SUMMER OF 2008 or 2009

DESCRIPTION

When I was a Girl Scout in the early 2000’s my parents sent me to camp at Silver Bay YMCA camp. I went with girls from my troop and when we arrived we found out the camp was run out of an old Victorian building called “Paine Hall.” It was very spooky looking but we didn’t really pay any mind. We had unsuccessfully fought for a spot in the big master bedroom with a private bathroom but lost out to another group of girls. We were lucky lol. After the first night the girls who slept in the room under the master room confronted the group of girls sleeping in it for making noise and rocking the chair all night, the girls upstairs claimed they had all been asleep. Later that afternoon my friends and I were in the library in the hotel on the grounds, we found a book about ghosts in the adirondacks (I googled it i believe it was Haunted Warren COunty by David Pitkin) we open the book and skim through and come across a section on Paine Hall at Silver Bay. Needless to say we FREAKED, told everyone to the point that the camp library pulled the book from the shelves for the remainder of our camp session so we couldnt freak ourselves out more. Here’s the weird thing though. None of the camp counselors tried to tell us it was fake, at all. They just told us not to worry about it and that they’d explain more at the end of the session but didn’t want to frighten some of the younger and more timid girls. In the remainder of the week I went to the bathroom and brought my friend (as we were now in a veritably haunted mansion lol) as I went to wash my hands we heard one of the girls from upstairs come down, there was a big staircase at the entrance of the bathroom downstairs, you could distinctly here the footsteps come down so clearly my friend Hannah literally said “whos coming down here so late” but then we heard the footsteps get to the bottom of the stairs, right in front of us. No one was there. At all. We RAN back to our room. The girls in the master room eventually asked to use another room as when they’d shower the faucet would turn on then the shower would turn off when they left to turn of the sink (and so on back and forth) on top of the noises they kept hearing and their downstairs neighbors. The counselors who took over the room admitted at the end of the session the same thing happened to them too. We convinced the counselors to let us into the spooky cellar on the last day, my friend had a camera and took a bunch of pictures, when we came outside we found a photo with a distinct face in the corner, when we went to turn the camera on and show it to another group of girls that photo was gone. Totally gone, all the other photos still there. Which I’d be more inclined to believe we had been mistaken if not for when the counselors told their stories before we left… they showed us a photo (I’d love to track down the former director of the program as she likely would still have the physical copy she showed us) apparently one night they had been trying to convince one of the other counselors who hadn’t experienced anything yet the house was haunted, they showed us a photo where you can see their reflection in the window of the rotunda standing behind a guardrail where the floor is raised (if you google a photo of Paine Hall you can see photos for reference) nothing there. Then they showed us the second photo. I’ll start by saying the woman claims she printed it out immediately upon seeing it and its good luck she did, as that photo ALSO went missing once she reopened it later. Since she printed it we were able to see what is clearly a large black person shaped mass IN FRONT of the window and their reflections. Also the camp director said she awoke in the middle of the night to the feeling of her dog on sitting on her feet, when she realized she was not home, she was at camp, with no dog and no one in the room but she could feel some one sitting on her bed. She slept upstairs with the teenage counselors she was so spooked. I’m sure there’s tons of more stories from our session I just don’t know. It was one of the greatest and scariest experiences of my life. I’ve read other peoples similar experiences online and I wonder if I had been in the same camp session as them.

Submitted by Nina