Hummel Park

Hummel Park covers about 200 acres of steep riverside woods on Omaha’s northern edge, above the Missouri River. The land had been part of a family homestead in the Ponca Hills for decades before it was donated to the city in 1930 and named for Joseph B. Hummel, Omaha’s long-serving parks superintendent. Depression-era work crews built its stone stairs, retaining walls and picnic shelters, and the park has hosted a summer day camp for more than 60 years. Markers recall the fur-trade posts that stood nearby in the early 1800s.

For generations of Omaha teenagers, though, Hummel Park has been the city’s scariest place. The most persistent tale – dated to 1966 by an Omaha high-school newspaper, though no printed source that early has been traced – says a family or “colony” of people with albinism lives hidden in the woods and attacks visitors at night. Others say the bent trees near the entrance are “hanging trees” weighed down by the spirits of lynching victims, that the stone “Stairs to Hell” never give the same count twice, that the Devil’s Slide cliff was a site of Satanic rituals, and that the park sits on a burial ground.

None of it holds up. There has never been evidence of anyone living in the woods or attacking visitors, and the albino story closely mirrors older Ozark legends that seem to have migrated north. No lynching in the park has ever been documented; Omaha’s notorious 1919 lynching of Will Brown took place downtown, at the courthouse. The stairs, counted carefully, have 188 steps – their crumbling, irregular shapes explain the miscounts – and the Devil’s Slide is simply a natural cliff. North Omaha historian Adam Fletcher Sasse has written that much of the misunderstanding about the park comes from racism.

There is a real and sadder side: because the woods are close to the city yet hidden, the remains of several missing people have been found in the park over the years. Those crimes, more than any ghost, explain why many locals still avoid it after dark.

Stories rather than sightings: pale figures in the woods, voices among the “hanging trees,” stairs that change their count and a sense of dread at the Devil’s Slide overlook – passed along mainly by teenagers on night-time dares.

The bent trees near the entrance, the long stone stairway, the Devil’s Slide cliff over the Missouri and the deep woods; the legends are almost always set at night.

Hummel Park is Omaha’s classic teenage legend-trip, retold in local magazines every October and on the “haunted hikes” of Midwest Paranormal History Tours, which present the stories alongside the history that disproves them.