When I recount these stories to friends nowadays, there’s one question in particular that comes up again and again: “Why did you keep going back?”
Sometimes I try to answer it, but other times I dodge and instead laugh and mention that there were places in the camp that were too much, that we would refuse to go back to.
These were the places with “bad vibes.” To be honest, I found it frustrating. After all, I was deaf to vibes, energy, gut feelings, and the like. To me, we’d find a cool spot or building that I’d enjoy exploring, only for the rest of the entire group present to declare that we would never be returning to that spot again, that it was a bad place. I had to shrug, accept the will of the group, then hop over to a different clique to talk them into going there with me instead.
The Other Side of the Camp was a big one. So, when you take the main highway through the camp entrance, you’re on the left lanes of what used to be a divided highway. Not all that far into the camp, there’s a big intersection that goes across the other two lanes—ending the closed set of lanes actually—a road that heads to the right, into an entire part of the camp we only barely ever explored.
During one of my first trips out to that side, we discovered a building with an amazing optical illusion. It was a small building, and its foundation was higher than most—some of us needed help from each other to get up to it. There were two spots, two pipes, both going down, one outside the building (but still up on the foundation), and the other inside of it.
If two people looked down the holes at the same time, one of them would be able to see the other person’s face down their pipe, in some standing water. For the life of me, I can’t remember if the person on the inside could see the one on the outside or vice versa, but I thought it was the coolest thing ever.
So, I was shocked that no one else ever wanted to go back and play with that effect again. That part of the camp was bad, they told me. Really bad. Really wrong. They were baffled that I couldn’t feel it, that I wasn’t creeped out. That entire side of the camp was no-go. There was something out there—that was the consensus from the same kids who had no problem trotting back to the same spots one experience after the next.
Not all of the “bad” spots revealed themselves on the first trip, though. One place in particular started off as a spot for a fun game that we’d play to scare people who hadn’t been there before.
That main road through the camp was a little bit hilly, but very straight for roughly two miles. Then, the road suddenly veers off to the right.
Our game was to start picking up a little bit of speed, not much, just a little, as we reached the turn, but then—and in retrospect, this was a bad idea and no one should do it—the driver would pretend to be distracted and drive straight into the other lane instead of veering right. The passenger who was new to this part of the camp would panic and scream but, instead of correcting the car, the driver would continue straight, driving off the side of the road and down a slight hill.
Then, the passenger would realize that down the hill was one of those barely-a-road roads, and it continued off into the dense forest. The road had a name. Right near the front of the road, painted on it, it said “Bat Cave Road.”
We never found the Bat Cave. At one point, Crazy Fireworks Man offered to go out there with us to show us where it was, but a parent happened to overhear us discussing this plan and, well, yeah, it turns out that parents don’t approve of their teens going off into the forest alone with an adult man whose name they don’t know, and who the kids only refer to as Crazy Fireworks Man. Imagine that.
We only explored the road a little bit. Like the one near the Grid and our usual place, it was overgrown to the point it was barely wide enough for a car. We explored it a little bit by daylight, only finding a building that looked very similar to the initiation building. We found some building foundations, too, some of them with tiny support pillars for what would have once been a slightly elevated floor. From trying to match up the spots to old maps of the camp when it was operational, we decided that some of these spots might have once been churches. We’d decided that about similar foundations in other parts of the camp as well.
That all said, exploring this side of the camp was tricky. Things were farther spread, it seemed, and driving carried a major drawback. The brush and tree branches were so overgrown that there was nowhere you could turn a car around. Instead, you’d have to drive the entire length that you’d traveled, in reverse.
We jokingly called it The Claiborne Driving School of Backing Up. Occasionally, we’d attempt to explore down this way in hopes of finding the promised caves, but the cost was pretty high with how far we’d have to travel in reverse.
One day, a few of us were riding in Kevin’s car while we explored. Finding nothing, we started the going backwards routine. Now, this was long before backup cameras were standard, so we’d all turn around and crane our necks backwards to watch where we were going. I was sitting in the front passenger seat. At one point, I had a little bit of a crick in my neck, so I decided to take a moment to turn forwards to relieve it.
My head reached forwards just in time to see what seemed to be a large, gray, hunched over thing walk across the road ahead of us. Despite the hunched posture, it moved quickly and fluidly.
Of course, I shouted, but by then all that was left to see was the rustle in the bushes where it had disappeared. As we double-timed it backwards to get out of there, I described what I had seen.
We named it The Gray Monster, and my friends’ reports of vague creepy vibes in that part of the camp became more pronounced; they stopped wanting to explore there. The whole place seemed more threatening. We started calling it Gray Monster Road even.
Secretly, though, I didn’t actually believe me. I mean, I know what I saw, but I didn’t believe in my interpretation of what I saw, if that makes sense. I figured I saw something, but maybe it was some kind of elderly mutant black-bear, or even a four-wheeler rider translated by my wild imagination and lack of visual skills (I have an extraordinarily weak “mind’s eye” and have trouble picturing things). But it was still a fun story.
