Urban Legends in New York

Welcome to creepy New York - a land of lake monsters and wild men, of hook-handed killers and flying blob monsters. There's more to New York than just the city - in fact, it's a whole state, and it's full of its share of strange stories. Many of the urban legends from New York have served as the inspiration for novels, movies, TV shows, and even urban legends in other states. This list looks at some of the strangest urban legends and ghost stories from New York State, from the ghostly tales of its original Dutch settlers to the weird science yarns of its modern inhabitants.

A Hook-Handed Killer Named Cropsey Haunts Staten Island

New York is the birthplace of many of America's favorite urban-legend themes. The night-stalking killer with a hook for a hand? Yeah, that started in New York.

The hook-handed boogeyman of Staten Island's urban mythology is called Cropsey. It used to be said that Cropsey haunted the area at night and would drag wayward boys and girls to their deaths in the ruins of the old Seaview Hospital. Parents would spook their children with tales and warnings about Cropsey: "Go to bed early, or Cropsey will get you" - that sort of thing.

But the Cropsey legend turned all too real in the 1970s, when serial killer Andre Rand allegedly began kidnapping the children of Staten Island. Though a suspect in five cases, Rand was ultimately only convicted for two of them, which was enough to earn him 50 years to life in prison.

Ghost Trains Carry Souls across Hell Gate Bridge

Hell Gate Bridge is a a vast steel and stone construction that straddles the East River in NYC - and more than lives up to its name as it is haunted by ghostly trains that carry the souls of the dead.

Local legend tells that the trains carry the souls of people who drowned (or had their bodies dumped) in the River.  People who climb the bridge will often see strange lights from trains that never actually arrive, or spectral locomotives dragging cars full of lost souls. Mafia victims, old Dutch explorers, and suicide victims all sit next to each other in the carriages, sharing one last ride to the hereafter. Or perhaps their souls on trapped on the trains in a private sort of hell. Either way, the story is no less unnerving for its anachronisms.

There's a Loch Ness Monster In Lake Champlain

Lake Champlain is the sixth-largest freshwater lake in North America, straddling the borders of  New York (on the west), Vermont (to the east), and Quebec, Canada (to the north). Its shores are home to numerous quaint New England towns and tourist hotspots, and the region brims with a rich history stretching back to pre-European settlement.

The waters of Lake Champlain are hundreds of feet deep in some places, and connected to the Atlantic Ocean through a network of rivers and smaller lakes, providing plenty of opportunities for mysterious swimming beasts to make their way into the area.  And this seems to have been going for a very long time, as there is at least one monster known to be living in Lake Champlain.

Local Native American cultures - including both the Abenaki and the Iroquois - shared legends of a lake monster with European explorers very early on, a creature that the Abenaki called Tatoskok. The earliest recorded sighting of this beast is ascribed to none other than Samuel de Champlain himself, the man after whom the lake is named. In 1609, he reportedly witnessed "a 20-foot serpent thick as a barrel and a head like a horse."

Encounters with "Champ," or "Champy" as the monster is now called, continue to the present day, but perhaps the most famous sighting occurred in 1977 when Sandra Mansi photographed the monster while having a picnic with friends and family.  In the photo, Champ looks an awful lot like his more famous colleague Nessie, the Loch Ness Monster. However, it's important to note that he's been around a lot longer - Nessie was first spotted in 1933, more than 300 years after Samuel de Champlain's encounter with Champ. So, by all rights, Champ should be more famous.

Montauk, NY, Is A Center Of Alien Contact, Mind Control, And Time-Travel Experiments

If you've seen Stranger Things on Netflix, a lot of this is going to sound familiar.  And there's a good reason for that: the strange things that happened, and may still be happening, at Montauk, NY, were the inspiration for Stranger Things.

Montauk is a long-time center of weirdness. Its old military base, Camp Hero (now abandoned and serving as a state park), is said to have been the site of top-secret, black-book experiments in the 1960s and through the 1980s that involved alien contact, psychic experiments with children, and even time travel.

Most of what we "know" about these bizarre happenings comes from the accounts of Preston Nichols, an electrical engineer who claims he worked at the site during that period of time. According to Nichols, the facility was built to turn kidnapped children into psychic soldiers, using technology supplied from alien spacecrafts.  Nichols says he interacted with at least three different alien species at Camp Hero, and that the research teams working there ripped a hole in space-time in 1983.

No word yet on whether a kid named Eleven escaped from them.

Upstate New York Hosts a Haunted Air Force Base

Plattsburgh Air Force Base, in Plattsburgh, NY (where else?!), has been associated with many strange occurrences over the years, but since it is no longer an active military base, its ghostly pedigree has been kicked up a notch.

There are many haunted spots at the old base, including the Old Gym, which was once used as the base morgue, and where witnesses have heard screaming and pounding; and at the cemetery, where ghost soldiers are said to march through the night.  There have also been reports of spirits re-enacting battles from the French and Indian War, and a Revolutionary War-era ghost who guards the base entrance.

There's even a notorious Building 666, which once served as the base crematorium and now hosts a revolving door of soldierly ghosts, according to reports by some security guards.

A Ghost Ship Sails the Hudson River

Since the days of old New Amsterdam, local people in the Hudson Valley have been reporting a mysterious ship with no known flags that sails down the river, bringing violent storms in its wake. The ship often moves against the tide, and nearly always appears to be without a crew. Then, within a few hours of its passing, powerful thunderstorms rock the area.

The ship's origins are unclear. Some believe it to be a remnant of the Half-Moon, the ship that Henry Hudson himself piloted on his journey up the river.  Others, especially the old Dutch settlers, believe it has been summoned by evil faeries to bring ruin and menace to the area's humans.

