This summer I was a camp counselor and now I wish I hadn't been.

Being young, bold, and trying to step out of my comfort zone, I decided to accept a job at a summer camp in Hawaii. I spent three months out there and I have to say, being born and raised in a landlocked state like Colorado, it was quite a shock integrating into a habitat that was the polar opposite of what I’ve been accustomed to my entire life. I just got back a couple days ago. It was a fantastic and life changing experience, but it’s good to be home. One reason being that I have technology again. This camp was in the middle of absolute nowhere, an infernal black hole that sucked all reception and Wi-Fi and decimated it into oblivion. This is relevant because I had some… odd occurrences that I wanted to share with the public in order to get explanations and hopefully some closure, but I had no means to do so until now. If you all enjoy this recollection (at the expense of my sanity of course) then I can share more of the eerie mishaps that I ran into this summer.

For now, I’ll start with the trust exercise.

Have you ever been by yourself, closed your eyes, and swore that you weren’t alone? This is a sensation that I have grown to abhor.

It was the first week here at camp and I was nervous as hell. I was eager to start this new adventure up until the very first moment I was in Hawaii. The second I stepped off the plane, I saw a cockroach fly onto a man’s face, so it was easy to say from that point on I was a little apprehensive. The friends I made alleviated my fear of the uncharted territory very quickly. We were a ragtag bunch from all over the states (some from other countries as well) and I’m not sure if it was due to our chemistry or the looming fact that we would see each other every single day for the next couple months, but we all got along almost instantaneously.
The camp facilities were all built in a clearing of dirt and dead grass, dry and inhospitable for bare feet. There were six or seven weathered buildings that littered around the area in an unorganized fashion, with the dining hall being at the hub of it all and the cabin quarters scattered around the outskirts. The only redeeming quality of this area was that it was built on the beach, so I was always less than a minute away from the ocean. At first glance, it seemed like the camp was in a perfect area, but after looking around more, I realized it was actually in an intriguing location. While one side of the camp was backed up against the beach, every other side was surrounded by woods. The perimeter around the camp was settled with thick, gnarling trees with branches like fingers clawing toward the sky. The woods started to invade into the edges of the camp like frost slowly creeping in from the corners of a window pane, giving this summer camp a gothic prominence, unfortunate for a place that harbors laughter and play.
It was about noon and we just finished lunch when all the camp counselors were led into a thicket of the woods. It had been a couple of days since I got to camp and I was already pretty good friends with most of the other counselors. Regardless, the camp director deemed it necessary that we still “learned more about each other and ourselves” by partaking in a couple cliché trust exercises and team building games, practicing on each other before we taught them to the campers that were starting to come next week. The first exercise we did was the classic blindfold game. For those unfamiliar with this game, everyone is paired up and one partner is blindfolded while the other partner has to verbally guide them toward a goal. I paired up with this really cute girl named Clara and I volunteered to be the one blindfolded first. She tied the bandana around my eyes and spun me around for about twenty seconds or so. Once I was completely disoriented and stumbling around Clara started shouting out directions, giggling with every instruction. “Alright, turn to your left and take ten steps forward… Turn slightly right and walk forward six steps, and watch out for that tree branch!” This went on for a couple more minutes before I guess I misheard what she said and walked too far in the wrong direction. While I was walking, something didn’t feel right because everything was becoming muffled. With each step I took the sounds of the other people, the wind, the birds, the crashing waves of the ocean, even the sound of my own footsteps melted away until there was complete and utter silence.
That’s when I felt it. Even though I could only see blackness, every hair on my body stood on its end. I felt that there was someone standing right in front of me. I knew it, I could sense it, and I could feel their presence only inches away from me. Instinctively, I called out, “Clara? Is that you?” but as I reached out in front of me, I felt nothing. There wasn’t anything there. The second I put my hands down, the same sense of dread immediately overcame me. This time, it felt like someone was so close in front of me that they could have leaned in and kissed me. I fell back in a panic and ripped the blindfold off of my eyes, only to be greeted by the scene that I was initially a part of. The warmth of the sunlight cascaded down onto my brow as I saw all of the other camp counselors either aimlessly wandering around blindfolded or shouting and laughing at the helplessness of their partner. The birds clamored to one another and the ocean conversed through its breaking waves. The person nearest me was Clara, who was thirty feet away. She ran over with a very concerned look stuck to her face. “Hey are you alright?”
“Clara, were you messing with me the entire time?” I sharply retorted.
“What do you mean? I was talking to Holly for a couple seconds and when I looked back, you were on the ground.” replied Clara, looking even more puzzled.
“When I had the blindfold on, I felt someone standing right in front of me.”
She changed her look from one that was sympathetic to one that thought I was a little mentally unstable.
“Umm, no one was near you. As you can see, you ended up walking in the complete opposite direction of the goal, even with my precise directions.”
She giggled again and started to walk back to the group, as we were starting the next team building game. She was lying, I knew it. That sense of someone standing in front of me was so real, it was unnerving and put me on edge the rest of the day. This sensation of fear and paranoia invaded my thoughts and emotions and slowly grinded me down. By the end of the day, I was so exhausted that right after dinner I went back to my cabin and collapsed into bed. As my vision faded and I slowly passed out, one thought came to my mind: I had to try it again.

