One of my favorite Claiborne stories is one that makes me question why anyone would ever go out there with me again, especially the witnesses present for this one.
You see, in deciding which stories to pull together for this, I’ve made a conscious decision to privilege things that happened to us in groups, so that there are other witnesses, people who could debunk strange things on the spot, or confirm that we really saw what we thought we did. For that reason, I’m including very few stories where I was the only witness.
In this first story, we had a big enough group that I was driving us in my family’s van. We headed out to Claiborne during the late afternoon, and we went to our usual trail spot. My van filled the parking spot across from the trail up, so it was a good thing we all fit in it.
We walked the trails and looked at the buildings, most likely talking about our plans to clean up the building that was in best shape to use as a clubhouse, to clean up the trails that went deeper in the woods, our agenda of using the area as a setting for a LARP (for those of you less nerdy than this clique was, that stands for Live Action Role Play).
When the sun started going down, someone spoke up that it was time for us to head off. It was getting dark, and older cellphones weren’t nearly as powerful of a light source as the ones we have nowadays—as we’d only planned on a daylight exploration trip, we didn’t have our flashlights on us. The terrain wasn’t safe to walk on blind, especially because it was Louisiana, and there could have been venomous snakes in the dark.
By the time we got out of the woods and back into my van, it was full dark. I reversed out of the parking spot and, off in the distance down the road, a pair of headlights appeared behind us.
It was the first, and only, time we ever saw another vehicle on that road at the same time as us.
I shifted from reverse to drive and started to pull forwards. The van suddenly died.
Behind us, the headlights came closer.
I started turning the keys, and nothing—no ignition, no click, no power, no engine. Nothing. It was just like in a horror movie, when the car won’t start. I vocalized that thought, and it was not well-received.
“Stop messing around!” “Quit the joke!” “It’s not funny!”
My passengers assumed I was pranking them, but were also way more worked up than they should have been over being approached by a car.
But as my van continued to refuse to start, their panic became contagious. Part of it was that I didn’t want to inconvenience strangers by blocking the road they needed. The other part was that, while they weren’t traveling especially quickly, they weren’t slowing down as they got closer to us. Not at all.
Closer and closer they came, when finally—
I turned the key once again, and this time it caught! The van turned on! We lurched forwards.
Behind us, there were no more headlights. My friends all looked out the van’s back windows, and said there was no car there. By the headlights and their speed, they should have been nearly to us, but there was no car there.
And this road was barely deserving of being called a road. The overgrown tree branches on either side would touch the side of your car if you weren’t driving perfectly centered. The only place to pull off on the half of the road we were on was the barricaded off old road parking spot that we’d reversed out of—meaning that there was no way the car behind us could have circled us to get to it, the only pull off spot behind us.
They were simply gone.
We left the camp, none of us able to explain what we all had seen. My parents’ van was a late-year model, well-maintained, and it never died like that ever again as long as we owned it.
Another unexplainable happening that stuck with me and kicked off a reputation for a spot happened when I was alone.
I fought with my parents and siblings a lot, so my favorite part about getting old enough to drive was that finally I was able to leave. When I got angry enough, I’d grab a fantasy novel and car keys, and storm out. Needing somewhere to cool off, especially if none of my friends were around, I took to driving to Camp Claiborne and parking to escape through reading.
I’d go to a spot I called The Parking Lot. It was one of those cement slab things, and it was just down the road a little bit from the initiation building. It was a driveway to a paved rectangle, the left half of it a downwards incline. I’d pull straight onto the level half of it to sit and read, and once I’d calmed down, I’d use the hill part to turn around so I could leave.
One day, it was a sunny, early summer (which is late May, in Louisiana, or at least it was back in my day) weekday, at around two in the afternoon. So, when I stormed off in a huff, I drove my mother’s convertible. (I was regularly allowed to take it, so it’s not like I was being truly rebellious. It was just another hand-me-down car that I drove.)
I pulled into the spot, like normal, turned off the engine and pulled out my book, reading to the soothing sounds of an older engine that’s just been shut off.
I didn’t get very far in my book when I started hearing something, faint and just barely audible, from outside the car. I dog-earned my paperback and put it on the passenger seat so I could try to hear whatever it was.
Closer the noise came. My directional hearing—that is, the ability to tell from which direction a sound is coming—has never been strong, but even I could tell that the noise was getting closer, and that it seemed to be coming from all directions. Closer and closer, becoming clearer and clearer. Whispers.
The closer it got, the more distinct the “voices” whispering became. The majority of them higher pitched, younger, like children. I strained my ears to try to hear what they were saying, what they were whispering about, but they were all talking over each other so I couldn’t make out a single word, even though they were closer and closer and louder and—
I snapped out of it and realized that I was in a convertible, listening to whispers that were right outside my car door, while there was nothing there. I was on an empty slab, in the open, and there was no one, nothing there. I was completely alone.
The whispering didn’t care. It just kept whispering.
My common sense finally snapped in, and I frantically turned on the car and fled.
Initially, I didn’t plan on telling anyone about what had happened. Being the only witness, I felt crazy and had trouble believing myself on what had happened. I didn’t think I’d be believed—again, since there was no confirming witness.
