Written by Joshua Zeman

Directed by Joshua Zeman and Barbara Brancaccio

Cropsey - Movie Synopsis

Growing up on Staten Island, filmmakers Joshua Zeman and Barbara Brancaccio had often heard the legend of ‘Cropsey.’ For the kids in their neighborhood, Cropsey was the escaped mental patient who lived in the old abandoned Willowbrook Mental Institution, who would come out late at night and snatch children off the streets. Sometimes Cropsey had a hook for a hand, other times he wielded a bloody axe, but it didn’t matter, Cropsey was always out there, lurking in the shadows, waiting to get them.

Later as teenagers, the filmmakers assumed Cropsey was just an urban legend: a cautionary tale used to keep them out of those abandoned buildings and stop them from doing all those things that teenagers like to do. That all changed in the summer of 1987 when a 13-year-old girl with Down syndrome, named Jennifer Schweiger, disappeared from their community. That was the summer all the kids from Staten Island discovered that their urban legend was real.

Now as adults Joshua and Barbara have returned to Staten Island to create Cropsey, a feature documentary that delves into the mystery behind Jennifer and four additional missing children. The film also investigates Andre Rand, the real-life boogeyman linked to their disappearances.

Embarking on a mysterious journey into the underbelly of their forgotten borough, these filmmakers uncover a reality that is more terrifying than any urban legend.

Director’s Statement

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. We remembered family members and neighbors searching for these children, wandering through vacant lots, poking at the ground with their sticks, testing the soil, etc. Minutes away from every point on the small island, the former Willowbrook Mental Institution cast a surreal shadow over the otherwise unexciting landscape of our suburbia. It was our playground, a place for bored teenagers seeking scary adventures or victimless crimes. It was also the inevitable location of all our nightmares when one child,Jennifer Schweiger was found there that fateful summer night.

Although Barbara and I had both moved from Staten Island, Cropsey had not left our imaginations. The story of the mysterious drifter had shed a new light on the overlap between myth and reality in our small town. Was Cropsey just a legend spread by children, an innocuous campfire story, or was it something much more serious? Could it have been, as we now surmise, passed down from parent to child, warning us of a potential killer living in our midst, waiting to strike?

It was our first trip back to Willowbrook in two decades, and now armed with a camera, we found that once familiar path to the center of the woods. Discarded hospital trays, broken dolls and rusted tricycles lie among the leaves, buildings. Nothing had changed, except for us now we had the impetus to help unearth not one, but four missing children.

It was only a few months later that the Staten Island District Attorney’s Office announced its decision to indict Andre Rand for the 22-year old disappearance of Holly Ann Hughes, and so the strange set of coincidences that began our journey have now led us to Cropsey.

-Joshua Zeman

Visit the official website at http://www.cropseylegend.com