Every town has a place teenagers dare each other to enter. In Clifton, Passaic County, New Jersey, that place has a name spray-painted at its mouth: the Gates of Hell. It is a set of old drainage tunnels off Paulison Avenue, and for decades local lore has insisted that somewhere deep inside them is a doorway to the devil’s own domain.
The legend
The stories have been collected for years by the folklore magazine Weird NJ, whose editors say they have never found another underground passage in the state carrying the same name. The versions overlap and escalate. People went into the tunnels and never came out. The walls were covered in satanic graffiti and upside-down crosses, and the floors littered with the remains of sacrificed animals. There were seven levels of tunnel, each closer to the devil than the one above. At the deepest point lay a sealed room guarded by a pair of enormous axes said to weigh thousands of pounds, which could be moved only by someone with supernatural strength, and behind them a dungeon holding a human skull, in some tellings a glowing one.
Other details accumulated around the main story. A guardian spirit called Red Eyed Mike was said to watch the entrance. One correspondent claimed that knocking three times on the railroad ties above the opening would bring the blast of a horn from inside, and that rocks had flown out of the tunnel with nobody there to throw them. Another described a row of dead trees spaced precisely three feet from one another, with the carcasses of cats and birds lashed to the trunks, and a smooth granite manhole at the far end that served as the actual portal to hell.
What is really there
Beneath the stories is a piece of municipal plumbing. Weird NJ describes a vaulted stone passage roughly eight feet tall in which daylight quickly gives out. It was built to carry runoff from Weasel Brook, a small stream that winds through the city, and in heavy rain the usual trickle can become a torrent with little warning. Rail tracks pass overhead, which may explain why a knock on the ties above the entrance can be followed by the sound of a horn. A 2020 Patch article noted that explorers’ videos pick up the noise of passing trains along with spiders and graffiti, and recalled a Herald News reporter’s verdict that the legends were “pretty standard teenage stuff.”
None of the sensational claims has ever been documented: no missing persons tied to the tunnels, no axes, no skull, no room seven levels down. What can be found is the graffiti left by generations of visitors, which supplies its own evidence for the satanic decor.
The real dangers
The site’s reputation has had real consequences, and they are legal and physical rather than supernatural. A Clifton police officer who headed the department’s gang and street-crime unit wrote to Weird NJ that he had arrested a number of visitors at the tunnels, some for trespassing and several for carrying weapons, including double-edged daggers, small swords and a large Bowie knife. Visitors had come from as far as Suffern, New York, and Cherry Hill in South Jersey, and when asked how they had heard of the place they named the magazine. He asked it to warn readers that anyone found there would be arrested, and the magazine now carries that warning alongside its story.
Early on September 22, 2017, a 21-year-old man from Port Reading who had been exploring the tunnels fell about twenty feet down a rocky slope and landed near a storm drain, injuring his head. The spot was so hard to reach that police needed help from the Clifton Fire Department to bring him out before he was taken to University Hospital in Newark. Police again urged the public to stay away.
Where it stands
The Gates of Hell is a classic legend trip, a real and genuinely risky place onto which a community has projected its fears and its dares. The tunnels drain water, not souls. The devil is absent from every documented account; the injuries, the flash floods and the trespass arrests are not.