Devil's Kitchen

Devil's Kitchen, a secluded creek canyon near Key's Castle off Old Ridgeway Road, takes its name either from the moonshine once called "the devil's water" that bootleggers distilled in the valley or from decades of ghost stories attached to the site. Local legend tells of Mary Moore Newman, said to have been strangled to death here, with her screams for help still heard in the surrounding woods; a separate story tells of a woman murdered in the 1940s by her boyfriend and an accomplice after a robbery, and of a young man in a blue windbreaker seen on the nearby bridge, supposedly left there as a drunken prank by friends who never returned, until he fell and drowned. Stories of Satanic worship and witchcraft at the site have also circulated for years, though nothing of that kind has ever been documented.