Terrifying True Urban Legends: Cropsey and The Missing Children
Today, I want to tell you about a horrifying urban legend that haunted a community nearby the ruins of the abandoned Willowbrook State School in Staten Island for decades. Eventually, children started really disappearing from this community, so let's explore the real story behind the urban legend....
TW: Child Abuse, Child Death
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SOURCES
Willowbrook: The Last Great Disgrace
What’s Left of Abandoned Willowbrook State School Now on Staten Island. Untapped New York
Cropsey (2009 film). Accessed via Kanopy
Various Cropsey Legends - (1) (2) (3)
Beatings, Burns and Betrayal: The Willowbrook Scandal’s Legacy
Remembering an Infamous New York Institution. NPR
New York Civil Rights History: Willie Mae Goodman Fighting Willowbrook
Willowbrook State School - a Voice Behind the Wall (narrative nonfiction - written by the daughter of one of the inmates)
Contemporaneous article – Commissioner won’t reinstate two dismissed at Willowbrook
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/21/nyregion/willowbrook-state-school-staten-island.html
50 Year Celebration of Willowbrook decision - 2025
Ethel Louise Atwell disappearance: [1], [2], [3]
Human experiments in Willowbrook: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6]
TRANSCRIPT
Today, I want to tell you about a horrifying urban legend that haunted a community in New York for decades. But eventually, children started disappearing from this community, so I want to deep dive into the real story behind the urban legend, which is scarier than the legend itself.
And if you like the real stories behind urban legends, unsolved mysteries that make you question everything, and mysterious disappearances, you’re in the right place, you’re just like me. We upload once a week so make sure you’re subscribed.
For decades, there’s been an urban legend that’s swirled around the woods of central staten island.
Residents would lock their doors at night, check over their shoulders when they went out to start their cars, and told their children to be extra careful while out playing with friends. Because there’s a monster that lives in those woods, they’d say. And he has a name: Cropsey.
Cropsey wanders throughout the back alleys and side streets of nearby suburbs, a transient man looking for work. But wherever he goes, children tend to disappear.
The legend goes that Cropsey lives in the ruins of the old abandoned mental institution.That’s where he lures children to,and they’re never seen again.
He was once a patient at the asylum, but he was kept isolated from the outside world for his own protection. Now this very real institution was built at a time before modern advances in medicine and mental health. Patients lived in overcrowded, unfurnished wards, with hardly a single cot to call their own. Sanitation was nonexistent — it was a filthy, hopeless life. The patients that didn’t die of disease were left to waste away into little more than skeletons.
Eventually, New York State shut the asylum down, and let the patients go free.
But some former residents, like Cropsey, didn’t know what to do with themselves. So, unable to integrate back into society, they wandered back into the ruins of their former home and lived there, typically in the old tunnels that existed beneath the ruins.
Children are warned that they may see Cropsey walking near the edge of the woods near the asylum, dragging an old, rusted axe behind him, waiting to find the perfect victim to drag down into the tunnels. And if you do see him, just pray that he doesn’t see you, because no child that’s interacted with him has lived to tell the tale.
Like the best campfire stories, the tale of Cropsey has been passed from generation to generation, picking up new details as it goes.
But what makes Cropsey different from your average urban legend… is that it’s built around a true story.
The asylum mentioned in this campfire story actually existed. It was called Willowbrook State School, an institution that used to be run by New York’s department of Mental Hygiene. It was the largest facility for the developmentally disabled in the country. Like many institutions of the time, it promised a safe haven for children with special needs, but functioned more like a prison than a school.
And as for Cropsey himself? Well, it seemed for the longest time like he was just a legend born from the scary ruins of the hospital… but then, in the 1970s and 80s, something started to stalk the children of Staten Island, forcing the public to reconsider whether this urban legend was really just a legend.
Welcome to heart starts pounding, a podcast of horrors, hauntings, and mysteries. I’m your host Kaelyn Moore
Today’s story is a dark one, folks. It concerns child abuse, medical cruelty and murders that remain unsolved to this day. But it’s also one of my favorite kinds of episodes to do, where we find an urban legend and look into it until we can find the true story hidden at its center.
