Eventually I’d grow so frustrated trying to sleep that I would get up from my bed, dress and leave my room. I’d walk around the dorm, daring the ghost to show himself, lingering for long spells at his purported haunts, traipsing silently through the hallways. But he never appeared.

Sometimes I’d sit at the top of the central hill on campus and think about being back home, some two-thousand miles away. Sometimes I’d go for long jogs through the wooded areas that surrounded the school. Mostly I’d go to the nearby Indian Hills cemetery and wander among the old mausoleums and crumbling headstones.

I’d often think about killing myself. Never all that seriously, I suppose, but I did ponder it a lot, with my back propped up against a tombstone. I’d think about how I would do it, who would find me, who would show up to my funeral, who would feel bad for how they treated me, who would remember me, who would forget. How my family would respond. It was childish and aimlessly vindictive. There’d be no doubt about who haunted Hewitt then.

When the sun started to rise over the cemetery, I’d rouse myself, go back to my dorm and shower, preparing for another somnambulant day of classes. I’d wonder what about becoming a ghost appealed to me. And I’d think about Old Man Toad.

Every camp has his equivalent: a spirit that both watches over and haunts the campgrounds. At my summer camp in Conifer, Colorado, it was Old Man Toad, a frog-like creature the size of a small human who was purported to live in the area and served as the camp’s mascot of sorts. A large, wooden statue of him greeted you as you pulled through the gates into camp. His face was carved into fence posts and adorned our annual T-shirts. All the kids at the camp were obsessed with him. His occasional appearances sent us into shrieking convulsions.

There you’d be, shooting an arrow into a target draped over a giant hay bale, swimming in the lake, or elbow-deep in pipe cleaners and beads at the arts and craft barn when suddenly someone in the distance would scream, “Old Man Toad!” You would immediately drop whatever you were doing and run toward the yelling. If you were lucky, if you had gotten there in time, you’d catch a glimpse of the old fella: a sheet with holes cut out for eyes darting through camp, hurling candy at the growing cluster of children in his wake. Sometimes he’d rip through camp in a VW van, a trusty accomplice driving while he sat in the back, sliding the van door open, tossing handfuls of his signature candy. We would tear after him as fast as our little elementary-school legs would carry us but we could never catch him.

According to tradition, Old Man Toad lived in an old school bus up near a collection of enormous stones we called the Elephant Rocks, on the far part of the campgrounds. You could hike up there. You weren’t technically supposed to, but the counselors looked the other way. They knew what they were doing, the mythos they were cultivating. We’d sneak off in small groups there and dare each other to touch the school bus door, to jiggle it and try and open it. It was always locked, but the mere act of confirming that it was there would send us sprinting back towards camp, squealing in paroxysms of danger and delight.