Welcome to Lore Legends, a subset of lore episodes that explore the strange tales we whisper in the dark, even if they can't always be proven by the history books. So if you're ready, let's begin. It's meant to be a time of fun and bonding, where kids make friendships that last a lifetime, and teens have romances that last until, well, until they have to go back to school. I'm talking, of course, about summer camp, a rite of passage for many American children and their parents, the latter of which who just need a break for a few months.
But many of our favorite horror movies have painted the summer camp experience as something less than wholesome, where campfire songs are replaced with the screams of victims, and sleeping bags become nothing more than flimsy coffins. Films like Friday the 13th, which was filmed at Camp Nobie Bosco in Hardwick, New Jersey, a real-life Boy Scout summer camp. There was also Sleepaway Camp, and it sequels as well as 1988's Cheerleader Camp. It seems there is no scarier place than a secluded compound in the woods, full of innocent children and crazed teenagers.
But why is that? What makes camp such a scary place, and the perfect setting for knife-wielding murderers and ghostly-hunting? Well, it might have to do with the stories behind some very real summer camps, ones that have been plagued by the monsters spoken about when the moon is high, and the marshmallows have been toasted black. So gather around the fire, and I'll tell you some tales.
Just keep an ear out for the sounds of a hooked hand scraping against the trees, or the haunting sight of a woman who's lost her head. Because at summer camp, anything is possible, just as long as it's frightening. I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore Legends. Located across 450 acres of Brandywine, Maryland is the William S.
Schmidt Outdoor Education Center. But everyone knows it as Camp Schmidt. It was named for the former superintendents who presided over the public school system there from 1951 through 1970. Today, Camp Schmidt collaborates with schools from all over Washington, D.C.
and Maryland to get young kids out of the cities and into the woods for just a little while. They learn all about nature, team-building, and problem-solving. And after dark, when the lights go out and the crickets come out to sing, the children tell each other scary stories about the camp and the lore that makes up its history. Stories like that of Old Man Clutch.
No summer camp tale is more prominent at Camp Schmidt than Old Man Clutch. Legend has it that the camp sits on an old tobacco plantation. It's a fact that's hard to prove, but the presence of other plantation homes in the area lends credibility to its provenance. The plantation was supposedly owned by the Clutch family, led by a cantankerous patriarch known as Old Man Clutch.
He had seven children, two of whom died and were buried on the property. Their gravestones have said to reside somewhere in the woods nearby, something of a historical Easter egg for campers today to scurry off and find. But what really made Old Man Clutch famous was his left leg, which caused him to walk with a staggering limp. Oh, and his missing head.
You see, Old Man Clutch had fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War and met at a timely end when he was decapitated on the battlefield. According to campers, he wanders the grounds of his former home to this day, waiting for poor, unsuspecting souls to stray into the woods. And when he finds them, it's said that he cuts off their heads, which he carries with him wherever he goes in a great big sack. Counselors usually tell the story to their campers as a way to keep them from venturing off on their own.
And as with most summer camp tales, this one has always happened to the person telling it just many years earlier. As the story goes, it starts with counselors telling a group of kids about Old Man Clutch, and usually everyone laughs at the part where he cuts off their heads. But then later that night, several campers decide to sneak off on their own into the dense, dark woods looking for proof. It's usually four girls and two boys wielding flashlights and a dangerous dose of curiosity.
Without warning, though, a loud rustling is heard as though something is being dragged through the underbrush. Suddenly, a figure emerges from the trees, pulling a heavy sack behind him. And although they can barely see him in the darkness, one thing is clear. The figure has no head.
So the children flee through the woods, screaming while the light from their flashlight bounces off the trees as though it's just as confused and afraid as they are. But Old Man Clutch is hot on their trail, hoping to add another head to his collection. The campers, of course, eventually make it back to their bunks, relieved that they all outran the legendary monster. Well, almost all of them.
As the children look around, they notice one of the girls didn't make it back. They go and wake the counselors to tell them what happened, and pretty soon a search party is organized. But it doesn't matter how long they search, or how much of the woods they scour. The girl is never found.
And just as you might expect, each retelling ends with a following morning when the victim's bracelet is discovered in front of her cabin. An ominous reminder to the others that summer camp isn't always about fun and friendships. It's also about fear. So if you ever get a chance to go visit Camp Schmidt for yourself and want to explore the woods, go right ahead.
Just be sure not to lose your head. Camp Owens in Marion, Ohio has something in common with Camp Schmidt. But more on that later. Located in North Central Ohio, Marion is full of history, both light and dark.
It's the hometown of America's 29th President, Warren G. Harding, as well as an annual popcorn festival. It was also a stop on the Underground Railroad. But during the early 20th century, Marion sadly became a sundown town, and the African-American residents who had lived there for generations were forced out.
