Alternatively, if you stop on the bridge and turn around, you are no longer looking at the bridge, but into the gates of hell. The local government has deemed the bridge “unsafe”, but instead of, you know, reasonably tearing it down, they’ve just blocked it with cement barriers. But I guess that does make sense, since the backdoor to hell is probably harder to demolish than one would imagine. Its cry probably sounds like, “Why didn’t you just put me on the ground?!” In other tales, Hatchet Lady was a homeless woman who used to live in a cave and kill children. Today, people hang out in the old graveyard off one of the trails, trying to get a glimpse of her. Either way, she’s just one of several ghostly apparitions that are haunting Red Rocks. After dealing with annoying bullies his whole life, Justice Chew’s spirit wasn’t ready to move on, so he haunted people in Delaware, a specter in flowing black robes, by making people sneeze uncontrollably. The resourceful towns people sent Chew’s spirit to rest by throwing another funeral, this one completely with an empty casket and all the respect Chew didn’t get in life. No one had reported sneeze haunting since. Eventually the townspeople caught on and stopped letting her deliver babies, so she went insane (You know, because of all the baby souls haunting her). She would sitc next to an empty bucket and it would slowly fill up with blood, which she would take down to the bridge and empty into the river. Over and over again this happened, until she just threw herself in the river, and it ran red for three days. If you go to the bridge at night and look at the water, it runs red. A short while later a tornado did in fact blow through town and destroyed the market, but left the pillar standing. Afterward, up through the 1950’s, stories spread of workers who died via thunderbolt or machinery malfunction when trying to move the pillar. The next morning, that same neighbor called the police again, because there was blood smeared across their door and trails of blood in the street. The other two men had dragged Murr back to the house, shot him fatally, and then dismembered him. They found pieces of Murr in the reservoir a few days later. Over the last 30 years the house has been in use, even being a fraternity house at one point, and people have reported seeing shadows out of the corners of their eyes, a dark oily presence, and the basement has a “creepy feel” that few want to experience. While this could have been one mom who’d had too many wine coolers, legends about giant creepy birds in that area go back to the Cahokia tribe. The most famous of the cliff drawings that the Cahokia tribe left behind is called the Piasa bird, which was a large bird/lizard hybrid. The tribe called them “Thunderbirds” because of the sound made when they flapped their wings. It’s interesting to note that there many stories of Thunderbirds among other plains tribes, and that in the 1940’s, there were sightings of massive birds near Alton, Illinois. People who reported these sightings included an Army Colonel and flight instructors from local airports. So, is it a myth, or just big creepy child stealing birds biding their time? By the time the hospital was renamed Central State Hospital in the 1920’s, there were over five miles of tunnels where they kept the worst patients. At its height, Central State housed over 3,000 patients, with the most insane being kept in an underground network of tunnels so no one could hear them scream. Eventually the hospital turned to more human techniques, but angry, abused, insane spirits don’t forget. Even once they stopped using the basement tunnels, staff still heard screams of the patients who had been housed there, and there were reports of unseen physical forces such as choking and several patients disappearing without a trace. The screams were so bad the hospital had to constantly rehire staff before it was finally closed in 1994. Unmarked graves kept being discovered after that. Shockingly, spending most of your life chained in a cage doesn’t lead to a kind disposition, and the goat baby grew into a large, angry, goatman. One night, the circus train was on its was to Louisville, Kentucky, when it crashed just before Pope Lick Creek, and justifiably angry, goat man was freed! In an act that surprised absolutely no one, angry goat man ripped the survivors of the crash to shreds, and in the years since, there have been a number of deaths, missing persons, and animal mutilations enough to to make the reasonable assumption that angry goat man, now the Pope Lick Monster, still lives in a cave nearby. As if owning human beings wasn’t bad enough, Madame LaLaurie took great pleasure in torturing her slaves, reportedly keeping her cook chained to the kitchen stove. When fire broke out, her neighbors had to break down the doors to the slave quarters as she had refused to provide the key. Inside, they found 7 badly mutilated enslaved people who had been kept there for some time. Once people got word of her cruel treatment, an angry mob destroyed everything left in the mansion and drove LaLaurie out of town. Being the decent man he was, Buck declared her a witch and had her burned. Afterward, their son stole her leg and buried it, so his mom would have a somewhat proper burial. There’s a stain on good ol’ Colonel Buck’s tomb in the shape of a leg. They’ve replaced the stone, and the leg reappears, just to remind everyone, years after his death, what an awful person he was. Confederate soldiers can be seen running across the road somewhat regularly, and the wife of a former keeper wanders around in a pretty dress telling people that “this is my house.” Despite a lighthouse nearby, several shipwrecks have occurred near Point Lookout. The USS Tulip sank offshore in 1964, with 47 deaths and eight corpses washing up on shore near the lighthouse, and a storm in 1978 killed 16 on The Express, a ship who’s ghostly second mate knocks on the lighthouse door right before or during a major storm. Perhaps they should’ve spent the money and built a more impressive lighthouse? Some legends say it was a disease that came from Europe, while others say that the men ingested too much lead. There’s also a conspiracy about how the government screwed up and tried to cover it up. Guess some things are worse than the cloying scent of Axe body spray. Do you like the macabre and paranormal? Well, you definitely need to check out 25 Disturbing Creepy True Stories