One night, with friends from a different clique, we were sharing Claiborne stories from times we hadn’t been together. I started to tell my Gray Monster story, when Aubrey immediately interrupted to describe the creature’s height, and to confirm where it was, and before I could mention anything else added in that it had a very strange gait. Aubrey had no friends in common with the group that I’d been with when I saw it; this was the first time she could possibly be hearing the story, and yet she had one of her own with nearly identical details.
The other friend who was there, Chris, was the friend who had introduced the two of us, the friend who had first introduced me to the camp itself. She added in that she’d seen it too. I figured Chris was just feeling left out. I mean, what are the odds that all three of us had had our own individual encounters with, well, with whatever that thing was?
But then Chris started perfectly demonstrating its unique, specific gait. Aubrey and I had said it had a weird gate, but we hadn’t described it—I lacked the ability to describe it, even—and yet without hesitation, Chris nailed it.
If there was some strange creature out there that I’d seen, Chris had to have seen it too.
We compared notes about specifically where we’d seen it, and Gray Monster Road expanded to Gray Monster Territory.
A couple of years later, I headed out there in the daytime with my friend Rosy. We parked just down the hill, at the beginning of the road, so that we could explore on foot.
Far down the road, there was a lump—you know how pine needles are green when they fall off of a tree, but then turn sort of coppery before sun-bleaching leeches all the color out of them? That’s what it looked like, a big pile of dead pine needles.
As we walked down the gentle hills of the road, sometimes the pile was visible, and sometimes not. When it became visible again, what was odd was that it didn’t seem to be getting bigger, it seemed to be staying roughly the same size.
Then, finally, we reached the last hill before we’d get to it. It went out of our view. When the spot came back into view, there was no lump. There was a scattering of dead pine needles, but no pile, definitely nothing that we could have seen from far off in the distance.
Whatever we’d been watching and walking towards, down Gray Monster Road, was gone.
That was enough for us. Constantly checking back over our shoulders, ears primed for any sudden noises, we quickly retreated to the car.
These strange things, things I know happened but am not able to explain—at least I know I wasn’t the only one there. I wasn’t the only witness. Other people, including people who have never met each other, can independently verify the stories.
This next story I hesitate to share because I was completely alone, and what happened made no sense.
One afternoon, I decided that I was going to go out to Claiborne to go for a jog. There was a trail, a multi-use trail, that I’d seen far past the place where the road veered right, but still down on the “bad vibes” right side of the camp. I wasn’t sure where the true trailhead was, but I knew one spot where I could park and get on the trail—it was marked by a sign on a tree and some spray paint.
I don’t know how long I was on that trail—long enough that the jog had deteriorated into a casual stroll—before I realized that what I was on wasn’t nearly as maintained as the stretch I’d started on, and that I hadn’t seen marked trees in quite a while. I was lost in the woods at Camp Claiborne.
I wandered around, exploring, trying to figure out where I was, how to get back. Finally, a stroke of luck! In the distance, I saw a sign on a tree, but I couldn’t read it. It looked like a white paper, laminated and stuck on a tree. I kept it in my sight as a goal, hoping that it would have some kind of information I could use to get unlost.
Close enough that I could make out text on the sign, though not close enough to make out what the text said, I looked down just in time to avoid a danger in my path.
Spread out perfectly straight across the trail was a venomous coral snake, with a textbook red-yellow-black stripe pattern, bright and clear.
I startled backwards, and looked around to make sure there weren’t any other snakes around. There was just the one stretched across the path.
Sure, the snake had neurotoxic venom, but I had to know what the sign said. So, keeping an eye on the snake, I carefully walked off of the trail on the side of its tail, weaving through the trees to give it a large, nonthreatening berth, and then back on the trail. Once I was back on the trail, a good six to ten feet beyond the stone-still snake, I turned to look at my goal, the tree with the sign.
The tree was still there. The sign was not. There was nothing on the tree at all. I turned back around on impulse. The path was clear. The snake was gone. There was no rustle, no movement on the side of the trail. Both sign and snake were gone.
Not knowing what else to do, I kept walking on and on. Eventually—I don’t remember how much time had passed—I started coming across occasional building foundations in the woods. The building type we nicknamed churches, with the short pillars that once held up a floor. It looked familiar, but I’d previously come across that type of building in a few different places in the camp.
The farther I went, though, the more familiar everything started to look. Finally, I reached an overgrown road and a building nearly identical to the initiation building, and I could no longer deny that I was on Bat Cave Road, on Gray Monster Road.
But I couldn’t be. I’d only walked through the woods. It was impossible for me to have gotten from the right side of the highway to the left.
I followed what looked like the road, all the way to the hill at the start of it, to the painted “Bat Cave Road” message. I walked along the highway. Then, when I spotted my car, I walked across the highway to get to it.
I still don’t know how I ended up on the other side of a highway, with no recollection of ever crossing any road. Just like I don’t know what was up with the sign, or the snake. I just don’t know.
Up Next:
vii. animal instincts
