Satan’s Hill and Foxcatcher Farm: A Hometown Urban Legend

Some of us called it, “Satan’s Hill”.  Others dubbed it, “Satansville”.  Online, on one of the many websites exploring geographic idiosyncrasies on the other side of the veil, it is referred to as, “Cult House Road.” However, in terms of real time and space, the street itself is formally labeled with the rather innocuous name of, “Cossart.”

Regardless of its specific moniker, everyone knew about Satan’s Hill. It was practically a rite of passage to learn this urban legend, an oral history handed down from one graduating class to the next in my public high school.

As I learned from my sister, who learned from an older friend – and going back, on and on and on – Satan’s Hill was haunted. The entire area was haunted, because the Cult House was haunted, because evil spreads by osmosis and infects through the root.

The stories were legion.

The details were amorphous, shifting with the storyteller and the unintended consequences of whisper-down-the-lane, but the main themes always seemed to be the same: A Satanic cult; infant sacrifices; devil-worshipping. Every iteration of the story mentioned the trees; every telling included a reference to the Skull at the bend in the road. Again and again, as we grew older and wiser and closer to a collective departure from our tiny hometown, we’d hear about the disembodied voices and the mysterious graffiti and the hulking black SUVs rumored to chase urban explorers off the road.

 Everyone knew someone who had been there, but no one had ever actually been.

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You would think, then, that the reality of Satan’s Hill would be terribly anticlimactic. You would think graduating and moving away and commencing adulthood would remove the sheen from the folklore of my youth, but you could not be more mistaken.

It wasn’t until my early twenties that I was lucky enough to find the entrance to Cossart Road, and not until my mid-thirties that I fully understood the byzantine story of Foxcatcher Farm and the du Pont family cult, but now – pushing 40 – I can say with confidence this particular urban legend lives up to its reputation.

In reality, this chronicle is even more intriguing and scandalous and fraught with local myth than we knew at sixteen and seventeen. In reality, this tale is steeped in truth, and the truth is stranger than any fictional account. It begins and ends with old money, rife with scandal, culminating in murder; it is filled with fame and controversy and heartache.

Having a ghost story in my own backyard was a formative experience. It was a synecdoche for my hometown and for my childhood, synonymous with the region and my coming-of-age. It was something phenomenological, unique to the place where I grew and grew up and came to be me. Satan’s Hill was my own little corner of the supernatural, and it only grew in scope and spectacle the more I learned and the older I became.

Because nothing beats a good urban legend.

The du Pont Family

You can’t grow up in the Delaware Valley without hearing about the du Ponts.

For the purposes of this story, there are two vital things to know about the du Ponts. The first is their history of arranged marriages between first cousins, designed to keep the considerable family wealth within the family; that also happens to be the second critical detail, the du Pont family fortune weighing in at over 14 billion as of 2016.

The tragic events at Foxcatcher Farm in 1996 could essentially be explained with just these essentials, but a bit more context is required to fully understand the legend.   

The du Ponts, one of the richest families in the United States since the mid-nineteenth century, founded E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company. They founded DuPont Chemical. They founded Nemours Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children. At their peak, du Pont companies in the chemical and automotive sectors employed roughly one-tenth of the state’s population, so it can be argued the du Ponts essentially founded modern-day Delaware, too. They have had this power and influence since Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours emigrated from France in 1800 and established a gunpowder monopoly on the banks of the Brandywine River.

Their notoriety extends beyond a slew of patents and overwhelming capitalist success. Du Ponts have been involved with the machinations of our country, socially and politically, since the very beginning. They assisted with negotiations for the Louisiana Purchase; they helped to preserve James Madison’s Montpelier. Du Ponts have been senators and philanthropists and figureheads and academics. They have established museums and bred racehorses and dealt antiques. Shielded by immense wealth and power, there are over 3,500 du Ponts these days, all living with the legacy of the family’s past mistakes.

On Satan’s Hill and My Early Twenties

Satan’s Hill is hidden deep within a vast wooded expanse known as, “The Valley.”

