The legends and stories of a woman named Mary are found scattered all over Sweet Hollow Road and Mount Misery. I’ve spoken to people who were teens in the sixties, and some of the stories were around then, and undoubtedly, some are much, much older. There’s Mary’s grave in Sweet Hollow Cemetery, which once had the words “Life, How Short” inscribed over its gates. There are actually a few Mary’s graves in that cemetery, if you get to poking around. The story is well-known. Go to the grave and stand before the tombstone, shine your flashlight on it, say Mary three times and Mary will appear to you. Or Mary will strike you dead on the spot. Or you will die before the sun comes up. There are many variations, and not only in this graveyard, but in graveyards all over Long Island, and in fact, all over the world.
Sweet Hollow Cemetery on Sweet Hollow Road.
As a child, my sister taught me that if you stared in a mirror without blinking and repeated out loud “I don’t believe in Bloody Mary,” over and over again, you would eventually see her, which of course is an optical illusion much more effective if you are female. Another variation of the same story.
People point to one or another tombstone with no words but Mary carved on them, and believe this must be the Mary’s grave of legend. Sadly, if you look nearby you’ll usually see a family tombstone, with the children listed, and the dates Mary died, along with her family. It was once a very common practice. No real mystery there about a tombstone with only a single name.
The stories pile up: Mary can sometimes be seen standing next to her tombstone. Mary is buried across the road from the graveyard, a suicide victim, not eligible to be buried in hallowed ground, and can sometimes be seen standing just inside the forest, watching. Mary is spotted sometimes, walking along the side of the road in her white dress. Mary darts out in front of cars and disappears. Mary sometimes flags you down and asks for a ride home, and when you reach the graveyard she tells you to stop, and says this is where she lives. When you look again to the passenger seat she is gone.
There are several Mary and the car stories in fact, which typically portrays Mary as an innocent, the lady in white. Mary and her husband were newlyweds going down Sweet Hollow Road when they were both killed in a car crash. Mary wanders the road in her wedding dress, looking for her husband, and her husband’s phantom headlights can be seen scouring the road for Mary. In another tale, Mary was a teenager whose boyfriend suspected her of cheating. In a fit of anger, while they drove through Sweet Hollow, he opened her door and pushed her out. Mary lived, but before she could crawl off to safety, another car ran over here like a bump in the road, killed her and kept on driving. Her spirit walks along the roadside now, looking for her jealous boyfriend and the driver who killed her.
Unfortunately, for those who need to believe that one or more of these stories are true, all of them can be found as urban legends throughout the country. What the urban legends about Mary make up for in quantity, they lack in originality.
Mary of Sweet Hollow Road (Amber D’Amato, model).
And what would a colonial era area be without a witchcraft legend? Mary treated the children of the area who had contracted smallpox, and unfortunately, several of them died. The locals as a result, accused Mary of witchcraft, and stoned her to death. Children playing in Sweet Hollow from time to time feel her tender hands stroking their hair. Other tales are less specific, only that she was accused of being a witch and was hung, some say in Sweet Hollow itself, others in Huntington. This is of course easily shot down, as the town records for the era are in existence, and does refer to a couple of accusations of witchcraft, which resulted in no hangings or stonings, and none involved a Mary from the Sweet Hollow area.
The first question to ask to get to the truth of the legend is why Mary? All these events didn’t happen here, and certainly not by a women named Mary. But most legends have some grain of truth about them, and at some point there might have been a Mary who lived along Sweet Hollow Road, and perhaps something happened so memorable and so horrifying, that she’s become a magnet for urban legends, which stick to her name like glue.
Or perhaps it wasn’t horrifying after all. As a child in the midwest, I heard the story of Black Annie, who wandered the alleys in our hometown at night, looking for children who were out where they shouldn’t be. If she caught you, she’d rush towards you screeching “my children, my children,” in her delusions, believing you to be one of her children who were lost to her long ago. Some stories claimed that the walls of her house were papered with the skin of the children she found after dark.
In truth, the tale is believed to have originated in the British isles, and refers to a nun, hence the black clothing, who used to care for leper children. She lived in a cave so as not to spread the disease should she contract it, and the walls of her cave were covered with tokens that grateful children had given her.
So you see, in time, even the best among us can become horror stories, especially if parents can tell the tales to keep their children from wandering where they shouldn’t be.
Many of our urban legends and ghost stories were brought over by immigrants from other countries. And it’s likely that this happened with Mary, and also that some of the tales are much older than one would suppose.
