now. He was raised Catholic on a farm with two siblings. He’s skeptical of the supernatural for the most part, but is pretty familiar with a lot of the Connecticut’s many ghost stories. The following conversation took place in person during a larger conversation in which he told me a number of his favorite Connecticut ghost stories. It was, for the most, part a classic storytelling situation, but at times felt more like a sharing of childhood memories than the dramatic performance of a ghost story.

Piece:

RS: Supposedly the most haunted place in all of Connecticut is Dudleytown in Cornwall. Dudleytown used to be a small town in early colonial times, founded by the Dudley family. There are many versions of the story, but the one I remember is that, I believe, a long time ago, one man in Dudleytown went insane and murdered everybody in the small town. Decades later, they built a new town where Dudleytown used to be, but the town was cursed with horrible misfortune. People either died from disease, or went insane, the population dwindling to nothing overtime, once again. Now, Dudleytown is just ruins, I few miles hike into the woods in Cornwall. Your mother dragged me out there once when we first met to go camping – it’s a big destination for lovers of the paranormal like your mother. Though I don’t believe this, she claims that she took photos of the ruins, and that when she looked at the photos later, strange markings and writing were on the rocks and rubble that weren’t there before.

 

Me: Who told you about Dudleytown?

RS: I believe it was your mother, though I may have heard about it from my friends back when I was a kid.

Me: What do you make of the story?

RS: I’m not sure… I don’t really believe that one man went crazy and murdered an entire town, but I guess I’d have to look into the history of it.

Analysis:

I think the legend of Dudleytown was most likely invented to provide a spooky reasoning for the town being abandoned. Unlike other places in America that are in constant renovation, Connecticut is filled with decaying old buildings, resulting in both a number of creepy sights that beg for spooky stories to explain them and a direct connection with the past. Insanity seems to often come up in Connecticut ghost stories, likely due to the large number of abandoned asylums in the state.

 

Curse of Dudleytown

Nationality: Canada
Age: 35
Occupation: Teacher
Residence: LA
Performance Date: 2/20/17
Primary Language: English

Informant is a teacher living in LA.

The story is one from a  summer camp in CT where he and I met originally. The subject of the story is a town called “Dudleytown” which suffers a horrible curse: every 7 years, somebody nearby dies.

“So Dudleytown as you know, is haunted. Every seven years, somebody nearby dies. That’s because Edward Dudley was cursed by King Henry for treason, and the curse followed him across the Atlantic Ocean and caused all their crops to die. Now, nobody’s growing crops there anymore. But the curse still comes up once every seven years……. some things just stick with the location geographically, you know?”

He says he heard the story from other people at the camp when he first got there, as the location was relatively close by. He swears it is real and true but he does so with an air of silliness, indicating to me that this belief is faux-sincerity. I think this choosing-to-believe makes sense: people like the strong narrative of a 7-year-curse more than they want to “ruin the fun” in applying logic. It’s a fun belief and brings people together over a common fear, even if it is just pretend.