“Just keep that girl away from me,” he said, motioning at Lucinda with his chin.
I was kind of hoping for a real fight. My money would have been on Lucinda kicking Tino’s ass all the way back to the Bend. But everyone settled around the fire while Jenna worked to get it started and Jaila unwrapped the fish so we could finally get some food in us.
Georgia sat down last.
“Okay, so this happened the summer before I was in sixth grade,” she said. “When I was at an all-girls camp. And none of it was my fault.”
“LOOK DOWN”
by Robin Talley
WE WERE ALL OBSESSED with ghost stories that summer.
It was the August before sixth grade. My mom wanted to get rid of me—my mom always wanted to get rid of me for one reason or another—so I was stuck going to the same dumb all-girls mountain camp I’d gone to the August before and the August before that.
But this time I didn’t really mind. In fact, that summer, camp actually turned out to be pretty awesome.
Up until all the creepy stuff started happening, anyway.
The awesome parts were mostly because of Hailey. She was my best friend that summer, and she told the freakiest ghost stories of anyone.
The others thought so too. Hailey and I shared a tiny wooden cabin that year with six other girls. Every night, as soon as we were tucked into our bunk beds, someone would turn out the overhead lights and put a flashlight in the middle of the floor, pointing at the ceiling so the room would get all shadowy. Then we’d take turns trying to outscare each other.
Most of the stories the girls told weren’t all that creepy, really. They were the kind you hear everywhere. Guys with hooks for hands who hide in the backseat of your car and try to kill you as soon as it gets dark. Babysitters who get creepy phone calls that turn out to be coming from inside the house. Med students who drug you at a party, then cut out your kidneys and leave you in a bathtub full of ice with a note to call 9-1-1 if you want to live. You know, that kind of thing.
In our cabin on the mountain, with the lights out, though, the stories still felt scary, even if you’d heard them before. The camp was basically in the middle of nowhere, and—actually, that camp looked a lot like where we are right now, come to think of it. Weird. I hadn’t noticed that before.
But anyway, it can get really, really dark up on the mountain at night, and when there’s no one else around . . . Well, it’s easy to get caught up in that kind of stuff. You know how it is—you hear a story, and even though you know it can’t possibly be true, it still sticks in your head. And then later, when you’re out in the dark, and a breeze goes by and you feel that sudden chill on the back of your neck . . . At times like that, even the stuff that you know can’t be true still feels like it could be, somehow.
I never let on when I got freaked out, though. Everyone at camp thought I was impossible to scare, and that was how I wanted it.
I told the goat-man story on our first night there. The goat-man was always my favorite. It was supposed to be a true story—I’d heard it from a counselor a couple of years earlier—but it was obviously impossible. But like all the best ghost stories, it felt real when you thought about it later. Even though you knew better.
Back in the 1920s, the story went, the mountain where our camp was built had been cleared for farmland, and there was this one weird farmer who owned the biggest chunk of it. All the other farmers who lived on the mountain hated him because he was more successful than they were. His harvests were always huge, even when the weather sucked and no one else could grow a thing.
He was getting rich from the land, and the other farmers wanted to know his secret. So one Saturday, two of the neighbors snuck up onto his land and hid all day to watch him work.
They figured they’d see him doing something illegal they could report him for, or at least using some secret farming techniques they could copy. They watched him from sunrise to sundown, but they didn’t see anything unusual. He was just planting and harvesting, the same way the rest of them did.
By the time it got dark, the farmer had stopped working for the day, and the two neighbors were ready to give up and go home. As they were creeping back over the property line, though, they heard a strange sound, like someone screaming. It was coming from the barn.
They rushed back across the farm and into the building, thinking someone must be in terrible danger—and saw the farmer holding a bloody ax, with a decapitated goat lying on the ground in front of him. On the wall of the barn, in huge red letters, the words “HAIL SATAN” were written in thick, dark blood.
Well, the two neighbors turned and ran as fast as they could. They made it home safely, and the next day they told everyone in town to watch out for the creepy, Satan-worshipping farmer.
After that the farmer couldn’t sell his crops to anyone. His harvests were just as big as they’d ever been, but the whole town knew it was because he’d cut a deal with the devil, and they didn’t want to eat food the devil had paid for.
No one really saw the farmer after that. He stopped leaving his land after a while, and then at some point, so much time had passed that everyone assumed he’d died.
He didn’t have any children, so there was no one to inherit the farm. Years later, it was turned into a camp. Workers tore down the farmer’s house and barn and built new lodges and cabins, and in between them, the scrub and trees grew back until the mountain was covered in forests again. You couldn’t tell it had ever been a farm at all.
But every Saturday night, if you wandered deep enough into the woods, you could hear a long, loud scraping sound out where the barn used to be. And if the moon were high enough, you’d see a half man, half goat walking down the trail, dragging a bloody ax behind him.
That was how the story ended. After I was done telling it, I’d pause for a second, so the room was totally silent. Then I made a high-pitched goat-bleating sound. You could tell who was cool and who was a wuss by whether they laughed or shrieked.
Up until that August, the girls I’d shared a cabin with had always said my goat-man story was the scariest they’d ever heard. But everything changed that summer. All because of Hailey.
Hailey loved telling ghost stories too. But the stories she told weren’t ridiculous like the ones about hook-hands and babysitters, or bizarre like my story about the goat-man. That was because Hailey’s stories really were true. She’d heard them from her grandmother, and they were nothing like our stupid made-up kids’ stories.