I don’t know if the boys’ cabins traded the same kind of ghost stories. This is the kind of story you hear at camp, or the kind you tell, a currency that girls exchange for shock value and popularity. The next day the cops found a young woman who had been strangled and raped, a tree branch shoved up her vagina. She felt a warning twinge, said no thanks and watched him drive off. She’d been walking home late at night from a party in Ann Arbor when a good-looking guy on a blue motorcycle pulled up next to her, offering a ride. She wasn’t a murder victim rather, she’d had a close call, a near miss, with a man who later turned out to be a serial killer, the perpetrator of what became known as the Michigan Murders.
Or maybe her friend’s older cousin: one of those twice-removed protagonists of a supposedly true account. At night, in a dark cabin, a girl told the rest of us about her older sister’s friend. I was around 12, so this was in the time of disco. The first murder I remember was a ghost story, told at my summer camp in Michigan.
