5th grade camp

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In telling a story about my childhood memories I remembered 5th grade camp. I don't know how other states do it but here in Ohio, most schools have 5th or 6th grade camp depending. My son missed out on this experience due to COVID but I digress. One of the most memorable things that happened at camp is something that would not fly today. It's pretty wild to think about it now. There was this part of camp where we reenacted the Underground Railroad. We were portraying slaves and various adults played people who would either help us or try to capture us. I remember we had this conversation beforehand about how if we were scared, we just needed to stand next to our teacher and they would leave us alone. I remember we rehearsed songs in music class for a month or so before we went to camp in preparation for our Underground Railroad experience. We were a choir who had our master's permission to travel (at least I think that's the story we told it's been a minute I'm 38 and this happened when I was 10 almost 11). I remember learning songs that we sang when questioned about what we were doing without our master. We were told to go knock on doors and say we were "a friend of a friend". At one house we hid in an attic and some guy came barreling in and we heard a loud crash and the woman who was there to help us told us to run so we all had to run down the stairs and out the door. We got stopped by two teachers who were portraying men who wanted to check our papers and upon seeing the papers he tore them up. He took one kid out back and told the kid to scream because he was supposed to whip him and obviously he didn't actually whip him. We escaped from there and were captured by someone else. I remember it was one of the camp counselors who was portraying a blind man who also wanted to capture us. He asked me what color my master's horse was so I told him white and then he asked another kid on the opposite end the same question and they said black and he goes "A black and white horse eh?" The guy was from England so add the accent to the way he said it. Anyway, he captured us and made us all crawl on the ground behind him. I was at the end and as we were crawling I remembered these were the same trails they used for the horses we just rode the day before and decided I wasn't going to risk crawling through horse poop and stood up because after all this guy was supposedly blind so how was he going to know unless he broke character? I mean there's the possibility that being blind he had super hearing but 5th grade me didn't think about that. Eventually, my classmates all stood up too and we eventually all ran off and escaped. Later on, when we were talking about this experience with the teacher someone asked the one 6th grade teacher why he tore up our papers and he said "Because I couldn't read it" and we were all amused. Later that night they did a slave trade reenactment where they had different people portray slaves and they had them locked behind bars and were selling them. I look back and think wow, how did they get away with this? I found out the camp still does the reenactment but I'm not sure to what degree. I do know our kids no longer go to that camp. This same camp told us a ghost story called The Cement Man. I remember being told we had to sneak past the cabins of the owners because they weren't allowed to tell this story. I now know that was a bunch of malarky because the teachers and all the other adults were with us and if they were truly not allowed to tell us this story they wouldn't all be risking their jobs. They took us to this bridge and it was super dark and there were lanterns and flashlights and they told the story and there was an adult on top of the bridge where the cement man was supposedly buried in the cement under the bridge then there was smoke and the adult disappeared. We all had suspicions that the adult was the same teacher who tore up the papers during the underground railroad reenactment, but he denied it. The story was pretty detailed about how this guy had his arms and legs cut off and was put into the cement wall of the bridge with only a straw in his mouth. I can't remember the whole story anymore but I remember my brother, my niece, and I all went within a three year span of each other and we all heard different variations of the story, and they were all pretty detailed for a story told to a group of 5th graders. Later that night the girls in my cabin were all freaking out when we came back and the window was open which they swore was closed when we left. They all swore it was the cement man and I was tired and just wanted to sleep and I rolled over and ignored them and went to sleep. I had heard scarier stories because my brother and I used to tell ghost stories with our friends in the camper in our yard and my dad loved coming up to the camper and scaring us. I wasn't buying a cement man haunting our cabin. It's just funny to think about how many things they could get away with when I was a kid that they would never get away with today. I tell this story to other people, and they are shocked. I started to wonder if I was dreaming it all because everyone I was talking to were like "We never had anything like that happen" and then I started finding people that went to the same camp I did and they all remembered the same things. I have a few friends who went with me to camp but we have never really talked about it and I'm not sure what they remember about it. I need to bring it up to them one day and see what they remember. I find I often remember things more vividly than my friends which I always found odd.