Hey, strangers, this episode originally aired on May 12, 2022. Enjoy.

Can a place be cursed? We've heard about haunted houses and cemeteries, sure, but what about whole towns?

How many tragedies can befall a community before people start to wonder if they're cursed?

Is violence contagious?

Welcome to Strange and Unexplained with me, Daisy Egan.

I'm a writer and an actor who, I'm not going to lie, looked up real estate prices in the town I'm going to cover in the next two episodes,

because, sure, the town experienced a string of nightmarish deaths that led residents to wonder if it was hexed,

but surely that would drive home prices down. Turns out, though, with everything that happened in the town of Dryden, New York,

for one horrific decade between

1989 and 1999, even this hardened cynic is like, I may be desperate to buy a house, but not

desperate enough to live in the village of the damned. No offense to anyone who lives there,

you're clearly made of hardier stuff than I.

And a quick warning before we dig in.

What lies ahead are mentions of some pretty gruesome, sexual and physical violence.

Take care if these are triggering topics for you. Upstate New York is one of my favorite places in the country,

the aesthetic of the bucolic rolling green hills,

the leaves that change color in the fall,

the rivers that literally run through it, so beautiful.

But the town of Dryden, New York, which sits about a three-hour drive west from the state's capital of Albany,

and southeast of the Great Finger Lakes, is gloomier than a lot of New York State.

For some sciencey reason, Dryden and its immediate surrounding area get more

cloud coverage than almost anywhere else in the country. In a 2001 piece for Spin, author E. Gene

...