Why exactly was Camp Claiborne so wretched, and when did it start getting this way? For answers, let’s look to the history of the place.
It’s hard to find detailed accounts of the land’s older history beyond what we can infer from archeology. To summarize what little I found, what’s now Central Louisiana was traded time and time again, territory changing hands between various indigenous nations. This is especially true of the 1700s and 1800s, after wars and forced migrations.
Jump forwards to the early 1900s, when those beautiful forests were being hacked down for lumber up until the late 20s, when the lumber mills closed and companies packed up, leaving cities of stumps behind.
In the late 20s and 30s, the federal government bought up the land, and the reforestation efforts resulted in the only national forest in Louisiana.
So, that’s the land. But what about the military base itself?
Before the United States entered World War II, we were already training and doing practice war games in preparation for the inevitable. This was called the Louisiana Maneuvers, and Claiborne was one of the major spots for it. Near the end of the war, we even held German prisoners of war at the camp.
Stories I’ve heard and come across say these German POWs were treated better than our own Black American soldiers. For example, after a racist attack on Black troops in the nearby city of Alexandria known as—depending who you ask—either the Lee Street Riot or Lee Street Massacre, German POWs could get passes to go into town while the Black soldiers were confined to the base in the woods. Is it any wonder that Claiborne hosted race riots and at least one race mutiny?
World War II era racial violence at and around Camp Claiborne is a research topic all on its own! If you’re interested, check out Claire DeLucca’s University of New Orleans masters thesis, “Both Sides of the Barbed Wire: Lives of German Prisoners of War and African Americans,” and Lamar White Jr.’s article from The Bayou Brief, “The Beginning of Hell,” for starting points.
So, in its active days, Camp Claiborne was a place of injustice, oppression, and violence.
For the next part of this story, I’m relying on old memories of what many, many people told me.
As a major training camp, massive amounts of troops traveled through Claiborne. How do you efficiently move such a large amount of manpower? Railroads.
There was a not-so-small problem, though. To plan out and build the railroad, the military sent some finely qualified engineers. Yankee engineers. Yankee engineers who had no idea that the swampy Louisiana land was a different beast than what they were used to.
It’s well-documented how disastrous this ended up being—train tracks sinking underground, swallowed up by wet earth, causing derailments. I was told that these dangerous derailments were so regular that at one point, train conductors were being cross-trained as chaplains.
As if that’s not enough, the stories say that the troops painted the train silver and gray, and that when it ran through the trees in the moonlight it looked downright ghostly.
By the time I was in high school, local legend had it that enough people died that the train had become a ghost train for real, that a spectral echo of it still ran on some nights through the camp. We wanted to see it, of course. I remember one summer we searched the camp day after day, hoping to find any sign where tracks once were. But all of the tracks had long sunk below the surface.
We looked for the ghost train, but we never found it. Enough people have claimed to have seen it, though, that I like to imagine a silvery train still runs through the camp on quiet, dark nights.
Aside from train disasters, the railroad wasn’t the only place Yankee planners grappled against the wilds of Louisiana and lost. In fact, our favorite building to hang out at bore the marks of northern arrogance: those crazy Yankees tried to put in a real basement in central Louisiana.
For those of you unfamiliar with the Deep South, there’s a reason you won’t find basements here. We have such high water tables that basements here would flood so much you’d risk your house floating away.
So, our favorite hangout spot, next to the Grid, giant cylinders, and Battle Arena of the previous stories, was a building we called The Tavern (the “we” in question being the same nerdy clique that named the Battle Arena, not the party crowd). It was a concrete box with a few random twists to smaller, not-quite-enclosed spaces, and had the customary creepy Claiborne graffiti all over it.
The building was one of the most intact that Claiborne had to offer—not that this is saying much. There are random holes in the floor, from pipe-sized to bigger ones, missing chunks of concrete with rusted rebar poking out.
There’s also the big opening where the stairs to the basement are.
The stairs wrap around the corner, descending down and turning alongside the junction of the foundation walls, with a landing half-way down.
On a regular dry day, when it’s been a while since the last rain, the water still almost reaches that landing. It’s stagnant, standing water, year-round, in the face of any droughts.
Every single time I went in that building, one of the first things I did was rush over to that staircase to see how far down I could make it this time. If the water was recessed, I’d try to make out more detail of the basement, see if the dark waters were willing to give up any secrets as a reward for my persistence. This never actually paid off, but it became my little ritual, a little game.
