rybaby Lane is a creepy little stretch of grass 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 half a century earlier. 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, 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. By the time the fire department arrived, the building had 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, like their own lungs were filling up with smoke, 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 in on the air, quietly at first, then growing louder. They were the voices of 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, and 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 was 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, 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.

he story of Crybaby Lane has some basis in fact, but unfortunately in the retelling a few important details have been mixed up, rendering this story almost completely bogus.

There was a Catholic Orphanage in Raleigh for a good chunk of the 20th century. The orphanage was part of Nazareth, a Catholic Community founded a few miles outside the borders of Raleigh in the late 19th century, established in 1899 by Father Frederick Price, the first native born North Carolinian to be ordained a priest. The site was four miles outside of what were then the Raleigh City Limits, stretching along a good chunk of Western Boulevard. But did the orphanage ever burn down? Yes, several times.

The Raleigh City Fire department is fortunate to have Mike Legeros working for it, a firefighter who's also written several histories of the Raleigh Fire department. Mr. Legeros has documented three instances of fire at the orphanage, one in 1905, one in 1912, and one in 1961.

Here we have our first problem - All the accounts I've had of Crybaby Lane 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, but I'm willing to take 1961 as being close enough to the late fifties and consider the possibility that some memories have gotten confused as the story has been passed down. But there's a few problems with the 1961 fire being the source of the legend.

The fire at the Nazareth Orphanage in 1961 was started by a priest, the Reverend Raymond J. Donohue, who was displaying some remarkably questionable judgement by attempting to clear some wasp's nests form the eaves of the building by setting them on fire.

Father Donohue's fire quickly burns the building to the ground, which brings us to our next problem - the building destroyed in the fire wasn't the dormitory, it was the rectory. 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 on Western Boulevard.

So the 1961 fire doesn't seem a likely candidate. But there was another fire, this one in the dormitory and resulting in death, but this was the fire in 1905. Is it possible that the stories have become confused, and the fatal fire is remembered as happening more recently than it did because of this orphanage's unfortunate tendency to go up in flames? Let's take a closer look at the 1905 fire.

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 building housing the Priests who ran the orphanage and 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 displayed particular heroism, 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 badly and was taken to the hospital, where he died that night from his injuries.

Gladdish was a hero, a believer, and he died not only not in the fire but also nowhere near the orphanage. If we assume that tortured souls are tied to the place where they perished, Gladdish doesn't seem a likely contender for specterhood.

The dormitory was destroyed in the 1912 fire, along with a school room, the stables, and a barn, as well as managing to set a good blaze going in the nearby fields. But no one was even injured in the fire.

So three fires, one death, but nothing that fits the details of our story. But this isn't even our biggest problem. Crybaby Lane is in the wrong place - the orphanage was never even there.

At its largest, the Catholic Community at Nazareth occupied several hundred acres. As Raleigh expanded, the Nazareth gradually began selling off or donating its property. A large chunk of land was granted 1962 to build a new facility for Raleigh's only Catholic School, Cathedral Latin High School, which after the move was renamed Cardinal Gibbons High.

The remaining building of the orphanage remained in use until 1975, when Bishop F. Joseph Gossman made the facility into the Catholic Center of the Diocese. This building is still standing on Nazareth Street, off of Avent Ferry Road, about a mile west of Crybaby Lane. The rest of the orphanage is now buried under Centennial Boulevard, where students in Hondas and heavy delivery trucks drive too fast down Crybaby Lane.