Creative Writing: Asleep On The Beach

Asleep on the Beach submitted 13 hours ago by ravacah
I was a boy scout, though its been a few years since I’ve had much to do with them, but that’s a story for another time.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the program, there are these things you can get called merit badges, which basically are like “hey, I learned a bit about this topic”. Most years, troops will go to an official scout camp to work on stuff like that for a week or so.
This is an experience I had at Camp Meriwether, which is on the Oregon coast. Now there are three ghost stories running around the camp while I was there. First was a bigfoot rip-off called the “cape ape”, which was about as believable as most stories of that kind.
Next were “demon leaves”, which were

A Norwegian lumber barge called the Strømwellwas caught in a storm and dragged into the cape where Camp Meriwether now resides. It was broken up and the wreckage washed ashore on the beach near the cape. Only the captain survived, trapped in the wreckage while his crew and his young wife drowned in the storm. He was found by some natives and died a few weeks later from gangrene in one of his shattered limbs. Apparently, he went mad from grief before the end, rambling on about how he should have gone down with the ship so that the others could have survived. It’s probably been embellished over the years, but that’s how I heard

I was soaking wet on the sand, and someone was panting heavily above me. I sucked in air heavily.
“Can you walk?” he said.
I pushed myself up. My limbs were weak, and I was shaking in the cold.
“Good. Let’s get you warm.”
We walked to the lodge, and I drank some hot chocolate. He was gone for a while and returned with my things.
“You saw her, didn’t you?”
I nodded.
He told me the tale of the Strømwell then and walked me back to my troop’s campsite. I never caught his name, and he wasn’t one of the camp counselors, or at least I never saw him again for the rest of the week. Oddly enough, my notebook held the sketches of star positions I needed to get the merit badge, despite me having never drawn the last two.
A few strange symbols were drawn on the last page of that notebook in green ink. I didn’t draw them in. I don 't own a green pen. I’ve seen those symbols a few places since, on old buildings, in the woods, and once in a graveyard. I try to avoid places where I see them, but its nice to know that someone is watching