And today I want to share with you the two very dark pieces of history that make up this urban legend: We’ll dive into the story of Willowbrook State School because that really lays the foundation for the legend, and then I want to tell you about its resident who became a monster, and terrorized Staten Island.
But before we dive in, if you are new here to our Rogue Detecting Society, welcome. You’re amongst friends in our headquarters for the darkly curious. We gather here every Wednesday evening, listeners from all over the world, but today I want to specially shout out our 5 listeners in Kyrgystan. Our video editor lives here in the US but she was back visiting family in Kyrgistan this summer and probably single handedly doubled listenership in the country. Thanks, Polina. And no matter where you’re listening or watching, thanks for being here. Seriously, your support means the world. And if you want, go ahead and comment where you’re listening from. I love seeing how many countries are represented. Ok, back to New York.
Nestled in the woods of the Willowbrook neighborhood in Staten Island, just south of Manhattan, lays a crumbling stone foundation and empty buildings with shattered windows. It’s hard to picture it as anything more than rubble, but in 1948, when the Willowbrook State School opened, it lauded itself as a fine institution set on helping some of society's most vulnerable.
Its campus was around 365 acres, with the capacity to serve 3,000 patients, mostly children with intellectual disabilities. It was the largest facility of its kind in the United States, and for many parents it seemed like a godsend. From the outside, it was idyllic, brand new buildings and wards, white trim and clean brick, all set among the thick, beautiful woods of Staten Island.
Willowbrook advertised itself to struggling parents who didn’t know what to do with a child with learning disabilities, and assured them that it was ok to send their children away. A brochure entitled ‘Willowbrook and You’ reads, quote:
“...It has been a big step for you to come to the conclusion that the best thing for you, your family and your mentally defective child is to have him cared for and treated at Willowbrook. Even though he is admitted here, you have not ‘surrendered’ him to the state, nor have you ‘put him away’.”
The marketing worked, The school opened its doors officially in 1948. In six years, it had significantly exceeded its maximum capacity of 3,000. And there was still a long line of people wanting to admit their children.
There was a woman named Diane Buglioli who began working as a nurse at Willowbrook when she was just 19. She’d heard that it was starting to get a little overcrowded because of demand, and wanted to help these kids however she could. She walked up to the large X-shaped building that formed Willowbrook’s central complex, thinking she was ready for whatever came next.
Once inside , she was quickly ushered to the children’s ward where she would spend most of her time. But one thing that was strange to Diane, was there weren’t a lot of children around. What happened to the “overcrowding” problem that everyone had been telling her about?
An orderly gave her a large key, and pointed to a long, foreboding hallway, and told her to go see the ward at the end. (SFX — EERIE FOOTSTEPS IN EMPTY HALLWAY) As Diane walked down the hallway, she realized This place didn’t feel as welcoming on the inside as she had expected.
She reached the door at the end of the hallway. It was large, made of cold steel. The key opened it (SFX: — KEY CLICKS, DOOR CREAKS horribly) and she found herself facing another identical steel door. She unlocked that too, to reveal a third steel door. By this point, she found herself wondering: “what institution keeps their patients behind three steel doors?”
When she opened the door, what she saw nearly broke her heart: it was a room of maybe 40 toddlers, looking up at her with uncomprehending expressions. The paint on the walls was peeling. At least half of the children weren’t properly clothed or had soiled themselves.
This was the reality of Willowbrook that management didn’t want parents to see. The truth of the matter was, the hospital had no idea what it was doing. It was understaffed, and overcrowded. Instead of tending to each child's needs, they were often locked behind steel doors and left to fend for themselves. Every ward was over capacity, with as many as 50 patients to each employee.
The population size created comprehensive problems with Willowbrook, which people like Diane would face every day. There weren’t enough clothes for patients, weren’t enough toothbrushes, towels, living space even. Something as simple as daily meals became an exhausting ordeal for everyone involved. Because of the sheer number of patients, they would have only around three minutes to feed each child. Their meals were mashed up and force fed to them in order to make this feasible.
