My Girl Scout Campfire Story

I was 10 or 11 when I made my first (and last) trip to Girl Scout camp.

The buses were waiting for us in the school parking lot, and I bounded onto the bus with all the energy you’d expect for my first sleep away at camp. I was a suburban kid with no exposure to camping, but I knew how to pack all the best stuff for the trip - absolutely nothing practical. I rummaged through my bag until I found my prized 45 - Joey Scarbury singing the theme song from The Greatest American Hero - and I passed it around for the other girls to admire. We spent the entire bus ride emptying our bags and sharing treasures.

Camp Peachtree was about 2 hours away, and it was dusk when we arrived. We scrambled off the bus, grabbed our duffels, and looked at the map. There was one campsite much further away from all the others, and that meant it would be far from the adults too. We took off and laid claim to it about 15 minutes later.

The campsites were rustic - platforms with canvas tents and 4 cots in each. But we hadn’t planned all that well - there were 7 of us and it was too dark to navigate back to the main camp. We also hadn’t wasted time on any essentials - like food or drink - we’d eaten our sack lunches on the bus and figured they’d call us for dinner when it was time. So we sat knee to knee on the cots singing and laughing and talking.

This went on for a long time - it seemed so late and we were getting tired. I was sitting on one of the cots with another girl when something caught my eye. I turned around to see a man’s hand coming up from between the canvas and the platform. There were no men at Peachtree because this was a Girl Scout camp. Why was there a man’s hand in my tent?

He grabbed the cot leg and yanked hard and the girl and I tumbled out of the tent backwards onto the ground. Immediately chaos erupted in and below the tent. The other girl and I scrambled under the platform and started screaming. The girls who remained in the tent screamed. I can still remember making out the man’s boots walking around the tent - black like work shoes. He circled the tent a few times stopping momentarily and then he ran off into the bushes.

We scrambled back into the tent - which scared the other girls even worse. By now we were all crying and huddled together in the middle of the platform, as far from the edges as we could get.

We screamed and cried for what felt like hours. Nobody came. We were so far from everyone else that they couldn’t hear us, so we yelled louder. Eventually, we stopped yelling and just sat together crying, and that’s when a counselor showed up. We told her what had happened and she told us that we’d probably just scared ourselves telling ghost stories. We pleaded with her and said we weren’t making things up, but she wouldn’t hear any of it. She announced it was time for a bonfire and instructed us to gather all our belongings. Only afterwards did I think that order strange - why would I be gathering up our things for a bonfire? She walked us back to camp - where we found the buses loading up and all of the troops assembled. We hadn’t even spent the night, but we were leaving right then and there.

That night there had been a prison break at the nearby penitentiary.

They didn’t tell us, but they did tell our parents. My mother pulled me out of Girl Scouts immediately and I didn’t camp for another 30 years. I’m still anxious about Sleeping in a tent.