by JL Bryan
“You've done a great job.” I stepped close to a wall filled with faded photographs, most of them black and white. The oldest showed boys and girls in military-style uniforms, canoeing, shooting arrows, marching in formation down a trail. The uniforms looked too hot for summer wear, with trousers for the boys, ankle-length skirts for the girls.
Near the baseboard were Polaroids; here, the thick uniforms and stiff, broad-brimmed campaign hats of early years had given way to 1970s-style short shorts and helmet hair. “It looks like this place has been here a long time.”
“It first opened around a hundred years ago. My husband could tell you exactly, but it's old. He felt like it would give us a tradition to tap into.” She shrugged.
“What was here?” I pointed to a noticeably empty square on the floor, less faded than the area around it, as though something had been there for many years.
“A horned owl,” she said. “Preserved through taxidermy, but it still looked rough. And weird. I mean, it's literally a dead animal, and it was just sitting out here like a decoration. I moved it to the museum area.”
She led us into a small back-corner office with two facing desks. One desk was chaotic, littered with notes and sketches scribbled on random pieces of paper. More random jots and scribbles, some on restaurant napkins, were pinned to a nearby bulletin board. The other desk was neatly organized, everything sorted into labeled trays, nothing out of place. A stack of crisp, white stationery with a horned-owl logo occupied one corner.
Allison walked toward the neat and organized desk, where a framed photograph offered my first glimpse at the rest of her family. Her husband Josh was smiling, strikingly good looking and wearing a nice suit, a big grin like a politician or a guy who's about to tell a joke you've heard a thousand times before, just before trying to sell you insurance or a used car.
They had three kids, two boys of middle or high school age and a girl who looked like she wasn't far out of kindergarten. The girl had dark eyes and seemed to glare at the camera while her brothers forced smiles.
“This is my desk,” she said. “You'll, uh, have to excuse Josh's. He claims to have a special pattern of organizing his things, but we both know he actually just doesn't organize them. Anyway, I used to keep the windows open while I worked, if the weather was nice.” She nodded toward two areas cloaked in floor-to-ceiling canvas curtains. “Now I keep them closed tight. I've seen something out there. And heard things.”
“What kinds of things?” I opened the curtains, revealing two windows large enough for someone to step right through. Both were closed and latched.
“When I'm here working alone—I have to keep all the details squared away, you know, insurance and taxes and our costs. There are so many costs. So much depletion of our... our budget.” She looked pained for a moment, but swallowed it back.
“Anyway,” she continued, “the first time it happened, it was night and I was in here alone. I heard footsteps on the back porch. They came closer and closer to the side window there. They didn't even scare me at first, because I assumed it was Josh coming up from the cabin he'd been renovating.
“I even started talking to him, catching him up on what I'd been doing, but he didn't reply. The footsteps kept thumping closer and closer until they were right outside my window. We hadn't put in the screens yet, and the windows were wide open. A cold breeze rustled the curtains. A stray cold breeze by itself isn't anything unusual up here in the mountains, but something about it made me uneasy.
“I looked up, wondering why Josh hadn't answered me. I said his name and watched the window, but it was too dark outside to see anything. There was just solid black nothingness out there, but it made me think of that old saying about the darkness looking back at you. You know that one?”
“I do.”
“When Josh didn't answer me, I started imagining some kind of, I don't know, wild man of the woods stalking around the place. Maybe the lodge previously had a squatter, or more than one, that the bank didn't know anything about. Maybe there was somebody else out here with us, somebody dangerous. Maybe this wild and crazy person had caused all the damage... and maybe he was still out here, watching us from the woods, resenting us for taking his home. That was what I imagined.
“So I got up, thinking I would close the windows, but I was too scared to actually walk over there. Without the screens, they may as well have been a pair of wide-open doors.
“I grabbed my letter opener.” She took a long, thin blade from her desk and pointed it at the window. “My hands were shaking so hard I could barely hold it. I couldn't help feeling like someone was watching me from out there in the dark, someone I couldn't see. I kept thinking about how isolated we are, and how I'd always had a little bit of a bad feeling about this place...” She swallowed.
“What did you do next?” I asked, as gently as I could.
“I walked out.” She turned and left the room. Stacey and I followed her back into the wood-paneled hallway, following the geography of her story. “I eased out of there one step at a time, and I didn't take my eyes off that window until I reached the hall, and then I ran.”
She led us back to the big fireplace room and pointed at the panel of light switches by the back door. “That door was open a few inches. I had to force myself to walk over there. I turned on every last outdoor light, and I turned off the ones inside for good measure. Then I went to the fireplace to grab the poker, since I needed a better weapon than this.” She wiggled the letter opener.
“Good thinking, Allison!” Stacey gave her a thumbs up, but this did not appear to cheer up Allison at all.
“Before I got there, I heard the front doors creak open.” She turned and pointed the letter opener at the double front doors, visible down a short, wide front hall. “I jumped when I saw him. But this time it really was Josh, thank goodness. I tried to tell him what was going on, but I was so panicked it came out like gibberish.”
“What was his reaction?”
