Camp Claiborne attracted more than just partying or thrill-seeking teens. On my first trip out there, I was warned by the older kids about the more dangerous sorts who would also use these woods—criminals and cultists.
Of course, I didn’t believe it. I figured it was just old rumors. But I listened to the stories and suspended my disbelief, as much as I could, because it was more fun that way. Something important to realize is that, despite how isolated the camp was, how few times we actually encountered people out there, there was tons of evidence of other people having visited.
There were the large items illegally dumped—proof of criminal activity, I suppose—and there was graffiti all over what few hollowed out cement building shells were still standing. The minority of the graffiti was crude; what was far more common were threatening, demonic phrases and ghastly art.
I remember a ghoulish face in particular, giant eyes and spaghetti hair. I liked it. It added to the ambiance.
But graffiti artists and shopping cart dumpers weren’t the criminals I was warned about. One of the teens warned me that occasionally the area was used as a dumping ground for dead bodies. They said the bodies weren’t just dumped anywhere—no, there was a specific spot. The Grid.
The trail in the woods that would be the second stop after the initiation building wasn’t just a random path in trees. It went to a handful of buildings, and—regardless of which friend group I was out at Claiborne with—it was this little neighborhood of buildings that we would spend most of our time at.
The trail first wound around giant, cement cylinders. The first, and largest of the three, was probably a good eighty feet across. There was a hole in one side of it, so we could peek in. We never saw much through it, just murky water. The other two cylinders we assumed were much of the same, though they were smaller, at around fifty feet across, or 150 feet around.
But there was no way into those, no openings. One—maybe both, I can’t quite remember—had a small room attached to it, a tall, narrow cement box with old wood around what was once a door frame, and no way into the cylinder. Just a random room.
Past the cylinders, there were two other buildings. One was divided in thirds—the right and left most sides open, while the center was walled off.
The left side was the simplest—low ceiling, graffiti, but nothing too remarkable.
If you stepped in the right side, you’d be able to reach the middle through an opening in the wall.
That middle section had a strange lump of cement that looked vaguely like a chair—the devil’s throne, we’d call it.
Above that chair, there was a large hole in the ceiling. If you stepped on the chair and were careful to avoid the rusty, broken rebar sticking out of the ceiling, you could pull yourself up.
The second floor of the building had no roof. It was just four tall walls making sort of a cell. It was a fun place to hang out, and we’d joke about camping out there, but of course we never did it—though part of me still wants to, to this day, every time I return home to Louisiana for a visit.
But, essentially, there wasn’t much to do up there. Back down in that center room, there was one other feature—a large pipe through the far wall, the only exit on that side of the building.
It emptied into a large, cement thing that reminded us of a coliseum. It was roundish, and surrounded by a wall just tall enough for a teen boy in decent enough shape to jump up and climb up in a pinch, though shorter people would have to crawl through the pipe to access it from that side of the camp.
Eventually, through day time explorations we’d find that the wall had crumbled away on the far side, and that there was a long, narrow trail that you could use to slowly wind your way to that side.
Looking at such a large stretch of concrete, it reminded one group of the kind of large, abandoned parking lot where you could safely blast off fireworks—you know, if not for the whole being in the middle of a national forest thing. My other primary group, far more nerdish, nicknamed it The Battle Arena.
But beyond the Battle Arena and its building, there was another building—it was one of our favorite places to hang out, having walls and a roof and being easy to get into—and is the subject of other stories.
Past the backside of that building, there it was, finally. The true destination: The Grid.
It was sprawling, and massive—a large pit in the ground with a cement grid built into it.
It was wide enough to walk across, with the paths ranged from being a few feet wide, to small stretches where there were gaps in the cement, where the walkable edges were only a few inches wide.
From the traversable walkways, if you were to stumble, you would fall a considerable distance—at least six feet, maybe ten—to the unknown depths of dark water collected in the bottom of the grid.
There was an anecdote of a girl who accidentally dropped her car keys in the grid while out partying, and according to the story, the next day her mother had to come out with scuba gear and dive down in order to find the keys. Multiple teens swore they knew the mother and daughter in question, and that the story was true.
Later, in daylight, some friends and I tried to figure out how deep the water was by finding the longest downed tree branches that we could. We’d lay on our stomachs on the grid, stretching our arms down, stirring through the water with the long branches. We never were able to reach through the water to the bottom.
It was this large, convoluted, watery place that murderers would dump bodies, according to the urban legends.
At the time, I slotted the information away, classified as “possible, but likely just a story.”
