Mount Misery & Sweet Hollow Road

The landscape itself is real and mostly intact: some 850 acres of steep, wooded terrain around West Hills County Park — Walt Whitman's country — too poor for farming and consequently left to pine and oak. The Mount Misery Nature Preserve's own trail guide notes the land was never much inhabited, and that the local lore reaches back to Native Americans and the first settlers, with strange lights over the woods among the oldest entries in the file. The 1829 Sweet Hollow Presbyterian Church — moved to its present site in the 1970s — and its small cemetery stand at the roadside, genuine and unrenovated, doing their share of the atmospheric work. Sweet Hollow itself runs about three miles from the West Jericho Turnpike to Route 110, winding straight through the preserve.

The file's story bank is deep enough to sort by type. There is Hatchet Mary — the preserve guide's own telling — a young woman said to have murdered her family with a hatchet and then herself, after which the house sank into the ground leaving only its chimney. There is Mary of the roadside, Long Island's standard-issue Lady in White, pushed from a car or leapt from one, struck by oncoming traffic, now said to step into headlights along Sweet Hollow. There is the Northern State Parkway overpass, where the school-bus variant of a hundred American bridges promises that a car left in neutral beneath it will be pushed by the children who went over it. And there is the elaborate hospital cycle: a nineteenth-century asylum in the woods that burned with everyone inside, was rebuilt, and burned again — a story for which the file finds no record at all.

Drivers file the officer, the girl on the bridge, lights among the trees, and an elderly figure said to carry a basket no one should look into. The reports are the standard roadside register: consistent in outline, variable in detail, and entirely without dates. What distinguishes the file is sheer density — Huntington's folklore shelves hold more distinct claims for these two roads than most towns generate for all their territory.

The roads are still there, still dark, still unofficially patrolled after midnight by teenagers testing the legends. The name Mount Misery, incidentally, is older than any ghost attached to it — it was the misery of the road itself, steep and stony, that named the hill. Everything after that is storytelling; but on the file's evidence, it has been very good storytelling for a very long time.