SPIRIT TALES AND MAGIC
Our host; Dr.G had his first paranormal experience at only eight years old. With over five decades of storytelling, magic and paranormal story collection he is an award winning story teller on a mission to revive firelight and the telling of stories!
SPIRIT TALES AND MAGIC
From Summer Camp Whisper To Staten Island Shadow: The Cropsey Legend And Its Real-World Echoes
Campfire whispers have a way of outlasting headlines, but what happens when they start to sound the same? We dive into the legend of Cropsey, tracing its path from summer camp lore near Maston Lake to the shadow it casts over Staten Island, and the unsettling moments where myth seemed to overlap with real cases. Along the way, we unpack the pieces that make a story travel so far for so long: a family tragedy, a vanished avenger, a hook for a hand, and a shuttered institution whose name still chills New Yorkers.
As we dig into the Andre Rand cases and the Willowbrook State School narrative, we explore how communities use legends to explain danger and place invisible fences around kids who wander too close to the edge of the map. The interplay goes both ways—news shapes the legend, the legend shapes how people read the news—and in that feedback loop, Cropsey becomes more than a camp tale. It turns into cultural shorthand for fear that feels local, personal, and always just out of sight. We also share a personal childhood story about a not-so-big patch of trees that felt like a forest when someone you trust pointed at it and said, “Look.”
This is a conversation about more than one name. It’s about why boogeyman stories stick, how they mark boundaries, and how a place can adopt a myth as part of its identity. If folklore, true crime, and the psychology of fear sit on your nightstand next to a flashlight, you’ll find a lot to think about here. Press play, then tell us the legend that haunted your hometown. Subscribe, share the episode with a friend who loves urban legends, and leave a review with your scariest local tale—we might read it on a future show.
Hey everybody, it's Dr. G Spirit Tales and Magic. I hope this is finding you well. You can go to spiritalesandmagic.com and click podcast. You will end up here. Or while you're on the website, you can tell us your story. Or even book Cassandra and I for your event. So we were speaking about Bloody Mary last time. Gotten a lot of emails about that sort of thing. We all have a friend's sister's boyfriend or a cousin who has experienced an urban legend, right? Someone you know knows someone who knows someone who really did see the hook man or really did see Bloody Mary in the mirror. Some of these urban legends seem a little deeper and maybe a little darker than the others. Today we're going to examine Cropsey. Cropsey is beginning in the nineteen seventies. He's terrified generations of New Yorkers. Cropsey started as so many classics did. Guess where? At a summer camp. Tales of Cropsey's origin and what exactly made him mad are highly debated. But they begin with a family tragedy. In short, a father loses his whole family, or at least his child, while on the shores of a small summer cottage near Maston Lake, which was also a summer camp. After the death of his family, or children, depending on which version you're listening to, George Cropsy, a once respected businessman, goes berserk. Now, typically in these stories, the reasons for the death is an irresponsible camper, or maybe a camp staff member, or causing a fire that gets out of control, and it kills George Cropsy's loved ones. Then he disappears for several weeks, only to return by the end of the summer and take his revenge on the campers. Campers are reported to be murdered, hurt, or threatened. The camp staff tries to make a stand, and the authorities are called in. But all the efforts are futile. Cropsy continues to evade and escape, and his body is never discovered. To this day, strange voices, threatening symbols, and even sightings can be seen by campers. The story rolled around for years, shared by campers and scouts. However, the urban legend began to meet reality in Andre Rand. Rand was responsible for a series of kidnappings and murders of children in the state. Something about Rand just wasn't right. For example, in 1983, he took a bus full of children from a New York City YMCA to the Newark International Airport. No children were hurt, but he was arrested, and he was given a ten-month sentence in jail. While he was known to be a, shall we say, shady figure, he could often be seen around children. No one could seem to pin anything on him. Even though sometimes children would go missing, Rand was reported as the last adult to be seen with the missing child. But that changed in 1987, when Jennifer Schweiger disappeared. Jennifer Foundley was found murdered in 1988. Rand, a custodian at the time, was charged with the murder. He was the last person to be seen with her. He was also retroactively associated with the disappearance of Alice, I want to say Piria. Holly Ann Hughes. And I want to say T has Jackson. Now there was another person, Hank Gaffo. However, the jury was not able to convict on those murder charges. Only the