RALEIGH, N.C. — In 1958, tragedy struck when an orphanage in Raleigh, North Carolina, burned down, killing almost everyone inside. Legend has that if you're at a certain location at night, you can hear the screams of those who are still trapped, and you can still smell the embers burning -- waiting to be put out.
Sounds haunting, right?
But what if I told you that everything that I mentioned above was total fiction?
It's true North Carolina has plenty of ghost stories, and the myth of Crybaby Lane is one of them.
Except for one thing...
“This place did exist, it didn’t quite exist where they say it exists," said oral historian John Horan of the NC Archives, who dug into the actual history of this myth dating back to the early 1900s,
“It was part of a seminary and orphanage that was run by the catholic church, Nazareth Seminary, and this place did catch on fire three times over the years... I will say, in all three of these fires – nobody died as a result of the actual fire," reiterated Horan.
Records show that in 1905, 1912, and 1961, the Nazareth Orphanage suffered three distinct fires with the 1905 fire resulting in three individuals being seriously hurt from jumping from the 4th floor to escape the fire with some reports at the time claiming that one died from internal injuries later.
The orphanage closed in the 1960s and in the late 1980s, the Diocese sold that land to North Carolina State University. That parcel of land is now Centennial Campus.
“Students would go by and they would see thee ruins and kind of hear these stories of fire and sometimes invent their own story and so it’s an evolution of fact into the legend," said Horan.
But, if this story was blatantly untrue, why did it hold so much weight for so long in the minds of storytellers?
“Overtime, these stories get added on and added on, more people add their little flair to the stories and they become these bigger, more entertaining, larger-than-life tales of something maybe that started off as a small little thing," said Ghost Tour Guide of the Great Raleigh Trolley, Darci VanderSlik.
VanderSlik has seen firsthand the power of storytelling, especially here in North Carolina as a tour guide for Raleigh's ghostly haunts.
“They sort of grow into their own folk lore and folklore have a very prominent place in our culture, and a lot of people don’t think about folklore like that," said VanderSlik.
And that scary folklore, from Lydia’s Bridge to the disappearance of Roanoke Colony, is found everywhere.
“In terms of geography, and in terms of time its engrained in the DNA of the state," said Horan.
However, for this instance, Crybaby Lane has more fiction than fact in its tale, but that doesn’t mean for this Halloween season, you can’t enjoy its haunting legend with the lights on.