I am now old but was owning in the eighties a campground somewhere in North America. I will not give more details about the location since the current owner has enough problems making it a profitable business.
It had been a good era in my life, living close to nature, having a lot of space for the kids, making people happy during their holidays. One event really disturbed me though, and could have made me go bankrupt if I had not done what I did.
It was the end of summer, the temperature was decreasing and the majority of the tourists had already gone back home. Remained the more dedicated or poorer ones. One family arrived, they had rented a plot for their trailer for a few days. My campground was on their path and a good place to have a break before taking back on the road.
I saw them to the plot they had rented and wished them a good stay. They were lucky, despite of the lower temperature, the weather was still good. Moreover, they had chosen a remote plot close to the lake, so no noisy neighbor or engine to wake them up.
The days passed, people were living and I was doing some repair work here and there, getting everything ready for the next season before closing the site. A week later, I had now to wear a coat on the morning, I checked the rental records. Shit, I said to myself, I totally forgot this family!
They had been so discreet and far from the rest of the tourists that I forgot about them, clearly a beginner mistake I should not have done.
I immediately got there riding my quad bike. Their trailer was indeed still there, clothes drying on a clothesline. I got closer and everything was neat and clean but the clothes had been clearly dry for a long time.
I stopped my quad bike and got off it, then I walked in the direction of their trailer. I said hi, two times, the second time louder, no answer. I walked around to see if anyone was there, still no one. Eventually I checked if the door was locked and it was.
Coming from inside, I was smelling something strong, unpleasant. Something happened there and I had to open that door. I got the crowbar stored in a bag hooked to the quad, came back, and broke open it.
Inside, blood smell literally invaded my noise. What happened there did I think? I kept the door open to get some fresh air inside and went towards the bedroom. It was a small trailer and the family, parents with their young son, could easily sleep in the only bedroom. I would lie if I told you I was not stressed at that moment.
The smell got stronger as I got closer to the bedroom, door closed but not locked. I took a second, to get ready for anything I could see, and opened it. Inside, three dead bodies, or not really bodies, skeletons. Three very clean skeletons in their beds, in crazy positions like they had tried to move or to fight something. The sheets and pillows were covered of dried blood though, but if not for that, everything was abnormally clean.
After this sight, I nearly ran to get out of the trailer and breathed deeply for a few minutes. What happened there? What ate these people to the bones? I was not prepared for this. A day before I was repairing a shower and saying bye for the last couple living. This was the sort of thing happening in horror movies or big cities, not in my campground.
I took a moment to think, to clear my mind. Back in the day, the campground was hardly profitable, so having its name published on the masthead of the local newspaper for a suicide-murder-weird case, was not possible. Calling the police didn’t even cross my mind. Instead, since I was alone there, I first tried to understand what had happened.
There were bears in the forest, but bears don’t do this. I quickly got short on rational explanations. After an hour looking around their plot, in their car, below the trailer, I got back into their bedroom. I was now wearing gloves and got closer to the skeletons. They were so clean, like something very hungry ate and sucked everything from this poor family.
Looking closely and lifting a little bit a leg or an arm, I noticed something, a small bug. It was hard to identify since it had been squashed but I knew quite well the local bugs. I took two more I found in the bloody sheets and got back to my office. There, I used a magnifying glass to have a better look at what they were.
They were looking like bedbugs. I still hate these things today. Once, tourists had brought some back with them and I had to call an exterminator to clean a trailer. It looked like this family had did the same, but bedbugs don’t kill people, do they?
I grabbed a book I had about bugs and checked for all the different living species, but none was perfectly matching what I had in front of me. Could it be a new and lethal species? I sincerely never got an answer to that question, and still don’t want to.
Between putting my business at risk of bankruptcy and cleaning the shit myself, I choose the second one. This family had rented there for a few days. As they told me, it had not been planned beforehand and they had paid me in cash. No one would suspect them to have stayed in my campground, this was an opportunity to save my business and my own family.
I grabbed a jerrycan and got back to their trailer. If these bugs were responsible for this nightmare, I had to make sure they would not infest the entire site. I parked the quad a few meters away, then poured gasoline around their trailer and their car. Then, I continued inside until I reached again the bedroom.
By curiosity, I lifted the mattress. I knew bedbugs were attracted by dark and hidden places, and I don’t know why but I needed to see those beasts if they were there. What I saw terrified me. One centimeter (0.4 inch) vivid red bugs, stuck together, swollen by the blood of their victims. They moved to escape the light but filled of blood as they were, they were not fast. I let the mattress fall with disgust and quickly spread gasoline everywhere in the bedroom.
I left this nightmarish place, lighted a matchstick, then threw it on the gasoline around the trailer. I watched it burn until only smoke was waving on top of this cursed plot. The next two days I cleaned everything, pushed the car and the trailer’s wreck into the lake, and double checked if there was any surviving bug, happily not finding one.
For the next two decades I owned this campground I never encountered again such tragic event. But, and the current owner still does it, I never rented again this plot, just to be sure. I will surely never know what happened. I hope it was the only case, and since then, I am always careful about where I am sleeping, and I hope you also are!