I was scrolling through the podcast options on Spotify, looking for something that would keep us entertained for the long drive back from our daughter’s college, when I spotted a name that sounded familiar. 

Did that say Camp Shane? That old camp in Ferndale?

On second look, I realized I’d misread the second word — Shame, it read, not Shane — but the similarity wasn’t coincidental. The eight-episode investigative podcast was about to take us on a journey into a 42-acre swath of Sullivan County few county residents have ever visited. 

Summer sleepaway camps scattered across Sullivan County are ubiquitous, stretching across hundreds of thousands of acres, and drawing hundreds of thousands of kids to our corner of the world each year. They spend summers slapping at mosquitos and learning to swim in our woods, and most of us never see much beyond fences and gates and a sign at the end of a driveaway. 

These camps fall into a sort of nether world. We know they’re there, but the goings on inside the gates are so removed from our lives that we simply forget that there are hundreds of lives being lived inside. 

As a kid growing up in Sullivan County, my own experiences with these camps were unique. The daughter of a local contractor, I spent many a summer afternoon inside those camp gates. When I wasn’t running back and forth between the company truck and the camp HVAC system to fetch tools and gadgets or completing menial but necessary tasks (that dented air return vent won’t straighten itself, you know), I stared, wide-eyed at laughing campers shuffling from activity to activity.

They all seemed to be having the time of their lives. I wanted to be them, begged my parents at times to let me be them. But like most Sullivan County kids, camp wasn’t in the cards for me. I lived the life parents from places like New York City, Chicago and LA were paying thousands to access for their kids. Why would I need to go to camp?

Camp Shame, believed to be the first-ever co-ed weight loss camp for kids in the US, wasn’t one of the camps I visited as a kid, but as an overweight kid growing up in a time of emaciated models and heroin chic, it fell right atop my list of places I wanted to go. 

Several decades later, after hours of listening to former campers and staffers detailing years of alleged starvation and wanton neglect, I feel lucky to have dodged that particular bullet even as my heart breaks for all the campers who came to Sullivan County in hopes that their lives would be changed but left with yet more pain. 

No doubt many of the county’s sleepaway summer camps have provided lifelong magical memories for kids, not least for some of the world famous actors and actresses who have name-checked their time at Loch Sheldrake’s Stagedoor Manor in the likes of the New York Times. 

But Camp Shame serves as an eight-episode reminder that each summer, there are thousands of kids coming to our county, and we, the residents of Sullivan County, may never know what’s really going on inside those gates.