Without proper solid food, many patients started to become malnourished, and many lost teeth. And without toys or any education for the vast majority of the population, children would be left with little to do besides sit in one place and waste away. Many doctors there, fearing that they could hurt each other, would just sedate patience with Thorazine.
So There were two horrible variables that were arising at Willowbrook that would end up colliding just a few years after the place opened. On one hand you had staff and leaders who thought that, even though the neglect of these children was cruel, and horrible, it was still better than letting them be a burden on society. They had this idea that they were doing some ultimate good, and that allowed them to get away with this gross mistreatment.
And you also had a rise in untreatable diseases amongst the population. And when you mix that with doctors who think they have a free pass to mistreat patients, it led to one of the most inhumane human experiments I’ve ever heard of…
When Nina’s mother brought her 10 year old to Willowbrook in the 1950’s, she felt like it was her only option.
Today, we understand that Nina was most likely autistic, but back then they didn’t really have the language to diagnose the girl. Nina’s mother just knew that she needed care that was beyond what she could provide, honestly one of the most heart breaking realizations that any parent ever has.
The two had traveled from institution to institution to find a place that would really work for Nina and her needs, and finally, after getting a really convincing pitch from a doctor at Willowbrook, they decided it was the best fit.
She knew Willowbrook had problems but, all of the options had their problems and she was desperate to find resources for her daughter. It is perhaps because of her desperation that she received a phone call shortly after applying. She spoke to a man who introduced himself as Dr. Saul Krugman. He said had a way of getting her to jump the line, but it required her to sign some paperwork.
It was a consent form, allowing Nina to participate in a hepatitis study. Nina’s mom had some questions, like what would this study entail. Dr. Krugman explained that the outbreaks in Willowbrook might be the best chance doctors would have to learn about the disease and develop a cure. It was a noble cause that Nina could play a meaningful role in.
There was something about the pitch that Nina’s mom didn’t really trust, but felt she had no choice. Her only other option was for Nina to get rejected from Willowbrook and get no care at all.
So, she signed. Nina, at 10 years old, was admitted to Willowbrook. Into the hands of Dr. Saul Krugman.
Krugman ultimately selected 50 children for this study, all between 5 and 10 years old. And step one of the study was to intentionally infect the children with hepatitis. Which, as a reminder, was incurable at the time.
Now, I have to warn you: the way they did this is pretty disgusting, and absolutely heartbreaking
Krugman gave each of the children a glass of chocolate milk and told them to drink it quickly. What he didn’t tell them, or their parents, was the milk had been mixed with the feces of other infected children.
((personal thoughts about reading this for the first time)) It is kind of validating, though, to hear that Krugman was not representative of his ideas at the time. When he started to publish his findings, other doctors immediately objected to his wildly unethical study.
Though all of the other doctors agreed that developing a hepatitis vaccine was a noble goal, they accused him of human experimentation and child abuse, yea DUH!! It didn’t matter that he’d technically gotten parental consent, these experiments were, quote “unjustifiable, whatever the aims, and however academically or therapeutically important the results.”
Krugman’s defense is a telling one: he said that things were already so bad at Willowbrook, that his experiments were not meaningfully making the kids’ lives any worse.
And as horrible as it sounds, he had a point. Living at Willowbrook as a child was as bad as drinking milk laced with poop. The neglect, the malnutrition, being locked behind steel doors. And it was about to get worse.
On September 1st, 1965, Senator Robert F. Kennedy paid a visit to Willowbrook. In a press conference, he compared the conditions to a snake pit.
After this tour, Kennedy gave a speech to congress, trying to get them to revamp the facility and improve care for the thousands of children and young adults living within the walls. However, New York was in the middle of a budget crisis. So instead of offering any help to Willowbrook… they slashed its budget.
By 1970, Willowbrook had cut 600 employees, almost 30% of their staff, even though the number of patients was still increasing. And this was already a place that didn’t have enough people working there.
