10 Documentaries More Terrifying Than Most Horror Films

Everywhere has its urban legends and boogeymen figures who kids gossip about in hushed whispers in playgrounds and dare one another to visit where the monster is said to live. For documentary duo Joshua Zeman and Barbara Brancaccio who grew up in Staten Island this ominous figure was “Cropsey”.

An escaped asylum patient with a hooked hand, Cropsey is said to live in an abandoned mental hospital in the woods and kidnap children in the dead of night. The building itself is like something taken from The Blair Witch Project. It’s exactly the kind of place a horror villain would live.

However, when Andrew Rand, a former employee at the hospital, was arrested for the kidnapping of a young girl in 1987, it looked like the stories of Cropsey were confirmed to be true. Images of Rand being arrested drooling and with a vacant expression made him look like a murderer. And that was all it took for public opinion to decide he was guilty despite a lack of any physical evidence.

Lo-fi footage exploring the abandoned buildings and tunnels is frightening enough. More frightening, though, is Cropsey’s bleak portrait of a man condemned because of an urban legend.