I spent a summer at Camp Fern-Point and I have seen things that no one should have. This is my warning to those who decide to go there: Dont. Plain and simple. You stay away from the town of Moss Lake and the corpse-like stretch of dead and dying forestry it borders on, and you should be set for a long and healthy life free of misery.
If you insist on going there and you are doing your research, you should have found this somewhere on the web amongst a plethora of colorful ads with smiling faces and open arms. They are all lies, and not a single word of it is true except a catchphrase you’ll find common to all of them. “It’s a once in a lifetime experience”. If you do decide to go there having read this, it may very well be your last experience ever. Have you ever wondered why you’ve never heard of Camp Fern-Point before? Is the lack of negative reviews astounding to you? If it’s as bad as I’m claiming, why haven’t you found a single news report or article about it? There are forces at play that keep the camp “safe” for the lack of a better word; forces that I can’t comprehend.
I’ve tried to use my experiences there to create a kind of survival guide. If you decide to go there and you follow every single rule to the letter, there’s a chance you’ll come out mentally broken and physically hurt, but at least you’ll be alive. At what cost? That depends on you. For me, it was two fingers on my right hand and one on my left. I have hallucinations and nightmares regularly and I am on 3 different medications at any given time. I spend my days cooped up inside my room because I don’t know if anything from that hell has followed me home, and anytime I do go out, I constantly look over my shoulder in fear of everything I see and don’t see. So abandon any idea of coming out unscathed in any way. The only way to do that is to avoid that place entirely.
In a way, this guide will highlight my experiences, my mistakes and the consequences that came with making them.
If you are completely prepared to ignore my warnings and head on, you need to understand a few things about Moss Lake before we enter the death trap that is Camp Fern-Point: it is a small town in the rural middle of nowhere, with a population of nothing for all I know. It’s about as pleasant as the name suggests, with its buildings and roads stagnant and rotting from disuse and lack of maintenance. You won’t find anything about it on the internet anyways, but you’ll somehow find your way to it like I did. It’s not the number of people that you should be concerned about, but rather what they do. The people of Moss Lake are like puppets or robots; they have no free will but instead go about their days with rigid routine and no deviation. They have no life of their own and you can see that in the breathless atmosphere that becomes dirty as soon as you set foot inside the town. Its like theres smoke in the air that chokes you but you cant see it. The people cant see it, but it has been absorbed by everything in sight, including the people themselves. You could observe them for days and not find a single aberration in what they do. Whatever controls them has erased the people that they once were and does not permit autonomy. Unless you want to become a part of Moss Lake permanently and participate in the endless stagnancy that echoes in its name, I’d suggest learning from my mistake and go in a group of people; being in a group provides you with a larger pool of resources in case of dire situations. You will find yourself doing things that you don’t want to do and that’s part of how the camp will get to you.
Bring with you a very sharp knife and sheath (and a sharpener if you feel you’ll need it), a compass, a flint, some form of blunt weapon (you can fashion one out of some dead branches later on too), and a small handheld mirror. Double check, triple check, or do as many checks as you want, but you cannot enter Camp Fern-Point without these items. These items were the difference between life and death for me.
Once you can confirm without the shadow of a doubt that you are inside Camp Fern-Point, it doesn’t matter what happens to the rest of the group as long as you stay alive. Don’t make friends or else you risk providing the Prey-Alls with an opportunity to grab hold onto you. ‘`What are the Prey-Alls?”, you may ask. It’s the name I haven chosen to give the powers that prevail over the god-forsaken camp. Giving them a name is like trying to reduce an infinity to a single word, but it helps understand a large part of what they will try to do to get to you. They will use your connections to anyone you meet to provoke you, to lead you, to cause you to hesitate. In Fern-Point, hesitation means death- not only of your body, but also your soul, which is a thousand times worse.
