Zombie Road

A two-mile trail in Wildwood originally known as Lawler Ford Road, built in the 1860s as an access road to the Meramec River. Now paved as Rock Hollow Trail, it has been called Zombie Road since the 1950s and is considered one of the most haunted roads in America.

Zombie Road is a two-mile stretch of abandoned roadway cutting through the dense forest of Wildwood, Missouri, in St. Louis County, widely considered one of the most haunted roads in the United States. Originally constructed in the late 1860s as Lawler Ford Road to provide access to the Meramec River and the railroad tracks along its banks, the path was created centuries earlier by indigenous peoples and follows a route that may pass over the largest Native American burial mound in the United States. In 2010, the road was paved and officially renamed Rock Hollow Trail, part of the Meramec Greenway system, but no amount of renaming can erase the stories that have given this corridor its infamous reputation.

The name "Zombie Road" emerged in the 1950s from local teenagers who used the isolated road as a gathering place for parties and dares. The nickname stuck because of the road's genuinely terrifying atmosphere -- a narrow passage through thick timber where the tree canopy blocks out the sky, creating a tunnel of darkness even on bright days. The road's isolation and the frequency of tragic events along its length have generated a concentration of paranormal activity that draws investigators and thrill-seekers from across the country.

The road's documented tragedies provide ample fuel for its haunting. In 1876, a woman named Della Hamilton McCullough was struck and killed by a train near the road, and her ghost is said to be the old woman who screams at trespassers, her voice carrying through the trees as she warns the living to stay away from the tracks that killed her. Multiple deaths from train derailments claimed the lives of engineers and railroad workers, and the sounds of phantom trains -- wheels on rails, the hiss of steam, the shriek of a whistle -- are reported by visitors who walk the trail after dark.

Shadow people are the most commonly reported phenomenon on Zombie Road. Witnesses describe dark, human-shaped figures that move among the trees just beyond the trail's edge, pacing alongside walkers and sometimes stepping onto the path itself before dissolving. Ghostly children have been seen standing in the woods, their pale faces visible between the tree trunks for a moment before they vanish. Disembodied cries echo through the forest at unpredictable intervals, and the sensation of being followed is so pervasive that even daytime visitors report the feeling of eyes on their backs.

The trail is now officially managed as a public recreational path, and trespassing after hours carries fines of up to one thousand dollars and up to ninety days in jail -- consequences that reflect the decades of problems caused by nighttime visitors drawn to the road's haunted reputation. Police and neighbors maintain surveillance of the trail, but the ghosts of Zombie Road appear unconcerned with municipal regulations. They continue to walk the path that indigenous peoples carved through the forest centuries ago, joined by the spirits of those who died along its length, in one of the most atmospheric and persistently haunted corridors in the American Midwest.