It is a labyrinth of rolling hills and narrow avenues, former farmland giving way to little boxes made of ticky-tacky. Within this deciduous maze, the roads were ill-kept and sinuous, winding in and out of Pennsylvania, into Delaware and back again.

Among the beauty of these evergreens and grassy knolls and Revolutionary War battlefields, I spent the summers of my young adulthood, driving at breakneck speed, music cranked up to near intolerable volume, chain-smoking cigarettes. I also inhaled an enormous amount of pot on those poorly-lit roads, jostled by curves as I attempted to conjure flame from a cheap plastic lighter.

It was du Pont country, housing some of the family’s most beautiful properties, including the former Liseter Estate – what would come to be know as Foxcatcher Farm.

It was home.

I was desperate to break away; I was scared to leave.

Deep within The Valley, among these lavish homes and museums, I finally found Satan’s Hill: A narrow road of ancient asphalt, barely wide enough for two vehicles to pass; a foreboding turnoff recognizable by a rickety one-lane bridge over a stream.

Driving down this tiny lane for the first time is a seminal event.

Satan’s Hill invariably evokes the kind of fear you deliberately misremember after the fact, so unnerving is the encounter. It happened to me, and it happened to the numerous manboys I enjoyed driving to this haunted mecca, all of them quaking with nerves as I narrated the regional ghost story I was only just beginning to understand.

It is not just the folklore that renders this a terrifying experience, and it is not just the rumors. It is, instead, the heavy pall of dread that hangs like an invisible mist. It is the unnatural silence, the artificial stillness in the woods on either side of the road. It is the oppressive darkness and the constantly-encroaching shadows and the omnipresent sense of being watched. It is the knowledge, the certainty, that one is in the presence of something dark; it is an authentic interaction with something that can only be described as evil.

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The Cult House is a dark hulking mansion, accessible by a long driveway on the other side of an ornate, perpetually-locked gate. It is here, legend claims, a cult is housed, a motley crew of devil-worshippers steeped in the occult. Inside, all manner of depravity is rumored to take place, human sacrifices and black magic rituals and the worst parts of the Satanic Panic.

It is a du Pont property.

Some take this fact to its natural conclusion, suggesting the mansion and its inhabitants are a direct result of the du Ponts’ habit of interfamilial marriage. While it may have been a successful way to keep the du Pont fortune close, intertwined branches on family trees never flourish; WASP-y society does not tolerate children with special needs. As storied tales often do, the lure of Satan’s Hill grew to include these genetic mistakes, the shame of the du Pont family, a cult comprised of those worth nothing with nothing to lose.

The trees lining Satan’s Hill look like they’re screaming.

Rigid branches like talons, these oak trees and maples are barren where they face the road. Leaves and shoots grow only on one side, like arms desperately clawing for safety. Every branch grows AWAY from the Cult House, in a mysterious defiance of scientific law, because it is also AWAY from sunlight.  They are not cut or pruned or coaxed like this; it is just how they grow.  Far enough past the Cult House, the trees resume growing towards the light, like normal goddamn trees.

About a quarter mile past the du Pont mansion is the Skull Tree, and this is where things get really twisted. The tree, growing on an embankment, has a tangled mess of a root structure, barbed roots stretching all the way down to the ground. They twist and contort, entropy in action, and have settled into the shape of a perfect skull, nature as symbolism. Stories claim the body of an infant was once discovered in the orbital socket, a recessed knothole like an eye that stares but never blinks. The sockets have since been filled with concrete, effectively confirming this facet of the story as truth among those of us who shared the tale.

The Valley is beautiful. It is historic and peaceful and haunted, thanks to the events at Foxcatcher Farm, and despite the pervasive boredom defining a childhood spent in the Delaware Valley, it remains…home.

John du Pont: An American Tragedy

John Eleuthere du Pont (1938-2010) died in jail.

Before that, he lived a tragic life.

