This escaped mental patient with a hook for a hand would snatch children in Staten Island, but the old legend became horrifyingly real when a killer named Andre Rand was caught in the 1970s
This is the story of a nightmare coming to life. Once, "Cropsey" was just an urban legend; the boogeyman of in New York City. Cropsey was rumored to be a homicidal madman, an escaped mental patient with a hook for a hand who hunted children and dragged them back to the tunnel system that lay under the abandoned ruins of the old Seaview Hospital, a former tuberculosis sanitarium.
Parents used Cropsey to frighten their children into being good and staying near home. After all, Cropsey could be anywhere, waiting to strike. Older siblings would tell Cropsey stories at night to terrify their younger brothers and sisters. As if that wasn't enough, one summer camp variation on the tale of Cropsey inspired a 1981 slasher movie, . The cult classic is surprisingly faithful to the tale that Staten Island scouts once swapped over toasted marshmallows. It features a once-respectable man named George Cropsey, who goes insane after a prank gone wrong leaves him disfigured and begins killing unsuspecting summer campers with an axe.
But then, in the 1980s, the children of Staten Island had even more reason to fear their local boogeyman. Cropsey had come to life in the form of an actual homicidal madman who really did hunt children. Soon, the urban legend would be unmasked as Andre Rand.