Urban Legend of Bloody Mary at Camp Tonikanee :: Urban Legends Ghost Stories

Bloody Mary Version 4--Bloody Mary at Camp Tonikanee One night, around 1:00 a.m., my roommates and I were sitting in the common room, and I asked the group if they knew of a compelling ghost story. My one roommate, a 20 year old from Pennsylvania, said she had heard a ghost story at the summer sleep-away camp she had attended when she was younger. She heard the story around a campfire in the woods of Camp Tonikanee, which is in Quakertown, Pennsylvania. She described her story as one that the counselors would tell the campers to convince them the camp was haunted. The camp was really, really old and many of the buildings had once burned down because of a big fire. Supposedly the camp was haunted by this woman named Mary, who was a witch. But, no one ever saw her, just weird things would happen. Little girls would disappear at night if they were out wandering around by themselves. It scared everyone because parents want their daughters to come home. So every time someone would disappear, people would go out looking for her but would never find her. But after a girl would disappear, it would get especially strange for a while. People thought Mary haunted other buildings, like the barn. Well, [lowers voice] one night one of the camp directors heard strange sounds coming from a little cabin in the woods where Mary supposedly lives and went to investigate. He found Mary with one of the campers, giving her an herbal potion. But the girl was already in a trance and hypnotized and they couldn’t bring her back. They took Mary and they tied her u p and put her on trial. As she was standing there, she put a spell on everyone and killed herself with the spell. It was said that anyone else who said her name three times in the mirror would die. My roommate told the story in a low, solemn tone, except raising her voice once or twice in the beginning to give the sense of her being unsure of her story. The story was told effectively with hand gestures and vocal inflections. There were a few occasions where she had to stop and think out what happened next, which is understandable because she hadn’t heard the story since she attended summer camp over ten years ago. Besides these instances, she used dramatic pausing to emphasize important events, and the dim lighting of the apartment helped to set the mood.