Shadows at Camp Cedar Crest

Witness: Alex Snyder
Location: Orange, Connecticut
Date of Encounter: early May 2004

My senior year of high school one of my best friends asked me if I would accompany her and a group of our friends from school to a camp to help her mother with a function she was running. (Her mother was involved with an inner city elementary school.) The proposed function was a 3 day, 2 night camp outing at Camp Cedar Crest in Orange, Connecticut. 

I of course accepted and was glad to go knowing nothing at the time of what lay ahead. 
We arrived at the camp with all of the trappings for a 3-day camp adventure and that's what it started off as: singing, hiking, baseball, marshmallows, it was a great time… until nightfall.
That night after all of the little kids had gone to bed my friends from school gathered in the main cabin. It was a very large hall that served as the cafeteria and the main gathering center, it had a large fireplace (which was not lit) and row upon row of cafeteria table and chairs. Their was also a very small kitchen attached to it through a door at the rear. We were all gathered on a small couch and a collection of folding chairs by the fireplace talking and telling stories and just reliving past times. And as the night wore on, we started talking about ghosts and spirits and our experiences. Now I am a (if the phrase doesn't seem too strange) seasoned paranormal investigator. I have been interested in the paranormal since early childhood, so I have seen my fair share of spooky/creepy nocturnal events. Well as discussion continued the hour grew later, first 11:00 PM, then next I knew it was 12:00 AM and what I had noticed about this place was the depth of the darkness this place had. It was as if all light had ceased to exist, I mean here we were alone, in the middle of the woods, sitting in an old cabin in the middle of one of the oldest parts of Connecticut. I remember it was almost exactly midnight when the strange phenomenon began. We were all alone in this building and it was so dark that you could not see the other side of the hall from our location, there were windows, but no light was shining in, and I clearly remember there being a beautiful moon out that night. But there was only darkness in this cabin. I was in the middle of relating a story when I very clearly heard the sound of chairs being moved around at the other end of the cabin. I shut up immediately, and it stopped, so I started speaking again and a few minutes later it was happening again, so grabbing a flash light and a friend, we walked down to the other end to investigate, and sure enough several of the chairs had been moved and arranged so that they were facing toward us at the other end of the room, as if someone was listening. So we put the chairs back where they belonged and went back to the group. I finished my story without interruption and another friend began to relate a experience. It was then that we began to hear movement outside, three was still no light but you could hear people first walking, then running, then jogging, then walking again, around the building encircling it. Then we began to see these odd sort of shadows moving outside the window, it's odd to call them shadows because there was no light but it was as if they were blackness beyond darkness. They were in the form of people just encircling the entire building kind of like a dance, you could hear them just moving. By this point we were all very frightened, but all we could do was watch. It went on for close to an hour and then slowly they individually faded into the darkness. For the rest of the night we all sat crunched onto the couch taking turns sleeping and waiting for dawn.

The next day we went outside to look for signs of anyone having been there. There wasn't a single stick or patch of ground disturbed. It was all very odd. The next night passed without event and the next afternoon we all went home.

I have scarcely mentioned the event since it occurred, in fact, I don't think any of us really has. So I share it now to all who care to read it and ask for any insights on the events, or information on the location.