Stairs thing seems kind of normal. I grew up in CT and NY and have done a lot of hiking in the northeast, you'll often find stairs to old structures seemingly in the middle of nowhere, but really it's just that the rest of the structure has been burnt down or was made of wood and rotted away.
That being said, a lot of the hikes here do have pretty intense ghost stories that go with them, lots of suicide from peaks, bridges, etc.