The following account has been reconstructed from memory, and I stand by every word as truth. The nightmarish events of the infamous Opera in the Woods incident have since become legend at Camp Mahachamack in Upstate New York. I was there. And this is my story.
For three years, between 2001 and 2003, I served as a Specialist and Camp Counselor, guiding wide-eyed campers through long summer days filled with laughter, adventure, and the occasional eerie tale whispered around the camp fire. But in my final year at camp in 2003, something happened—something so profoundly unsettling that it cemented my decision never to return.
Even now, as I write this, I struggle to make sense of what we experienced that night. If I had been alone, I might have convinced myself that it was all a hallucination—a trick of the mind, the product of an overactive imagination steeped in too many ghost stories and horror films. But I wasn’t alone. I was with eight others, and to this day, whenever we reconnect, we can’t wait to talk about it.
Not to relive the horror, necessarily, but to try—desperately—to understand what happened to us. To piece together the fragments of that night, to compare memories, to find some logic in the madness. Yet, the more time that passes, the greater our unease. The legend only grows, and the mystery deepens.
Now, at last, I will retell it as best I can.
By the height of summer of ‘03, my focus had shifted towards entertaining an alluring Australian sheila—a fellow counselor whose flirtations had been gently subtle. She was playful, intoxicating in her confidence, and had, with a knowing glance and a smirk that lingered just long enough, extended an invitation I couldn’t refuse.
That night, she beckoned me into the depths of the woods, where a handful of camp friends had gathered beneath the canopy of ancient trees, their laughter and whispered secrets mingling with the thick summer air. The scent of earth and pine was laced with something more—the telltale traces of weed smoke and liquor, the unspoken promise of a night unfettered by rules or consequence.
That year had been one of indulgence, a season where drunken passion burned bright, and I had reveled in the reckless abandonment of youth. My experience had been plentiful, usually involving intoxication of some sort. My memories of that summer was a blur of young revelry, vivid and unrestrained. And as I stepped into the flickering glow of the gathering, the joint I had carefully rolled between my fingers felt like a prelude to yet another unforgettable chapter in an already extraordinary summer. Little did I know what the evening had in store for us.
And I can already hear your skepticism—What was in that joint? Let me assure you, it was nothing out of the ordinary. Just your standard, run-of-the-mill bud, the kind that mellowed the edges of a long summer day but certainly didn’t send anyone spiraling into hallucinations. No psychedelics. No laced surprises. Just the same familiar haze that had accompanied a hundred other late-night conversations under the stars.
At first, our chatter was as mundane as any other night. The usual camp gossip swirled around us—who was sneaking off with whom, which counselors were locked in secret romances, and the ever-evolving drama of summer friendships and rivalries. We laughed, stretched out in the dim glow of the campfire, trading stories that would be forgotten by morning.
But something about the woods that night was different. The darkness pressed in a little heavier. The trees, usually passive sentinels, seemed to loom with quiet intent. The distant rustling of leaves and the occasional crack of unseen movement played tricks on our nerves.
And so, as if instinctively warding off the unease creeping into our bones, we turned to an old tradition—sharing ghost stories. The kind meant to chill spines and set imaginations ablaze. The kind we could later whisper to the campers, watching their young faces contort with the delicious fear of believing, if only for a moment, that something lurked just beyond the firelight.
A chilling tale has long lingered in hushed whispers among those who know the land where Camp Mahachamack now stands. It is the story of an ill-fated couple who, in the early 1900s, purchased a remote plot of land deep within the woods—long before the camp existed.
They were a quiet, reclusive pair who built a modest cabin in the forest, seeking a life of solitude and simplicity. In time, they were blessed with two young daughters, and for a while, the family lived in peace beneath the towering pines. But as the specter of World War I loomed, the husband, driven by duty—or perhaps something deeper, something unspoken—felt compelled to leave. Against his wife’s desperate pleas, he enlisted, journeying across the sea to fight in a war that would swallow him whole. He never returned.
The woman waited. Days bled into weeks, weeks into months, and months into years. No word arrived. No letter, no telegram, no whisper of his fate. Consumed by grief and uncertainty, she began to unravel, the weight of solitude pressing heavily upon her fragile mind. The once-loving mother became a shadow of herself, slipping further into despair until the silence of the woods became unbearable.
And then, one fateful night, she committed an act so unspeakable that time itself has refused to let the tale fade. In a moment of madness—or perhaps twisted mercy—she poisoned her daughters, laying their small bodies in shallow graves near the cabin that had once been their home. Then, with the same cruel hand, she ended her own suffering.
Weeks passed. The townspeople of Port Jervis, having noticed her absence, sent a group of men into the forest to check on the family. What they found would haunt them forever.
The woman sat lifeless beside an old record player, her body eerily still, as if frozen in time. On the turntable, an opera record rested in place, the needle long since fallen into a hush of static. It was as though the music had carried her into death—an elegy she had chosen, yearning in her final moments for the ghostly embrace of a song that echoed with memories of a lost love.
The cabin, they say, stood for years before nature reclaimed it. Some believe its ruins still exist, hidden beneath the overgrowth, whispering the secrets of the past. And on certain nights, when the wind carries just right, there are those who swear they can hear the distant echoes of opera drifting through the trees—an eerie requiem for a mother, her lost love, and the innocent lives she took.
The story had cast an eerie shadow over us all, its chilling grip tightening as we silently pondered the grim legend that loomed over the camp. Fear lingered in the spaces between our words, unspoken yet palpable. Desperate to shake its hold, we passed a fresh joint around, each of us clinging to the small ritual as if it could dispel the unease settling in our bones.
