Whiskey Hollow Road

Whiskey Hollow Road's lore clusters around the figures of children whose spirits are said to walk the road at night, along with strange lights, disembodied noises, and an unsettling atmosphere in the surrounding woods (The NewsHouse; Big Frog 104; Hudson Valley Post).

A frequently retold tale holds that a man wrongly convicted of murder was held in a small shack along the road and died there before his sentence could be carried out; stricken with grief, his wife is said to have hanged herself from a nearby tree, and both are counted among the road's ghosts (Shadowlands seed; Haunted Places).

More lurid versions of the legend assert that the KKK or satanic groups once used a stretch of the road for ritual killings, including of children. Reporting on the road, and even the Shadowlands account itself, flags these claims as almost certainly false. Folklore researchers such as Mason Winfield describe them as the product of 'folkloric clustering,' in which sensational rumors accrete to an already eerie place. This site does not present those claims as history; they are documented here only as an example of the kind of rumor that attaches to legend-trip roads, and the real, documented incident in the area is the 1987 discovery of a murder victim's body in the nearby woods.

With no homes along it, no lights, and a standing nighttime closure, Whiskey Hollow Road has become Central New York's archetypal haunted road, a legend sustained, as one writer put it, because it is a fun and frightening story to tell.