If the knowledge that I actually went out to adventure in Camp Claiborne on a Halloween night doesn’t make you question my sanity, then the story of what happened might. It’s a story that I don’t really like telling for that reason. If there hadn’t been another witness there…well, then I wouldn’t know what to think.
I was a freshman when my friend Chris was a senior. The next year, Chris went off to college, where her roommate was Julie. Julie came home with Chris to visit, meet everyone, and I became friends with her. Fast forward a couple of years—Chris had transferred to a different college, and Julie would still sporadically make the drive to visit us in our town, especially in the summer when everyone was around.
Julie had been out to Claiborne a couple of times, of course, but the two of us got it in our heads—I can’t remember which of us proposed it—that the best way to really have fun at Claiborne would be if just the two of us went out there on Halloween night.
We planned it weeks and weeks in advance. On one hand, creepy things on Halloween night is kind of a cliché, so I thought we had some degree of protection from anything too serious happening. But on the other, Halloween night! Best night of the year for horror lovers of all stripes! And what better place to go than our local urban legend?
So, during the weeks leading up to it, both of us really hyped each other up. Because I had two teen brothers close to me in age, my mom even got us a room for the night at the local La Quinta, so that we wouldn’t be bothered by them. It was going to be awesome.
I woke up that Halloween morning and the very first thought I had was: Don’t go to Camp Claiborne tonight.
How baffling! Why would I not want to go to one of my favorite places, when this had been planned special for so long? I dismissed the thoughts as best I could, but the longer the day went on, the stronger the bad feeling got. Don’t go to Camp Claiborne. Don’t go. Such a bad feeling about it.
But by the time these thoughts got too intrusive, Julie was already over an hour deep into her drive to my city. I wasn’t going to let my cool, older friend drive all the way to visit me only for me to cancel the main event! No way, no matter how bad the powerful gut feeling got—an alien kind of feeling, as my survival instincts are bad enough to be a running joke among those who know me. I don’t get bad feelings, or sense danger. At least, I didn’t until that Halloween night.
Julie and I met up at the motel to check into our room early—standard issue La Quinta. We didn’t even bring in our overnight bags from our cars, so consumed with mutual silliness and excitement were we.
As a safety-first aside: when we left our room, I was last out the door. I always like to be, to shake the door handle and make sure it really is latched. It’s a good practice. In my opinion, you shouldn’t leave a hotel room without confirming it is good and truly locked. Just a pro-tip.
Anyway, when we left we took my car, since Julie had already driven so long, and since it was my home turf. We goofed around during the early evening hours, me trying to squish down that powerful, forbidding feeling that kept seeping through my holiday-festive thoughts. We passed out candy at my parents’ house, went for a walk to see more costumes out in force.
Finally, the night got later, and darker. The stream of trick or treaters turned into a trickle, then dried up entirely. There was no more waiting. It was late. It was time.
We got into my car, and I started driving us to Camp Claiborne.
The closer we got to the camp, the more powerful my bad feelings about it got.
I stopped being baffled, and started to get angry. This was irrational, illogical, and uncool of me. Despite my love for poking at supernatural or dangerous things, I liked to pretend I was a creature of pure logic and reason, especially back then.
More than that, I was not going to chicken out and ruin this for my friend. No matter how many alarms were screaming in my head, the closer I got to the camp on that dark, lonely highway.
Do you know that moment in horror movies, when the music goes from really soft to a loud, frantic strings kind of music cue? The music of wrongness? And do you know the way it makes the back of your neck feel, what the startle of it does to your heart rate?
As I turned right off of the highway and into the camp, there was no music, but there’s no better way I have of describing the physical sensations I felt. It came on all at once, as soon as we crossed the threshold of that camp.
As a reminder, here was what the layout of the camp entrance is. The two lanes on the left side of the divided highway were the ones in use. There were regular little junctions across the median to the right lanes, which were barricaded off at the entrance and which terminated in the larger intersection where, off to the right, was the side of the camp my friends didn’t want to go back to more than once. The side of the camp that my friends said was bad, was wrong.
As I drove down the initial stretch into the camp, the bad feeling grew so intense that my eyes started to water. Worse, though, was the images I started seeing in my mind.
Gut feelings and picking up on bad vibes weren’t the only sensory areas I was deficient in—I frequently joke that I have no mind’s eye. It’s an overstatement, but not by much. I don’t have a very visual imagination; I have trouble picturing things. I’m not a visual person at all. I don’t think in pictures. I have to make a real effort, really try to imagine how something looks.
It felt like my underdeveloped mind’s eye was under assault. I could see the images not like they were physically present, but like I was imagining them against my will.
There was a pile of bones. It wasn’t a random pile; it was organized into a specific pattern around a center point.
