Several years ago, rumors about a lost Nickelodeon movie branded too disturbing for children’s television began popping up around the internet. They all referenced the same plot: A father of conjoined twins was so ashamed of his sons that he hid them away throughout their childhood. (This being a made-for-TV horror movie, naturally one of the twins was evil.)
After one twin got sick the other soon followed, with both boys eventually succumbing to the illness. To keep the town from discovering his secret, the father separated their bodies with a rusty saw and buried the good one at the local cemetery and the evil one at the end of a desolate dirt road called Cry Baby Lane, which also happened to be the title of the rumored film. According to the local undertaker, anyone who ventured down Cry Baby Lane after dark could hear the evil brother crying from beyond the grave.
Cry Baby Lane then jumps to present day (well, present day in 2000), where a group of teens sneaks into the local graveyard in an effort to contact the spirit of the good twin. After holding a seance, they learn that the boys’ father had made a mistake and mixed up the bodies of his children—burying the good son at the end of Cry Baby Lane and the evil one in the cemetery. Meaning those ghostly wails were actually the good twin crying out for help. But the teens realized the error too late: The evil twin had already been summoned and quickly began possessing the local townspeople.
MOVIE OR MYTH?
Parents were appalled that such dark content ever made it onto the family-friendly network, or so the story goes, and after airing the film once the Saturday before Halloween in 2000, Nickelodeon promptly scrubbed it from existence. But with no video evidence of it online for years, some people questioned whether Cry Baby Lane had ever really existed in the first place.
“Okay, so this story sounds completely fake, Nick would NEVER air this on TV,” one Kongregate forum poster said in September 2011. “And why would this be made knowing it’s for kids? This story just sounds too fake …”
While the folklore surrounding the film may not be 100 percent factual, Nickelodeon quickly confirmed that the “lost” Halloween movie was very real, and that it did indeed contain all the rumored twisted elements that have made it into a legend.
Before Cry Baby Lane was a blip in Nick’s primetime schedule, it was nearly a $100 million theatrical release. Peter Lauer, who had previously directed episodes of the Nick shows The Secret World of Alex Mack and The Adventures of Pete & Pete, co-wrote the screenplay with KaBlam! co-creator Robert Mittenthal. Cry Baby Lane, which would eventually spawn urban legends of its own, was inspired by a local ghost story Lauer heard growing up in Ohio. “There was a haunted farmhouse, and if you went up there at midnight, you could hear a baby crying and it’d make your high school girlfriend scared,” he told The Daily.
BIG SCARES ON A SMALL BUDGET:
Even with the now-meager budget, Cry Baby Lane maintained many of the same elements of a much larger picture. In a bid to generate more publicity around the project, Nickelodeon cast Oscar nominee Frank Langella as the local undertaker (a role Lauer had originally wanted Tom Waits to play). All the biggest set pieces from the screenplay were kept intact, and as a result, the crew had no money left to do any extra filming.
Only two scenes from the movie ended up getting cut—one that alluded to skinny dipping and another that depicted an old man’s head fused onto the body of a baby in a cemetery. The story of a father performing amateur surgery on the corpses of his sons, however, made it into the final film.
The truth of what happened after Cry Baby Lane premiered on October 28, 2000 has been muddied over the years. In most retellings, Nickelodeon received an “unprecedented number” of complaints about the film and responded by sealing it away in its vault and acting like the whole thing never happened. But if that version of events is true, Nick has never acknowledged it.
Even Lauer wasn’t aware of any backlash from parents concerned about the potentially scarring effects of the film until The Daily made him aware of the rumors years later. “All I know is that they aired it once,” he told the paper. “I just assumed they didn’t show it again because they didn’t like it! I did it, I thought it failed, and I moved on.”
But the idea that the movie was pulled from airwaves for being too scary for kids isn’t so far-fetched. Though Cry Baby Lane never shows the conjoined twins being sawed apart on screen, it does pair the already-unsettling story with creepy images of writhing worms, broken glass, and animal skulls. This opening sequence, combined with the spooky, empty-eyed victims of possession that appear later, and multiple scenes where a child gets swallowed by a grave, may have made the film slightly more intense than the average episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark?
IMPERFECT TIMING:
Cry Baby Lane premiered at a strange time in internet history: Too early for pirated copies to immediately spring up online yet late enough for it to grow into a web-fueled folktale. The fervor surrounding the film peaked in 2011, when a viral Reddit thread about Cry Baby Lane caught the attention of one user claiming to have the so-called “lost” film recorded on VHS. He later uploaded the tape for the world to view and suddenly the lost movie was lost no longer.
News of the unearthed movie made waves across the web, and instead of staying quiet and waiting for the story to die down, Nickelodeon decided to get in on the hype. That Halloween, Nick aired Cry Baby Lane for the first time in over a decade. Regardless of whether the movie had previously been banned or merely forgotten, the network used the mystery surrounding its origins to their PR advantage.
“We tried to freak people out with it,” a Nick employee who worked at The 90s Are All That (now The Splat), the programming block that resurrected Cry Baby Lane (and who wished to remain anonymous) said of the promotional campaign for the event. “They were creepy and a little glitchy. We were like, ‘This never aired because it was too scary and we’re going to air it now.’”
