Camp High Hope

I’ll never forget the summer of 1998, or the encounters I shared with my classmates.

When I was ten years old, just two weeks into the beginning of the school year, the entire fifth grade was taken on a special week-long camping trip to ‘Camp High Hope’ in Indiana. Being ten years old, the idea of spending a week away from home, without any parents or siblings, just friends and the other kids from school, was one of the coolest experiences you could ever hope for as a child.

The bus arrived at the camp after about three hours on the road, and despite the relatively short ride, we were all tired. It was just noon, and we wanted nothing more than to rest.

The three classrooms were divided by gender, as one would expect. The boys had their cabin on one end of the camp, and the girls had their own on the opposite end. It was a rule that no boys were allowed to enter the girls’ cabin and no girls were allowed to enter the boys’ cabin. The teachers, who were chaperoning the camping trip, kept this rule strictly enforced.

After settling in and having lunch, we were introduced to the activities we’d be participating in during our week at camp: horseback riding, archery, painting, tracking, canoeing, bonfires, ghost stories; everything you’d expect at camp. But the one thing everyone was the most excited about was playing flashlight tag in the woods—in the pitch-black dark of night.

The night before the game was to begin, our camp counselors took us on a tour of the entire property that the camp was situated on. In the furthest outskirts of the property was a dilapidated old house that had been long since abandoned in the 1800s. That night we were told the story behind the house and why it had been abandoned.

In 1894, a farmer and his wife owned the house. The farmer, Mr. Shaw, had been out working in his field one evening, a bright lantern burning nearby, when he suddenly grabbed his chest in pain and collapsed in the mud. His wife rushed to his side and found that he had died—heart attack, apparently. With the sun setting and with no one else on the property, Mrs. Shaw left her husband’s body alone as she ran to the nearest neighbor to seek help.

Upon returning to their farm, they discovered that Mr. Shaw’s body had disappeared. There was no sign of a struggle, no footprints leading to or away from where the body had lain, with the exception of Mrs. Shaw’s footprints from earlier. Stranger still, there were no drag marks in the mud and no sign that Mr. Shaw’s body had perhaps rolled away from the muddy field down the hill.

The neighbors organized a search for his body the next morning. The nearby marsh was dragged for his possibly sunken corpse, and the woods were thoroughly searched for signs of scavengers who may have taken his body for a meal.

No sign of Mr. Shaw was ever found. No explanation was ever given.

A week after Mr. Shaw mysteriously vanished, Mrs. Shaw reported seeing a glow coming from the woods, the glow very reminiscent of a lantern. She called out to the figure roaming the woods, but no one ever responded. The figure crept closer and closer to the property with each passing night, causing Mrs. Shaw to fear for her life.

The neighbors agreed to stake out the property and identify this unknown figure, but their efforts were for naught. After the figure appeared in the treeline, a painful wail that couldn’t possibly come from any man emanated from the woods. The wail grew louder in sound and ferocity as it approached the house and the widow, Mrs. Shaw.

A frightful, ear-piercing scream caught the attention of the patrolling neighbors, who recognized Mrs. Shaw’s voice. Rushing to the house, they found Mrs. Shaw dead on the floor. Her eyes were wide with fright, and her mouth was frozen in a perpetual scream. Muddy footprints were found inside the house, leading to where Mrs. Shaw had been standing, but there were no footprints leading back outside.

Searching the house for any intruders, the neighbors found no one and nothing out of place.

Mrs. Shaw was laid to rest in the small village cemetery, and the figure in the woods continued to haunt and stalk all the homes near the treeline.

All of those who attempted to move into the former Shaw residence reported a sense of being watched and threatened. No family ever lived in the house for more than a month before being scared away. The house fell to ruin, and the property was believed to be cursed, completely uninhabitable by any mortal creature.

Needless to say, the ghost story frightened us all considerably—even the boys were shaken by the eerie tale.

That night, all of the girls gathered together to form a strategy for the game of flashlight tag the next night. None of us wanted to go anywhere near the house, especially in the dark. We all agreed to partner up with a friend and never go off the main trail, even if we were about to be found.

