Christmas at Camp Hero

A fun fact you definitely don’t know about me. I actually spent a Christmas with my friend Geo inside Camp Hero. We used to love to explore out there. We were young so we would bungie a tape deck radio to our GT BMX handlebars and listen to Beastie Boys all the way to the lighthouse while peddling. It was freezing. We would stash our bikes and hop the fence. Sometimes we would bring in the radio. Like on Christmas, because we knew everyone was gone.

The bunkers were open back then. The giant one you see first that says DO NOT ENTER on it you could walk right in through a hole someone blew open with dynamite.

So as any real goonie would do you grab your flashlight and go inside and pray for the best. The inside is massive. The ceilings are three stories. On each side of the corridor are giant cages with doors in them. Little caged cells. In one particular cell is a metal chair. Not a nice metal chair. I’m talking the kind of chair from the dentist office with straps. Creepiest thing I ever saw there. It’s so dark, too. You could shine your flashlight down the hall and see nothing for yards. The more we crept in the stronger this smell got. It was like Napalm and mothballs mixed together with a bad AXE body spray. Brutal. So we got out of there pronto. I won’t even front like I wasn’t scared.

In one particular cell is a metal chair. Not a nice metal chair.

Now on the other side of the base was the fake town they built in case of an air raid. The idea was whoever “it” was would bomb this fake village instead of Montauk. Talk about creepy. We would go inside these rooms and it was just all hard beds and fake lamps. Really trippy.

There was another house which was the “Acid House” thats supposedly where they tested LSD on humans. Each room had different pattern walling.

We finally got restless and got the courage to break into one of the main offices. Inside I found a giant filing cabinet with old pad locks on it. They were so old we easily broke them open with some rocks. Inside we found thousands of checks for fractions of pennies from Boeing Airlines. It was the oddest thing. A check for $.000. It cost more money to print the check! I shoved some in my Jansport backpack (thats right, Jansport) but they were covered in dirt, grime and this funky dust.

Camp Hero photo by James Katsipis

It was the oddest thing.

So after trying to figure out what the checks were for I came up with a theory. If you know what a worm is, its a way to transfer large amounts of money into many accounts untraceable and unnoticed. Could they be getting funding secretly through other airlines? After all, it was an air force base. But unfortunately my mom threw them out thinking they were of garbage, so I cant prove any of this anyway. You’ll just have to take my word for it.

In another building was a full-on bowling alley. They had basketball courts. Staff halls just like normal bases. But what really got our attention was all the man hole covers all over the camp. Why so many? And why so spaced out all over Camp Hero and the lighthouse bluffs. The blueprints show nothing underground was ever built. But yet you can clearly see underground tunnels.You can still find them up there today and once in a awhile some eager person manages to break open the cement and get down a flight of stairs.

One problem. The government filled in all the underground bunkers with cement and then poured water on top. So unless you bring scuba gear you aren’t getting too far. Not that you would want to, because another rumor is that us where the government sealed off all its agent orange. Scary stuff. If you believe in that sort of thing. So why were they trying to keep us out so bad, or, what were they trying to keep in?