You're lost in the woods, it's the middle of the night, and all the creepy sounds of branches creaking and wind howling have you on the edge. Worse, you get the feeling you're being watched. Maybe it's a territorial wolf or Grizzly bear, maybe it's some mask-wearing chainsaw-wielding lunatic, maybe it's some carnivorous sasquatch, or a Wendigo, or some other local Boogeyman the people in town told you about. Are the sounds getting closer? You push on along the trail.
Then you see what looks like a campsite up ahead and several cars. Whew! Now you’ll have shelter, a fire, food, help and transportation!
Nope, this is an Abandoned Camp Ruins. The tents have been ripped to shreds, the fire has long since burnt out, the food boxes are empty and smouldering in the ashes and the cars the campers came in have been smashed and are in no condition to go anywhere. And if there are any people left, expect them to be the partially-eaten/murdered remains.
This trope is often common in Horror Films set in the wild. It shows that others have been in the area before The Protagonist, and that the area is dangerous, no matter how good it sounded, or looked from the outside. Now that you're out here with the threat, you're in a fight for your life.
Can be considered a Sub-Trope to Don't Go in the Woods, as that's definitely a place you're liable to find these. Can also apply to any other type of area where people like to go camping. May cause a Not the First Victim realization.
Compare Abandoned Playground, since both this and that are former places kids come to have fun. Compare also Abandoned Mine, as both are areas very remote and cut off from civilization.
Examples:
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Fan Works
- Quizzical: From Chapter 4, "Heavy Traffic In The Everfree Forest", a downplayed example with Dr. Stalker's camp, which isn't ruined, but just left alone for a day and with its owner lost in the forest while others are conducting a search:
"This isn't a crime scene, it's a work space," stated Professor Heart. "The only disorder comes not from a struggle but from work being done. See how they left the paperwork all carefully weighted down? They left intending to come back and get to work again. Clearly they just haven't been back since this morning."
Film - Live-Action
- Annihilation (2018): It's made clearer here than in the book that the Lighthouse is an abandoned camp for the previous expedition, where Lena finds the videotapes from her husband and which is also stained in blood.
- In the Friday the 13th franchise, a recurring location is Camp Crystal Lake, which is in a constant state of abandonment and attempted reactivation courtesy of the massacres caused by the Voorhees family.
- Invoked in Fyre, where some of the attendees at the Fire Festival, trying to camp overnight, ripped up the sleeping bags and urinated in tents nearest to them, so that nobody would get too close to them.
- In Never Hike Alone, a hiker named Kyle McLeod discovers the ruins of Camp Crystal Lake, which ends up turning him into a target for Jason Voorhees's latest rampage.
- The Weird West movie Ravenous (1999) is about a group of soldiers at a remote frontier outpost, setting out to rescue a party of snow-bound settlers in the mountains who have been forced by circumstances to eat their dead. When they arrive at the cave where the settlers have holed up, there's no one left alive... but the soldiers' problems are only beginning.
- The Thing (1982): When MacReady and Doctor Copper visit the Norwegian base camp in Antarctica, they find the place ravaged. No structure is left intact, and much of it has been torched. The pair get one clue when they explore a storage hangar: something very like a Flying Saucer is embedded in ice. Apparently, the two Norwegians pursuing the "dog" were the last two from this camp; all the others died in a fiery fight for survival.
Literature
- Downplayed in Congo: When the protagonists' expedition arrives to the place where the the missing E.R.T.S. expedition they were sent to find was camped, the narration notes that in the weeks in between the missing team's last contact and the protagonists' arrival the whole site has been Reclaimed by Nature and cleaned by the Killer Gorilla tribe who killed the team, and aside from a couple of gadgets there is no trace left.
Live-Action TV
- Creeped Out: In "Bravery Badge", the Brownies find the long-abandoned camp in the woods belonging to the previous scout troop who came out there long ago.
- Jungle Run has a challenge location called the Abandoned Camp.
Video Games
- Assassin's Creed Origins: Bayek finds one on an island south of Alexandria. No people, just a lot of hungry crocodiles, and a journal, the last entry of which mentions a strange rustling sound in the nearby bushes...
- Black Mesa has several scattered around the alien world of Xen, ranging from a few stacks of crates and a couple of scientific instruments to elaborate field laboratories in air-tight tents. Everyone working there is long dead by the time Gordon arrives, victim to either the hostile local wildlife or Nihilanth's Slave Mooks.
- Curious Expedition: One of the various tiles you can find are abandoned camp sites of previous expeditions. You can raid the area for supplies, but stay too long and you might find that dangerous predators have surrounded you on the main map.