“He was worried. We looked around, but found no sign of an intruder. He drove me to the caretaker cottage to stay with the kids, then came back by himself. I didn't want him to, but he said he had to lock up and make sure nobody was inside.
“I did my best to act normal in front of the kids, and anyway I was already starting to question myself. I could have heard any kind of noise out there and thought it was footsteps. It wasn't like I'd even been paying much attention. It could have been anything from a raccoon to a black bear on the porch. I wouldn't know the difference. I grew up in north Atlanta, in suburbs where you didn't see wildlife much bigger than a squirrel. All this roughing it out here is still new to me.” Her face told me she wasn't necessarily enjoying it, either.
“Yeah, I'm definitely more of a city girl myself,” I said. “Did your husband find anything when he searched the lodge?”
“Nothing. There was nobody here, at least not anymore. He left it locked up with all the lights on. He said that should help keep animals away. I knew he also meant people, like maybe trespassers, but he didn't say it out loud. We locked up our house tight that night, and every night since. We hadn't always bothered before that.”
“Did you ever hear the footsteps again?”
“Oh, yes. Not just at night, either, although it's so dark around here under all these old trees, it always feels later than it is. Now I always work with the porch lights on and the windows latched.”
“How many times have you heard them?”
“I don't know exactly. Three or four times out on the porch. Other times, I've heard them upstairs like somebody was clomping around the attic. I panicked then, too. At some point Josh stopped taking me as seriously. He told me it was probably the old building settling and creaking. Which I didn't believe. He started treating me like the wife who cried wolf. And I was questioning myself, too. I kept having to push it all down to act positive for the kids, because two out of three are already not happy to be here.”
“Have they reported anything unusua
l?” I asked.
“Well, Shy immediately said she was seeing things, right after we moved in, but she's always let her imagination run away with her. She's always daydreaming and drawing wild things.”
“That's your daughter?” I asked, thinking of the frowning girl with the big, dark eyes.
“Shiloh, yes. She's seven. Quiet as a mouse most of the time. But she has nightmares, and they got worse after we moved here. She's had a hard time adjusting.”
“What has she seen?”
“She claims to see invisible people running around the cabins and sometimes down by the lake. The old people, she calls them, or the campers. And she sees a giant who walks out of the woods at night. And a herd of unicorns on the ropes course. And a fairy flying on a broomstick.”
“Ooh, a witch fairy,” Stacey said. “Neat. Imagine the outfits. And the shoes.”
“And those are just a few examples. Shy isn't an outgoing kid—she makes Ephraim, my moody older teen, look like a chatterbox—but when she talks, it's almost always something made up. It's hard to know when to believe her.”
“Do you think she's making it up?” I asked.
“Maybe not all of it. Not anymore.” Allison looked like she wanted to say something else but held it back. She'd crossed the main room to the back door, and now slid the screen door aside and stepped onto the back porch. “Let's get out of here.”
“Sounds good,” I said, letting her take the lead. She'd mentioned seeing things when we'd talked on the phone, but maybe she didn't feel comfortable talking about that yet.
I followed her out into the gloomy afternoon, notepad open, ready to see more of this allegedly haunted campground.
Chapter Four
The fire pit behind the lodge, with its rings of log seats, seemed to be the camp's hub. Paths led off in different directions through the woods, marked with wooden signs so weathered they were illegible.
We followed Allison down a path that had been recently cleared. Weeds had been whacked down all along it, and masses of dead, shriveled poison ivy indicated someone had been at work with a sprayer. Overhead limbs looked recently pruned back, too, raising the canopy over the trails but not fully alleviating the gloom.
We emerged into a clearing arranged around a smaller fire ring. A cluster of cabins stood nearby, freshly restored. Flowers bloomed in the window boxes. I peered through one window, trimmed on the inside with starchy lace curtains. The cabin's interior was dollhouse-like: cheerful yellow walls with red trim, a ceiling fan that looked like a sunflower, butterflies painted on the white bunk-bed ladders.
“These are the girls' cabins,” Allison said. “It's taken some work, but they're mostly done. New wiring and plumbing. New everything. Josh says the boys' cabins should stay a little rougher, because they'll end up that way anyhow, so we started those later.”
“Is this where your daughter says she saw people?”
“That was the boys' area, over through those woods.” She pointed down another trail that curved out of sight, presumably toward the less-restored boys' area. “And down by the lake, which is just past that.”
“Let's have a look,” I said. Allison nodded and started down the trail.
Stacey followed behind us more slowly, taking snapshots of the cabins, the fire ring, the brick bathhouse surrounded by raised garden beds ready for planting. Each cabin was freshly painted with a different cutesy animal—a rabbit, a bluebird, a chipmunk.
“This place is so fun,” Stacey said. “I like how each cabin gets a different animal.”
“Those were already there,” Allison told her. “We added fresh paint and made them look a little friendlier. A mascot helps each cabin become its own little community. I think it helps kids feel more at home and gives them a special sense of identity. Their own little tribes.”
We started down another path through thick woods. The way forward looked gloomy, more like a tunnel; the place needed a major trimming back of its canopy. A little more sunlight would have gone a long way.