Here’s a basic question which no one seems to ask, why the name Mary? Why is this name associated with legends and mysteries? In fact it’s a practice which goes way back, all the way to the Good Book, the Bible, to the story of the virginal Mary at the well. Mary had just drawn water from the well when the angel Gabriel appeared to her and told her that she was to give birth. Some might say that lie has begat countless lies about Mary since then. Others might be more considerate and say legend rather than lie. And of course, there are others who simply believe.
Some might point to that other Mary, the Magdalene, as the source of mysteries attached to the various Marys. There’s a great body of evidence that this Mary was much aligned by the disciples, apostles and the authors of the various books of the Bible. The oldest tales have her afflicted with demons, something which wouldn’t be her fault after all, which gradually metamorphosed into Mary being a prostitute. Just like our Mary, her tale seems to have changed over time, and not for the better.
Of course, one can’t count out the fact that Mary was one of the most popular names throughout the ages. In the 19th century, it was hard to swing a dead cat, black or otherwise without belting a woman named Mary.
As I wrote about the story of Mary Hatchet at Head of the Harbor, legends about women named Mary are especially common around wells and springs. In Ireland, a lot of the cures and miracles that are associated with the cult of Mary are attributed to Saint Brigid, who actually predates Christianity, whose shrines are typically found at wells and springs, and whose pagan origins became entwined and replaced with the worship to Mary the virgin. In fact springs are considered sacred in most ancient cultures, from the people who built Stonehenge and who turned Glastonbury into the mystery it is today, to the native Americans. In a suburb of London a couple centuries back, there was a popular legend about a Mary remarkably similar to the Mary of American folklore, who was said to haunt a well.
That people coming to these shores brought folk-tales and legends with them isn’t even a matter for debate. Neither is the fact that they then began to associate these stories with landmarks near their new homes. Wells and springs were dangerous places, particularly when the wildlife on Long Island was likely to kill and eat you. After all, animals typically used the same springs as humans, so children were particularly vulnerable to these dangers. Tell a child to stay away from the spring because there might be wolves and they’ll go there every chance they get. Tell them that Mary might be there and they’ll think twice.
There was a spring in Sweet Hollow, around the intersection of Chichester Road and Sweet Hollow Road. It was called Mountain Mist Springs, and the water from there was used in the early 20th century, bottled and shipped to Montauk to treat soldiers returning from the Spanish American War suffering from yellow fever. Certainly the spring was known of much earlier, and being a spring, it was likely considered a dangerous, and quite possibly a haunted place. Certainly the kind of place that a mother would warn children to stay away from, even employing what are affectionately called mommy lies to keep them away.
Which brings us to a couple of the most gruesome tales told about Mary of Sweet Hollow Road.
It was near this spot that according to one legend, a house once stood where Mary and her family lived. As the tale is told, the house caught fire and Mary burned alive in the blaze. On lonely nights you can still hear her screams. And it is entirely possible that this story is true. A look through newspapers of the 19th century find many articles about fire in Sweet Hollow. It was remote, under populated, and as a result, fire and rescue services were basically non-existent. There are however, no articles that I’m aware of which refer to a woman named Mary perishing in any of the blazes, though I did find one of an elderly gentleman who was burned alive.
But the story can’t end there, as the stories are never told the same way twice. Mary became an arsonist, who set the blaze in which she died, as well as her family. It wasn’t her home, but an insane asylum which Mary had been committed to, and the other patients and the staff burned alive as well.
To begin with, as I’ve pointed out in the first article in this series, there is almost no possibility that there was an institution here during that time. There wasn’t a population to support it, there was no money allotted to it, and the infrastructure wasn’t there. Think about it – the reason given for it being located on Mount Misery is that it was remote, and so neighbors wouldn’t be upset by the screams of the patients. Being remote, there weren’t enough people needing mental care – which was almost non-existent at the time anyway, to warrant the service. Some say it was for patients from New York City, but most of Long Island was farmland or wilderness at the time. They certainly didn’t need to come all the way to Mannetto Hills to find a suitably isolated location.
So Mary was never a patient in the mental institution on Mount Misery, nor a worker, nor did she set the fire that killed all the inmates and the staff. Which means she couldn’t have laughed as she burned alive, and therefore her laughter and the patient screams can’t be heard on Mount Misery. Nor can you occasionally catch the scent of burned wood and flesh, unless it’s from a different ghastly fire.
