This story was told by an American named Joe, who in 1972. was a counselor at Navaqua Children's Camp in Adams County, Pennsylvania. This camp, which still operates today, belongs to the Lutheran Church, whose staff also work in the Navakva administration. In particular, Joe worked at the camp from 1967 to 1973.
His story begins with a mention of an old apple orchard, which was about a mile from Navaqwa, on a hill. While hiking in the forests, children and counselors often spent the night in tents on the top of this hill, since it was a picturesque place, and a quiet, deserted one.
Missing girl
… That evening, the adults sent the children to bed, while they themselves sat around the fire and talked leisurely. Among the counselors was one Paul, a seminary student who read passages from the Bible, explaining some of the difficult points along the way. Someone asked if Paul believed in the afterlife and the existence of ghosts, to which he answered in the affirmative, since, according to him, he once saw a phantom of an old soldier in the seminary building …
The time was late, and soon the counselors also went to bed. A few hours later, Joe was woken up with a shout that a girl had disappeared from the tent. Ten-year-old Katie's sleeping bag was empty. Leaving one counselor with the children, all the others went in search of the missing.
They searched for the girl almost until dawn. We contacted the camp by radio to find out if she had returned there. However, the child was nowhere, and everyone wondered where he could go at all …
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And suddenly Katie appeared from the side where the apple orchard was. She choked with sobs. The girl's legs and arms were scratched, and two cuts were bleeding on her back.
The counselors urgently called doctors, and Paul took the victim to the camp. However, before Katie was taken away, Joe heard her talk about an "ugly man" snatching her from her sleeping bag and dragging her into some abandoned building. The girl managed to escape from his hands, after which she fell into a ravine and hardly got out of there.
When Joe, among other counselors and children, was in the camp, there were already doctors and policemen. The latter, having heard Katie's story, seem to have completely ignored it. Joe himself thought the child's story was very strange, while Paul argued that there was something else behind it all. The camp season was soon over; Joe left "Navaqua", but for a long time he remembered the mysterious event that happened there …
The shadows of the apple orchard emerge from the past
Subsequently, Joe and Paul, who became the church pastor, communicated regularly, and just recently Joe received an interesting piece of news from a friend that sheds light on a mystery more than forty years ago.
Paul received a letter from the daughter of the same Cathy who disappeared from her tent at night. The woman found the pastor's contact information among the papers of her mother, who died several months ago. The papers were well hidden so that outsiders would not find them. There was also a leaf on which Katie described in detail what happened to her in the apple orchard. This was followed by a postscript asking to contact Pastor Paul because this person "knows the truth."
From the letter to Katie it followed that at night the ghost of some old man pounced on her and dragged her to the basement of a dilapidated building, which stood in the garden. The girl managed to escape from the hands of the kidnapper, but then she was attacked by a completely awful creature that looked like a huge wolf. Katie contrived and hit the monster's face with a stone, after which she rushed to run …
The note went on to say that the girl had repeatedly tried to tell her story to people, but no one believed her. Worst of all, however, was that the "spirit of the wolf," as she called it, continued to haunt Katie day and night. He could dream of her, turning a dream into a nightmare, but often she saw his shadow in real life …
The woman could not understand why this entity was pursuing her, perhaps the mystical wolf wanted to take revenge on her for hitting her with a stone on the nose, but why on that fateful night the creepy old man chose her?
Neither Joe, nor even Priest Paul, with his rich experience in the spiritual field, knew the answer to this question. And is he even in this world, the pastor noticed in his letter to a friend. However, Paul believes that after Katie died she found out why this happened: beyond that line, each of us will certainly discover the secrets that tormented us in this life …
Victoria Prime