'Cropsey' an urban legend come to horrible life
Cropsey, a documentary by Joshua Zeman and Barbara Brancaccio, is a nightmare come true.
Every neighborhood has its one scary house that kids run by, or cross the street to avoid. Staten Island had a complex of former hospitals that spawned the urban legend known as Cropsey.
One of the buildings in this complex was called Willowbrook State School, a benign name for a malignant place. Parents of the time used Willowbrook to keep their kids in line, "Be good or Cropsey will get you." Crospey was a supposed mental patient who escaped and would snatch children off the streets. He supposedly lived in the now abandoned hospital.
In reality Willowbrook was a place pronounced as a snake pit by none other than Senator Robert F. Kennedy in the 60s. It finally took a young investigative reporter working for WABC-TV in New York to bring Westbrook the attention that even a Kennedy couldn't. Gerald Rivera secreted a camera into the facility and for the first time showed the world what a filthy place this school, (hospital), really was. Video can still be found online, if you want to see how horrible conditions were.
This documentary involves Willbrook, but only as a backdrop for the terrible urban legend come to life.
As children, filmmakers Zeman and Brancaccio heard the urban legends and were properly scared.
Then, in the summer of 1987, a 12-year-old girl who had Down Syndrome disappeared. Jennifer Schwiger was a much loved child who simply disappeared from the face of the earth. A search was launched for the young child, centering on the forest and grounds of the hospital complex. It was on that summer day in '87 that the children of Staten Island realized that Cropsey was real.
According to Zeman;
When Barbara and I first met, a conversation about our hometown quickly turned into a discussion of this urban legend and of the Island’s missing children.
The pair returned to Staten Island to find the truth, which turned into the documentary Cropsey.
Cropsey is a film that looks not only at the disappearance of Jennifer, but of several other children. Almost all of which were mentally challenged.
What Zeman and Brancaccio found was Andre Rand who they call a real boogeyman. Their investigation of the disappearances and Andre Rand is compelling film making. Interviews of both parents of missing children and other residence of Staten Island are heartbreaking.
The pair presents their case from the facts they were able to gather from old records and newspaper articles. It is through these articles, interviews and memories of principals involved in the story that actually gives plausible answers, something that is usually missing from true crime documentaries.
Cropsey won the Hammer To Nails Grand Jury Prize for best documentary at the 2009. The film deserved the award and will win more in the future.
Comments