In early 2008, a shaky video called “Oniontown Adventures” appeared on YouTube. In it, three young jokers drive up a dirt road in an SUV at dusk, pretending like they’re reenacting a scene from Deliverance while commenting on the “little inbred hick village.” A guy in the backseat sarcastically says, “We’re gonna die.” The one in the passenger seat raises a pickax and says, “I’m gonna take one of those fuckers with me” as they blast twangy country music to pump themselves up. Once they cross the invisible border into Oniontown, everything seems to take on a preternatural significance. They roll down the windows and snap cameraphone photos of the trailers and trash. One guy spots a chicken on the dirt road and shouts, “Oh my God, look—a fucking chicken!” Then the video begins to slow down as the camera zooms in on a shadowy figure standing out in the woods. “That’s the sketchiest person I’ve ever seen in my life,” one of the boys says. Another shouts, “Look, I think there’s someone in the window!” This is followed by a couple Blair Witch slow-motion shots of other people standing in the woods. In the end, nothing really happens except a few terrible jokes and even worse laughter, concluding with one of the kids saying, “Didn’t they all look dazed? It’s like they are oblivious to the rest of the world.”
Later that summer, perhaps inspired by the bro-trio’s now-popular YouTube video, two teenagers from the wealthy town of Mahopac ventured into Oniontown with a camcorder to poke fun at its residents. They weren’t so lucky. Oniontowners wielding bricks and rocks attacked their car, and both of them ended up in the hospital. The incident made national news, adding to the place’s infamy. The situation was exacerbated by state police investigator Eric Schaeffer’s ominous warning to the press: “Anybody that doesn’t belong there, anybody that’s not a resident, just stay out of Oniontown.”Read: Peeling Oniontown - Unraveling the Layers of New York’s Most Reclusive—And Feared—Community
