As someone who never went to summer camp, I think of cute log cabins, middle school crushes, being reunited with your long lost identical twin sister, and sing-alongs around a campfire.
Anyways, that's what I though UNTIL Reddit user u/whatsthatpidge posed the question: "People who have gone to summer camp as a child, what was your creepy/scary experience?"
And that's when I remembered precisely why I never wanted to go to camp in the first place....
1. "As a 13 year old kid, I went out into the woods at like 1am with a headlamp to pee, just immediately behind my cabin, because I didn't want to walk to the wash house. While I'm peeing, I look forward and see a large bear, just staring at me. Would have pissed myself if not for the fact that I was already peeing."
2. "I was about 12 and I was at sleep-away camp and the councilors took us on a hike into the woods for a night. When it came time to go to bed, of course none of us were actually falling asleep and we overheard the councilors talking about the police looking for someone."
"We later learned one of the kids was in the middle of a serious custody battle and that the dad was planning on taking the kid and that the reason we were in the woods was so that he wouldn't find us at the cabin. No idea if it was actually dangerous, but looking back it definitely is unsettling."
3. "My youth group stayed at a camp site for a weekend trip. We were all in the cabin playing card games when someone with a gorilla suit ran by and started banging on the door. It really freaked everyone out because it was no one in our group. They came back a couple times until one of the adults confronted the person and they ran away. They never found out who the person was."
4. "Church camp early 2000s. Someone was pooping in suit cases. Everyone was worried they would be targeted but no one knew who it was. A camp counsellor and others were hit. They even got away with pooping in a large gathering area with many people around. I don't think they were caught."
5. "We were playing soccer and someone shattered my leg, broke it in 8 places. There was no swelling, so they said I was faking it and they wouldn't take me to the hospital. I hopped around for a day but the next night I was in too much pain to sleep so I limped to the nurses office, broke in and took a handful of Benadryl just so I could sleep." [...]
"That night, a group was doing an overnight in a three-sided shelter and decided to have a peanut butter fight before bed. One kid fell asleep with peanut butter in his hair and woke up when a skunk walked into the shelter and pulled a piece of his scalp out." [...]
So they 'had' to take the kid for rabies shots so they 'might' as well" take me along to get x-rays since they were going anyway. Helen Keller could have pointed out the breaks on my x-rays."
6. "Went on a camping trip. I was one of the first ones out of the bus and had to use the public bathroom. I notice a few daddy long legs on the wall outside the bathroom and think nothing if it. I open the door and am immediately greeted by thousands if not millions of daddy long legs that are covering the bathroom from top to bottom. The bathroom was big as well, like 3 stalls and 3 urinals."
"That and coupled with the fact that our camp counselors were sadistic and told us pre-teens a bunch of scary stories then jumped out of the woods in the middle of the night screaming with bloody Jason masks. I stayed in my tent most of the time after that."
7. "Stayed at a week-long camp in the early 80s. A series of storms hit one night and my cabin was shaking like a ship at sea. A camp director told us to grab a sleeping bag, a pillow, a jacket and our shoes, and we hiked (mostly in the dark) to the Rec centre basement. Tornado sirens were blaring and we could hear (but not see) trees crashing in the woods around us. We made it and hunkered down thru the storms, but that walk was the longest half mile of my life."
8. "I was the creepy experience. The boys tried to spook us by banging on our cabin windows at night. Once they had run back to their own cabin I chewed a purified coal tablet mom had packed for food poisoning/ stomach upset/etc. I let the chewed coal run down my chin like black blood and stood outside their cabin in my white nightgown, just in the distance, waiting for them to come out to “scare the girls” again. As soon as they spotted me they squeeled and ran back inside, leaving 2 kids behind the locked door cause they didn’t want to open it again.
9. "My camp counsellor thought it'd be a good idea to take her group of 11-year olds out of a warm cabin and instead, sleep overnight on the outdoor stage they used for camp plays. I was so cold, it was unbearable. I remember being tense and scrunched up in a ball. Every movement I made was like dipping my legs in ice. Eventually we walked back at 4am because all the kids couldn't take it anymore. It was scary to be so so cold and tired in the dark. I still remember it!"
10. "Went to a boys scout summer camp in the mid-late 90's. They had an archery range where we all were learning how to shoot. Everyone shoots and we are down range getting our arrows, when we hear someone yell out in the covered shooting area. I look up and see a kid holding an arrow at full draw and let go. Hits the kid standing 5-feet from me in the arm. It's chaos everyone's running around and screaming. The kid with an arrow stick out of him is just standing there in shock. Next year, there was no more archery training."
11. "I was young and at Girl Scout Camp. One night, after lights out, we were told by our counsellors to stay in the cabins, latch the doors, get under the beds and turn out all lights. Some old guy had gotten drunk and trespassed. He had been walking around the property but luckily didn't find any of the camp grounds. Rumours were that he had an ax."
12. We were on this really long canoe trip in Northern Ontario. Like DEEP wilderness. We were on this gorgeous clear lake when we found a secluded beach. It was really Beautiful. So we decided to stay there for the night." [...]
"The whole day and even sitting around the fire that night felt weird. But I couldn’t really place my finger on it. I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of soft country music. None of us had a stereo so I stuck my head out of the tent to see what was up." [...]
"There was a bald guy going through our campsite picking up stuff as he went along. We made eye contact and he put a finger to his lips and made a 'shhh' sound. So I hid in my sleeping bag. I can’t remember what he took but it wasn’t much. Turns out there is a pretty significant hermit population in Northern Ontario."
13. "Went to a camp that was half a mile away from a peacock farm and I gotta say, peacock screams echoing through the middle of the night are terrifying when you’re 10 and nobody told you there was a peacock farm nearby."
It really makes you ponder who decided to normalize letting groups of children go away into the wilderness to be watched by other groups of slightly larger children for chunks of time!
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