MovieChat Forums > Cropsey (2009) Discussion > Why steal NYS' Urban Legend Crospey and ...

Why steal NYS' Urban Legend Crospey and make it just for staten Island?


Basically Cropsey is an area in Brooklyn, There is even a Crospey avenue in Brooklyn.

Why these film makers have taken an urban legend from New York State, plus mainly from Brooklyn, and decided to reduce it to just being Staten Island is beyond me.

If it was not done as NYS inclusive making it brooklyn would of made more sense as at least the Dutch had named an area of Brooklyn Cropsey. I also think Crospey can be used for woods in Dutch--a cropse of trees.

The Cropsey stories had always been told around campfires in NYS. Why it was reduced to being a Staten Island story is beyond me. Especially since if a place was mentioned it was Brooklyn, not Staten Island

Maybe the use of the name Cropsey was because of Heraldo Rivera's (Jerry Rivers back then) story back then about the use of the buildings at Willowbrook in Staten Island as a warehouse for the mentally ill and the shameful treatment they got at willowbrook at the poorly run and shameful treatment of the inmates at the mental institute helped bring him to notice and fame. However once he got fame he never went back to check on the inmates.

Crospey who had a hook for a hand from unethical experiments terrorized upstate NY and was not a Staten Island Urban Legend.

Why the film makers used Staten Island for the setting except it could be had cheap is beyond me especially when Brooklyn actually has a street named Crospey Avenue and a section of brooklyn known as Cropsey besdies it was an entire NYS urban legend pr real story about the escaped inmate from creedmoore they never talk about we will never know.

The one thing I do know is that Crospey was not from Staten Island.

Cropsey was more of a NYS or Brooklyn urban legend, Okay.

No Cropsey don't! I meant no disrespect. Please don't for god sake no mo ahhhhh!

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Speaking from experience as someone who grew up in Brooklyn in the 80's...the Cropsey story was THE story my big brother would break out every Halloween (or whenever I just needed to have the life scared out of me).

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It didn't seem to me that they were trying to say that the Cropsey legend was just a Staten Island thing...in fact they even said, a few times, it was popular throughout the state. The film makers were just showing the parallel between actual crimes from Staten Island and the legend of Cropsey.

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As someone stated below - at the beginning of the movie, they explain that the legend crossed along many parts of New York.

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I believe they said it was popular in many areas beside NY as Cropsey was something that was told when I was a kid and I am from Pennsylvania. He was a crazy guy who escaped from the mental hospital who kidnapped kids. I actually had no idea it originated in NY and the title was actually what grabbed my attention while flipping through Netflix.

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It's set in SI as that's where Rand was committing the killings. Why they chose Cropsey I think is just to connect to ghost lore and urban legend.

I'm from that area and he was the boogey man our Mom's warned us about.

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Interesting you should mention this. I grew up in Westchester County, and remember hearing of Cropsey only once, at a sleepover from a friend who said she'd heard it at summer camp (I'm not sure where the camp was, but I believe it was fairly local). However, according to her, Cropsey was not a psychiatric patient but a deranged farmer (hence the name "Crop" sey), who was disfigured, had his land stolen, or faced some otherwise cruel injustice, and so roamed the land looking for vengeance. My friend told me that the counselors had a tradition of smearing themselves with chocolate syrup and screaming "Cropsey got me!" and scaring the campers silly.

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I grew up in Jersey City in Hudson County, NJ and I remember talking about the Cropsey kidnapper in grammar school as someone to watch out for when we walked home afterschool. And since we watched ABC Eyewitness News in my house I remembered that reporter immediately.

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Why these film makers have taken an urban legend from New York State, plus mainly from Brooklyn, and decided to reduce it to just being Staten Island is beyond me.
They don't do this. They start by examining an urban legend from their perspective as Staten Island natives, which includes how it was tied to local places for them, but while mentioning that it's a wider and older legend than that. However, shortly into filming from their perspective, they keep hearing the Cropsey urban legend being conflated with the story of Andre Rand, so the film becomes much more of a documentary about Rand instead.

The result is that Cropsey becomes just a way to get to Rand, which is a Staten Island story, but they still focus on the urban legend/myth angle in their film about Rand.



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Everyone likes to believe that they "own" a certain urban legend or that their version is the only true version of the legend. That is the true nature of urban legends. The documentary made clear that the Cropsey legend is known throughout several regions and that the story varies. This happens to be the filmakers version of the old urban legend. Theirs is no more or less true than Brooklyn or any other region. Just because there is a street in Brooklyn named "Cropsey" does not mean that Brooklyn owns it. Cropsey is actually a surname and there is even a town in Illinois named Cropsey.

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I remember an Episode of Full House when the girls are at summer camp and someone tells the story of Cropsey.

You're a lunatic with a mad man's dream of a milk-proof robot!

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Once Full House uses it, it's all over.
By the time I'd heard the Cropsey story it had been so twisted and bastardized, it bore no resemblance to the original tale. This film did a pretty good job of covering the fact that it was a NY wide thing.

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No offense to you, OP alphaboo, but the filmmakers related much of what you state here, including the New York state origins. What they do in "Cropsey" is localize a real case that occurred on Staten Island and conjoin it with a well-know tale. Frankly, the legend has less to do with the movie subject itself and acts as a character itself to color the events related to the Rand case.

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I'm dutch. I know that the name Brooklyn comes from Breukelen. But I don't know Cropsey or Crospey as you wrote, it doesn't sound dutch and neither do I recall having ever read it in old dutch manuscripts.

The only info I found about the name Cropsey, was that it also was a 19th century then famous landscape painter from Staten Island, N.Y., Jasper Francis Cropsey.



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I think he meant "copse".

"Hot lesbian witches!"

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'Copse' is not a dutch word either. I try to think of a word that resembles it, but... no.


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I grew up in Brooklyn in the 70's and 80's and never heard of Cropsey. Believe me, I was a big horror story fan but the urban ghost story completely passed me by.

The filmmakers did not say that Rand WAS Cropsey or that the legend originated in S.I. They just stated that they had a real life criminal in S.I. that fit the legend.

All in all, I thought it was a good documentary and quite frightening in many respects.

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Decent movie, but I attended grade school, intermediate school, high school and college in three boroughs, and lived in two counties upstate and never heard of Cropsey either.

Revenge is a dish that best goes stale.

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