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John was the son of William du Pont, Jr., who was the son of Wlliam du Pont, Sr. William duPont, Sr., was the son of Lammot du Pont, who was the son of Alfred V. duPont, the son of Éleuthère Irénée du Pont. Eleuthere was the son of the previously-mentioned Pierre who started this whole legacy, and it is safe to say each generation got progressively richer than the one before.

Heir to this fortune, John enjoyed a life of privilege in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania. He grew up in the heart of The Valley on the du Ponts’ 800-acre Liseter Estate, luxury juxtaposed against toxic loneliness. John’s parents divorced when he was young; reminiscent of a Hitchcock film, he spent his early years – those years which determine who you will be and how you will get there – in the company of only his mother and a handful of servants.

John graduated from the University of Miami with a degree in Zoology. He would go on to earn a doctorate from Villanova; to discover two dozen different species of birds in the South Pacific; to establish the Delaware Museum of Natural History; to distinguish himself as a renowned conchologist, philatelist, and philanthropist; to acquire an extensive collection of firearms; to vie unsuccessfully for an Olympic spot in the modern Pentathlon; and, most importantly for our purposes, to tie himself inextricably to USA Wrestling.

John was an avid supporter of amateur athletics, developing Liseter Hall into a 440-acre wrestling and swimming facility following his mother’s death. It was dubbed the Foxcatcher National Training Center, after his father’s thoroughbred horse farm, and housed, “Team Foxcatcher,” a circle of elite Olympic hopefuls who trained on the DuPont property. Surrounded by the athletes he considered close friends, he allowed a number of these wrestlers to live at Foxcatcher Farm, raising their families and training on the grounds. John began to sponsor the national wrestling team in the late 1980s; he also began wrestling competitively at the age of 55 with essentially no prior experience.

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None of that must sound particularly tragic yet.

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But the tragedy of John DuPont’s life was not just a childhood spent in isolation, yearning for something communal; it was not just a riding accident with a horse and a fence, necessitating the removal of his testicles; it was not just the death of his mother, quite literally his only friend in the world. The tragedy of John DuPont’s life was all this and more, a sum total of past events and the events that would happen next. It was tragedy as wallpaper and tragedy as backsplash, tragedy that lay below the surface, simmering like magma until a violent eruption came and spread tragedy in every conceivable direction.

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Always described as, “eccentric”, John became increasingly paranoid in the early 1990s; relatives claim his erratic behavior began after the death of his mother. Signs of mental illness began to make themselves visible. John spoke of ghosts haunting the estate. He saw bugs and animals coming out of the walls. Having overcome alcoholism, he started drinking again; he used prodigious amounts of cocaine. He drove a Lincoln Continental into a pond on his property. He always carried a loaded gun.  

Friends spoke behind closed door about his mental state. Officials with USA Wrestling also expressed concern, vocalizing a desire to break away from John’s financial support. The sport, however, was too enmeshed with DuPont funding – the team’s training and stipends too entangled with John’s sponsorship – and so things did not change, and things grew worse. John would eventually be diagnosed with Paranoid Schizophrenia – but not until he was 60, and not until it was too late. Protected by legacy, shielded by wealth, John’s sickness was allowed to fester; and his mental state declined until not even money could clean up the fallout.

From the Mind of M. Night Shyamalan

You might have seen Satan’s Hill. You just didn’t know it at the time.

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M. Night Shyamalan, movie director extraordinaire – or, a has-been who peaked after The Sixth Sense, depending whom you ask – is from Philadelphia. As such, all of his films take place in either the city proper or in one of Philly’s surrounding suburbs. It is The Village that is set in the early 19th century, in a quaint settlement in the woods, and thus The Village that was filmed in The Valley in the early 2000s.

As a fellow Philadelphian, I am a reluctant M. Night Shyamalan fan; I feel a hometown pride in his work, despite his obvious struggle with writing realistic dialogue. The film felt incredibly auspicious set against the geography of my own spooky campfire tale, a habitat where I have always felt something deeply personal and inarguably eerie.