Diane Buglioli was still working there in the late 1960s. It was appalling, stressful work, but what else was she to do? She couldn’t abandon these kids. And the horrible truth was few of her co-workers cared much about the patients as people.
The staff was largely made up of low-income locals who were desperate for work, many of whom had little to no background in caregiving. And Willowbrook was so desperate for staff they were not doing background checks…
To give you a quick picture of the kind of person Willowbrook hired, there was a custodian who worked there in the late 60s known as Frank Bruchette. This wasn’t his real name. He’d lied on his job application. We don’t really know why, but it’s easy enough to guess after what happened later.
In 1969, he was caught by police having lured a 9 year old into his car. He plead guilty to attempted sexual assault and went to prison.
The fact that a man like this was allowed to work with children for years is chilling.
But here’s the thing, over the coming years, it wouldn’t just be the children that felt unsafe. A bunch of the female staff started noticing something strange. As if there was a threat lurking in the woods where the institution stood. One that was closing in on them
On October 24th, 1978, Ethel Louise Atwell was on her way to work at Willowbrook. It was very early in the morning; between 5:30 AM and 6 o’clock. She drove through the dark woods, eventually pulling into the parking lot outside of the School. Atwell was a physical therapist for the patients here, in her mid-40s and dedicated to her job.
She stepped out of her car and locked the door.
The nearest building to Atwell’s car was building 47. A couple of other nurses were already inside. After a little while, they heard Atwell’s voice coming from the dark outside, but did not see her. She was talking with someone. A man.
They couldn’t see the man, but they heard him say something like “Come on, come on…” like he was trying to lure her nearer. They swore they heard Ethel respond, “No, you’ll beat me.” followed by a loud scream outside. They called the police immediately.
By the time authorities arrived, it was too late. There was no one in the parking lot. The police combed the area, looking for Ethel. Her car was there but it was still locked, and a small handful of objects were scattered by the side door: her pocketbook, one of her shoes, an earring, and half her set of dentures. They looked for a long time, but never found Ethel herself. In the woods, 75 feet from the parking lot, they found her car keys, discarded in the underbrush.
The man she’d been talking to was never identified — her co-workers hadn’t recognized his voice, and no one got a good look at him.
Now, 1978 was a transitional period for Willowbrook. 6 years prior, a doctor at the school blew the whistle on the conditions to a journalist, who ran a big story for Eyewitness News. As a result, a big group of parents filed a class action lawsuit and the school had to try to clean up its act.
But this had some unintended consequences as well. Patients were discharged, pulled out, or moved to other facilities in an attempt to ease the overcrowding. Staff were reassigned. And now there was almost an eerie emptiness to a lot of the campus. You could pull up to work before the sun rose and not see a single other car in the parking lot. You could walk from one building to another, along the edge of the woods, completely alone.
Though, a lot of the staff claimed that they didn’t FEEL alone during these times. It felt….almost like someone was watching them.
And Ethel Louise Atwell? She wasn’t the first Willowbrook employee to disappear that year.
Back in July of 1978, a 44-year-old nurse named Shin Lee had clocked out of her shift around midnight, with the plan to walk home. She lived not far away from the campus, it was just a short walk that she made every night. But that night, She walked out into the darkness and never came back. A few weeks later, her body was found in a shallow grave with evidence that She’d been strangled to death.
The police had no clues when it came to either woman. And so, a rumor started spreading around the community, that there was someone lurking in the thick woods, waiting to snatch women leaving the building.
But the thing is, with rumors, most of the time they’re exaggerations. The people in the surrounding community, had no idea how true this rumor was… or how much worse it was about to get.
Picture this: It’s the late-1980s. Willowbrook is mostly shut down. Its staff has been reduced severely, as well as its patient count. There are only maybe 250 residents left, in one or two buildings. The rest of the campus — 375 acres— lies empty. Buildings have been decaying for years, there’s no funding to patch them back up. Windows have been smashed in, brick walls vandalized… the forest has risen up all around the complex.
For a decade, rumors of a boogeyman in the neighborhood have been told on nearby playgrounds. But that’s all it is, right? A rumor?