I remember the young Australian beside me—her presence a welcomed distraction—taking it upon herself to lighten the mood. With a smirk and a casual flick of her wrist, she launched into a tale, something playful, something meant to pull us back from the edge. At first, it worked. But as she spoke, her voice began to shift—rising in both volume and urgency, as though some unseen force compelled her to match its growing intensity.
We all felt it. And yet, none of us wanted to acknowledge it.
I tried to focus on her lips, full and mesmerizing as they formed words I could no longer comprehend. Whatever she was saying had become distant, drowned beneath the sound none of us wanted to admit we were hearing.
A sound that did not belong. It came from the depths of the dark woods beyond our campfire, distinct and deliberate, threading its way through the trees, finding us in the silence between her words. Then it hit us. We were listening to opera.
I was the first to address it. Without thinking, I lifted a finger—an instinctive gesture, a silent request for pause. My dear friend, ever graceful, halted mid-sentence, sensing the shift in my demeanor.
In the stillness that followed, I asked, “Do you guys hear that?”
A tense silence hung between us until another voice broke through, low and uneasy.
“I wish you hadn’t said that,” my friend murmured. “I thought it was all in my head.”
But it wasn’t.
“You all hear it too, then?” I pressed, my voice barely above a whisper. “That eerie opera… just like in the ghost stories?”
My Australian friend’s usual radiant smile faltered, twisting into something unnatural—something worried, disturbed. The others exchanged glances, faces shadowed with uncertainty as the distant, spectral melody swelled, growing clearer, impossibly close.
“What’s out there?” I asked, forcing steadiness into my voice. “Any houses?”
“Nothing,” another companion answered hesitantly. “Nothing but the ruins of that old cabin.”
And in that moment, we knew without a shadow of a doubt – the ghost stories were true!
We immediately began to gather our things as a sort of panic and loathing took refuge in our guts. One of my friends began to kick dirt over the campfire, but the thought of being in pitch darkness drove a spear into my spine. I told him to stop, to leave it.
“What if the campfire spreads?” he asked.
“I’d rather deal with a wildfire than be in total darkness with that opera,” I replied, my voice cutting through the thick tension in the air. And it rang true with everyone present. No one argued. No one hesitated. We began walking toward camp, our movements hurried yet cautious, leaving the campfire to burn out on its own. There was an unspoken agreement among us—whatever was lurking in that sound, whatever force had decided to serenade us from the depths of the unknown, was not something we wanted to challenge.
But in that moment, the unfathomable occurred.
It was as if the forest itself had turned against us. The faster we treaded that woodland trail in the dark, ever moving farther away from our source of light, the louder the opera became. Not just louder—it swelled, rising and crashing like waves against jagged cliffs, growing in intensity as though it were alive. As though it were chasing us out!
Only a couple of us had flashlights, weak, pitiful beams against the encroaching blackness. And then, as if on cue, those beams began to flicker and fade, dimming simultaneously like a cruel joke played by some unseen force. The added horror of it sent a new kind of desperation through us. At first, we kept our pace, trying to convince ourselves it was just in our heads, just our fear magnifying the moment. But when the sound of the opera—its soaring, ghostly voices, its sweeping orchestration—began to press down on us from above, as if unseen concert speakers had manifested in the treetops, we broke.
We began an all-out dash, fueled by terror. But no matter how fast we moved, the sound pursued us, growing impossibly loud, booming through the trees, shaking the very ground beneath our feet. Some of the women began to cry, their sobs barely audible against the sheer volume of the haunting, inescapable music. It was no longer just an eerie sound in the distance; it was a force, an entity, a presence commanding us to leave the cursed woods we had foolishly disturbed.
“What the fuck?” yelled my Australian friend, forsaking her usual, polite tone for the raw, unfiltered panic of someone who had just glimpsed the abyss.
“What is happening right now?” I remember screaming, my own voice swallowed up in the relentless symphony of dread.
And then—suddenly, as we burst past the final stretch of trees, as our feet hit open ground at the edge of the woods—the opera’s volume quickly dropped, as if an unseen hand lowered the volume instantly and it retreated back into the blackness of the woods.
The forest behind us loomed, its darkness thick and pulsing, an impenetrable void that seemed to breathe. The air was different out there. Lighter. As if we had just been spit out, rejected, spared by something that had no reason to let us go.
And yet, it did.
We stood there, panting, our ears still ringing with the echoes of what had just transpired. None of us spoke. There was nothing to say. Because whatever had been singing in those woods, whatever had been watching us, had decided we didn’t belong. And it had made sure we knew it.
We did not speak about it for many years, not even in passing. It lingered in the back of our minds, a shared shadow we refused to acknowledge. It wasn’t until a reunion brought many of us together—though our international friends were absent—that the silence was finally tested. Even then, it was an unspoken understanding among us, a reluctance not born out of fear of ridicule but of something deeper. Speaking of it again would solidify its reality. It would mean admitting that, for one terrifying moment, we had been caught in the wake of a supernatural force, a presence that had expelled us like we were the demons. It did not want us there. It did not want us to gawk at its misfortune or to find entertainment in the echoes of suffering long past. Ever since, we talk about it every chance we get. For many of us, it has become an obsession of sorts.
That night bonded us forever, an unbreakable thread woven by fear and the unknown. And we never disturbed them again. We urged campers to stay out of the woods at night because of bears, and we kept silent for many years until we could no longer ignore the creeping fear that still haunts all of our dreams. We were forced to talk about it, to deal with the trauma we ignored for so long.
The ghosts behind the opera would prefer that I not share their story. But I tell it now—not to entertain, not to embellish—but for my own closure. But my tale comes with a stark warning: If you ever find yourself near the woods at Camp Mahachamack at night, be careful. We were lucky. Whatever was out there that night let us go. But the next group of curious revelers might not be so fortunate.
Beware.
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