I remember one day we went out there and managed to—quite carefully—walk our way across the grid all the way to the other side. It was nerve-wracking, especially on those narrow paths around the openings. Thankfully, none of us fell.
We’d barely all reached the far side when we started to hear noise in the woods beyond the grid. It was the sound of a human making their way through the brush. We yelled out a greeting.
Instead of a verbal response, the person in the woods started running in our direction.
We called out to them again, and again instead of a reply, they charged us. With the runner getting closer, bearing down on us, we had to act. We were forced into a snap decision.
Our clearest escape route, the one that wouldn’t leave us lost in the woods—and we had reason to believe our pursuer knew that part of the forest, a part new for us—our only way out was the grid.
Rather than the slow, cautious steps and hand-holding that got us safely across the first time, this time we burst into frantic sprints. We ran like our lives depended on it, knowing full and well that we were one bad step away from plunging into the water below.
We had no rope or ladder. If someone fell, we wouldn’t have been able to get them out.
And that’s taking for granted that our pursuer would even allow us to mount a rescue attempt.
But somehow, none of us fell. We all safely made the crossing. I have the faintest, most shadowy of recollections of looking back across the grid, and seeing a man on the other side, standing right at the edge.
He was too far for me to see him with detail, and we only paused for a moment before fleeing the camp itself. But in my memory, he stood there, watching us, body language held tense and hostile.
We never went all the way to the other side of the grid again. But that couldn’t dissuade us from returning to the camp itself.
One time, a group of us were sitting in our friend Anya’s bedroom, planning out our next Claiborne adventure, using code words and innuendo, when her mother’s friend happened to walk by her room and overhear just enough.
She whipped the door open and point blank asked us: “Are you talking about going out to Camp Claiborne?”
This woman was one of those meticulously put together society women, highly respectable and who had invested highly in said respectability. Of course she wouldn’t approve of partying, especially in the dirty woods—we thought.
But that wasn’t it at all. She told us we were to never, EVER go out there, that it was a dangerous place. She revealed that it had already been a known teen partying spot even back when she was a girl, and—though she was cagey about if she’d been one of the kids out there—told us a story from her youth.
One of the girls who went out there partying, she was followed back home by someone who was also out there. He followed the girl home, snuck into her house, and murdered her.
The polished, society woman who told us this story—her eyes were watering with tears as she told it, as she pled with us to never, ever, EVER go out to that place. That it was dangerous, that it attracted dangerous people decades ago, and still did decades later.
Unfortunately for her, we were dumb kids, and that story only added to Claiborne’s mystique.
That said, being followed by someone from Claiborne, someone you didn’t see until they were already in pursuit, was easy to believe because it was still happening.
My own older brother had an encounter during his early twenties, I want to say. He was just joyriding with a friend or two, not partying, just driving aimlessly around the camp hanging out, when he picked up a follower.
He was a bold, tactical kind of driver, and knew the web of remaining roads—both crumbling official roads, and informal dirt ones—well, and did his best to shake his pursuer.
But his evasive maneuvers weren’t successful, and he didn’t lose the aggressive car tailing his pick-up truck until he was already back to the outskirts of our small city.
Another story of Claiborne stalkers came from a beloved local character that we referred to as Crazy Fireworks Guy. He was a quirky, friendly man who ran a small fireworks stand, and was willing to sell to teens.
At one point, we were there buying roman candles and other small things to mess with in one of our backyards, when someone made a joke about getting a larger firework cake to take out to the Battle Arena in Camp Claiborne.
Crazy Fireworks Man’s friendly, laughing demeanor went instantly serious. Selling kids explosives was one thing, but Claiborne was too dangerous, he said. He told us a story.
Years ago, he and his now ex-wife were out there, driving around, exploring. They came across a group of people wearing black robes, and even he thought it was ridiculous that people were in the middle of the woods playing dress up like a stereotypical cult. His ex-wife was afraid, and he figured regardless of what they were doing, he didn’t want any part of it. They left, in a hurry.
A couple of days later, there was a knock at their door. It was a man, not dressed as a police officer or anything. Just a normal man. The man opened by telling them their license plate number, and then asking them what they were doing out in Camp Claiborne on such-and-such date, at such-and-such time.
Just exploring, they said. Just curious.
The man nodded, accepting their story. But he warned them. He told them not to come back. He didn’t threaten them, but he did address them by their full names when he told them his warning—names they hadn’t given him.
Although Crazy Fireworks Man was as far away from the Society Woman as you could get, socially, he had the same kind of warning: There were bad people at Claiborne, threatening people, and they were willing to follow you home.
