Hello fellow campers…I thought I’d upload the ghost story so everyone could have it if they want it!
Go Stags!
Biz
You know there were a series of murders that happened around here right?
I found out about it online when I was looking up information about what this area was like.
The Mayor of Jamestown had a son who went crazy and killed everyone.
The mayor’s son, I think his name was Jed, anyway, Jed was crazy…When he was a child he did all the classic serial killer stuff like killing animals and being pretty anti social with other kids. His parents chalked it up to good old boys will be boys and since they lived near the entrance to the state park, they just let him run wild in the woods because in their opinion as long as he wasn’t hurting anyone or himself, what did they care. Around the time Jed was a teenager, he had been pulled out of school because he was constantly getting into fights and skipping classes and tearing up the class rooms. He was a nightmare at home too so his folks decided to build him a small cabin…more of a shack…up in the woods…
They would bring him food in the morning and at night. It seems cruel, but this was like 20 years ago and by this time, Jed’s dad was entering his first year as mayor, so they figured keeping Jed out of school and out of town would be best for everyone…especially Jed’s father. So as not to draw too many questions about it, Mr. Turner told everyone that Jed had gone off to private school in Europe and besides, Mrs. Turner was pregnant.
Then a little girl went missing. She and her parents were camping up in these woods and during the night their daughter disappeared. A week went by without anyone finding the little girl and then two hikers found the body. It was mutilated and barely recognizable. If it wasn’t for the fact that they found pieces of her favorite pajamas on her, they might not have known it was her.
It seemed like a wild animal had attacked her, but the Turners were scared it was Jed. Because of The Turners’ hectic schedule they both just assumed that the other had been feeding and checking on Jed. It had been 8 months since they had gone into the woods to check on their son.
A hunting party was organized, and went out into the woods, armed with shotguns and rifles. One of the more experienced hunters in the group followed the blood trail from the site where they found the girl all the way back to the small shack in the middle of the woods. Through the door, they could hear something furiously pacing back and forth, growling and yelling like a wild animal. When they looked through the small, dirty window, they saw a human being, on all fours, mouth, hair and hands crusted over with dried blood, snarling and drooling. They were just about to open the door and kill whatever that thing was, when they hear a loud “STOP!â€
They turned around to see the Mayor running up the hill toward them. He begged them not to shoot his son. He asked them please to just consider letting him lock up his son in the cabin so he could never leave. Because the Mayor had lived in the town his whole life and was a respected member of the community, the hunters reluctantly agreed, but only if they could do the barricading of the cabin. The Mayor, seeing that this was his only chance to keep his son alive, nodded, and the men set to work, nailing the doors and windows shut. They left Jed in the cabin with 10 years worth of canned and dried food.
They never told the rest of the town what they had seen…they shot and killed a wolf on the way back and told everybody that it had been the beast that killed that little girl, swearing never to reveal what they had really seen in the woods.
A year passed and then another and another and soon 9 years had come and gone and the Turners were able to ignore their guilt by focusing on their young daughter. The town forgot about the murder and the Turners’ oldest up in the woods. He was no more than a ghost story to keep the kids in line at the newly established Camp Turner, which had been the happy summer camping grounds of kids ages 7 – 18 for 5 years…that is until the bodies turned up.
It was the last week of camp and the two hottest teen couples had snuck off for one of their last nights of fooling around after lights out. The next morning all four bodies were found in the pool by the early morning swim group known as the Ducklings made up of the youngest campers at the camp. Their bodies had been cut open from stem to stern and had been gutted. They were like 4 human canoes waiting for the next riders.
One of the little Ducklings, when running to anywhere but there, tripped over what appeared to be a mound of dirt from a gopher hole, except when she and her counselor looked closer, thought it was too big for a gopher. As the camp and the surrounding woods were searched, they found over 20 more of these mysterious mounds.
Suddenly the ghost story about a wild killer locked in a shack in the woods didn’t seem that unbelievable. The citizens of Jamestown who were old enough to remember the Turner’s oldest boy and where they locked him up ran to the Turners house outraged that the Turners would have let this monster loose, but when they got to their house they found the whole Turner family slaughtered. The bodies were so torn apart that you could not tell whose body part belonged to whom, and scrawled on the wall in blood were the words “you’re all gonna die, one by one, sleep no more till the woodsman is done.â€
The town went into a panic. By this time the camp had been shut down and the children were all locked safely in at home. A group of the biggest, strongest men set out for the old shack where the Turner Boy had been imprisoned only to find that the shack was still locked tight from the outside. They pried opened the door, guns raised, ready for anything, only to find the cabin empty and what appeared to be several very deep holes dug throughout the room. Tunnels. They were tunnels. This explained the mounds of dirt found around the camp. The Turner boy, the town was very sure was also the Woodsman, had spent the last 10 years digging tunnels out of the shack leading all over Allegheny State park.
He could be anywhere.
There were 4 townsmen that night that went off into the woods to find and kill the Woodsman. They agreed to find and fill all of the tunnels. Two days later only one made it back to town. He looked like hell and it took most of the day to calm him down to the point where he could speak. He said that he and the other men split up and roamed the park following the tunnels. He and his partner had just finished filling up their 8th tunnel when they heard a horrible scream. They ran towards the sound only to find two of their friends dead. One, partially sticking out of a tunnel as if he had been crawling out for his life only to be ripped in half from within the tunnel, the other torn apart, scattered throughout a tree. The two surviving men ran for their lives. They no longer cared about sealing up the tunnels, they just wanted to live. Suddenly one fell, tripped up by a hole. As he struggled to get out, he felt a tug on his foot. His friend came back and grabbed his wrists and pulled with all his might. Then he felt his friend get jerked from his grip and watched him disappear into the whole. It was so fast and was done with such strength he couldn’t believe it. He stood in a daze surrounded by the screams of his friend echoing all around him. He grabbed his dynamite and set it off throwing it into the tunnel with is friend. He new his friend had no chance to live and figured he could save him from a greater pain by killing him and blowing up the tunnel and hopefully the woodsman as well.
Then he ran. He ran as far as he could before he was thrown by the explosion. Then he ran home.
The town agreed that the Woodsman had been killed by the explosion. When they went to check in the daylight, they were sure there was no way anyone could have survived. The next year the camp opened again. It’s been operating for the last 5 years with no incidents.
The Woodsman has once again become a scary story to tell around the campfire, but one of the rangers we talked to coming up here said that he has found the opening to one or two tunnels around the camp and the park when he makes his rounds. And that sometimes, late at night he has heard the sound of digging.

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