During our Halloween special I told Emmy about a local urban legend from a couple towns over. I think it’s really interesting that everyone in Westchester seems to know about the cannibals of Buckout Road, yet no one outside of the area has ever heard of the legend. For this blog and our podcast, I use the version of the urban legend I heard growing up and subsidized that with information from Westchester Magazine.
Albino Cannibals of Buckout Road
The legend as I heard it growing up goes if you stop in front of the Red house at the end of Buckout Road in West Harrison and honk your horn three times, a group of flesh eating albinos will come out and attack you. Obviously this tall tale is ridiculous and is clearly not true. Or is it? I’m kidding there definitely aren’t any albino cannibal cultists living on Buckout road there is no way the local HOA would approve of that. Also you’d think that the FBI, US Army, or I don’t know, the local police would have dealt with these albino cannibals killing and eating people on a nightly basis. It's not like they don’t know where to find them. Not to mention that only 1 in 18,000 to 20,000 Americans are Albino. It seems unlikely that with those odds we would have a group of them living in the same home, in the same cult, who all happen to enjoy eating other humans.
Although this legend is clearly fake, I never tested it out for myself, just in case I’m wrong. It also would be just flat out rude to drive to the red house on Buckout road in the middle of the night and honk my horn 3 times. If I lived in that red house and I had to deal with shithead kids waking me up on a nightly basis I might be mistaken for an albino cannibal running out to attack them.
This is the only iteration of Buckout road legend that I heard growing up. There are a couple of other iterations of this urban legend, which I will go into below, however, I don’t consider these to be the real Legend because I never heard them growing up.
Witches and a Ghost
Another version of legend goes that if you drive over the three x’s marked on the road, something bad will happen to you. I’m not sure exactly what will happen to you, this iteration is pretty vague, but how could it be much worse than getting eaten by a group of albino cannibals? According to legend the three x’s denote where three witches were burned at the steak and when you drive over them the souls of the witches will curse you with bad luck. While there were quite a few people burned at the stake for being witches in the 1600’s, there is absolutely no written record of this occurring in Harrison at the time. Considering pretty much nothing interesting was going on back then I can’t imagine no one wrote about it, that would have been front page new.
The other legend goes that you can see the ghost of Mary Buchout (different spelling just a coincidence) in the graveyard at the end of Buckout road. She allegedly hung herself from a tree, but there is absolutely no record of her doing that. I’m not sure if she was married to the Buchout in the true story below but if she was she definitely died but not by hanging.
The Truth
First off there are almost certainly no albino cannibal cultists living in the red house on Buckout road, or if they are they certainly don't eat people who honk their horns 3 times. What we do know is that a murder did occur at that house in the 1800s. On New Year's Day 1870, Isacc Buckhout invited his neighbor and his neighbor's son to a tea party and excused himself while his wife served the guests tea. Isaac came back with his double barrel shotgun, and killed his neighbor, injured his neighbors son, and crushed his wife’s skull to death. Isacc believed she was cheating so he wanted to kill her and unfortunately for his neighbor he was not the one she was cheating with. In fact, his neighbors seemed to be innocent bystanders. Isaac was arrested and lived the rest of his life in jail.
Despite these gruesome murders, the legend of buckout road was not created until much later. The theory is that the legend of Buckout road was created in the 80s by the locals to try and discourage teenagers from drinking and partying in the cemetery. I was surprised by this because who the heck is partying in a cemetery? That’s creepy enough without a tale of ghosts, witches, and cannibals. Not to mention kind of disrespectful.
I hope you enjoyed learning about this local urban legend. We would love to hear about local legends from your hometown. You can submit them here, or DM us on Twitter or Instagram: @Podcast_Misfits. Make sure to check out our podcast, you can find us anywhere you listen to podcasts and new episodes come out every Thursday. Stay Spooky Friends!
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