The first floor, so long as you watched your step, was our favorite place to hang out, day or night.
So, that’s the place and its history–but this wouldn’t be my Camp Claiborne if it didn’t involve modern spookiness.
The creepiest thing I ever experienced there happened during the day.
A small group of us nerds, the ones who wanted to use the camp as the setting for our own LARP, all went out one day. I want to say there were probably only five or six of us in all, and we brought out implements to help fix up the certain spots of the camp so that it would better fit our ambitions.
Once we reached the tavern, we split up.
The larger group took branch cutters and wilderness machetes or hatchets, and the like. Their goal was to clear out the barely accessible far-end of a trail that would eventually wrap from our main base around the far side of the Battle Arena, and all the way out to the road.
I was with one other person. We only had two brooms, so it was just two of us who had the chore of cleaning up the tavern itself.
So, the trail party set out, and we got to sweeping. It was tedious, because there was just so much dirt, decades of dirt crusted all over that floor, soot from old camp fires, occasional litter, leaves that had blown in, and all sorts of natural debris.
What made it tolerable was that we didn’t have to sweep stuff very far—there were enough random holes in the floor that all we had to do was push our broom over to one. I had fun making all the little splashes of twigs and rocks hitting the water far below.
We chatted as we worked, especially giving a heads up on when we were going to be pushing in any larger chunks of branches or broken off concrete chunks, anything that would make a larger splash. We were finding our entertainment where we could!
Suddenly, my friend was frantically signaling for me to stop sweeping. I pushed in what I was already in progress of pushing, and then paused. He first held a finger over his lips—the universal Shh! sign—and then pointed down to the floor, leaning his head down to tell me to listen.
The little splashes of my dirt pile hit the water, as expected, but the noise kept going. It was the wrong noise.
Water has a rhythm to it, you know. In Louisiana, where we had every body of water imaginable, flooding from tropical storms, and grew up in swimming pools and lakes, we were very well accustomed to how water sounds.
The plunk of something falling into water and sending out ripples in a circle away from it is very different from the sloshing sound of something wading through water, going in one direction.
What my friend had recognized first, and what I was now hearing, was a clear sound made clearer by the slight echo that the basement had: the sound that it makes when an adult wades through waist deep water.
I stood there, baffled—the first thing I did in the Tavern that day, before we separated our groups, was pop over to the basement to take a peek. It had been empty, still, stagnant as always. But now, we could clearly hear that something big was methodically moving through the water, and it was moving towards those stairs.
We both tossed down our brooms and took off running, past the cylinders, on the trail back to the road. When we reached the road, we realized that the other group wasn’t planning on making it all the way to the road on this day—since their task was considerably bigger than ours—that they were going to eventually turn back and head to the tavern to rejoin us. We couldn’t let that happen.
Nowadays, we would have probably been able to call someone’s cell phone. But back then, the signal out there was weak and unreliable. It was the middle of a national forest, after all.
We decided to start down the far side of the Battle Arena trail, the part at the road a little down from our normal trailhead. At spots that were clear enough, we jogged, but for the most part we had to just keep pushing our way through branches and vines with sharp stickers and thorny bushes and all sorts of overgrown vegetation.
Our only saving grace was that our goal was to move as quickly as we could, while the other group was concentrating on widening and neatening the trail, so eventually we were able to get in shouting distance of them, and then visual distance. And so, we were able to flag them down, despite us being nowhere near where they had expected us to be.
We told them what had happened, what we had both heard. That we’d marched all the way through the worst of the trail to get to them was proof enough for them of our seriousness, that it was time to abandon our efforts—and our dollar store brooms—for the day.
Later, I would retell this story to a few people from the first clique, the one that had introduced me to Claiborne. One person, Aubrey, spoke up that she’d had a similar experience there.
One night, she’d been there with another friend and they started hearing something moving below them. She started down the stairs just in time to see, bone white pale and stark in the darkness, a hand starting to come up out of the dark water. She and her friend ran.
Resources Mentioned:
DeLucca, Claire. “Both Sides of the Barbed Wire: Lives of German Prisoners of War and African Americans,” https://scholarworks.uno.edu/
Kisatchie Heritage Project, https://www.fs.usda.gov/
White, Lamar Jr. “The Beginning of Hell,” https://www.bayoubrief.com/
And for actual, legit history of the base itself (no paranormal, just facts), you can’t beat Ken Kopacki’s extraordinary CampClaiborne.com
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vi. the places we won’t go