And there was a face. The face was awful. It was too long, too bony, with skin that looked like it was stretching too tightly over it. The eyes were enormous, and solid black. The grin was wide and deep. There was a gash, some kind of a wound, below one of its eyes.
My headlights on the empty road ahead of us. The bones. The forest, looming over the sides of the road. The face. That malicious face.
It was illogical, unreasonable, and irrational, but it was too much for me. I gave up. I started to slow at the little junction to my right so that I could use it to make a U-turn.
The moment my car started to slow for it, I panicked. It was the most threatening sensation I have ever felt, to this day. It felt like I knew that, if I slowed down as much as it would take to safely turn, something would get us and we would die. I sped up without turning, and tried again at the next junction, where it happened again. I just couldn’t slow down enough, it was too dangerous.
I braced myself more for the next junction, and slowed down despite my hands shaking on the steering wheel, despite thousands of years of evolution ringing alarm bells that there was a predator somewhere in the dark night, waiting to leap.
I just barely was able to slow enough, to get my car turned around.
And then, we were back on that central road in the camp, heading back to the highway. Getting back to the main highway was a lot faster, what without the slowdowns followed by panicked speed ups at failed attempts to turn.
I didn’t know how I was going to explain this to my friend. After all, from her perspective she drove hours to visit me for this Claiborne Halloween adventure, only for me to—in total silence from the both of us—drive barely into the camp, not even to the regular first left turn we’d take, before turning around and taking us straight out of the camp without a word.
I make my left turn back onto the highway, trying to figure out how I could possibly explain myself, but Julie spoke first.
“Thank God,” she said. “I was terrified that you weren’t going to turn around.”
And then she went on to start describing visions she’d been having of the woods, visions of bones, piled in a specific arrangement. I wouldn’t have been able to articulate the details like she could; it was unmistakable, though. She was describing the image that was in my imagination, in my mind’s eye.
The closer we got back to town, the lighter we began to feel. The gigglier we got. We’d had our Halloween scare, and we’d survived. At the motel parking lot, I grabbed my backpack from my trunk while Julie grabbed the overnight bag from hers.
As we walked down the long hallway to go to our room, I was still feeling kind of high on feeling vibes, gut feelings, and the like. It was a typical motel hallway, long and straight with little shallow, symmetrical alcoves off to the sides where the room doors were. Looking down the hallway, I spotted one little dip in the hall in particular, and the thought clearly crossed my mind: “I feel sorry for the poor suckers stuck in that room tonight!”
It was just a bad feeling, a bad energy, at that spot.
We walked past the rooms that weren’t ours. The closer we got to that set of doors, the closer we got to our room number.
Yep. We were the poor suckers stuck there tonight.
I approached the door slowly, cautiously. I reached for the handle, then stopped, and motioned for Julie to stop also.
Our door was ajar. It was very slightly, almost imperceptibly, but it was definitely unlocked. I had personally pulled and yanked on the handle before we left. It had been locked when we left. But now, it was open.
We power-walked back down the hall to the front desk, and told the man working there that our room door was open.
He tried to brush us off. “Sometimes the doors stick. You must not have closed it all the way.”
But we had. Julie had to pressure him to get him to do anything, and so he finally walked down the hall with us. He pushed open the door to our room, barely stepped in, declared nothing was amiss and no one had been in, and then hauled it back to his post like he couldn’t get away from the room fast enough.
Nowadays, I would have demanded a new room. But back then, I wasn’t even a legal adult yet. I didn’t know to advocate for myself. I thought there was nothing else to be done. I pushed open the door and did a full sweep of the room. I looked under the beds, in the closet, behind the curtains and in the shower. There wasn’t a sign of anything out of place.
We locked the door, dead bolted it, and propped the room’s chair under the door handle. And we did the best we could to talk about other things, safer things, and to sleep.
The next day, we drove back out to the camp—I wasn’t going to let Julie drive so far to only spend all of five minutes in the camp. In the light of day, there were two interesting things I noted.
Firstly, the air felt strange in the spot where I turned the car around that night. It felt heavy, thicker, staticy.
Second, the next turning spot after the one I managed to turn at, it wasn’t one of the little junctions. It was the big intersection. I knew then and still know, without a doubt, that had I panicked one more time, had I driven down the road just a little more, had I tried to turn around at the bigger intersection and that primal panic hit, I wouldn’t have been able to slow down enough to turn. I would have started right into the turn, but then panicked and gassed it, heading straight into the bad side of the camp.
And I don’t know what would have happened then. It felt like a trap that we had only just so narrowly avoided.
Of all of my Claiborne experiences, this is the one that troubles me the most. I’m just glad there was a witness, someone who felt and saw the same things I did, who confirmed the details before I could say a word.
Thank you for spending some Halloween time with me. Come back tomorrow to hear about the state of Camp Claiborne in the present-day.
Up Next:
ix. claiborne of today
