The Haunting History of Whiskey Hollow Road

In the summer of 2011, a group of teens wandered around a five-mile dirt path known as Whiskey Hollow Road when local authorities showed up and asked the group to leave. The teens, on one of their routine night visits of the road, explored the area and saw what paranormal activity they could pick up on camera. 

Whiskey Hollow Road is famously closed after dark, but for what reason is debated. 

Matthew Lipke, one of the Whiskey Hollow Road explorers, has always been a big fan of horror. Inspired by a dream he had one night, Lipke chose the eerie road as the focus of his high school senior film project. Despite his personal research, Lipke doubts the validity of paranormal activity. 

“Just being out there, you get kind of an eerie sense,” Lipke said. “Part of it is your mindset.” 

Upstate New York is home to many paranormal legends, like Whiskey Hollow Road, located in Van Buren, New York. Whiskey Hollow Road has been the site of satanic rituals, Klu Klux Klan activities and reported spirits haunting the area. 

Locals have also reported seeing spirits of children, strange lights and noises on the road. In 1987, there were reports of the body of a murdered woman found in the woods. These legends continue to be spread by word-of-mouth amongst Baldwinsville natives. 

For some, legends like Whiskey Hollow Road should be approached with skepticism. 

Supernatural historian Mason Winfield said skeptics look at both sides of any question, while non-believers totally disbelieve in spirituality and psychic phenomena. 

As the author of nearly 20 novels on supernatural topics, Winfield has a diverse background in studying the paranormal. 

“There’s a lot of paranormal cases I hear about and I don’t believe it,” Winfield said. “Do I think you’re going to walk down Whiskey Hollow at midnight on Halloween Eve and see ghosts? I don’t think so. Will you ever see one there? Well, you probably will. Can I tell you when? No.”

Winfield said that legends most likely arise when a folkloric site with a few local ghost stories expands into a broad pattern of storytelling. He points to a clustering effect caused by folkloric storytelling traditions, or the preservation of stories by word-of-mouth. Locals keep the Whiskey Hollow Road legend alive by continuing to spread stories about the area. 

“When a society considers a place spooky it will tend to tell stories about everything it believes in,” Winfield said. “It would not surprise me at all if there are a lot of legends about Whiskey Hollow and its region that are broader than just a bunch of ghost stories about that road.”

Winfield also believes in finding a grey area in situations and not focusing on just true or false. 

“If you really study some of these interesting cases, you come away going ‘Woah, I can understand why some people believe in this, and some people don’t,’” Winfield said. “It’s never as simple.” 

Dense forests surround the winding curves and dips of Whiskey Hollow Road. Nature lovers not spooked by the road’s folkloric history can enjoy hiking trails and a nature preserve that borders the road. 

Winfield speculated that a disruption to the Feng-shui of Whiskey Hollow Road could point to legends piling up. Feng-shui, a Chinese geomantic practice, states that sites are chosen to harmonize with the spiritual forces present. He said landscape patterns can experience an obstruction to their Feng-Shui, or natural energy flow, when a road is chopped off.

“It will tend to cause disease in the body,” Winfield said. “Maybe not physical disease, but it will cause emotional disease. Those are some patterns that explain why ghost stories might happen there.” 

Photo by Madelyn Taylor

Whiskey Hollow Road, a supposedly haunted five-mile road in Van Burn, New York, closes daily after dusk.

Having grown up with the Algonquin people, Michael Bastine said remnants of paranormal activity are embedded in the land. 

Bastine said that he believes that some cultures that misunderstand folklore and Indigenous culture can categorize it as “evil” or “darkness.”

“I don’t refuse, deny or don’t think that the paranormal is a real thing, I know it is a real thing,” Bastine said. “It’s just one of these elements, or areas, whether you call them witches, ghosts, demons, any of those things, that’s actually in my views and opinion to be a natural structure.”

He said that further stories from other areas, such as the Tuscarora Reservation, are valid and real. He believes these accounts defy the understanding of logic and the standards that physics presents to us. 

“I believe this is where all of the urban legends come from, they are derived from actual events,” Bastine said. 

Potsdam-based psychic-medium Claire Erica’s work focuses on life empowerment, connecting her clients with their spirit guides. These guides don’t direct, but present interesting questions to help the client find their way through grief. 

After working on paranormal investigations, Erica found that negative energies can be a reflection of ourselves. 

“If you have this concept that ‘Ooh, that’s a haunted road, I better not go down there. Ooh, it’s a haunted road, it’s going to be scary,’ then you are going to get scary. You are going to receive scary,” Erica said. “If you set an expectation, the energy in the space is going to meet that expectation.”

Erica’s philosophy is what you believe is what you’re going to see. 

“It’s the reverse of seeing is believing, it’s believing makes you see,” Erica said. 

Lipke said his crew did not capture anything conclusive while researching and filming “Whiskey Hollow.” Despite not necessarily believing in the legend he was capturing on screen, the film received a lot of local buzz.  

To this day, Lipke gets requests asking to see the film. Lipke said the survival of the Whiskey Hollow Road legend comes down to a few factors: it’s a fun story to tell, people like to scare others and local pride. 

“Part of me wishes I would be more of a believer but I’m also shrouded in science,” Lipke said. “I think the brain’s a very powerful thing and people just trick themselves either knowingly or unknowingly to believe.”