Cropsey

Also Known As: also the Cropsey Maniac, Judge Cropsey, and Cropsy; a bogeyman of New York summer camps and, later, of Staten Island
Region/Culture: North America
Mythos: Urban Legends & Contemporary Folklore
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: He is a mortal man driven mad by grief who lives hidden in the woods, cannot quite be killed, and comes back on an anniversary with an axe.
Role in Mythos: He is the campfire bogeyman of New York State, the story older campers and counselors tell to frighten younger ones and keep them out of the woods after dark.
Relation to Humans: He was once a respected neighbor, and he hunts children because careless campers caused the death of his own family. On Staten Island the name moved to an escaped patient said to live under an abandoned institution and carry children off.

The fire has burned down to coals, and the smallest campers have stopped poking it with sticks. Pine smoke hangs in the damp air. A counselor of about seventeen leans in, drops his voice, and points past the last cabin to where the trees close up. There was a man who lived over there, he says. He had a house, a family and a good name in town. Then some kids from this camp did something stupid.

That is how Cropsey arrives, and for most of the twentieth century he arrived the same way at sleepaway camps all over New York State. He is not a ghost or a beast. He is a man, and that is most of what makes him work. In the usual telling he is somebody solid: a judge, a businessman, the owner of the hardware store, a member of the town council. He lives near the camp with his wife and children. Campers, through carelessness, cause a death in his family, very often by a fire that gets away from them. In some versions his wife then dies of grief. Cropsey loses his mind, swears to pay the camp back, and walks into the woods.

After that he is somewhere out there in a shack, and he has an axe. The tellers give him hair gone white as chalk and eyes shot through with red. Every year, when the date of the death comes round, he picks one camper. It does not matter which. The story is firm that it could be anyone at the fire tonight.

The tale usually includes a chase. Counselors or police track him down, and one of them wounds him in the leg, so that afterward he drags it. They corner him at last. He is shot, or the shack burns with him inside, or he goes over a cliff. Then the teller pauses, because the important part comes next. Nobody ever found the body. On a still night the listeners are invited to notice how the leaves sound, and how a slow step followed by a scrape would sound if there were one.

Nobody knows who first told it. The story has no author and no first night. What it does have is a paper trail, which is rare for a camp story. In the autumn of 1966 a student named Mark Breslerman questioned eleven people from New York City who had heard about Cropsey at different camps upstate, among them Camp Lakota on Masten Lake at Wurtsboro. He and the folklorist Lee Haring published the results in 1977 in the journal New York Folklore under the title The Cropsey Maniac. The eleven accounts disagreed about his job, his family and his end, and agreed about everything that mattered: the good citizen, the accident, the madness, the axe, the anniversary, the missing corpse. Later collectors have gone on finding him in Boy Scout troops in the Catskills, sometimes promoted to Judge Cropsey. The tellings never say where the name itself came from.

It is a useful story for the people who tell it. A camp is full of city children loose near deep water and dark woods, and a maniac at the tree line keeps them in their bunks better than any rule. It also carries a plain warning that fooling around with fire gets people killed. Counselors have always known both things.

The cinema found him in due course. The 1981 horror film The Burning is set at a summer camp and has a caretaker called Cropsy, who is burned in a prank and returns with garden shears. A second camp film, Madman, followed in 1982 from the same campfire stock.

Then the story moved to Staten Island and got worse. Children there in the 1970s and 1980s told of a Cropsey who was an escaped mental patient. He lived in the old tunnels and ruined buildings of the Willowbrook State School, a vast and notorious institution for disabled children that a 1972 television report exposed and that finally shut in 1987. He had an axe, or a hook for a hand, and he came out at night to drag children back into the dark.

In July 1987 a twelve-year-old girl named Jennifer Schweiger, who had Down syndrome, disappeared on Staten Island. Searchers combed the Willowbrook woods for weeks. Thirty-five days later her body was found in a shallow grave on the grounds, close to a rough campsite. The man who had been living there was Andre Rand, a drifter who had worked at Willowbrook in the 1960s. A jury in 1988 convicted him of kidnapping her and could not agree on the murder charge. In 2004 a second jury convicted him of kidnapping Holly Ann Hughes, aged seven, who vanished in 1981 and has never been found. Each conviction brought twenty-five years to life. Other children went missing from the island in those years, and those cases remain open.

Two filmmakers who grew up there, Joshua Zeman and Barbara Brancaccio, released a documentary called Cropsey in 2009, and since then the name has belonged as much to Rand as to the judge with the axe. The legend did not predict the crimes. It was simply the nearest shape the island had for them.

As a figure of story, Cropsey has a short list of powers and all of them come from what he is. He knows the woods better than anyone hunting him. He is patient, he keeps a calendar, and he survives what ought to have finished him, because a bogeyman with a grave is no use to anybody. His limits are equally clear. He is one man with one weapon and a bad leg. He strikes once a year and takes one victim. He keeps to the dark edge of things, the tree line, the tunnel, the ruin, and he does not come into the lit cabin. He is also tied to a place. Away from the fire, on the bus home at the end of August, he has never been known to follow.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Cropsey?

Cropsey is a bogeyman from New York folklore, best known from stories told around the fire at summer camps. In the usual version he is a respected local man who goes mad after campers accidentally cause a death in his family. He then hides in the woods and returns each year with an axe to attack a camper.

Is Cropsey a real person?

Cropsey the axe-carrying maniac is a legend, and no telling has been traced to a real man of that name. The name later became attached to Andre Rand, a real former worker at the Willowbrook State School on Staten Island. Rand was convicted of kidnapping Jennifer Schweiger in 1988 and Holly Ann Hughes in 2004.

Where does the Cropsey legend come from?

The Cropsey legend comes from sleepaway camps in New York State, where counselors and older campers told it to younger ones. Its first study was The Cropsey Maniac by Lee Haring and Mark Breslerman, published in New York Folklore in 1977 and based on eleven accounts gathered in 1966. No one knows who first told the story.

What does Cropsey look like?

In the camp versions, Cropsey has chalk-white hair, bloodshot eyes and an axe, and he drags a leg that a counselor wounded. In Staten Island versions he is an escaped patient who carries an axe or has a hook in place of a hand. The versions agree that he is a human being and not a ghost or monster.

What is the Staten Island version of Cropsey?

On Staten Island, Cropsey was said to be an escaped mental patient living in the tunnels and ruins of the Willowbrook State School. Children said he came out at night to carry off other children. The 2009 documentary Cropsey, by Joshua Zeman and Barbara Brancaccio, links this version of the legend to the real crimes of Andre Rand.