It's more sinister background also extends to other parts of the town as well, including a haunted hotel and a country club murder. Marion's boy scouts, though, would spend their summers at Camp Owens, named after the Owens family patriarch John A. Owens, who allowed the scouts to use his land for camp outs, starting way back in 1925. Then one of the regular stories the campers would tell revolved around a woman named Headless Hattie.
It seems that a ghostly figure lacking their head is somewhat common at summer camps. And according to the scouts themselves, there is more than just one version of the Headless Hattie story. In one telling Hattie, this time with two D's in her name, was the wife of a farmer who had lived north of the camp. One day the couple's neighbors stopped by to check in on them.
The farmer and his wife hadn't been seen around town for quite a while. When they got there, the neighbors found Hattie dead. Well, most of her. Her body was still there, but her head had been chopped off, and the husband was completely gone, never to be seen again.
One version claimed that it was her husband who had actually done the chopping. Another blamed the deed on a band of thieves. But no matter who is telling the story or how, it always ends the same way, with Headless Hattie, with two T's this time in her name, haunting the camp, searching for her missing head. She is usually seen mucking through the swampy quarry on the edge of the property.
And just as with old man clutch, older scouts used the story of Headless Hattie to keep the younger ones in line and discourage them from wandering off after dark. They even take them on a tour of an old, dilapidated farmhouse on the grounds as they tell them the story, supposedly the house that was once occupied by Hattie herself. But is the story true? Had a woman really lost her head to her husband or a group of violent thieves a long time ago?
Well, according to a book owned by the local scout's office, back in the 1800s, a prominent German colony had once occupied the lamp that the camp now sits on, and the dilapidated farmhouse on Camp Owens is the last vestige of that once thriving community. The man who lived there had purchased a life-size statue of a beautiful woman as a gift for his wife. The woman, taken with the gift, placed it in her garden so that she could admire it among the greenery growing there. Sadly, the statue was at the mercy of the elements.
As time went on, the wind and the rain began to eat away at it, so the woman moved the statue to an upper porch where she hoped it might be more protected. But by then, it was too late. The statue started to fall apart, and one day, her head cracked off and tumbled to the ground below. At dusk one evening afterward, a rider passed by the house and noticed the silhouettes of a headless figure standing at one of the windows.
And with that, the legend of Headless Hattie was born. Isolated wooded campgrounds aren't the only places with their own haunted legends. Cities like New York are crawling with more than just rats and tourists. They're teeming with stories of terrified figures who bring nothing but dread and sorrow to the people who live there.
Staten Island, for example, was home to several mental hospitals, facilities that had been known to breed tales of lost patients and disgruntled former workers that now terrorize the local population. One of those institutions was Willowbrook State School, which opened its doors in 1947. It was intended to house the most vulnerable people in the borough, with the goal of providing these individuals with a safe, welcoming place for them to live out their days. But Willowbrook was anything but safe or welcoming.
By 1955, it had reached its full capacity of 4,000 students, but it kept growing. The number ballooned to 6,200 by 1969, and most of those living there were children. At various points, diseases like hepatitis and measles spread like wildfire throughout the school, and the word school here is used very loosely. There was almost no educational resource available to the people at Willowbrook, and many were left huddled together in rooms moaning by themselves.
Violence and abuse was also common, both from staff and from other residents. Often students would be left naked or smeared in their own urine and feces for long periods of time without any supervision. It wasn't until the 1970s, when a pair of journalists stuck a camera into Willowbrook that people finally got a first-hand look at the atrocities being committed within its walls. They was finally shut down in 1987.
Another institution was Sea View Hospital, which was once one of the largest tuberculosis sanitariums in the US. Its first buildings were constructed in 1905 and housed most of Staten Island's urban poor. But by the 1970s and 80s, most of the buildings there had been abandoned. Urban spelunkers would wander the empty halls and spray paint all kinds of words and symbols on the walls, stepping over random pill bottles and papers strewn about.
Meanwhile, beneath the once bustling hospital, underground tunnels wound their way from one end to the other like a nest of coiling serpents, and out of these facilities, King the Legend of Cropsy. He was the boogeyman of Staten Island, a homicidal madman who had once resided in one of these institutions. It might have been Willowbrook or it could have been Sea View. No one is quite sure.
Some locals claim that he had killed his entire family. Others believe that he'd been driven mad after being disfigured and a prank gone wrong. But regardless of the actual reason, Cropsy was said to have been committed and then escaped. The stories vary, with one version believing that he vanished into the nearby woods.
Another claims that he slithered into the sewer systems beneath Staten Island, lying in wait for unsuspecting children to wander by. As with other famed killers of urban legend, Cropsy was usually described as having a hook for a hand, although some say that he carried a knife or maybe an axe instead, and he was burned horribly all over his body. Once he had a young victim in his clutches, he dragged them down to the bowels of the city deep below the defunct hospitals. Older siblings and parents told this to younger kids to scare them out of exploring these old dangerous buildings on their own.
