The Ghost of Hen House

by Belle
(Nashville, TN, USA )

(Photo from Chas Redmond)
Every year when I was a kid I would spend at least four weeks every summer at horse camp. As with most camps, there was a legend of a Ghost in one of the dorms. It was an outside dorm, a cabin rather than the dorms in the main building (our camp was pretty large) and the cabin was called Hen House.

The legend was that long before the camp was a camp, it was a Ranch and Hen House was actually lived in by a married couple, their two children, and one of the couples Mothers. The Grandmother was old and sick and couldn’t move around very well on her own.

The parents went out to work the ranch late at night for some reason and left their two children in charge of watching over their Grandmother, but as children often do, they got restless, bored, and decided to wander off.

When they returned, their Grandmother was on the floor next to her rocking chair, fingers curled as if clawing at the carpet, eyes wide open and stone cold dead. When the parents returned the children confessed that they had wandered away from the cabin and they hadn’t been watching their Grandmother.

The father took the boy outside and beat him so hard with a belt that he could never sit down again. The little girl on the other hand woke up every night in a cold sweat screaming because the Grandmothers ghost haunted her, crying, whispering “Why did you leave me to die??” over and over again in the girls ear.

The legend continued with the Grandmothers ghost unable to rest or leave the cabin, and any camper who tried to sneak out at night would be forever haunted by her restless spirit. On my last summer as a camper, I was sixteen and my friends and I were taking pictures outside of Hen House with an old Polaroid.

Suddenly, one of my friends was watching the pictures develop, and she gasped and jumped back. I grabbed the picture, and there, in the window of Hen House, you could clearly see the cloudy figure of a woman looking out. We were confused and shocked, and that picture ended up in the dining hall on the wall as official proof of the Ghost of Hen House.

I came back to that camp for four summers after that as a counselor and that picture continued to remain on the wall, confirming the legend.

Hen House Ghost Legend

by Belle
(Nashville, TN, USA)

(Photo from Lee Haywood)
Every camp usually has some made-up ghost story to keep campers on their toes, and the horse camp I went to every summer for my entire childhood and teenage years was no exception.

In one of the dorms we call “Hen House” there was supposedly a ghost that haunted it and once I was old enough to stay in that particular dorm/cabin, the other campers would tell me stories about hearing noises at night.

I was skeptical and unafraid, I’ve never been the type that got scared easily. I did hear noises now and then at night but I attributed them to creaky floors and wind against the windows.

When I was fifteen, we were outside Hen House taking some silly pictures with a polaroid. I pulled one out of the camera and watched it develop only to notice something a little odd in the upper window.

It looked like the figure of an old lady, a milky figure with black eyes. Excited, I started showing it to the other campers, who showed it to the counselors and word spread quickly that there was proof of the Hen House Ghost!

The picture ended up going on the cafeteria wall, and I was a camper there for one more year and then a counselor for three summers after that and that picture remained up, becoming an important part of the Hen House Ghost Legend.