Sometime around 2000 or earlier my friend had gone camping with his family, he’s about five at this time. They had gone to this summer camp that his family had been involved with for years, and were allowed to use one of their cabins for the weekend because they were on good terms with the full time staff.

Now, the camp is divided into a few clusters of cabins, all of which were pretty old and creepy and built in the early 1930’s. They’d been well maintained but never refurbished, and with just mesh windows and creaky big wooden doors they could give anyone the creeps, especially with the winter wind blowing. My friend’s family was staying in one of the cabins close to the building where the camp director worked and slept.

On the second day as it was getting dark my friend and his older brother who was a regular counselor there for the past few years went for a walk which lead them down a winding dirt road to another cluster of cabins. They could both tell there was something wrong, but they couldn’t place it. My friend several years later told me that it felt like everything looked completely ordinary, but it was like there was just something that completely threw the vibe off. His brother would attribute it to what he noticed next: The furthest cabin from the entrance had all of the windows closed (there were large wooden panels that had to be lifted up and put in the mesh windows). Then he heard a loud thud and then the lights in the cabin were on.

Now it wasn’t uncommon for other cabins to be rented out by hunters in the winter, so he left it alone even though he still had a strange vibe and decided not to investigate further.

The next morning during breakfast he was speaking to the camp director and casually asked him how many other cabins he was planning on renting that hunting season and mentioned that he had noticed that another cabin was being used back towards the far side of camp. The director had a stunned look on his face and then told him to call the police and that they weren’t renting out any of the other cabins that weekend.

The police showed up, and after a two hour stand off in the middle of the woods ended with a man in custody.

For the past three weeks there had been a dangerous man hiding out in a summer camp. My friend didn’t know it at the time, but was later told by his brother that when they took him out he was starving and unshaved, he had a rifle a pistol and a shotgun, and two duffle bags full of valuables that had been taken during violent break ins over the past month in the surrounding counties.