But there was also the cultist element of his story—I loved the idea of backwoods Satanic cultists lurking in the dark, but I could only love it because I didn’t really believe it. It was just too far out-there, too cliché and yet also—backwoods Louisiana devil worshipers? That’s more of an LA-Los Angeles than an LA-Louisiana thing! People out here just aren’t like that. Dangerous country folks—sure, but more likely territorial hunter types, not cultists.
There was one of us who said she had seen the cultists out there, though. Aubrey said that she’d been exploring with a different friend—someone I didn’t know—and they found themselves perched, looking down at a group of people in black, flowy clothes. She said that they were dancing around a fire. She and her friend crept away, silent, and got out of there.
She swore they were cultists. I didn’t know what to believe. On one hand, I really struggled with the idea of cultists being real, and not just something from a movie or urban legend. But on the other hand, Aubrey wasn’t just smart, she was ridiculously smart, and cool, and not one to make up stories or tell lies.
She was a senior when I was a freshman, and I looked up to her a lot. I haven’t heard from her in many years, but the last time was when she was trying to decide between competing offers from various universities for her PhD in mathematics (yes, pure maths).
I set the cultist idea aside, and continued as normal. Then, the deer happened.
That primary trail we’d take, there was the “parking spot” where you could fit a car, maybe two max if you squeezed in. Then, across and down a yard or two, there was the trail head. One day—it was a daylight trip—we arrived at the trail to go exploring, and found there was something waiting for us at the trailhead.
It was a dead deer—pieces of one, at least, arranged around the eyeless head.
If there was a deeper meaning in the arrangement, I couldn’t even guess what it was. But even I could see that it wasn’t just sloppily tossed out by a hunter discarding what he didn’t want, or the leavings of another animal’s meal. It was clearly arranged.
And we were in the middle of Louisiana—though I was no hunter, it was pretty much impossible to have a friend group without at least one person who’d been hunting before. The hunters among us swore this was no field dressing, that it wasn’t how a hunter would butcher a kill.
Our consensus was that this was a warning, and it was a warning left for us. We were the ones always using this trail, after all. And we’d never seen anyone else near it, but us. Our version of Occam’s Razor said this was a warning from the cultists, to us, telling us this was their spot and we weren’t welcome. A threatening message.
And we thought this was…
hilarious.
As if these adults were going to tell us what to do! We’d never actually encountered them out there, so we assumed we were clear. We laughed about the dead deer warning, even as we carefully stepped around it on our way down the trail. Even after the arrangement got bigger, another deer head joining the collection of body parts.
At the time, we never questioned why no other animals or wildlife carried off any of these deer pieces from the arrangement.
After all, though we all said it was clearly the cultists’ doing, I suspect a lot of us didn’t really believe the cultists were real. At least, I knew I didn’t.
Then, one day I went out to Camp Claiborne with my friend Kevin, and one of his friends. He’d only brought his friend out to Claiborne a time or two before, so that night we were doing more exploring, both showing Kevin’s friend deeper parts of the camp, and trying to find new parts of it ourselves.
I don’t have the greatest sense of direction, never have, and still don’t. So I’m not exactly sure where in the camp we were, only that we were deep in the woods, well past all of my familiar areas. Kevin’s car was a very old Saab, made of real steel and so small we could even take it on the smoother four-wheeler trails. We took a turn off of one of those trails and found a road. Just off the road, there was a clearing—possibly one of those slab foundations where there was once a building, but who knows for sure.
The clearing was filled with people, all wearing dark, billowy fabric.
Kevin’s car, slowed as we stumbled on the scene, started creeping faster as we realized what we were seeing.
The people were all gathered around a large bonfire. Up in the trees surrounding the bonfire, there were these tiny little shelf platforms, maybe fifteen feet in the air? These platform shelves surrounding the bonfire, each one had a lit candle on it.
Suddenly, one of those figures tossed something into the center of the bonfire, and it flared up high.
At this point, Kevin gunned the engine and we fled.
What in the world was that? Who were they? What were they doing? Where were their cars? What did they toss in the fire? Why were there candles in trees? Seriously, why were there candles in trees?
We didn’t know. Not long after, in daylight, Kevin and I returned to try to find their clearing but, especially when you take the web of informal roads and four-wheeler paths into account, it was hard to navigate that deep in the camp. We never found that clearing again. But all three of us knew what we saw. We knew it was real, it really happened. They were really there.
Up Next:
iv. the unlikely and the impossible
