When I was 11, my parents sent me away to this summer camp for an entire month. It was somewhere in upstate New York, but I forget what the exact area was called. At any rate, it was the sort of place where we slept in sleeping bags, drank bug juice, sung campfire songs, roasted marshmallows – the whole deal. One night everyone in my cabin decided to sneak out and break into the camp’s walk in freezer to get ice cream, despite the rumors that there was a ghost haunting the campgrounds.
We sat around waiting after the lights were turned out, when we were supposed to have gone to bed. After a while, we carefully peered out the window to make sure nobody was out with a flashlight, knowing we’d get in a lot of trouble if we were found out. After all, we figured, they made that ghost story up to scare us into not leaving our cabins after dark. Tip toeing out the door, we quickly (although probably not that quietly) made our way across the camp to the hut the kitchen was in.
The skinniest kid we were with climbed through the small window and opened the side door of the building. We were giddy with the feeling that comes with doing something mischievous as a kid at camp. After entering the kitchen, we started to walk down a hallway to where the walk-in freezer was, which we knew would be filled with everything from cheeseburgers to cartons of orange juice to the ice cream we sought. As we rounded the corner, we came upon a ghost sitting at a table, eating fudge swirl ice cream from a huge tub with his hands.
We all stood there in shock, starting at the ghostly figure. A moment after the eerie scene sunk in, the ghost looked up at us and we saw – it was Bill fucking Murray! He stood up, face and hands covered in ice cream, and waved his arms wildly in the air. Without a pause he said, in a ghostly tone, “OOoooohh!! Noooo one will ever belieeeeve yooou!!” At that, we all screamed and scrambled out of there in a panic.
To this day, I can’t take Ghostbusters seriously.