And unsurprisingly, the story of Cropsy expanded far beyond the dilapidated structures of New York's outer boroughs to numerous summer camps nearby. After all, every campground needs a boogeyman. And Cropsy is scarier than most. Fotales often start from a seed of truth, a kernel of history nestled beneath the pageantry of legends.
But sometimes this happens the other way around, where an imaginary monster becomes real. In 1972, children started disappearing on Staten Island. Over the next several years, four kids vanished with the authorities never getting any closer to finding them. Someone, or something, was abducting the neighborhood children.
Until one day, a 12-year-old girl with Down syndrome named Jennifer Schweiger disappeared. The police quickly connected her case to the four others that had eluded them for so long. And their investigation took them all the way to Seaview Hospital. It was there that they found the bodies of the missing children, including young Jennifer's.
Each one had been buried there by a man named Andrew Rand. Rand had been homeless for some time, living near the abandoned Seaview Hospital by himself. But there was something else about him, something familiar. As it turned out, Rand had once been a school janitor, but not just any school.
He'd been employed at Willowbrook State School. And although he wasn't burned all over his body, nor did he have a hook for a hand, what the cops had discovered was something even more frightening, that the stories about Cropsy had actually been real, all along. There's nothing quite like the smell of a campfire on a warm summer's night. Flickering flames, tasty s'mores, and good conversation are always the perfect companion to a setting like that.
And I think we can all agree, so are spooky stories. But there's never really a shortage of creepy tales to tell around the fire, and we've got more in our backpack. This last one, though? Well, it's a doozy.
Stick around through this brief sponsor break, to hear all about it. Some campfire stories are told everywhere. There's something universal about strange sounds and shadowy figures lurking in the darkness that transcend location and social class, like the one about the licked hand. It's not a long or complicated tale.
In its most common form, it tells the story of a girl who wakes up in the middle of the night. She hears a strange tapping sound coming from the bathroom. Tap. Tap.
Tap. The girl is scared, so she lowers her hand off of her bed to the floor where her dog is sleeping, to make sure that he's still there. The dog reassures her by licking her hand, which calms her enough to go back to sleep. But then the tapping from the bathroom wakes her again.
Tap. Tap. Tap. So once more, the girl reaches down to make sure her dog is beside her.
He licks her hand, and she goes back to sleep. Sometime later, the tapping awakens the poor girl for a third time. Tap. Tap.
Tap. Tap. And she senses the dog on the floor next to her, as he licks her hand one last time before she returns to slumber. The following morning, the girl wakes up and stumbles into the bathroom.
As she rubs the sleep from her eyes, she screams in horror at the sight of her dog, hanging from the shower, with its throat cut open. The tapping she had heard throughout the night was the sound of its blood, drip, drip, dripping onto the tile, and painted in the same blood across the mirror. Of the words, people can lick too. Like I said, I'm sure you've heard it before.
The licked hand is as common as the story of a vanishing hitchhiker or the yellow ribbon. Its details change with each retelling, but the impact of its ending never fails to strike fear into the hearts of those who listen. In some versions, the girl is having a slumber party, and not only awakens to find her dog dead, but all of her friends as well. In others, it's her parents who are killed, and some tellings change the main character from a child to an old woman.
There's also a variant set in college where a girl stays up studying before going back to her dorm to get some books. Not wanting to wake her sleeping roommate, she leaves the lights off and collects her things in the dark. The following morning, she returns to her room only to find her roommate dead, and on the mirror, written in lipstick, it says, aren't you glad you didn't turn on the lights. So where did the story of the licked hand come from?
Was it invented by parents and camp counselors to scare kids into behaving properly? It certainly has all the telltale signs of a 1980s campfire legend born from the age of stranger danger and the satanic panic. As it turns out, the licked hand has been moist for more than a century, and it didn't start in America, either. Its origins can be traced back to English writer M.R.
James. He had written a piece titled The Diary of Mr. Pointer, in which a man reads about the grisly death of a young man obsessed with his hair. As he reads it, he absentmindedly strokes his dog, which is, of course, not actually his dog at all.
An even earlier story from 1871 was recorded by Englishman Dearman Burchall, who wrote in his diary about something one of his guests at a croquet party had once told him. It was an anecdote about a clergyman who had been woken up in the middle of the night by his wife, believing that a robber had scurried under their bed. The clergyman though told her not to worry, as it was only their large dog moving around. He told her that he had placed his hand down toward the floor and the dog had licked it.
The following morning, the couple woke up to find all of their jewelry and expensive belongings missing. As for the writing on the mirror or wall, that element is probably the oldest of them all. Here's a quote for you. Suddenly, the fingers of a human hand appeared and wrote on the plaster of the wall near the lamp sand in the royal palace.
The king watched the hand as it wrote, his face turned pale, and he was so frightened that his legs became weak and his knees were knocking. And where has that little gem been hiding all these years? Right inside the best-selling book of all time. The Christian Bible.
And when you do, say hi. I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for listening.