- Etrian Odyssey III: The Drowned City: One sidequest involves investigating a campsite out in the Waterfall Woods. The surrounding area is quite beautiful, but the grounds themselves are in bloody disarray, thanks to the group being attacked by monsters in the middle of their sleep. Fortunately, they survived and made it back to Armoroad, leaving the site in ruins for your party to discover and assume the worst.
- Fallout 4: Frequently encountered spread out across the Commonwealth, often with feral ghouls or a deathclaw nearby to give a hint as to the fate of the campers. Though once cleared of the threat, can be a good place to search for loot or sleep to recuperate health (and save on Survival mode). Probably the best example is the Acadia National Park campground in the Far Harbor DLC (set on an island in Maine), as the island's eerie and persistent fog makes the area resemble a location pulled straight out of a Stephen King novel.
- Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water: You'll find a couple of remains of old campsites on Mt. Hikami, left there by people who have come to commit suicide.
- The Forest: There are plenty of abandoned camps in the game. They're stocked with items you can take, a fire you can cook meat with and warm up at, and sleeping bags you can sleep and save in.
- The Legend of Zelda:
- The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: In the ruins of Hyrule Castle Town Link can find the remnants of a campsite presumably used by explorers attempting to search through Hyrule Castle.
- The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom: The Zonai Survey Team often leave behind campsites in or near Zonai ruins where they could not proceed with their investigations any further. Link can usually find diaries left behind that give hints on how to solve nearby puzzles.
- QUESTER: Your team can find these strewn throughout the underground ruins. Not only do you have a chance of finding other Questers there, enabling you to recruit new members, these campsites also provide places for you to move your own base camp, putting them to good use.
- The Skeleton: The map has the camp that you were to meet your friends at in Story Mode. It's a circle of chairs around a fireplace next to a truck.
- Valheim: At the beginning of the game, you'll run into houses and villages built by the people who came to Valheim before you, which are useful as they give shelter, resources and sometimes food (some villages have boars and berry bushes, others have beehives). However, the further you explore, the more you run into houses occupied by monsters or undead, until even the starting Meadows biome has villages chock-full of draugr. Fortunately they all still have resources inside (and in some cases are the only way to get them).
- Vigor: Several maps have the ruins of small campsites as points of interest, many of which are marked on an Outlander's map once discovered. While most of these isolated areas are completely ransacked and not really worth making a detour to pillage they can occasionally be looted for useful supplies and may be worth checking out if the player is passing through on a nearby path.
- The Walking Dead: Season Two: In "All That Remains", Clementine finds a dog out in the woods. Some trekking later, she stumbles upon an abandoned campsite that presumably belonged to Sam's owners. While there, she attempts to find food.
Web Videos
- Bedtime Stories (YouTube Channel) has this as a recurring feature in episodes featuring unexplained disappearances in remote areas such as forests, mountains, and deserts. Often, said campsite ruins would feature destroyed tents, but surprisingly intact supply storages, untouched bags, and no signs of the former inhabitants.
Western Animation
- Kim Possible gives us the ruins of Camp Wannaweep, where Kim, Ron, and the rest of the Cheerleaders are lured into traps by Gill, a former camp bully mutated into a fish monster via the polluted lake, twice.
- In The Simpsons at the very end of the episode "Boy Scout N' the Hood," while Homer, Bart, Ned, and Todd (Ned's younger son) are rescued (accidentally because of Homer), celebrity guest for the father/son-rafting trip Ernest Borgnine, and the other Junior campers get lost during the river expedition and utlimately stumble into an abandoned summer camp to rest before continuing their trek. As they sing a round of "Bingo was his Name-O'," a slasher stalks the camp, and the last shot of the episode is horror music playing while the camera pans into a screaming Borgine.
Real Life
- The Dyatlov Pass Incident
: Sometime between February 1 and 2, 1959, 9 Russian hikers died under mysterious circumstances. Search parties found the group's campsite, their tent cut open from the inside - evidently, something had frightened the group enough that they fled in a hurry, inadequately dressed for the cold Russian winter. All 9 bodies were later found, some distance from the camp: 6 had died from hypothermia, while the remaining 3 suffered various physical injuries to the chest or skull. The case remains unsolved to this day, although investigators have come up with plausible theories as to what happened, such as the expedition being falsely startled by what they thought was an avalanche.
- In 1977, three Girl Scouts were raped and murdered at a summer camp by Gene Leroy Hart. That camp was permanently closed afterwards and has stood abandoned ever since. It is rumored to be haunted.
