Cropsey

Cropsey began as a campfire story told across New York and New England, the escaped maniac with a hook or an axe who haunts the woods and the summer camps, punishing children who wander off. On Staten Island the legend took on a darker life when real disappearances of local children in the 1970s and 1980s became tangled up with the old boogeyman, until no one could say where the story ended.

It is the rare urban legend that brushed up against genuine fear. O Devil, Where Art Thou? tells the hook-handed tale.