Well, In July of 1987, a few neighbors noticed a local 12-year-old girl named Jennifer Schweiger out walking near the edge of the woods. Beside her was an older man that none of them recognized.
Now, Jennifer had down syndrome, so when neighbors saw her with a stranger, they got very concerned. But by the time anyone could call it in, she was gone without a trace, and so was the man.
Her parents were devastated to say the least, and they got to work gathering a search party. Within a week, their entire neighborhood had been mobilized to methodically search the area for the little girl.
And This search took them past all the houses, through the woods, to the ruins of Willowbrook State School. Like I said, it was in the process of getting shut down. There were plans to fully close the remaining buildings by September of that year. But as far as these parents were concerned, this was like walking through a ghost town.
In the years since the Willowbrook scandal, the institution had grown in the local imagination. Parents in the search party later recalled feeling a chill as they stepped among the old buildings, where thousands of children had been abused and neglected, calling out Jennifer's name.
Then one of them saw something. Deep inside the Willowbrook grounds was a freshly dug, shallow grave. And that’s where they found the body of little Jennifer.
Immediately the NYPD got to work conducting an investigation into known predators in the area. A pair of eyewitnesses spoke to a Detective named Bobby Jensen, and they were able to give him a description of the middle aged man they saw her walking with on the day she disappeared
And one thing they mentioned that really stood out to the detective was that The man was pushing a pale green bicycle with a basket on the front.
When detective Jensen heard this, he knew right away who they’d seen. In fact, he’d seen the same man mere days ago while out on patrol: a local transient named Andre Rand.
Now, you’re not going to recognize that name, but I’ve already told you about Andre Rand in this story. Remember Frank Bruchette, the sex offender who had lied about his name to get a job at Willowbrook?
Well, after his release from prison in 1972, he’d changed his name again. Perhaps this was a halfhearted attempt to keep a low profile or evade the law, or maybe just give himself a fresh start. Whatever the reason, he was now Andre Rand. And Andre Rand had a rap sheet.
Since his stint in prison for attempted sexual assault of a minor, he’d been working various odd jobs in the area. All the while, he was going in and out of police custody for various offenses.
Then, in 1981, he’d attempted to assault another 9-year-old girl. He’d tried to lure her into his car with a lollipop. Fortunately, she was able to escape and run home, with Rand’s green Volkswagen following her all the way. In that instance, for whatever reason, the parents never pressed charges.
Two years later, he’d attempted an even more dramatic kidnapping. He drove a bus to a YMCA, picked up 11 kids, and drove off with them. He wound up stopping at a White Castle, where he bought them burgers. Then, he took them to Newark Airport, where they spent the afternoon watching planes.
What he did next is kind of confusing. He brought the kids back to the YMCA, where he found police and concerned parents waiting for him. He was arrested and served 10 months for kidnapping. Why kidnap 11 kids, just to drop them off where he found them? Some people think that he had something horrible in mind, but got nervous and bailed on his own plan.
Whatever the case, by the time Jennifer Schweiger disappeared, he was back on the streets. And living, at least part of the time, in a camp on the grounds of his former place of employment: Willowbrook. Detective Jensen interrogated him when the search for Jennifer began, ultimately releasing him when he denied having seen her.
A month later, when her body was found, they arrested him for murder.
As soon as photos of this guy hit the papers, the public was certain they had their man. He was creepy looking, he had an eerie, faraway gaze. A local photographer caught an image of Rand getting escorted out of police headquarters. I’ll be honest, the image is a chilling one. Rand doesn’t seem like he’s resisting at all. He barely seems to know where he is. He’s slumped between the three men in suits, his head on his chin. A line of drool runs from his chin down his shirt.
And when the public saw this photo, they branded him the boogeyman they had been looking for.
As Rand’s trial began, investigators started piecing together a trail of disappearances that stretched all the way back to the early 1970s. Before Jennifer Schweiger, five young people, many of whom had developmental disabilities, had disappeared in the area. The one that was easiest to connect to Rand was a 7-year-old named Holly Ann Hughes, who had disappeared in 1981. Rand’s green Volkswagen had been seen loitering near where she disappeared, though a search of the car hadn’t turned up any evidence.