And that different ghastly fire wasn’t the second institution, built after the inferno that was supposed to have swallowed up the first one. Once you get past the colonial era, you’re in well-documented history. And there is no documentation of a mental institution in the area in the 19th or 20th centuries either. At least none that has come to light, and it would have to be hidden in a very dark corner of history to have remained hidden all this time. After all, if such a tragedy existed, there would be a documentary on PBS – Tragedy at Sweet Hollow.
One of the first asylums on Long Island was built in Amityville, and that structure did catch fire once. But not with wholesale death and destruction. And of course, that fire was well-reported, even in the New York Times. As are several other fires in mental institutions in the New York City area. This was a constant fear, and at times it did happen, sometimes with the loss of human life. It just never happened on Mount Misery, nor along Sweet Hollow Road. Which also brings into the doubt the integrity of all those ghost hunters out here who have EVPs of people being burned alive on Mount Misery.
Sweet Hollow School on Sweet Hollow Road. Click to view large or order prints
“But,” dear reader you might ask, “what about the schoolhouse fire?”
Which brings us back to the intersection of Sweet Hollow and Chichester roads.
Just up Sweet Hollow Road from this intersection is the old West Hills school. The old West Hills school house was built in the 18th century, and as the population of the area in the 17th century was dismally low, it’s unlikely that there was an earlier one, lost to history. According to the grand-daughter of Lemuel Carll, when the old school building was partially burned in the 1880’s, she walked to Melville school. Once repaired, the building was used as a school until 1912.
There are two main legends about this school. In the first, Mary is at her home at the intersection when her father, the school teacher returns from a hard day of work. She notices he has a funny smell about him, which he said was from smoke. When she asks why, he relates to her that, more or less, he got fed up with the noisy little rugrats, went outside the school, locked the door from the outside and torched the place. Then presumably danced his little happy dance as all the hapless creatures inside were toasted like marshmallows. Understandably horrified – as she was never a teacher herself, otherwise she might have been more understanding – Mary retreats to her room and hangs herself in shame. And since there are those who can never have Mary being a victim, in some telling of the tale, Mary was the school marm and set the blaze herself.
In another version, the father dispatches the students one by one with an axe, which is certainly a more hands on approach. And of course, in another, it was Mary wielding the axe.
That bloody hatchet.
Sweet Hollow is a short road, but a long enough road for Mary to make the leap from the innocent lady in white to the ruthless killer garbed in black, Mary Hatchet.
You find the full range of Mary’s emotions in these stories. There’s Mary the victim, where Mary was molested by her father, or sodomized by her boyfriend, and she takes her revenge with a hatchet to the skulls of her transgressors. In some tales, there were two sodomites, and as a result, she takes two lives every year beyond the grave, which of course is poppycock as two people yearly dispatched with hatchets to the head would surely attract people’s attention in the liberal news media. And yet I’ve seen no CNN trucks parked alongside Sweet Hollow road with film crews scouring the area. Film crews abound of course, usually consisting of amateurs with sometimes startlingly professional equipment, the results usually finding their way to YouTube.
And there’s the insane Mary as well, with Mary cleaving the brains of her entire family for no other reason other than she wanted to. Or perhaps it was those pesky voices in her head. These stories can be found all over Long Island as well, nay, all over the country. Anyone out there remember the truly atrocious southern rock band of the seventies, Molly Hatchet? Same story, only a prostitute in New Orleans, and Molly is of course a derivative of Mary. And the whole prostitute premise harkens back to the Magdalene.
Luckily enough, Mary Hatchet is a historical figure. Often depicted in drawings, engravings and photographs wearing a black, Victorian style dress and wielding a hatchet, Mary was quite a popular figure early in the twentieth century. She was one of the symbols of the Women’s Temperance Christian Union, who campaigned tirelessly to have the old demon alcohol prohibited. Which she eventually accomplished. These organizations often met secretly, and to avoid people disrupting their meetings, they never gave out the address. Only that the meeting would be held at Mary Hatchet’s house, hence the large number of Mary Hatchet’s houses found in folklore all over the country.
And for those of us who might enjoy a bit of the sauce now and then, plenty of reason to make up mean stories about the woman.
