There’s an abandoned wilderness camp a few miles from where I live. A couple years ago, it was a popular place for parents to send their kids during the school holidays. The counsellors would meet the kids at the main road and then hike out into the wilderness until they came to an isolated area where the cabins were located.
For years, the local people spread rumors about the wilderness camp. They said it was built on an area of cursed ground where, 30 years earlier, a religious sect had committed mass suicide. Local people would never send their kids to the camp, so the only children who went there were from out of town. None of these kids were aware of the history of the place.
One night, the counsellors were arranging activities and games to keep the kids occupied. They decided to play a game of hide and seek. To make it more challenging, they tied one of the kids, a young boy named Gerald, to a tree in the middle of the forest. He was told to close his eyes and count to 100, while the other kids found hiding places in the woods. When the boy finished counting, he would have to untie himself and go looking for the others.
The counsellors and the kids spent 20 minutes or more crouching behind trees and rocks, waiting for Gerald to come and find them. They started to wonder where the boy was. Finally, they grew impatient and made their way back to the clearing where they had left Gerald. There, at the foot of the tree, they found a horrible scene.
The rope was still tied around the tree, but poor Gerald had been chopped up into tiny pieces. Bits of his body were strewn all around the clearing and his severed head was balanced on a tree branch.
The kids were all screaming and crying. The counsellors were trying to calm them down, but there was little they could do. Eventually, they all went back to the cabins and one of the counsellors tried to use a long wave radio to contact the police. Unfortunately, the radio was broken, so the first counsellor hiked back down the dirt road to alert the police, while the other counsellor stayed with the children to make sure they were safe.
As the kids sat in the cabin, they trembled with fear and tried to make sense of what had happened. The counsellor who was staying with them seemed really shaken and began drinking alcohol. He was knocking back glass after glass with shaking hands. He kept telling the kids that it was probably a wild animal, a man-eating beast from the forest, that tore their poor friend to pieces. The kids all said that theory couldn’t possibly be true. Gerald’s body had been chopped up. No wild animal could have done that.
They all agreed that their friend must have been murdered by a person. They began to suspect everyone and questioned each other. “Where were you?” asked one boy. “I was hiding behind a rock with her”, said a girl. “And where were you?” asked another girl. “I was up in a tree. I can prove it. He saw me climbing up there”, said another boy.
Eventually, they had accounted for everyone’s whereabouts except for the counsellor “Where were you?”, asked one of the boys.
The counsellor just stared at them and refused to answer. His eyes seemed to glaze over and his face twisted into a horrible grimace.
Just then, the kids heard the sound of a jeep driving up the dirt road. The counsellor jumped out of his chair and ran out of the cabin. The kids raced to the window and caught sight of him, just as he disappeared into the woods. When the police arrived, the kids told them about the counsellor and they took off after him, running into the wilderness with their guns drawn.
Even though the police searched the forest for four whole days, no trace of the counsellor was ever found. The children were urgently evacuated and the wilderness camp was closed down. It now lies abandoned. Of course, there are still some thrill-seekers who hike out to the remote camp, specifically to be able to say they stayed there overnight and lived. Many of them come back talking about some strange paintings on the walls of the surviving buildings. Some of them don’t come back at all.
The End.
Note: This story is based on a scary story that is told around the campfire at summer camps in Russia. The scary stories that Russian kids tell each other tend to be extremely odd, to say the least. I’m not sure what to make of this one. What do you think? If you like it, I’ll try to translate and post some more weird and freaky Russian camp stories.
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