And that’s one of the most unsettling things about this case: There was no physical evidence that definitively tied Rand to this series of victims. Even Jennifer Schweiger, who was found buried so close to Rand’s campsite, couldn’t be directly tied to him. The only links were the eyewitnesses who’d seen them together, and the location of her body. Both of these are pretty damning, but remember: Willowbrook’s grounds were huge. Rand wasn’t the only one camping there.
On top of the six children, Rand became a suspect in the disappearance of Ethel Louise Atwell and the death of Shin Lee, the two Willowbrook employees. But again, with no physical evidence, it was impossible to charge him for these.
But Rand would be charged with the kidnapping and first degree murder of Jennifer Schweiger. He was convicted for kidnapping, but the jury couldn’t reach a verdict on the murder. Either way, he received a sentence of 25 years to life. Many years later he would be retried for the kidnapping of Holly Hughes, and given another 25 to life.
He is still behind bars to this day, and has never confessed to any of the murders attributed to him. He’ll be eligible for parole in 2037, at which point he will be 91 years old.
In the meantime, the legend of Rand, honestly like most of the monsters we’ve recently covered on this show, has continued to grow and take on a shape of its own, almost completely separate from his story. I mean, even the NAME Cropsey doesn't really have anything to do with Rand, but it was the name given to him.
The name Cropsey was actually taken from another common urban legend in New York that long predates Willowbrook itself. In the story, a judge named George Cropsey is driven mad by the death of his family and takes out his fury on local summer camp kids.
But now it’s synonymous with Rand and Willowbrook.
And that’s not the only way the legend has changed over time. In some versions, Andre Rand was a practicing Satanist. According to locals, the woods near Willowbrook were a popular ritual site for The Process Church of the Final Judgment. It that rings a bell to you, it’s probably because they were one of the big groups people wrote about during the height of the Satanic Panic, which was going on around at the time of Jennifer’s murder in the late 80’s. This, like many legends during the Satanic Panic, has been debunked.
But one thing I want to mention, is that the legend of Cropsey, has now become the most popular story in the zeitgeist when it comes to Willowbrook, but what’s even scarier, at least to me, is the horrors that persisted inside of those buildings for over 30 years. But that’s not the stuff of legend. That was real, and horrible, and some of the victims are still alive today and dealing with the consequences of being sent there as a child.
Which is why I wanted to end our story today on some of the good that came out of that place.
Former Willowbrook Nurse Diane Buglioli helped found a nonprofit organization called A Very Special Place, which offers services to the developmentally disabled. According to their website, they have helped over 1,600 people lead more fulfilling lives through their educational and community building services.
And that class action lawsuit that parents filed against Willowbrook inspired legislation like The Developmental Disabilities Assistance and Bill of Rights Act, which were some of the very first federal laws protecting the civil rights of disabled people. Today’s Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA, was built on the progress made by the Willowbrook families in the 1970s.
Willowbrook was a place of horrors; but The name of this horribly mismanaged institution is now also synonymous with disability rights, and that is a more worthwhile legacy than any summer camp boogeyman.
If you want to learn more about the history of Willowbrook and associated urban legends, the book Public Hostage, Public Ransom by Dr. William Bronston and the documentary Cropsey by Joshua Zeman and Barbara Brancaccio were two of the main sources we used in our research, and I highly recommend them.
But that is all I have for you this week. Thank you once again for joining me here in the rogue detecting society headquarters, this one was HEAV-Y. But next week, my dear listeners, I am taking you even further into the abyss with me, as we look at one of the eeriest unsolved mysteries in all of Japan’s history.
And if you want to hear a bit MORE about Willowbrook, I have a bit more dark history that didn’t make it into this episode, including some more information on the supposed satanists that were or weren’t living in the woods near the building that I’ll be sharing on Footnotes, our weekly show for the high council tier on patreon.
Alright, I’ll meet you here once again next week. And until then, stay curious. OoooOOooo