If you are on your toes at all times, you might live. Those who are in your group will not. Unwitting and unprepared, they will be slaughtered like animals one by one and no one will come looking for them. Not inside the camp or outside the town of Moss Lake. you will not hear their screams, nor will you find their bodies. You will not know their fate, and you will not find it unless you go looking for it. And if you do find it, you will suffer through what they did. Keep the knife, compass, and flint with you at all times inside Fern-Point. Do not let these leave your person at any time, even when you toss and turn through what little sleep you can find. It’s best to not bring a map because the Prey-Alls will mess with your sense of direction and time perception regardless and a map will only add to the confusion.
When you eventually decide to explore the dead forestry around you, I have one and only suggestion for you when it comes to direction: do not go north. It seems odd but trust me when I say that things only get worse when you go north. The creatures get more aggressive, day and night blur into an unending dusk, the trees become more and more imposing, like they’re watching you move past them. Whichever direction you choose to move in, you will come across various ponds of what appear to be clear fresh water with flourishing plants and ripe fruits near it. Do not drink the water in the ponds or eat the fruits that you can see there. The forest the camp is located in makes it impossible for these fruits to thrive and for the water to stay clean, so you’re better off eating vines from dead trees and drinking the water you find in leaves or dew. The dew is the safest option from what i’ve seen and as far as i know it’s one of the few things the Prey-Alls can’t control or manipulate. The fruits and water will make you violently ill, and that’s not what you need when you’re trying to conserve your bodily resources and energy.
If you see humans that you do not recognise from your group, do not interact with them. They are not real and it is imperative that you get as far away from them as possible. Even if they do look like people from the group, do not approach them. They will try to use all manner of tricks to get you to come closer to them; acting wounded and in pain, sitting around a campfire with clean clothes and food, appearing sleeping and audibly snoring. I shouldn’t even be calling them human in the first place. These creatures are anything but human. Their features may resemble those of humans at first glance, but if you go closer you can see their elongated fingers and limbs, unnatural teeth and eyes that are empty and sharp at the same time. An encounter with one of these “Mimics” is how I lost the two fingers I mentioned earlier. A well placed stab is how I managed to kill it, but you might not be so lucky.
But the Mimics are like mosquitos compared to some of the other creatures that you will encounter in the dead forests of Fern-Point. Apart from the one night’s sleep you will have in the shacks they call cabins given by the camp, there are no other buildings in the entire area. So if you happen across a wooden home in the deep woods that looks like a nice place to spend the night, do not enter it. It looks cozy and warm with soft light emanating from behind the windows and faint trails of smoke wafting from the chimney, but that’s the way that it lures you in. The building has no floor past the door, and instead houses a pit that you will fall into as soon as you enter. There are spikes at the bottom that will trap you from the impact of a fall of what looked to be a good 7 to 8 feet. While you may think this is man-made, it is not. The spikes move like hungry tongues and teeth, the edges of the pit shift constantly, and upon closer inspection you will see the house is not made up of wood at all, but instead is made of a material that more resembles your fingernails or a beetle’s shell. This “House-Bug” and any of its varieties should be avoided at all costs. I personally encountered only a handful including a tent, a shack, and a mud hut, so I don’t know how many there are or how many different types there are.
It’s not the size of the creature that you should necessarily be worried about. There are small creatures that can inflict fates worse than simply losing a few fingers. You’ll find a clearing in the forestry with a single warped and heavy looking tree in the middle. This tree will have an ashy color and dull yellow leaves. Do not touch the tree or go near it. The closer you get to the tree, the more clearly you’ll be able to hear a buzzing noise coming from what seems to be inside the tree. I wasn’t able to judge too clearly what the noise was for; maybe it uses the buzzing to attract prey to consume or is simply a side effect of its consuming mechanism. But I have seen what happens to anything unfortunate enough to enter its proximity, and you really don’t want it to happen to you. The surface of the tree looks normal, but is very very sticky, and whatever touches it is essentially stuck to it unless they want to lose a limb to get away from it. The source of the buzzing was made clear to me when I saw what I think was a fox approaching the tree and trying to climb it. With all four of its limbs stuck, it writhed about but couldnt get free. The small creatures that were settled on the branches of the tree disguised as its leaves started falling off and latching onto the fox with the buzzing growing even louder, tearing chunks of flesh off of the poor animal. Before I could even blink, the fox was gone- bones and all. The “Ashen” is not the most dangerous of creatures, but it at least guarantees a quick death.
