The official name is Lawler Ford Road. It was built in the early twentieth century to provide access to a now-vanished railroad stop and a collection of vacation cottages along the Meramec River. When the railroad died and the cottages crumbled, the road was closed to vehicles and quietly forgotten by everyone except the teenagers of Wildwood, who discovered that an abandoned road through dense forest along a river bluff is exactly the kind of place where legends breed.

The legends are numerous and contradictory. A hermit named Zombie lived in the woods and attacked trespassers. A construction worker died building the road. A woman was killed on the railroad tracks that once ran alongside it. Children drowned in the river and their ghosts linger on the bank. Native American spirits were disturbed when the road was carved through ancient land. The police-blotter truth — that a woman named Della Hamilton McCullough was struck and killed by a train here in 1876, before the road existed — is somehow less satisfying than any of the invented versions.

What is documented: Lawler Ford Road was a real access route. The rock-faced concrete retaining walls along the bluff are still largely intact, crumbling elegantly into the hillside. The cottages are gone but their foundations remain, mossy concrete slabs in the middle of what has become forest again. The Meramec River is beautiful and occasionally floods catastrophically, which is presumably why the cottages were abandoned.

The road is now part of the Rockwoods Range conservation area and is legally accessible as a hiking trail during daylight hours. The Wildwood city government erected a sign at the trailhead that actually includes the name “Zombie Road,” an act of civic self-awareness that is either charming or defeating depending on your perspective.

Ghost hunters have conducted dozens of investigations here. A 2006 documentary called Children of the Grave filmed along Zombie Road and claimed to capture anomalous sounds and lights in the woods. The documentary has been viewed millions of times on YouTube and is taken with varying degrees of seriousness.

The two miles of trail are genuinely atmospheric. Limestone bluffs crowd overhead. The tree canopy is so thick that even on summer afternoons it feels like dusk. The Meramec flashes silver through the trees below. It is, by any measure, a beautiful and strange walk. Whether anything is haunting it is a question the bluffs decline to answer.