When I was a freshman in high school, I was friends with seniors who let me in on their favorite partying spot. It was secluded, private, and—best of all—incredibly creepy. It was Camp Claiborne, a military base built for and discarded after World War 2, abandoned and left to be swallowed up by Kisatchie National Forest, in middle-of-nowhere Louisiana.
Imagine it’s your first time going out there. You ride in a car packed with kids, leaving the lights of the regional, small-sized city for the dark stretches of farmland outside it. Farther you go, past small-town speed traps and a single blinking yellow light, until you get to the turn into the camp. There’s a big stone sign, left over from the camp’s glory days, but what was once a big, two-lane highway through the camp has had one side barricaded off. Into the camp you go, until, at the top of a small hill, your driver hangs a left onto a smaller road.
There’s thick forest on either side of you, and suddenly the car pulls off onto the road’s right shoulder. The others, Claiborne veterans, will point out the car windows at a concrete shell of the building. This is normal for Claiborne, you’ll soon learn—thick woods with sudden cement intrusions, old foundations, and the occasional building that still stands, randomly popping out of the woods.
But this is your first time facing one of these buildings. You’ll squint and be able to see it, door less entrance and long-broken out windows dark and gaping. Someone will hand you a flashlight.
This was initiation. You are to take the flashlight and, alone, walk through the dark to the door of the building. You are to shine it in, peer into the building, alone. It’s a short walk from the road to the building, but in the dark of the night, you know it will feel longer.
Once you get close enough to really see through the door of the building, you can tell why you only have to stand outside of it. The floor is unwalkable—sunken in, possibly flooded if it’s rained recently, and completely filled with illegally dumped garbage.
But it’s such a strange building! There’s the door you’re looking through, and a door in the back. But this small building is attached to a larger part of the building, a cement block with occasional, small, pipe-ish openings. From the inside of the accessible building, you can clearly tell that there is no entrance into the larger portion of the building from the part you’re looking in through.
Later—in daylight—the Claiborne veterans will bring you back and walk you around the building, show you that there is no door anywhere to getting inside of that part of the building, the lion’s share of it really. Jump forward through the years, and try to revisit the building in present day, you’ll find something more suspicious and sinister—but that’s for later though.
For now, you head back to the car. You’ve passed your initiation, and it’s time for your reward.
Up Next:
ii. rules