Allison told us in detail about all the hard restoration work around the campground as we walked the path.
“Unfortunately, opinions about the work vary among the kids,” she said. “Nathan, our fourteen-year-old, really has a knack for it. I think he likes the noise, the banging and hammering and drilling. And he's proud of himself when he finishes a project. He's like his father. Ephraim—he's the sixteen-year-old—not so much. For weeks, it was like pulling teeth getting him to help at all. Now he's more resigned to it, but he just doesn't have Nathan's spirit.”
“And what about your daughter?” I asked.
Allison frowned. “Shy is... a little different. She tries to help but wanders off into her own little world. She's not being rebellious. I don't always understand the world inside her mind, to be honest. Here's the boys' cabins. Like I said, we haven't made as much progress here.”
“This is definitely more rustic.” There were a dozen cabins on the boys' side, not all of them restored yet.
Some of the cabins near the back were little more than shabby ruins. Allison led us to one of these, painted with a faded, peeling bobcat with an aggressive snarl. Allison hadn't yet repainted it into something friendly.
“That mascot is not so cute,” Stacey said.
“All the cabin mascots here on the boys' side looked like this when we got here,” Allison said. “Not exactly kid-friendly. I have to cuten them up as I paint over them.”
The cabin door creaked and swayed in the wind, knocking against the cabin's outside wall. Allison stepped up onto the cabin's stoop and closed the door firmly, with the frustrated sigh of someone doing the same thing for the thousandth time.
“Josh left his tools here in Bobcat Cabin once, overnight,” she said. “So he didn't have to haul them back and forth. When we came back the next morning, the door was wide open and everything had been knocked over or thrown around. We thought we'd been robbed! But nothing was missing.
“Josh said it must have been animals, maybe a black bear. Or maybe the world's biggest bobcat. 'My fault, I must have left the door open,' he said. He started leaving his things in Fox Cabin after that.”
“So does Josh have a background in construction?” I asked, trying to get a clearer picture of these prospective clients.
“That's what he did in Atlanta, planned out communities for a real estate development firm. He designed really expensive neighborhoods, and the high-end shopping centers to go with them. That's what he got tired of doing, though. Insulated nests for rich people, he called them, but I thought it gave him a chance to create really beautiful things.
“But he wanted to do this instead. Go out in the woods, create something meaningful. And I support him. His heart's in the right place. He feels a calling. Maybe he could have spent a few more years at that job, and we'd have been a little more safe and secure, but he was working seventy hours a week. He would have missed these last few years with his sons, and he'd already missed most of them. It was a hard choice.” She looked quietly at the dilapidated cabin, as if still feeling those hard choices. “I hoped it would bring us all closer.”
She went quiet, and I took in the place. Like the girls' area, there was a bathhouse and a fire ring marked with stones—not as large as the giant ceremonial-sized pit out behind the main lodge, but just the size where campers could sit together, toasting marshmallows and telling secrets and ghost stories.
The cabin area bordered the woods. A steep hillside with several spindly trees formed a natural barrier that might help keep wayward boys from wandering too far—or maybe challenge them into the adventure of a treacherous climb into the wild places above.
Chapter Five
Most of what I knew about going to camp came from the movies, a scattershot of lame kid comedies, crass teen farces, and cheesy horror flicks. So far, this place was pretty well fitting my accumulated movie-based impression of summer camps: a pleasant, natural retreat on the surface, with a vague but palpable undercurrent
of something wild and unpredictable, something scary and uncontrollable underneath. The kids' comedies were like that as much as the horror movies.
Wooden buildings formed a little village by the lake. Allison showed us an arts and crafts cabin with an outdoor stage facing a picnic-table pavilion, not far from a grassy field with a sports equipment shed. A dock extended into the water from a big shack of a boathouse stocked with colorful new canoes and kayaks.
“Have you experienced anything strange in this area?” I asked.
“No, not here.” She sighed. “I guess I'm just putting it off, but you should see it, if you're going to understand this place.”
“Putting what off?”
“The Stony Owl, the place the camp is named after. The old native burial mound.” She pointed toward the top of a high, densely wooded hill beyond the activity village. A steep trail wound up and around the hill, twisting out of sight among the trees. “I know it's a forgotten cultural treasure and all that, and I'm glad we're taking care of it, but... it's not a place I'd want to be alone.”
A cold feeling crawled up my back at her words. Stacey looked at me, and I knew she felt something similar.
“We better go before it gets dark.” Allison started up the trail, marked with another weather-worn sign: Stony Owl Effigy.
“You said it's a burial mound?” I asked, following close, making sure my flashlight was in its holster though we still had an hour of daylight left.
“That's what the archaeologist said, a hundred years ago or whenever anyone last tried to study it. They found bones under it, and lot of old artifacts.”
The trail to the effigy hill skirted the lake and was muddy, slurping at my boots. An occasional short footbridge or fallen trunk offered passage over particularly sunken and wet areas. The canopy converged tightly above us, keeping the daylight scarce.
We began the steep path. It coiled up a high hill like a constrictor snake around its latest victim. There were points where I had to pull myself up with the nearby tree limbs.