Lucy Rose

**Lucy Rose** is a fictional obscure supernatural character from urban legend originating from Upper New York with variants of her legend in Vermont, New Hampshire, Eastern Massachusetts, Connecticut and Northern Pennsylvania, and even as far west as Ohio, Michigan, Indiana and Illinois. She is typically depicted as a young teenaged girl between sixteen and eighteen with a round childlike face with voluminous curly black hair and wearing worn-out clingy clothing.

Not much is known about the origins of the character. According to legend, she was a teenage girl who was abused and neglected by her parents. At a certain age, she stole a motorcycle and fled northward on Highway 199, taking over an abandoned mansion near Schroon Lake as a squatter. In another version, she was a girl who once lived with her grandmother in the old Gilbert House north of Mill City. As a result, the structure is alternately known as the Lucy Rose House. This legend claims that when her grandmother died, she continued living in the house by herself while living on her grandmother's pension and often inviting young lovers or even young children into the house who vanished. Between 1976 and 1994, over seventeen male students from the high school in Winchester, New York reportedly vanished. (Actual research shows that most of those students actually moved to other schools, died in accidents or were completely fictional to perpetuate the legend.)

Over the years, Lucy Rose has developed into the teenage spirit of death, reportedly posing as a student in area schools and making students disappear to perpetuate her existence. She is often considered the Spirit of Death for teenagers who die from drug overdoses. In 1978, her legend was combined with the stereotypical vampire legend. Writer Melissa Strickland once claimed that Lucy Rose slept in a coffin in the basement of Ashford Falls High School in order to taunt Rachel Hedison. However, in 1989, writer William Collins included Lucy Rose with other urban legends in his horror novel, "One Dark Night," describing her as a succubus who absorbed her victims into her body, leaving behind just their clothes. According to the book, Lucy had incredible physical strength, was incapable of being harmed and capable of conjuring vast poltergeist activity. This is the version mostly associated with the character.

Stories of Lucy Rose commonly feature her luring off teenage boys with promises of sex before making them vanish into her. As a result, several legends of teenagers disappearing have been used as confirmation of her existence. She has been blamed for seven students disappearing from a Schenectady high school, twelve from a high school in Westbridge, Massachusetts, eleven from a school in Westbury, Vermont and others. Teenagers also tried calling her up in other Lucy Rose Houses in Addamsville, New York, Waterbury, New York and Lexington, New York among other cities.

In January 2004, Melissa Strickland working on a story for the Ashford Falls Falls Newspaper was covering the disappearance of Jeremy Harrison, a high school student in Peytonville, New York that was implausibly linked to other seemingly random disappearances in Essex County, Warren County, Washington County, Hamilton County in New York state as well as Addison County and Rutland Counties in Vermont. Hearing about Lucy Rose from some students who had tried raising her in a seance, she started researching the urban legend and discovered a trail of similar vanishings going back to the 70s, even presuming that Lucy Rose was a name for for one of the daughters of Johnathan Trout, who had been blamed for the disappearance of a youth in the Thirties. To further document the case, she erroneously believed Ashford Falls was the center of the urban legend. Furthermore, Jenny Turbeville erroneously believed the Old Gilbert House had once been the Old Lucy Rose house because it matched the description of the house in the legend from William Collins's novel. To prove their theory, they had psychic Hannah Valesic give her impressions of items from the house and from Jeremy Harrison's old jacket. Although she could get no impressions from the objects from the house since they had not been handled in years, she felt that Jeremy was in a place that could not be reached. When they tried to reach Jeremy or Lucy by recreating the séance, they ended up distracted by storm damage to Hannah's shop from a thunderstorm that night. Melissa was soon forced to hand over her incomplete article to her editor, Vernon Potts, who ended up summarizing it by deleting all her research on Lucy Rose. The experience humiliated Melissa as a writer but strengthened her interest in pursuing an interest in the paranormal. As she drove by the Ashford Falls Grammar School, a figure resembling Lucy Rose's description crossed the street and started watching the kids on the playground.