kidnappings. So he was put in prison. And despite remaining there, his legend and Cropsey are often associated. Now later on it was a different version of Cropsy lore. He was said to be a member of the Willowbrook Meadow Institution on Staten Island, who had escaped after the hospital closed down. He lived there in the woods. He was said to carry around an axe, waiting to snatch children who wandered by. No matter what version you were told, or like to listen to, I guess. The story emphasizes the powers of children's storytelling habits, and how the boogeyman fairy tales of youth can give way to something, shall we say, a little more horrendous. Now whether the legend is based on facts, or was it inspired by headlines? Or is it just another urban myth that forever remains unclear? The story of Cropsey has been retold countless times. It has been a major part and has become, even with the newer generation, a part of New York's cultural identity. So the next time you visit New York, take a walk in the woods surrounding the Willowbrook State School, and you might just hear the whispers of the infamous Cropsey. There was a piece a while back in one of the local magazines here, which I thought was interesting. It's New York, The Legend of Cropsey. It's just a paragraph or so. Staten Island's Cropsey has been a local legend for decades, gaining national attention when a documentary of the same name was released in 2009. The story goes that Cropsey had a hook for a hand and was a patient at the Willowbrook State School. He would come out late at night to hunt and chase the local children with his hook. In truth, a series of child murders did take place in that area of Staten Island in the 1970s and 80s. And the legend may have loosely been based on Andre Rand, an employee of the Willowbrook, who was convicted of kidnapping children in the 70s. And 80s. So there's a New York urban legend that was recently mentioned in a magazine in Phoenix, Arizona. Kind of tells the story of how the legends travel. Now I had told you last night that Cassandra and I do a particular show called A Witch in the Woods. There are many folks in the storytelling magic venue who do something like that. When I was very young, I want to say 10, 11, 12 years old, right in that range. We had just started to live in Woodard 3. Now, if you went out the back door of that property and went down over a hill, about three or four hundred yards, you would you'd pass where my grandfather had his garden. There was a steel mill. Not a steel mill, I'm sorry. There was a steel scrap yard. It's called Abe Sabalski's. The big fence separated that from everything else. But you walk that fence line and you're in the woods. Now you're only in the woods for about, I want to say a hundred yards, maybe a hundred and a quarter. And it's not a deep, thick woods, really. When you came out of that, if you were in a straight line from Woodrow, you would end up at my Aunt Aggie's house, and you've heard of Agnes Wagner a couple of times. And how if you went down into those woods off of Spring Street, you might never be seen again. They eat children in those woods. So the first time that they make me stay home and not go see Ann Aggie, they're gonna tell her that I don't want to see her. I don't want to come down there. That makes me mad. I'm a young kid, so out the back door going down and through the woods. Nothing happened. I was pretty spooked though most of the time through the woods. I got there just a little bit after they did. If I had been a little faster, I would have beaten them there. They didn't like that very much. I got punished for that when I got home. And then we got the lecture about the monsters in the woods and the witch in the woods. I remember saying something like, It's not even a real wood. There was one day shortly after that that Grand Bab calls me outside. He's got some binoculars. He says, I saw something down there in that wood, you want to look. Sure. So I'm looking in the binoculars down through the woods, and I see what looks like a pretty large animal walking on two legs that quickly vanishes out of my sight. Now I know that he said that up. But when we think about urban legends and the boogeyman, we heard a lot about them with boogeyman. Email me and tell me if the boogeyman was in your young life. I'd like to know. Urban legends spread very quickly, and they seem to stand the test of time. We'll be talking about a few more of those as October rolls on. And I'm not really sure what we're going to do tomorrow. Cassandra and I are taking the night off tonight, so we're not going to go anywhere. We're just gonna hang out. Try and regroup. We'll be back with you guys tomorrow. And then tomorrow evening, I do believe we're going to do something at the Magic Club. So remember, my friends, there is indeed a world unseen. It's a world that exists all around us all the time. And every now and again, for whatever the reason, we catch a glimpse of it. And the dead get in. Send us your stories. We appreciate you. Give us a like, give us a share, follow us, and hey, let all your friends know about it. And while you're out there, tell a ghost story, even if it's a boogie man.