Cry Baby Lane now makes regular appearances on Nickelodeon’s ‘90s block around Halloween, which likely means Nick hasn’t received enough complaints to warrant locking it back in the vault. And during less spooky times of the year, nostalgic horror fans can find the full movie on YouTube.
The mystery surrounding Cry Baby Lane’s existence may have been solved, but the urban legend of the movie that was “too scary for kids’ TV” persists—even at the network that produced it.
“People who were definitely working at Nickelodeon in 2000, but didn’t necessarily work on [Cry Baby Lane] were like, ‘Yeah I heard about it, I remember it being a thing,’“ the Nick employee says. “It’s sort of like its own legend within the company.”
there’s only one week left to grab your copy of HAUNTS, my 50+ page haunted house artbook, on kickstarter!
the initial goal has been reached, but there’s still one stretch goal left: if the campaign hits $69k, i will go spend the night in an actual haunted house (possibly the lizzie borden house!), do some ghost hunter-y activities, and make a comic about it!! i would love to be able to do this, so go grab a copy of the book if you’d like, and tell your friends to get one, too!
I had a vivid dream of a ghost, I couldn’t see it but it would manifest as great fears people have. Near the end of the dream I was tasked with killing it, so it appeared to me as a cat to make it harder for me to kill it (I love cats). I fought with it and it obviously scratched me up and fought back. I never ended up being able to kill it before I woke up.
When I woke up, I had to go to the bathroom so I got straight up and went into the restroom. I looked in the mirror, and saw this on my chest. It faded alittle before I could take the photo but you can still see it.
Located on Seguin island is the second oldest lighthouse in Maine, Seguin Lighthouse. Although it shines a bright light onto the sea to guide sailors home, it is also known for its dark history.
Legend has it that in the 1850s a lighthouse keeper got married to a young woman. Newly-wed, the keeper decided to bring his new wife to Seguin Island. However, being isolated from everyone and everything caused the bride to become severely depressed. In order to help with her depression and boredom, the keeper had a piano shipped to the island.
This was a great way to distract his wife at first. However, either due to only having one piece of sheet music or because she was going crazy, she played the same song over and over again. Eventually her husband snapped. He took an axe to the piano smashing it to pieces. However he didn’t stop there. He then turned the axe on the wife, hacking her to bits. Finally, after realizing what he had done, he turned the axe on himself.
Although the lighthouse is abandoned, it is not empty. Ghostly sounds of a piano playing can be heard emanating from the building. Also, there are those who claimed to have seen the spirit of a man holding an axe drifting through the site.
Located in southeastern Massachusetts is a 200sq foot area known as the Bridgewater Triangle. This area got its name because of all of the strange happenings that occur within its boundaries. It a zone that is overloaded with the paranormal.
Here there is an abnormally high amount of poltergeist and other spirit activities within the local areas and in residents homes. One of the most haunted places is the Hockomock swamp. This area is believed to be cursed by the Native Americans that used to live here. It is also the site of a 8,000 year old Native American Burial ground. It is said that when archaelogists opened the graves, a red ochre bubbled up and then disappeared. No one was able to take photos of the site as none of the pictures developed. People now here mysterious voices and will smell smoke at random times. There have been reports of a bonfire on top of a large rock that will disappear when a person gets too close to it. People have also reported seeing ghostly figures dancing a ritualistic dance. Other famous ghosts in this area include a redheaded hitchhiker on Route 44 in Rehoboth, a spirit near the Hockomock swamp on route 138, and a ghostly truck driver from Freetown who will blare his horn angrily at other motorists and speed past them.
The Bridgewater triangle is also well known for its cryptids. A Bigfoot like creature has been seen throughout the area, usually near Hockomock swamp. In the 1970s reports of a 7ft tall creature, along with footprints prompted the police to search for a bear. Neither human being or bear was ever found in the area. Other than Bigfoot there have been reports of thunderbirds. These massive birds have a wingspan of 8-12 feet and have been spotted in Hockomock swamp and Taunton. Another mysterious report is that of a phantom dog. It was reported that a large dog with glowing red eyes was found killing two ponies. Supposedly the dog was as big as the two ponies were. There have also been reports of giant snakes in the area.
Other than ghosts and cryptids, the Bridgwater triangle is home to many UFO sightings. These sightings date back to 300 years when settlers in 1760 saw a glowing ball of light up in the sky. Other UFO sightings include Halloween of 1908 when UFO sightings made the local newspapers, in 1968 when five people claimed to have seen a strange ball of light floating among the trees in Rehoboth, A string of UFO sightings in the 1970’s, with one report in 1976 claiming that two UFOs were seen landing along route 44, in 1994 an officer saw a triangular shaped craft with red and white lights, and in modern times there are still frequent reports of glowing balls of light which float over the ground a the local dog track in Raynham.
As if the above were not enough, this area has been home to grisly murders (including an underground bunker with chains and bindings made for children), mysterious will-o-the wisp type lights, animal mutilations, satanic rituals, and mysterious black helicopters that patrol the skys.
