One of the coolest places to explore in the eastern part of the Great Toronto Area, Camp 30 is an abandoned WWII POW camp that's filled with an eerie history and countless photo ops.
It was summertime when I went to the eerie Camp 30 in Bowmanville with a couple of my friends.
Camp 30 was a school for delinquent boys that was converted to a POW camp for Nazi officers during WWII. After the war, it was used a private training school, a Catholic secondary school, and then as Darul Uloom Islamic University (for more information, click here); I was told that the last time it was a school, it was closed down because the principal was murdered there, but I wasn’t able to find anything about that when I did some research. Regardless though, I think that a lot of satanic rituals happen in those buildings to this day, which is evident in the graffiti as well as the fact that I found burned Bible pages. Not to mention the fact that the place is extremely creepy and you always feel like you’re being watched…but maybe that was just me being jittery and paranoid.
Pictured here are the various frightening things written on walls in some of the many buildings:
Apart from the POW and concentration camps I visited in Europe, this was probably the most unnerving place that I have ever set foot in. I had no idea that a place like this existed in Canada, let alone such a short drive from my old house in Brooklin. All three of us were too scared to set foot in the unlit basements, even with flashlights to guide us; it’s a place that seems as if it’s ready to swallow you whole and never spit you back out again. That you would go down there never to return.
Nonetheless, the grounds are still fun to spend way far too much time daring each other to venture down the warped and knotted wooden steps, like elementary school children taunting their friends to go ring the doorbell of the rumoured haunted house at the end of the street in those countless, clichéd movies.
There were also some things scrawled across the walls that I found captivating, things I found myself staring at and reading a few times over.
It was an adventure to roam through: climbing through broken windows, shimmying between unhinged doors, clambering onto roofs – all the while, navigating my way over shattered glass and a floor littered with trash, old rusted spray paint cans, and gaping holes that opened into the pitch black cellars. We all had our cameras out, capturing this uniquely horrifying and semi-secret world. In one of the buildings, we found smeared hand prints in what appeared to be grape juice, but directly beside it was dripping what seemed very much like blood. Marta even pointed out that it had the exact colour and viscosity of real blood, but we weren’t able to figure it out indefinitely.
I’ve included some of my favourite pictures that I was able to take, along with a few pictures of me scouring the area that Marta took, with one at the train tracks just outside of the camp (which I clearly wasn’t prepared for, judging by my weird facial expression).
Have you ever been to a POW camp, or any place that’s set your completely on edge? Where was it, and how long were you brave enough to explore the area? Let me know in the comments!
X,
Emily
*Originally posted on Emulating Emily