Unfortunately, this image of Mary the crazed, axe-wielding lunatic is likely to be the one we’re stuck with for some time to come. For coming this fall to a theater near you, Blood Night, The Legend of Mary Hatchet brings the legend of Sweet Hollow road to the masses. Of course it’s not the legend of Sweet Hollow Road, to borrow a particularly catchy phrase I read recently, “any more than masturbating to Posh Spice makes you David Beckham.” It’s just an excuse to swill a few buckets of gore and gallons of blood across the big screen. It’s billed as stemming from the real Long Island legend of Mary Hatchet, though in truth it bears little resemblance to any of the stories. No doubt many people will fall for the illusion the film’s marketing is trying to spin, that the events, or at least some of the events actually took place. Already people are googling Mary Hatchet and Mary Mattock to find the true story. For good measure they even toss in Kings Park Psychiatric Institute into the film, re-christianed as the more scathing Kings Park Lunatic Asylum.
If they look hard enough, they’ll find there is no true story, only a rich body of legend. Hopefully they’ll find the much simpler tales, told for the sake of a good story, which captures the feel of the place, if not the history. There are plenty of Mary stories to choose from, and if your tastes run to the gruesome, you’ll find plenty to your liking.
But my favorite is much simpler. Mary is seen wandering the woods along Sweet Hollow Road. No reason why, no horror or gore, just a ghost moving through the trees. Which is why I like the simplest story the best. I’ve hiked most of the trails on Mount Misery, Sweet Hollow and West Hills, in summer, winter, spring and fall, and in day and night. I’ve stood over Mary’s grave and said her name three times. I’ve called for her in the woods. And so far she’s not shown herself. I’m not saying she’s not there, just that so far, I’m still alive, and still walking the woods alone.
Why does Mary still wander the woods of Mount Misery and Sweet Hollow? Because she is called to. She’s summoned by countless fear seekers, ghost hunters and curious teenagers each year, and no doubt will be this Halloween as well, and for many more to come. I have no doubt that from time to time, when someone calls, she’s there. There is something about us that needs the supernatural. And as long as we need Mary, she will come.
Real ghost stories and the places that inspired them
Really enjoyed this one! (Love it when you give full vent to your delicious sense of humor, too.)
I’m always curious about how legends begin and then get passed around. When something doesn’t make sense, I want to figure it out. Then again, some things just elude explanations. I too have walked within the woods of Mount Misery … but not alone, never alone!
Thank you for the sanity! There’s certainly very little of it to be found on Sweet Hollow Road these days.
The probelm is, there are so many reports of interatctions with a ghostly woman on Sweet Hollow Road that we have to ask ourselves if dismissing the block of stories is an attack on the truth. Are all the stories of a ghostly woman false? I’ve spoken to many witnesses. Some are absoultely crazy, others seem well grounded. The truth seems to fall somewhere between them.
Sweet Hollow Road is haunted, I can attest to this becuse of my own experiences; whether or not “Mary” is a ghost of the woods and road is a question that I think you answered in your discussion. It sure seems that people are quick to attach legends from other places to Sweet Hollow.
Thanks for a great, thought provoking read.
I am indebted to this blog and its comment posters for enlightening me .
My friends mom told us this story at a sleepover. I was the only one that was excided to hear it all of the other girls went in a group… HAHA WIMPS
Oh, my gosh… I lived at 7 Sweet Hollow Rd. from 1955 to 1972. During that time, one of my little sisters was having a camp-out party on our large front lawn. A male friend and I contrived to dress up like an ax murderer type chasing a victim type (bless me, I can’t even remember which one I was!), and we rushed up out of the dark schmaltzing it up & hollering, etc., etc. – we ended up taking a long walk up Sweet Hollow Rd., back down Bluebird Lane, along Jericho Turnpike, and them home. Later that evening, a police officer showed up at our door, saying concerned citizens had seen these things & they were just looking into it… hmmmmmm. Am I the origin of the Mary of Sweet Hollow Rd. myth?!?!?!?
So you’re the one who started it! Honestly, I’ve not found any horrific type stories involving axe murders, or even any of the Mary stories which predate the early seventies. So you might very well be responsible.
I love the site and applaud your detective skills. My girlfriend of 2 years has always admitted to being able to see dead people. We have driven down Sweet Hollow Road too many times to count and not once has she ever seen Mary or a woman in white. What she has seen is the ghostly figures of 5 or 6 boys hanging by ropes from the underpass right near SH cemetery. She’s told me the story of a horrible accident there involving schoolchildren. I was wondering if you have ever heard of anything like this. Also I can say that I’ve gotten extremely cold and filled with a sense of dread and something else not quite explainable while driving down that road. It might not be Mary, but that road is definitely haunted. Maybe the Mothman does visit.