Still thinking about the story, none of us slept well that night. We all lay in our bunks, our eyes watching the door and the windows, afraid that the boys would attempt to prank us or scare us in any way. Eventually, we drifted off to sleep, one by one.

At about 3 a.m., we were all startled awake by the sound of twigs and branches snapping. Our teachers told us not to worry, that it was just a deer being curious about all the new smells and sounds from the cabins. Hesitantly, we tried to go back to sleep—that is, until we heard a pitiful wailing noise coming from the woods. Sitting up in fright, we all turned on our flashlights and wrapped our blankets around ourselves in fear. Again, the teachers insisted it was an animal. They tried to tell us that it was just a coyote who, like the deer, was curious. We didn’t believe them—not this time.

The wailing grew louder and closer. With each step, a twig snapped and branches shook. Everyone ducked under their covers, trembling with fear. I remember seeing my teachers whispering to each other in the corner; one had grabbed a baseball bat that was hidden in their private quarters of the cabin while the other had her hands on a flashlight.

I watched as my teachers went through the cabin, checking all the windows and the door to make sure they were all closed and locked for the night. Now they were trying to tell us that it was the boys playing a sick joke on us.

The wailing grew ever louder, and we became more and more frightened with each passing moment.

A sudden knock on our cabin door made us all jump, but no one said a word. My teacher, who was wielding the bat, approached the door and sighed in relief, seeing that it was one of the teachers from the boys’ cabin.

They stood together on the porch and spoke softly, but we could still hear every word they were saying. The boys’ teacher was upset, convinced that the girls’ cabin had been playing a prank on the boys by making a howling sound and breaking twigs. Our teacher told him that no one had left the cabin and that we were just as scared.

The boys’ teacher tensed up nervously, realizing that there was some third party at work. He jogged back to the boys’ cabin, and a few minutes later he and the camp counselors were checking the campground, trying to identify the prankster in the woods.

No one was found, and the wailing stopped as the sun began to rise.

That morning, everyone was exhausted, just as tired as we had been when we first arrived. We were all too nervous to really eat or play games, and no one was interested in playing flashlight tag anymore.

The day went on, and we slowly relaxed, forgetting about the creepy events from the night before. And then evening crept in, and all the fear returned.

The teachers and counselors all insisted that there was nothing to fear. We were letting our imaginations get the best of us. They even took extra steps and roped off the trail leading to the old house so that no one would get lost in the woods.

The game proceeded and played out just about as successfully as you’d imagine. Everyone was scared stiff and wandered aimlessly on the dark trails, unwilling to walk alone. As a group, the entire camp ended up wandering much further away from the camp than we were allowed, which made the teachers and counselors very angry. We kept seeing shadows of people darting along the trails and behind the tree lines. No one else was supposed to be out on the trails that night, yet we saw strangers stalking us in the darkened woods.

In a panic, many of us ran back toward the camp while the rest of us became lost, only to find ourselves surrounded by the shadows. One of the shadows, who stood just beyond the roped-off trail, was holding some kind of bright light. And yet, despite the brightness of the light, he appeared as nothing more than a shadow…

We finally found our way back to camp and were promptly lectured about following the rules and knowing the importance of rules being in place for our own safety. No one took their eyes off the woods, even as we were reprimanded, and no one spoke out of turn for the rest of the night.

We went to bed early that night, out of punishment and because the next morning we were going to return home. Too tired to be afraid, we all slept soundly that final night at the camp.

The next morning, after packing our clothes and supplies, we prepared to leave the cabin as a group, only to find muddy footprints on the porch of the cabin—footprints that led to the front door but didn’t lead away.

The boys’ cabin was all the more frightening. All through their cabin, muddy footprints were found, marching up and down the aisles between the bunks and stopping at their teacher’s private quarters. The footprints stopped and never led away.

Again, the teachers accused one cabin of pranking the other, but the teachers all vouched for each student that night. No one had left the cabin.

After returning to school, our teachers showed us all the photographs taken during our week at the camp. One photo, the only one taken during the night of the ghost story, showed a shadow in the treeline listening in on the tale…

No one knows what happened to Mr. Shaw’s body, but I can tell you this: he never left the property, and he’s still stalking the woods of ‘Camp High Hope.’