The movie set was expansive, a thudding heart of technology in the midst of cornfields and grazing cattle and antiques favored by those with privilege. It was not public land and security was tight, but human error is always the rule and not the exception. I was privileged to learn this one night when a production assistant or intern foolishly left a back gate open and unlocked. The gate was located behind an overgrown hedge, accessible from Cossart Road, and thus I will always have in my memory banks the lived experience of breaking onto M. Night Shyamalan’s film set in the middle of the night, reeking of marijuana and giggling maniacally. Because even M. Night Shyamalan, master of all things uncanny, was sucked in by Satan’s Hill.

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But is it really haunted?

Of course, I can’t answer that one way or the other; I am not the one to ask. I do not have dowsing rods or EMF meters or any form of extrasensory perception. I have only my own experience, limited as it is by my five senses; but I do have my own Satan’s Hill story, and I still don’t have an explanation for it.

It was an evening in mid-July, not long before dusk. I was 22, desperate to escape the vestiges of my youth for grad school and greener pastures in the fall. I was en route to the shenanigans which used to fill my summer nights. Satan’s Hill was quiet, the silence pressing in from all sides, the leaves filtering the sunlight to throw intricate shadows below. All was as it normally was; nothing was amiss.

I do not recall why I turned around, if it was a missing wallet or a forgotten cell phone or cancelled plans, but I found myself back on Cossart, retracing my route. And then, coming out of a blind curve, I saw the road’s only speed-limit sign. Pristinely white only minutes before, it was now completely doused with blood-red paint.

(Paint? Was it paint? It is paint whenever I tell this story, whenever I recall the sudden burst of color through the gloom of the rapidly-descending darkness, but…was it really paint?)

It was already bone-dry.

Murder and Madness at Foxcatcher Farm

After his failed Olympic bid, John du Pont funneled his hope for athletic glory exclusively into USA Wrestling. He aspired for all the starters on the forthcoming 1996 freestyle Olympic wrestling team to train at the Foxcatcher estate. John financed, housed, and befriended these athletes, famous by association, significant by proximity. 

One member of this inner circle was Dave Schultz (1959-1996), a multi-time World and Olympic title-holder. He won the 1983 freestyle wrestling World Championships and earned Olympic gold in Los Angeles a year later. Dave lost at the 1988 Olympic trials, however, and never made it to Seoul; the following Olympiad came and went, and he never made it to Barcelona. Already in his mid-thirties, struggling to make a living, many in the wrestling community wondered if Dave had peaked.

It was the early nineties when, determined to make a comeback, determined to earn a spot on the 1996 Olympic team, he came to live and train at Foxcatcher Farm. Over the next few years, this comeback began to seem not only possible but actually somewhat likely. Dave won three national titles in a row beginning in 1993; he took silver at the World Championships that same year. He won at the Goodwill Games and the Pan Am Games and the World Cup event, successfully defending his 1994 victory again in 1995.

He – it turned out – had not already peaked.

With John as his benefactor, Dave’s star was ascending once again; he was reigning national champion in late 1995, practically the eve of Olympic team selection. It must be acknowledged, then, that Dave’s time at the Foxcatcher estate was primarily responsible for this development. It must also be acknowledged that Dave’s success was irrevocably ensnared with, and reliant upon, du Pont money.  

Dave was an exceptionally-talented wrestler and universally well-regarded in the sport; among those close to John DuPont, he was arguably the closest. John venerated Dave’s athletic ability and idolized his company. Dave depended on John’s sponsorship and repaid it with loyalty. There was hero worship and there was friendship and there was a history, but there was also schizophrenia and drug use and inbreeding. As John grew progressively more detached from reality, the fabric of his inner circle started to strip away, one strand at a time. He abruptly cut all the Black athletes from Team Foxcatcher, ordering them off the estate. He allegedly pointed a loaded semiautomatic rifle at the chest of one athlete; he set another’s wrestler empty house on fire.

