Seven gates of hell

The seven gates of hell is the catch-all label of a collection of widely varied local legends situated in various locations in Pennsylvania, USA.

Background
The details of these legends are extremely variable. No legitimate attempt to verify the events depicted in the legends has ever been recorded, and indeed even the locations mentioned seem to no longer exist, assuming that they ever did. To call the seven gates of hell an urban legend exaggerates the cohesiveness of this body of material.

The Seven Gates of Hell are located in Hellam, near York, in Pennsylvania.

The story goes that there was once a mental asylum which had caught fire. The inmates tried to escape through the forest in which the asylum was located. Surrounding the asylum were seven gates which trapped the inmates. Many were killed by the fire or by other inmates. To this day, it is said that no one has made it past the location of the Fifth Gate and returned out of the forest.

Obstacles to legitimate investigation
In keeping with the conventions of urban legends, most first hand accounts of a visit to one of these locations are necessarily vague and melodramatic, consisting of warnings about companions who never returned or who were "never the same afterwards". These are almost certainly spurious.

A second class of first hand accounts universally relate that the speaker was "really there" but saw or experienced nothing, yet still believes that "something really happened there once." This class of accounts usually includes the detail that there were no gates or ruins to be seen, and that the speaker was told where to go to find the site, which relegates responsibility for knowledge of the location to a usually unnamed third party. Naturally, without any evidence of the structures depicted within the legend, the speaker — who may be totally sincere — could have been absolutely anywhere, even in a location where no such events ever occurred.

All other accounts of visits are naturally attributed to a distant acquaintance or relative who lost a friend in the process, or who never returned, or who was "never the same"; the tenuous relationship between the speaker and the experient is also consistent with an urban legend. All of these accounts are somewhat more believable if one assumes that the persons in the accounts were extremely impressionable.

Frustrating attempts to nail down any location in conjunction with the legends is that the existence and location of Toad Road is unverifiable, and its relation to the location of the hospital, etal., is unclear. Modern maps show no such roadway in York County, and there is little evidence that one existed in the past. Different versions of the legend give Toad Road as the frontage road of the haunted property, while others offer it as a "main road" that leads to a secondary or tertiary road that leads to the property. Defenders of the legends claim that "Toad Road" is or was a nickname for a road officially known by another name, a convenient conceit that leads nowhere . At least one version of the legend claims that "Toad Road" was the nickname for the driveway to the estate of a rural eccentric who admonished visitors to "worship the toad", hence the nickname.

A further obstacle to any attempt to investigate the source of these legends is that just as many people, often living closer to the supposed locations of these events than the retellers of the legends, have never heard of any of the foregoing.

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