True Curse Haunting Family's Forest Land Was Progress

The curse legend started with the 1938 publication of "They Found a Way," a popular history by Iveagh Hunt Sherry and William H. Garrigus that relies more on hearsay and hyperbole than fact. They wrote that the curse caused madness, suicide, fatal accidents, natural disasters and vanishings - both human and animal - to befall Dudleytown. They traced it to 1510, when Edmund Dudley of England was beheaded for plotting to overthrow King Henry VIII. Satanists placed a curse on his descendants.