We were given the next day off. The camp director knew we worked our asses off training and preparing for the long weeks of unrelenting work yet to come, so he decided to give us a full day to go out and enjoy ourselves. I was so tired from the previous night that I slept completely through breakfast and woke up just in time for lunch. After I ate, I slipped away to head back to the same part of the woods we were in yesterday. After a few minutes of searching, I found the exact spot I stood in before. It was at the base of a tree that had no branches and stood straighter than the rest. The ground underneath was layered with blankets of damp dirt and rotting leaves. As I stood by the tree, my feet sunk into the decaying foliage and it began to mold around my shoes as if it was inviting me to stand there for the rest of eternity. Once again, I tied the blindfold around my eyes and proceeded to spin for another twenty seconds or so.

Then, I waited.

It was only a couple of seconds before that same feeling I would come to loathe began to burrow itself under my skin and fester. The paranoia and sinking feeling that someone was standing in front of me paralyzed my nervous system. This feeling came much worse than before because this time I knew for a fact I was completely alone. I tried to keep the blindfold on for as long as possible while this trepidation engulfed my entirety. Every little hair on the back of my neck was about to rip itself out of my skin by the follicle as I could feel this person inching closer and closer to me. I kept my hands to my side, seeing how far I could push my threshold of terror. At this point I was shaking, but I knew if my will was strong I could manage to endure this sensation for a couple more moments. Until I felt a warm breath on the back of my neck.
I broke down and started wildly flailing with one hand while trying to take off the blindfold with the other. When I finally managed to get the stupid thing off I saw what I feared most: nothing. I saw nothing. There was nobody there and I was completely alone with the trees that have remained sentinels for centuries. I was panting, still shaking, and covered in a cold sweat. I was in desperate need of a shower, since I was too shaken up to take one yesterday, so I headed back to my cabin and rinsed off in hopes to also clear my mind. Nobody was in the cabin when I stepped into the shower and I was actually quite relieved; I didn’t want anyone to see me post-shock and I really didn’t want to explain myself and my absurdity. Halfway through the shower, I closed my eyes while I rinsed the shampoo out of my hair. That’s when I felt it again. I was speared through the gut with this fear that someone was in the room, watching me shower. I opened my eyes, letting the soapy water stream into them and half blind me. Behind the shower curtain, there was a silhouette of a figure. A scream managed to escape my throat and as it did I slipped backwards and had what felt like porcelain hit the base of my skull.

I woke up with a jerk and bolted upright, scared for my life. My eyes were open, yet all I could see was blackness. Oh fuck, I hit my head so hard I went blind. I was on the verge of tears because of this newfound, life changing moment when I felt something crinkle up on the bridge of my nose. The blindfold! I slid off the bandana and was drowned in relief. I felt idiotic for jumping to such a childish conclusion, but that moment was short-lived when I finally looked around and recognized where I was. I wasn’t in the shower, or even in the cabin. I was lying in a mound of damp dirt and rotting leaves, underneath a tree that had no branches and stood straighter than the rest. I was wearing the same clothes as I was when I first entered the woods earlier and, yet again, I was completely alone. My initial thought was that I did something really stupid like spin around too fast or too long and passed out. I was trying to recall walking back to my cabin and taking a shower. It felt very vivid, so I guess I just had a crazy dream. A gentle breeze tumbled through the woods and brought with it a taste of salty air. As the gust of wind caressed and cooled me, I came to a realization that made my heart stop.

My hair was still wet.