Cropsey: New York’s Terrifying Urban Legend

Unexplained Mysteries

Urban legends are the modern version of campfire tales, updated for city living. These spooky stories, told to frighten and thrill, are almost always macabre, gory, or otherwise threatening.

And we can see this in their form. They almost always involve some sort of danger which resonates with the listener because it taps into a real and present fear.

Home invasions, your car breaking down late at night, terrible things in the sewers beneath your feet. You can almost see the torch held underneath the face as they are told to wide-eyed audiences.

Happily, these stories are also near-universally untrue. But sometimes, at the bottom of a story there is a truth. Sometimes a terrifying urban legend is actually real.

This is the story of Cropsey, the child murderer of Staten Island.

The Legend of Cropsey

Cropsey was a killer rumored to haunt Staten Island during the 1970s. The legend talks about a man who kidnapped young children after he lost his own son. This man was mentally unstable, so the story went. Out of grief, he had resorted to stealing the children of others as replacements.

Staten Island is very different to the rest of New York. Large areas of undeveloped woodland abut against the streets and houses of its occupants, and in the woods there are ruins. It can be easy to get lost in them. This was Cropsey’s hunting ground.

Staten Island, unlike much of New York city, contains large areas of undeveloped woodland (Jonathan Schilling / CC BY-SA 4.0)