Crybaby Lane is a creepy little stretch of deserted grass off Western Boulevard in Raleigh with a sad, scary story tied to it. The story begins in the middle of the last century, when what’s now called Crybaby Lane was the site of a Roman Catholic orphanage. The orphanage was the home to a few dozen young boys and girls, who were raised by the priests, as had been happening there since the orphanage had been founded in the early 1900s. We can assume these orphans lived as orphans did in those days, going to school to learn a useful trade, and once a week during the summers being taken down to swim in the pool at nearby Pullen Park. Since this was a Catholic home, some of the older boys would be studying for the priesthood. For those children without parents there weren’t many options back then. It may not have been a completely happy life, but it was more than it could have been.
This all came to a tragic end one night in 1958 when a fire broke out in the orphanage dormitory. The fire spread quickly through the building, and by the time the sleeping children were aware of the smoke and the heat filling the hallways of their only home it was too late. When the fire department arrived, the building had already been gutted, reduced to burnt beams and flame-broken bricks. Many of the children burned to death in the flames.
Months after the fire, when after what remained of the burned orphanage had been torn down and hauled away, the city began receiving complaints from the neighbors that the smell of smoke was still strong in the air, as if the fire was still burning. The smell was so strong that some people would choke when they walked into the field, as if their own lungs were filling up with smoke. This happened even though the new grass had already covered up where the building once stood.
But the smell of smoke was only part of it — there were also the voices.
The voices came out of the air, quietly at first, then growing louder. They were the voices of children. Children crying, wailing in fear, sadness, and pain. The screams of the orphaned children who had died in the fire could still be heard.
Now, some of the neighbors thought it was just their minds playing tricks on then. They had been there the night of the fire, and seen and heard these horrible things. They thought that they just couldn’t get the awful memories out of their heads. But time passed, and the people who had been there that night all died or moved away, but still the acrid smell of smoke lingered. And the cries of the children could still be heard.
If you go to find this place yourself, you’ll see that most of the houses around the field where the orphanage once stood have been abandoned. The place where the orphanage stood is now an empty field. If you hunt through the grass you’ll be able to find the cornerstone, all that’s left of the old orphanage.
And after you’ve stood in the field for a few minutes, you’ll start to notice that the place has a strange, distinct smell. It’s the odor of smoke and burning wood.
And if you stay a few minutes more, you’ll 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 that they ever knew as a home.
And not many people will stay much longer than that in the empty field that’s come to be called Crybaby Lane.
But there’s more to this story than just the story. Learn the scary truth about Crybaby Lane.
More About This Story
The story of Crybaby Lane is an interesting one, and a good example of how some local memories can get wrapped up in a good story and become a folk tale. Let’s dig in a little and see how history and folklore come together.
There was a Catholic Orphanage in Raleigh for a good portion of the 20th century. The orphanage was part of Nazareth, a Catholic Community founded a few miles outside the borders of Raleigh in 1899 by Father Frederick Price. Price was the first native-born North Carolinian to be ordained a Catholic priest. The site was four miles outside of what were then the Raleigh City Limits, stretching along a good chunk of Western Boulevard.
That orphanage founded by Father Pierce did, indeed, burn down. It burned down several times. In 1905, in 1912, and in 1961. But did any of these fires happen in a way similar to the details of the story?
All the versions of the Crybaby Lane story say the fire happened either sometime in the late 1950s or specifically in 1958. None of the dates of recorded fires at the orphanage match that exactly, so we’ll take 1961 as being close enough.
The fire at the Nazareth Orphanage in 1961 was started accidentally by a priest, the Reverend Raymond J. Donohue. Donohue was displaying some questionable judgement by attempting to clear some wasps’ nests form the eaves of one of the orphanage’s several buildings by setting those nests on fire.
Father Donohue’s flaming vengeance on those wasps quickly got out of control and burned that building to the ground. But unlike the fire in the story, the building destroyed in the fire wasn’t a dormitory, it was the rectory. Where there were no children. What’s more, the fire happened in the middle of the day and everyone escaped without harm. The only injury was to a fireman, who sprained his back running a remarkable 4,500 feet of hose from the nearest hydrant out on Western Boulevard.
But there was another, earlier, fire that did result in a death. This was the fire in 1905.
This fire did happen at night, at around 2 a.m. on October 29th, 1905. However, this fire also wasn’t in the dormitory, it was in what was called “The Priest’s Building,” a home for the priests who ran the orphanage and for the older boys who were studying to take the cloth.
The fire broke out in the kitchen, which was on the first floor, trapping five young men on the upper stories of the building. One of these young men, whom the News and Observer write-up from the day after the fire describes as “a Bohemian,” was named John Gladdish, or Gladdesh, or Glavish. The N&O astoundingly uses all thee spellings in the one 500 word article.
Gladdish was a hero, going back into the burning building to help his fellow seminarians onto the roof, and giving them the courage to jump from the third story where they were trapped onto the ground below. But when it came time for Gladdish himself to make the leap, he landed very badly and was taken to the hospital. Gladdish died that night from his injuries.
None of this matches the story. If we assume, as ghost stories tell us we should, that tortured souls are tied to the place where they perished, Gladdish doesn’t seem a likely contender being the mysterious presence haunting Crybaby Lane. He died in the hospital, not on the Nazareth property. And he wasn’t multiple orphans.
The only time a dormitory burned at Nazareth was in the fire of 1912. This fire also destroyed the school room, the stables, and a barn, and kicked off a wildfire in the nearby fields. But no one was injured in this fire.
So three fires, one death, and nothing that fits the details of our story. But none of this really matters if we’re hunting for ghosts. Because Crybaby Lane isn’t Crybaby Lane. The Nazareth community ended about a mile west of where what’s now called Crybaby Lane is located. There was never an orphanage on the spot off of Bilyeu. And what’s more, what’s left of the old Nazareth Orphanage is still there.
At its largest, the Catholic Community at Nazareth occupied several hundred acres. As Raleigh expanded, The Church gradually began selling off or donating its property. A large chunk of land was granted in 1962 to build a new facility for Raleigh’s only Catholic School, Cathedral Latin High School, which later became Cardinal Gibbons High.
The remaining building of the orphanage remained in use as an orphanage until 1975, when Bishop F. Joseph Gossman made the facility into the Catholic Center of the Diocese. This building stood on Nazareth Street, off of Avent Ferry Road, about a mile west of Crybaby Lane. The building was demolished as part of North Carolina State’s Centennial Campus expansion, removing the last piece of this part of Raleigh’s history.
So, while there was an orphanage near Crybaby Lane, there was never an orphanage on that spot and no orphans ever died there. The Crybaby Lane off of Bilyeu is just a sheltered little piece of undeveloped land, which was close enough to where people remembered the orphanage to be to become confused with memories of the actual orphanage and it’s fires. That’s the way it is with ghost stories, sometimes if you dig around you can find some real history that played a part in forming the story. Memories get confused and elaborated on when they’re retold, truth and fiction get mixed in together, and throwing a ghost just makes for a good story. So think about the people and lives that were lived in a vanished part of Raleigh when you go down to stand where the orphanage wasn’t at a place called Crybaby Lane.