41. The Voice With No Source
I work as a counselor at a summer camp in southern California. The place is very out in the woods, so we get all sorts of animals wandering through, from deer and foxes, coyotes howling in the distance, to a mountain lion that’s been spotted in the area. But there’s something else. The camp also occasionally has a haunted vibe.
There are a couple creepy and weird spots, some things in the area that we think show the place has been inhabited in the past, ghost stories, etc. One night after putting my kids to bed, I was standing outside our cabin talking to another counselor when my friend Sadie comes running by with her entire teenage girls’ cabin, maybe 12 of them.
They were all dressed in black and freaking the heck out. She screams at me that she thought they heard a ghost and once her kids were asleep, she’d meet me back here to explain and investigate. Sadie is normally the level-headed type and does not freak out easily, so this really caught my attention. She meets me back by my cabin maybe 30 minutes later and explains what was going on.
She took her campers on a night hike, had them all dress up in black and pretend to be ninjas. All was fun until on their way back, they passed a particularly dark part of the trail. They heard off in the distance, just beyond the treeline, what sounded like a faint “help!” from a small child. But that was just the beginning of the nightmare.
Each time they heard it, it got more and more distorted until it no longer sounded human. Even so, it still sounded like a child yelling “help” in the distance. Naturally, they freaked right out and ran. Me and Sadie decide to be good counselors and go investigate the sound of a small child yelling “help.” As we walk over to the area of the trail, we hear it.
It didn’t sound like a small child anymore. It sounded like a demon screeching out its best impression of a child, and it didn’t sound like it was coming from any source, but more like it was coming from an entire mountain side. We booked it back to the safety of the main part of camp, where we tell this story to anyone who will listen.
The next day, the camp director had a meeting where they told us to tell our campers not to freak out at the sound of bobcats in the forest. They are harmless, they told us, but they do still tend to make a high-pitched yelping sound at night. Oh. My. God. Well, our friends wouldn’t let us live that one down all summer.