There were meetings and memos regarding John among the sport’s highest-ranking officials, but it was the calming voice of Dave Schultz that kept anyone from intervening. When it came time to consider parting ways with John DuPont and his checkbook, it was Dave who assured USA Wrestling that John was harmless. His family lived on Foxcatcher Farm, Dave argued; if there was any danger, he would be the first to leave.  

So they stayed.

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On January 26, 1996, John du Pont drove to the home of Dave Schultz and his family, located at Foxcatcher Farm, with a .44 Magnum revolver. Upon Dave’s cheerful greeting, John fired twice through the car window, striking Dave directly in the chest; after Dave fell to the ground, John shot him a final time in the back. Then he drove away.

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The standoff was a media frenzy.

After shooting Dave and fleeing the scene, John barricaded himself in the Liseter/Foxcatcher mansion. For a tense 48 hours, he cloistered in the library, reinforced as a bomb shelter during the Cold War in the event of a nuclear holocaust (as one so often does with a library). In communications with the SWAT team and dozens of officers outside, John referred to himself as the Dalai Lama; he requested to be addressed as, “Your Holiness.”  

As the country watched Pennsylvania, negotiations continued through the weekend. Finally, having turned off the mansion’s heat, police captured John outside his residence when he emerged to check the boiler. He pled Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity, his lawyers arguing that John had suffered a psychotic break and believed Dave Schultz intended to kill him. The jury found him mentally ill but guilty of third-degree murder; he was sentenced to 13-30 years at the Pennsylvania State Correctional Institution.

In 2010, still incarcerated, John Eleuthere du Pont died from COPD.

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He was buried in his Team Foxcatcher wrestling singlet, per his request.

The Denouement

In a final perplexing act, John left most of his estate not to a du Pont – not to a cousin or a nephew or a distant great-aunt – but to wrestler Valentin Yordanov. Valentin emigrated to the United States from Bulgaria to train with Team Foxcatcher; he would go on to medal at the 1996 Olympics. John grew enamored with Valentin not long before the murder of Dave Schultz; he was fiercely protective of the man’s attention. Valentin’s budding friendship with Dave was reportedly a source of great jealousy.

Valentin was also the beneficiary of the 800-acre property in Newtown Square, and that elicited quite the scandal. His will was hotly contested by any number of living du Pont heirs, including his paternal niece and nephew. The pair claims Valentin exerted undue pressure and influence upon an ailing John Dupont; his mental state was in question, these blood relatives argue, and thus his will cannot be held as legally binding. Their petition to the court claimed they were promised Foxcatcher by William du Pont, Jr.; a press release stated they intended to “restore the estate to its former glory.”

John Dupont’s will, however, still stands to this day.

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Valentin returned to Bulgaria three weeks before John’s trial. He refused to testify.

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Before his death, John ordered all the buildings on the Foxcatcher estate to be painted a matte black. After that, the structures were razed; the 800-acre property has since evolved into a luxury retail and residential living experience baptized, “Liseter”, proof once again that Ka is a wheel.

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Now, pushing 40 and living in Philadelphia, it has been quite some time since I’ve returned home to visit Satan’s Hill. I’ve heard it has changed. Folk tales do not remain a secret in the internet age, and the influx of urban explorers has caused property owners to take all due precautions. Sightseers are discouraged; trespassers are prosecuted.

I was one of the lucky ones, then.

I got to experience the entire gestalt of this tale, world-building in real time; I got to live the story and follow the consequences and smoke enormous amounts of pot in the principal players’ backyard. The sense memories are strong, automatically calling to mind those late nights in small-town America, cruising around as if the world isn’t thirty seconds away from going to shit at any given time. It felt like freedom, and it felt like invincibility, and it felt like I could feel that way forever.

I was only 14 when John DuPont shot Dave Schultz, but the pull of Foxcatcher Farm is still just as strong, thirty years later after the fact. I was molded from an early age by this tragedy, the story interwoven with memories of my youth, so Satan’s Hill stands out, still, in the foggy haze of the past.

And that, I believe, is the point of a good urban legend: It allows us to remember where we came from so we can remember how to get where we’re going.