Cropsey

A children's bogeyman with a hook, told on Staten Island for generations — until children began disappearing in the neighbourhood in the 1980s and it emerged that a former orderly from the abandoned Willowbrook school was living beside it. Willowbrook was a real institution, closed after a 1972 investigation exposed appalling conditions. A rare and unpleasant case of a local bogeyman and a documented local history meeting at the same point on the map.

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Houska Castle

A Gothic castle in Bohemia, built in the thirteenth century in a place with no water, no roads and no population — that is, with no military or economic purpose at all. Legend explains it by the chapel standing directly over a chasm held to be an entrance to hell: a condemned man was promised his freedom for going down, came back white-haired and died within days. The castle is fortified as though against something inside rather than out.