Britt Spencer
Haunted? You mean by ghosts? At my age, I’m not scared of ghosts—probably because I’m dangerously close to becoming one. But I’ve been around long enough to hear stories about this alleged thoroughfare for the dead. Folks say they’ve spotted the specters of Native Americans, Confederate soldiers, and schoolchildren on midnight field trips. Other says they’ve seen quarry workers maimed by machinery; the spirit of an old woman; even a serial killer who lived in a nearby shack and preyed upon teens searching for a secluded place.
The land along Lawler Ford Road, as it was originally called, was a popular place in the 1950s for youth to park their cars. In fact, that’s about when the area started to get its reputation as a crossroads for the damned. The story goes that a man named Zombie had escaped from a local mental hospital and disappeared along Lawler Ford, leaving only his blood-soaked clothes. The nickname Zombie Road followed soon thereafter.
Real-life ghost hunters like Troy Taylor, however, have delved deeper. “I’m an optimistic skeptic,” says Taylor, who’s written more than 100 books on hauntings, history, crime, and the unexplained. “I like to think these stories are true, but I approach them from a historical basis.”
Taylor has dedicated several chapters of his books to Zombie Road. Native Americans initially used the trail to cross the Meramec River, he says; by the time the Civil War broke out, the path had become an oft-traveled route west. In 1868, Glencoe Marble Company mined the area’s limestone deposits and set up a small railroad. Years later, a judge’s widow was killed by a train there. But Taylor found no record of a mental asylum, and the nearest orphanage was miles away.
Trucks hauled stone and gravel from the Meramec River along the dirt road until the quarry shut down in the ’70s. The road eventually weathered away and, in 2010, Wildwood paved the 2.3-mile path and renamed it Rock Hollow Trail.
Today the trail is officially closed after dark, but that doesn’t stop thrill-seekers. Though Taylor’s found no evidence of supernatural presence, he says, the history is there. Besides, the combination of dense woods and the fog and cooler temperatures in the valley is enough to cause one’s spine to tingle.
“What urban legend doesn’t have a road into the woods?” he says. “You can’t deny it’s a creepy spot.”
