Connecticut Unsolved Part 3
Ray Family Vampires and the Curse of Dudleytown
From possessed dolls to early seventeenth century witch trials, Connecticut certainly has its fair share of urban legends and spooky history. However, the previous installments in this Connecticut Unsolved series have only just scratched the surface. In fact, the strange tales and mysterious happenstance discussed in this article delve deeper into such a peculiar history, as this installment covers what is perhaps the weirdest and most fascinating of Connecticut’s paranormal phenomena.
We begin during the first half of the nineteenth century, in Jewett City, Connecticut, a subset of the larger New London County’s town of Griswold. Stories of vampirism and familial hauntings by the aforementioned demonic bloodsuckers have circulated the globe throughout the centuries, dating back to their origins in Transylvania or, rather, Romania as we know it today, all the way to the present day, where gothic fiction has become a hokey staple of popular culture and modern literature. However, by the mid eighteenth century, tales of vampirism and those wretched things that go bump in the night had become little more than scary stories to tell in the dark, harmless bogeymen. Except, it would seem, for in nineteenth century Connecticut.
Enter the Ray family, composed of Jewett City residents Henry and Lucy Ray and their five children. Toward the mid 1840s, three members of the family — Henry and two of his sons — had fallen ill with a strange affliction and slowly, agonizingly, withered away until their eventual deaths. Shortly after, another of Ray’s sons had succumbed to the same disease. With nothing but myths, legends, and an astounding lack of medical knowledge to fall back on, the Rays and the other townsfolk assumed that the Ray family lineage had incurred the wrath of a vampire, which preyed upon them at night and slowly but surely drained them of their blood. Some even thought that the vampire was a member of the Ray family itself, returned from the dead to feast upon its own kin. Thus, none of Griswold’s residents batted an eye when, following the Ray men’s deaths, the remaining family exhumed the bodies from their freshly-laid graves and set them aflame right there in the cemetery, a gruesome mode of cremation they thought would effectively prevent any further vampiric attacks. Of course, we know today that their illness was not, in fact, caused by a vampire, but instead by tuberculosis or, as it was previously known: consumption. The Ray family’s graves remain today in a somber Jewett City cemetery, a testament to the Ray family’s perils and the dark morbidity of Connecticut’s past.
Believe it or not, the Ray family graves are not the only bone-chilling remnants of Connecticut’s past paranormal activity. In fact, there exists on the opposite side of the state a much larger, much creepier historical monument: an abandoned plot of farmland by the name of Dudleytown. This case takes us to the town of Cornwall in the county of Litchfield, CT, a scenic town founded in the first half of the eighteenth century, wherein this veritable ghost town lay. The name “Dudleytown” is more than a little misleading. The property itself is not actually a town, but rather a section of Cornwall that had once been forest but, upon its purchase by one Gideon Dudley, was converted to farmland.
Allegedly, the Dudleys were not from Connecticut, but rather were descendants of an English nobleman by the name of Edmund Dudley, who was beheaded for treason, a death-sentence that forced the remaining members of his family to flee to America. Some versions of the rumors state that Edmund Dudley’s grim demise brought a curse upon the family, one that followed them to America and caused a slew of resulting tragedies of varying severity, including but not limited to suicide, mental illness, murder, failed economic endeavors, the destruction of their farm’s crops and, by extension, their livelihood.
Another version purports that the Dudleys had toyed with a magical tome, one that opened the gates of hell and brought harm to their closest friends and family. Most of these stories, of course, have been debunked. The Dudleys’ trouble with crops was found to be caused by of a lack of available water, as Dudleytown’s elevated position atop a massive Cornwall hill had led to infertile land and shaky business prospects. The cause for the reported claims of mental illness, elevated suicide rates, and murder are still somewhat unknown, but it is safe to assume that hysteria often leads to more hysteria and the rumors were more than likely heavily embellished along the way. The lack of evidence to suggest the Dudleys that founded Dudleytown were even related to Englishman Edmund Dudley at all certainly does not lend the story any more credibility. One might argue that it does quite the opposite, in fact. Today, the town sits abandoned and under private ownership by the Dark Forest Entry Association. It has become the victim of rampant vandalism, despite the many “no trespassing” signs posted within its borders, and remains a point of intrigue for paranormal investigators and CT residents alike.
Perhaps a bit surprisingly, the CTDA houses some interesting documents and information relating to both the Ray family vampires and the odd occurrences at Dudleytown. Of course, these items are steeped more in fact than in fiction, and only offer concrete information regarding these historical sites, people, and their still-standing landmarks. Rather than feeding into the rumors and hearsay, they allow us to take a closer look at Connecticut’s past, through a purely historical lens, so that we might better construct the state’s fascinating chronology. Among those items is a survey of historic Cornwall and its surrounding land, a pamphlet labeled “Dudleytown” published by the Cornwall Historical Society in the year 1966, a drawing of a view of Jewett City, and text and images relating to the Litchfield Hills, published in June of 1964. Each offers insight into the actual towns from which these peculiar ghost stories have sprung, rooting myth in reality and providing first-hand accounts of Connecticut’s actual historical proceedings, rather than such outlandish urban legends.
As we have seen time and time again, Connecticut is no stranger to its share of weird stories and supernatural encounters. With the knowledge that we have today, it is easy to roll our eyes at the plight of the misguided Rays, who truly believed their family was under siege by one of Dracula’s lesser known brethren, rather than the medically explainable, totally rational case of tuberculosis that had actually plagued them. Likewise, we know better than to feed into the rampant hysteria and fear of the unknown that led to the downfall and eventual abandonment of Dudleytown. Well, most of us do at least. Still, though, there exists that little voice at the back of one’s mind, a little voice that believes the stories, that convinces us that maybe, just maybe, the rumors were never just rumors.
For more information on vampirism in Connecticut and Dudleytown’s strange backstory, visit the links below!
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/jewett-city-vampires
Connecticut Digital Archive Connect is the publication of the Connecticut Digital Archive, a program of the UConn Library. Visit https://ctdigitalarchive.org to learn more.
