History & local legend
Sawmill Road near Downingtown became associated with rust-red gates that locals called the Gates of Hell. According to the story, they stood outside a house where a man had killed his wife and child. A visitor who drove the road with a friend in fall 2006 later described the trip on the Ghost Hunts in Pennsylvania blog.
By their visit, the gates were gone. What unsettled the pair was the quiet drive beneath overhanging branches. One remarked that they had seen no rabbits, deer or foxes anywhere along the road. Immediately after leaving it, they saw those same animals in that order: first a rabbit, then a deer, then a fox. The writer’s October 2009 account presents the sequence as the strange coincidence that stayed with them.