Now on the matter of size, this brings us to the biggest creature of them all- Camp Fern-Point. I feel like it is a parasitic entity that has latched itself to Moss Lake like a leech and is draining it of its life one day at a time. No wonder the forest is dead and the people are dying whether they know it or not. It’s a living being in more than a figurative way, though. I have heard its heartbeat in the ground and seen it in the ripples of the puddles at times. The trees are its extensions and the creatures are its monstrous protectors. It is something that has been made in defiance of God, and left to fester in a place devoid of God’s presence like an oozing sore on the surface of the earth. Maybe the Coercives and its agents in the forests are the servants of the Camp, or maybe the Coercives have enslaved the Camp entity. I do not know what the full picture is, but I know that I am better off not knowing for my own sanity.
If you think you can simply climb a tree and figure out where the exit is, I am sorry to say that you are mistaken there too. I tried that and at first I thought I was getting somewhere when I climbed the tallest tree I could find that wasn’t a monster and searched around me to see where the forest ended. I saw the line of sickly trees stopped like zombies at a wall, and while it would take around 20 minutes of walking, I felt ecstatic because my hell was over and salvation was within reach. After around an hour of walking I climbed another tree and tried to figure out where I went off course, but the terrain had completely shifted and the edge of the forest was even further away than when I had first seen it.
That’s about it for survival, and a list of dos and don’ts. I think you get the point about avoiding most things that look harmless or normal.
But how do you get out of the camp? That is the most difficult part. I do not know if what worked for me will work for you, or if what happened to me will happen to you. For me, this is where the mirror came into play. I had cut myself on a branch and i was checking to see if it was anything serious when i noticed that the mirror was showing me something that wasnt there: the exit. I turned around and all I saw were the endless trees. I checked back and forth a few times and it was there in the mirror. I tried walking in every direction and turning around like a madman with my mirror in one hand and my compass in the other. Finally, I figured out what it would take to get out: find southwest and keep walking backwards in that direction. The Coercives will try and confuse you, but keep true to the southwest and within a day you will find yourself at the rotten exit of Camp Fern-Point. You will face resistance from the creatures of the forest who will have gained a kind of sentience and directive to hunt you down as soon as the possibility of you finding an exit comes into play, so I’d suggest moving fast.
The last problem you will encounter in Camp Fern-Point lies within it, but you will see the effect of the tendrils that it has placed in its host, the town of Moss Lake. The land of the town will be empty, as if it had never existed there in the first place, but the people will be dead- emptied out and discarded like wrappers. Moss Lake does not exist. Maybe it did at one point in time, but there are no records that I can find. There is no saying how old Fern-Point is, or if the camp is just the form that it has chosen for now, but my theory is that Fern-Point transfigures whatever land it gets into Moss Lake and uses the locals as its puppets.
I can tell you one thing for sure though, the camp was angry that I had found my way out. I felt a buzzing in the air working its way into my head that grew stronger and stronger until I set foot outside the town border. Then all I heard was silence.
I have a few words for you from the bottom of my heart, and you can consider this a warning; not from a cynical or practical point of view, but from a broken human to an unbroken one. I do not have the courage to go back, I do not have the guarantee that Fern-Point will still be there, and I do not know if the creatures have adapted to what I did there. Maybe you will encounter something I did not and maybe you will survive to tell the tale, but perhaps a swift death is preferable to a life devoid of anything worth living for. Maybe your friends and family have forgotten you, but perhaps not knowing your fate is preferable to them being claimed by the Camp in your pursuit. I have been rendered a ghost by the camp, so in a way it has claimed me as a victim. You will suffer through the aftermath in a similar way, being wiped from the world as a person. If you can live with that, consider what I have told you and take it to heart and mind.
But I hope that you, the reader, will never find this anywhere. If you do, it’s only a matter of time until you will need the advice I provide here.
If you find this, it is no coincidence.
If you find this, you have been chosen.
If you find this, good luck and may life grant you a second chance.