Hill Farm, later Arequipa, c 1910  

This is a true story…

I awoke with a start, struggling to swim up to consciousness and remember where I was.  Shoving my long, sweaty, tangled hair out of my face I pushed myself up to a sitting position.  Around me in the warm, humid night other campers, Girl Scouts just like me, were sleeping; some sighing, a few snoring and my friend Maria, murmuring dreamily.  The darkness around me was complete.  We were at a camp far away from the city lights and there was no moon that night.  Soft sounds of the forest could be heard; a hooting owl, deer moving quietly in the brush, the wind rustling high above in the tops of the magnificent redwood trees – all sounds I had heard before – sounds that were normally very comforting. But something else had woken me.  A different kind of noise. Disturbing unformed images.  Half asleep, I fought to remember what it had been. It hovered on the edge of my awareness, just out of reach. 

It was an ordinary Girl Scout campout.  My troop of some fifteen girls and a few adult leaders were spending the weekend at a camp in Fairfax, California.  We all had arrived the day before and were elated to find that we wouldn’t have to sleep on the ground or in tents.  The Youth Center had several old buildings, one of which had long sleeping porches that we could lay our sleeping bags on – a real luxury to those of us who usually specialized in primitive camping. We were all at the wonderful and contradictory age of the students I now teach: in our early teens with the attitudes to match.  All afternoon the sleeping bags on the porch had been rearranged according to who was speaking to whom. As is the custom with 13-year-olds, little spats and disagreements had broken out and, by bedtime, I was relieved that I had at least one friend sleeping near me for I had been uneasy all day.  Something about this place didn’t feel right to me.  Although the day was sunny and we had loads of fun doing crafts and swimming in the pool that had been added when the property was acquired by the Girl Scouts, the old buildings seem to brood and hold secrets in their shadowy interiors. As the day went on, I became more and more anxious and not having any idea why. When night fell, I made sure I had someone with me when I went to the bathroom before bed.  There was a row of old sinks gleaming eerily white in the low-hanging, dim ceiling lights; leftover from the early days of the building someone said.  The hall to the sleeping porch was long and dark, filled with shadows that seemed to shift and move as we passed. I looked furtively at my companion, but she was laughing and singing a camp song as we headed to bed and chatted happily with the other girls. Surely, I must be imagining things, I thought to myself; no one else seems nervous.

And now, several hours later, here I was sitting up in my sleeping bag, alone in the black night, wondering what had woken me.  At that moment, with a sinking feeling, I realized I really needed to use the bathroom.  How could I go by myself?  Could I wake someone up and risk becoming a butt of jokes in the morning because I was such a baby I couldn’t go to the bathroom by myself?  To a thirteen-year-old, the risk of humiliation is a strong taskmaster.  And so, disentangling myself from my twisted sleeping bag, I slowly stood up and cautiously stepped over my sleeping troop mates, fear rumbling deep in the pit of my stomach – or perhaps that was what I had eaten for dinner?  I stepped into the long hall that led to the bathrooms.  Down the endless hallway I went and was near the bathroom when, suddenly, I head the sound that had awakened me and froze.  The soft sound of a child crying was echoing somewhere close by.  Quickly, I inventoried the group in my mind. We were fifteen teens and three adults – no younger brothers or sisters or babies. 

Paralyzed by fear, I backed up against the wall.  The crying became louder and with it, came other voices, faint and fuzzy as on a radio which isn’t tuned properly. I caught snatches of conversations – words that were disconnected and overlapped and made no sense: “her cough” and “sunshine is medicine” and heard the rattling of invisible carts being rolled down the very hall in which I stood. I heard the sounds of doors opening and shutting, machinery running and what sounded like someone shouting outside.  An overwhelming odor, which I would later identify in my dad’s medical office as compound tincture of benzoin, filled my nostrils.  If you’ve ever smelled it, you don’t forget it. In my peripheral vision shapes shifted and floated by; indistinct and unidentifiable all imbued with an atmosphere of illness, heavy with worry and pain. Oddly enough, there was laughter as well counterbalancing the sadness, as if something healing had taken place here, too. It seemed as the hall in which I cowered was actually in another time and that time was layered with other times like transparent leaves of a book.  I was caught in between – not in the present and not in the past – an unwilling observer as immovable as a fly in amber as the activities of another age swirled around and through me.

My memory after this is somewhat hazy.  I know I finally mustered the strength to scream and was rescued by one of the adults in the group who determined that I must have been sleepwalking.  I tearfully tried to tell her what I had seen and heard and smelled and she just shook her head and scolded me for telling stories to get the other girls, awake by now due to my screaming, upset.  She was convinced I was trying to exact revenge on someone I had had a tiff with the previous afternoon and roughly ordered me back to bed.  I crawled into my sleeping bag and listened as, one by one, the others settled down and drifted back to sleep.  Exhaustion finally overwhelmed me and I fell into a fitful sleep.  My dreams were of this place and all that had taken place there – crowded with faces and voices and fear.  I felt like a passage to the past had opened up into my brain and I couldn’t stop the memories that flooded in.  I didn’t sleep well for a month after the experience and would wake several times a night in a frantic, heart pounding sweat.

Tent city in 1906 following the San Francisco earthquake

Eventually, I went to a friend of the family, Paula, who had a reputation for being psychic and confessed what was happening to me.  She helped me “close” the portal to the past, if that in fact is what it was.  I don't really claim to be "psychic" myself - but I do know the membrane is sometimes thin and my intuition strong.  Paula also helped me look up information about the camp.  Those were the days (the 60s) before the internet and finding information was not as easy as it is today.  The building we had been camping in had, in the early days of the century, been a sanitarium both for women and children.  Before being transferred to the Girl Scouts to be used as a camp, it had a long history of use from about 1903-1957 as a children’s home, a camp for victims of the San Francisco earthquake and a sanitarium for “tired women” with TB.  It was called Arequipa, Spanish for "place of rest" or "place of peace"

One of the therapies for the women was the creation of pottery.  The work of preparing the clay was done by boys from a San Francisco orphanage.  Arequipa pottery is very highly prized today.

The old fashioned word for TB is "consumption" – a good word for what happened to me on that long ago night; I was consumed by the past…

(In doing a quick web search tonight, I found that I'm not the only one who has experienced its hospital past.  I notice that the author of the haunted places description also mentioned the original sinks from the early days.  For some reason, that's a detail that has stuck with me all these years.  Whenever I go to an old building that had a past as some sort of institution, I notice the sinks and often sense that "time shift" like at Arequipa.  It happened just this summer when I visited Craigdarroch Castle in Victoria, British Columbia.  When I entered the restroom I was confronted  by a long line of those old fashioned sinks and everything seemed to slide for a few seconds.  As always, I hear, see and especially smell things that aren't there...at least in the present.)