But on regular jaunts out to Claiborne, I would no longer ask to stop by “my” spot, and if I was driving wouldn’t stop there as usual. My friends asked why, and I eventually caved and told them, stressing that it happened in the middle of the day.
They believed me enough to start paying extra attention to that spot, going there even when I wasn’t with them. They’d report back small odd things happening—movement in the trees, maybe-I-heard-something kind of things that were pretty easy to dismiss.
But they’d also report back about bad vibes there, about feeling like something was watching them. Bad sensations, bad juju.
To be honest, I was a little envious of them. Like my directional hearing and mind’s eye, my danger-senses were also defective at birth. I never felt any vibes or creepiness or energies or what-have-you, at that spot or in any of the other active spots around the camp. (One guy in particular, Shane, practically made a catch phrase out of “Can you feel the evil?” Sadly, I could not.)
For the most part, though, the happenings in that spot remained sporadic and not terribly bad for a long while.
Then, one day I was out with a different friend, Rosy. We took a day trip out there and she was snapping pictures of various things with her phone. Nothing terribly exciting was happening, we were just chatting and taking pictures. The sun started going down, but there was still plenty of light. The last place we stopped was the parking spot.
She snapped a few pictures of the empty “parking lot.” Then we looked at her phone screen.
The image on her phone wasn’t so empty. There was a face, watching us from the trees. I looked up at the tree, right where it was. Nothing was there.
Worse, though, from a crack in the pavement, the picture showed silvery tendrils of a plant-like something, coming out of the ground. But they had a misty, ephemeral quality to them in the picture, like they weren’t quite solid. Distinct and clear, yes, but not solid.
With our naked eyes, though, not a single weed grew from that crack.
Freaked out, we jumped back into Rosy’s car and flew down the road, off onto the main Claiborne highway, and then made our left onto the “real” highway back to safety.
The moment we crossed over past the southbound lane and into the northbound, wham, the ENTIRE windshield of Rosy’s car fogged completely over. You know how when your window fogs up, usually it starts at the bottom or top and sort of crawls across, giving you time to adjust your defroster settings? This was INSTANT. Perfectly clear to completely covered.
Rosy had to pull off the road, completely blind, and we both wiped the inside of the window with our hands, sleeves, anything we had to pull off the foggy, misty moisture.
After taking a breather—it’s genuinely scary to pull onto a highway and then suddenly be completely blind, we continued on to the pizza place we planned on for dinner. As we ate, we studied that picture on her phone. Just as clear, just as distinct, just as unexplainable.
Then, we separated for the night, her promising to email me the picture when she got home (because I wanted to look at it on my computer, not my phone). Once she arrived home, though, the picture was completely gone. Her other photos from our adventure were on her phone, but that last one was missing. She was never able to recover it.
That wasn’t my only experience with photographic anomalies at Camp Claiborne. A couple of years before that outing, I had another Claiborne trip that started the same way—a daytime visit to take pictures, where nothing creepy seemed to be happening.
I was taking pictures on a digital camera and, in the bright daylight, I couldn’t really see any details on its tiny screen. I took pictures randomly, trying to capture all of the buildings. My goal was getting pictures to show to online friends who lived too far away to visit it, and who wanted to see what the place from my stories looked like.
So, I also took photos of the small building attached to one of the giant cylinders, just a small box of a room. I didn’t actually step in, because there was decaying leaf debris on the floor, and I was paranoid about stepping on a camouflaged snake. The room was really dark—the only light source being the doorway I was standing at, and the sun was far overhead. I snapped my pictures, with flash, and moved on to take photos of more interesting things.
It was when I was safe at home, my camera plugged into my computer, that I realized something was wrong.
All of my photos of various buildings and spots were perfectly normal, just as expected, nothing creepy or wrong, except for one—the one of that small, empty room.
In the photo, there was an electric lantern style light hanging off one wall. There was no light in that room—there was nothing that anyone could have hung a light on. There was nothing reflective on that wall. But it was very clear in the photo.
What was worse was on the other wall, though. That wall had a pipe that went into its cylinder, high on the wall. Just a boring old empty pipe. I made sure to frame the photo to catch it, since it was the only thing in an otherwise plain cement room, but it was just an empty old pipe.
In the photograph, though, the pipe wasn’t empty. In the photograph, clearly visible, a rounded, red, shiny, gelatinous blob, like a balloon overstuffed with pudding, was squeezing its way, either emerging from or disappearing into that pipe, barely fitting.
To this day, I can think of nothing that could have looked like that, no optical illusion that could have been misinterpreted by the camera, nothing it could have been, no explanation. There was nothing there when I took the photo—if there had been, I would have noticed and drawn the others to see it. In fact, my friends did glance in the building before I took the picture, as we all sort of poked around everywhere, each time. No one saw it. It wasn’t there.
But everyone who has seen the photo agrees that there it is, clear as day.
That photo likely still exists, somewhere—be it belonging to people I sent it to, once upon a time, and if my old hard drive is still viable, it will still be there. Maybe the next time I visit home, I’ll try to dig up that old computer, see what I can find. Maybe my brother knows what happened to it.
Up Next:
v. a history lesson; let that sink in
