CARD

“Oh my god guys no this was like actually so scary. Okay I was like eleven years old… how old are you when you’re in sixth grade? I was at sleepwaway camp in the middle of bumfuck West Virginia. One rainy day me and my friend were looking for board games to bring back to our cabin because all of our activities got cancelled for the day. And we found a Ouija board. Me and my friend had never used one but we had heard about them. This was an old closet. Like Ouija board tucked in the back of it. We bring it back to our cabin, and convince everyone to do the Ouija board with us. The counselor was like, Yeah lets do it. So we go in our cubby room, which is a small dark room in the back of the cabin, sit in a circle with candles. My counselor was the only one who had ever used a a Ouija board because we were all eleven and no one had used that shit. So my friend and my counselor go on the Ouija board and start to ask it questions, like you’re supposed to. They ask pretty normal questions, like “what’s your name,” and the board spelled out Card, like C-A-R-D, its name was Card. Um… it said it went to our camp and it lived in cabin 25 in 1989. And then we made the mistake of asking “Did you die here?” Card said yes. So we just put it away, we were like whaatt … we were these eleven year old scared dweebs and we just put it away. Later that day we go to the dining hall for dinner and my friend who I found the Ouija board with, we were in line to get food and in the dining hall… each summer makes a plaque for their cabin and they can decorate it however, and they’re attached to the rafters in this huge dining hall. Hundreds of them. My friend pokes me on the shoulder and points to one specific plaque. This is where shit gets wild. The only thing painted on the plaque was a Ouija board, with all black letters except in red was CARD 1989 and at the bottom it said Cabin 25. And I just ran away I was freaking out. I was crying in the dining hall. Everyone was just like what? We couldn’t even express ourselves. My camp is haunted by Card. Next time I went there I tried to find the plaque and it was fairly hidden amongst the other hundreds of plaques. We just happened to see it that day, which is scary.”

Background: The informant told this piece with a lot of excitement because everything in her story had happened in such a creepy, ironic way. The fact that she was able to spot out the plaque right after this Ouija board experience was very creepy. Now, it doesn’t mean as much to her as it did back then, because she now believes it could have been a trick played on her by her counselor, but she is still unsure and remembers very vividly how terrified she was of what had happened that day. I think this piece is very interesting and I like the aesthetic presented of a boring, rainy day at camp turned into a creepy ghost story. This seems very typical of a bizarre experience that a young child might experience at a camp, those of which have been told many times and exaggerated, about for example ghosts haunting certain cabins and such. This was a very interesting story for me to hear as I did not attend summer camps like these every summer as the informant did.