Interestingly, there are no reports of the ship appearing just before Hurricane Sandy, though modern sightings do turn up from time to time.

The White Lady of Rochester Searches Eternally For Her Lost Children

Ladies in White are common ghost manifestations around the world, and New York state is no exception - they have one in Rochester who endlessly searches Durand Eastman Park for her missing daughter in the company of her two spectral dogs.

The most popular version of the story says that the White Lady of Rochester is the ghost of a woman from the early 1800s whose daughter was kidnapped, raped, and murdered by a local farmer. The mother searched the marshy land day and night trying to discover where the perpetrator had hidden the body, but she never succeeded. Eventually, she succumbed to despair and threw herself off of a cliff into the waters of Lake Ontario. Her two dogs pined for her on the shore until they, too, joined her in death shortly after.

Now, all three of them haunt the park forever searching for the daughter's missing corpse.  Sometimes, she makes trouble for men who visit the park, but women always remain unmolested by her and her ghost hounds.

Upstate New York Is a Hotbed of Bigfoot Activity

Most people associate Bigfoot with the Pacific Northwest, but in fact, there's evidence that the creatures are common in many stretches of pristine wilderness across North America, including the old forests of upstate New York that cluster around Lake Champlain in Essex and Warren counties.

Many people have reported hairy wild-men in the area over the decades, but one unlucky fellow encountered Bigfoot close-up twice in the span of just a few years - and both run-ins with the creature were terrifying.

The first happened on June 25, 1989, when Scott David Harris and two friends were looking for one of their brothers, who was lost in the woods late at night. Walking along a railroad track that followed LakeChamplain's shoreline, they heard awful thrashing, growling, and metal-ripping noises coming from the south bank of the trail. And whatever it was seemed to hear them, too, because the noises it was making stopped, and it came over to check them out.  Harris couldn't get a good look at the creature in the dark, but as his friends ran off, he stuck around long enough to feel its breath and realize it was a huge and smelly beast. When he ran, it chased him, and only stopped its pursuit when Harris and his friends broke out of the woods and onto the nearby road.

But Bigfoot wasn't done with Harris yet. A few years later, in 1993, Harris was parked on a trail near Westport, NY, with another friend, waiting for a party to start, when he saw a huge, black, hairy creature coming out of the woods and reaching for the car's rear door.  Harris alerted his friend, who immediately drove away, and Harris saw the creature rear up in the car's lights with glowing red eyes.

A Floating Blob Monster Haunted The Woods Of Kinderhook, NY

Bigfoot isn't the only forest monster in the wilds of New York - there's also a flying blob.

Most accounts of the Kinderhook Monster come from the 1960s, and at least six different people claim to have encountered the creature. The being is described as an amorphous "white shape" that floated above the ground and maneuvered through tree-tops in the woods near Kinderhook, NY. It was also capable of releasing a high-pitched whistling noise, which is what first drew the attention of witnesses to it.

In one encounter, the blob creature watched two young children playing in the lake, until they noticed it peering from behind a tree, and they ran away in fear.

In a second encounter, a lone hiker saw it floating down the hill towards him, and also ran in fear.  He came back later armed and with a friend in tow, but numbers and weapons served them naught - both men saw the creature moving through the branches of the trees above them and again fled in terror.

The third recorded encounter involved two teenaged campers, who described it as appearing as a "bell-shaped white thing" that was moving around outside their tent one night.  Just after they spotted it, the creature fled into the woods, and it hasn't been reported since.

There's a Cursed Apartment on West 57th Street in Manhattan

As a city of over eight million people, New York City is replete with haunted buildings, and even just haunted parts of buildings. Take the case of the penthouse at 57 West 57th St., for instance: it's said to be haunted by the ghosts of two lovers who bickered each other to death.

It started with the guy who invented spark plugs, Albert Champion. In 1922, he married a young showgirl named Edna Crawford, who proceeded to embarrass Champion by having an affair with a fellow much younger than Champion - a Frenchman named Charles Brazelle.  Brazelle allegedly murdered Champion in Paris while Crawford convinced the police that her husband had died of a heart attack.  Because the police believed her, she was entitled to collect on Champion's will, and used her inheritance to buy the penthouse at 57 West 57th St., where she and Brazelle shacked up together.

But Brazelle turned out to be an extremely jealous lover and often kept Crawford locked up in the penthouse. One day, he beat her to death with a telephone, after which her bodyguards threw him out of the window to his death. (Of course, how Brazelle was able to keep Crawford prisoner, let alone beat her to death, when she had bodyguards has never been explained).

The next person to live in the penthouse was Carlton Alsop, a wealthy socialite. Alsop claimed to have heard the ghostly sounds of Crawford and Brazelle arguing, and of Crawford's high heels walking around.  Eventually, the haunting drove Alsop mad - his wife left him, he committed himself to a sanitarium, and even his dogs had nervous breakdowns.

People continue to report the haunting by the bickering ghosts to this day, and the penthouse is a popular stop for ghost hunters in NYC.

Sewer Alligators First Appeared In NYC

The sewer gator is a perennial American urban legend, so it's not surprising that it has a long pedigree in NYC. And, to spice up the story, it turns out that real alligators have been found in NYC sewers before, so this particular urban legend is at least rather plausible.

The typical story goes that New Yorkers vacationing in Florida or Louisiana decide to bring a baby alligator back to NYC as a pet, but when the gator gets too big to be cute anymore, the family flushes it down the toilet hoping to be rid of the creature.  The gator then survives - and even thrives - under the streets of the city, feeding mostly on rats and other vermin, eventually growing big enough to menace human targets such as sewer workers or transients. Some variations of the story include alligators who have turned albino due to lack of light exposure, or who have grown so large that they are virtually dragons.

Are you too scared to visit New York?!