The Ghost at the Camp

A town over from where I grew up (and from where I live now), there's an old cemetery down a dirt road and at the end of that road is an abandoned sleep away/day camp. When I was in high school, we went down to that road at night and totally freaked ourselves out with stories of the Green Lady in the cemetery and the supposed mass murder that happened at the camp however many years ago (which was the reason why it was closed, of course). There was a rumor that the ghosts moved around the supposed killer's rusty truck that was still there so when you went there, it was in a different place every time you saw it.

Of course, this makes for excellent story-telling and a pulse-pumping Friday night. But the murder story wasn't true, I found out years later. Green Lady, well, that's a different story. But the camp, when I went there during the day to take pictures, I still thought it was all true, as a 16 year old is wont to do.

My dad gave me a new 35 millimeter camera for Christmas so me, him and my best friend went out there because I wanted to take some pictures. During the day. It was still illegal to drive down that road but the police don't really take notice of anything like that during the day. They just care about the punks at night. It is a private road, after all.

So I took some pictures of the graveyard (with its nubs for stones and single standing gravestone that's said to be the Green Lady's and she takes care of it) and the creepy, rundown camp at the end of the street and developed the film. Nothing special, really, except for one photo with this white flash in a window of one of the bunk houses. I couldn't tell what it was and it was on the negative as well but I didn't think twice about it for about a year.

Until I took a photography class the following year. That picture kept nagging me so I decided to blow it up and find out what was in the frame. I blew it up and blew it up and blew it up . . . and freaked the fuck out.

This wasn't an orb. It was a person. A pure white woman (not as in skin tone but instead of a black silhouette, it was white) and it was obvious by the way she was standing she was in a corseted bustle dress. She was standing in the window of the bunk house. There was nothing in that window when I took the picture and I took multiple pictures of that same bunk house. Just that one frame was affected. And in hindsight with multiple years of photo and negative processing behind me, there's no way anything could have happened to those negatives in the developing stage that would coincidentally affect that single photo frame and create the shape of a woman without doing anything else to any of the other frames. Not even close.

I often dream of people from older times without faces and this white silhouette reminded me of those dreams. I wish I still had my test strips but they, along with the drawer I had them stuck in, suffered water damage when my basement flooded two and a half years ago. Needless to say, I was pissed. I think I just ended up throwing it out because the water ruined the image. I was pissed.

So while no mass murder ever happened at that camp, I'm convinced something happened on those grounds many years before. Why else would this woman be walking around in a bunk house wearing a bustle dress? The connection isn't there but I'm sure if I did my research a little better, I could find something with that land. So no mass orbs this time. Just a full on figure. It still gives me tinglies.