Most of the stories are true, I have experienced countless terrors there. I live about ten minutes from the road, and you don’t have to be on the road for odd things to happen to you. Katie you are not the start of Mary, trust me I wish you were.
Hi I’m Jenny :3 I’m 13 years old but is Mary Hatchet a true legend?
It’s true that it’s a legend. Like all legends, there might well be some truth in it. But in all likelihood, nobody will ever know. The idea that she was a teenager who chopped up her family or however that story goes is I’m pretty confident, poppycock.
I came across this by chance, and I talked to my father about it. He said he and his buddies used to go out on both Mt. Misery and Sweet Hollow Roads at night (can’t say if they were wasted or not, but let’s use our imaginations either way), and he mentioned the alleged hellhound in the woods. He said that a friend of his had to stop over on the side of the road to relieve himself, when they saw two red eyes in the woods in the distance beside him. They basically had to say, “Uh, [name redacted], might wanna hurry it up.” I asked my father if they were headlights; he said no, but I’m pretty sure they were. After all, as opposed to what the legend says, they didn’t die soon after!
There are also two things that might be interesting to look into (sorry if I’m going long). First, he said that as they were trying to drive through the cemetery, something was stopping the car from going any further , like a treadmill. (I’m guessing this was a little after they’d gone into it.) They had to go around on the grass. Maybe there was something there they didn’t see in the night, like a log? The second is about the Presbyterian Church of Sweet Hollow, which is about midway between the roads and very close to Old Country Road. (There’s also an older location at the corner of Sweet Hollow and Old Country–my father said it was the newer one.) He said that on Saturday night at midnight, the lights would go on and church music would play from the organ. Even when only one person had the key. He said that they chained it off, blocked the entrances, even got the police involved to test it out, and it still happened. I haven’t found any evidence of that on the Internet, so if you’re in the area, perhaps you could check that out? Thanks.
Oh, to clarify: the music and the lights would go out after a few minutes; people came from all over to see it. Also, this only went on for two years (he said sometime around 1979-80), and it doesn’t happen anymore (if it ever did.)
the horrors of sweet hollow road Movie 2015
Death House
http://vimeo.com/93012534
Sweet Hollow Road The Hauntings
http://vimeo.com/62526581
So last night my mom and i walked around. Mt. Misery road. To marys grave. I was to scared ans ran back half way thru. And exactly an hour later. We got a call from mary saying. To come back to the forrest face our fears.
I live about 15-20 minutes from mount misery and sweet hollow road, I come here like once month for me and my friends own amusement. I found out about these roads from my Dad. He told me about probably twenty or more years ago he was in the cemetery with his friends at night , because the cemetery was open at night back than , keep in note; not now. It was in the middle of the night , and he saw a male figure . Although , it might’ve been someone that has died from the cemetery not any of the legends. Anyways, it made me want to go out there. I’ve been on sweet hollow and the cemetery during the day , not mount misery road. But I’ve been on sweet hollow , past the cemetery , and on mount misery road countless of times at the middle of the night. And I can assure you , there’s something there that gives off a weird vibe , only thing I’ve see. Was orb like spots in the air at the beginning of chinester road or whatever it’s called and it was flying up. Nothing else . I’ve done every trick, I’ve seen nothing . Other than that, driving on sweet hollow and having a raccoon cross in front of our car scared the hell out of me , but I’ve seen nothing !!!!!!!!! False or true? Probably false
This is very interesting to me. Didn’t know anything about this folklore until now. But, I lived, as a child, within a five-minute walk to Mt. Misery Road and Sweet Hollow. Odd thing about Mt. Misery Road: I was a teen driving my car, late at night, on this narrow road, hugging the right side, when I came upon a bright light and steam coming from the woods. When I arrived at the light, I realized there had been an awful car crash. An oncoming car, heading toward me, veered across my lane, apparently, just before I arrived. He crossed my future path, missing a head-on with me, losing control at a curve where he plunged into the woods and into a large tree. That driver hit a tree in the woods on my side of the road. I discovered, later, he was a fellow teen from my high school, who turned out to be my friend’s nephew. The solo occupant of that car, he was, then, in the passenger seat, with his head draped outside the passenger door, bleeding profusely. His neck from severed from ear to ear. It was apparent to me, by observing the large crash hole in the passenger windshield, that he had gone through the windshield and back thru it, again, landing on the passenger seat. That I thought is what cut his neck. I summoned help and he was saved.