Crybaby Lane

This rural road near Raleigh was once the site of a Catholic orphanage housing dozens of children. In 1958, the dormitory caught fire, killing nearly everyone inside. The orphanage was eventually demolished, but the road remains.

Crybaby Lane is a creepy stretch of deserted land off Western Boulevard in Raleigh, not far from the former Dorothea Dix Hospital. It isn't an actual lane but a thin strip of woods that opens into a wide field with ancient oaks looming like giant groundskeepers. The legend attached to this place is one of fire, madness, and the screams of children who never escaped.

According to the story, a Catholic orphanage burned down in 1958 after escapees from Dorothea Dix Hospital—patients who had endured the torturous electroshock therapy practices of the era—crossed the field and set the building ablaze. Several children lost their lives either from the flames or at the hands of the escaped mental patients. Their rattling screams and the smell of smoke carried all the way to nearby homes.

If you visit the site today, you may begin to hear something strange in the air—awful, unearthly sounds. The cries of children in fear and in pain. Children who are lost, but still never able to leave the only place on earth they ever knew as home. Not many people stay much longer than that in the empty field that has come to be called Crybaby Lane.

People who live near the site have reported that they can still smell sulfur and smoke on certain nights, though nothing is burning. Those who have walked the grounds searching for the still-standing cornerstone of the building have felt little ghost baby hands grabbing at their ankles. The screams of the children still echo across the field, begging to be saved from flames that consumed them decades ago.

Historians have largely debunked the legend. There was indeed a Catholic orphanage in Raleigh—part of Nazareth, a Catholic community founded just outside the city in 1899 by Father Frederick Price. But the dates don't align with the story. Fires occurred in 1905, 1912, and 1961, not 1958. The fire in 1905 did kill two orphans. There is no record of Dorothea Dix patients escaping to set fires—though this may have been a ghost story the children themselves told each other during sleepless nights at the orphanage.

More troublingly, Crybaby Lane isn't even at the right location. The Nazareth community ended about a mile west of where the supposed haunted field lies today. There was never an orphanage on the spot off Bilyeu Street. Yet people continue to experience unexplainable phenomena there. Perhaps the truth matters less than the weight of belief—or perhaps something else entirely accounts for the crying that carries across that empty field.