How the Tragedy at Camp Mystic Unfolded, Cabin by Cabin

The power died around 3 a.m.

Amelia Moore, 14, had been awakened about an hour earlier by a clap of thunder so near that it shook her cabin at Camp Mystic. There were screams in the night. She and her friends in “Angel’s Attic” were growing anxious.

Go back to sleep, a counselor urged them.

Violent summer storms—and even floods and power outages—were hardly unusual at the camp along the Guadalupe River in the Texas Hill Country.

“A lot of counselors had been here for so long they thought it was, like, nothing. So they were like ‘Just stay in the cabin,’ ” Amelia recalled.

But soon, other girls on Mystic’s Senior Hill began to crowd into Angel’s Attic and another cabin, Cloud 9, where another 14-year-old, Eliza Miller, was staying. Theirs were filling with water, they said. Two of those other cabins, Hangover and Look Out, were lower down the hill and would be submerged. Car alarms were erupting from the counselors’ parking lot.

Amelia heard more screaming, too. It was coming from an area just across the river known as the Flats, where Mystic’s youngest campers were clustered—including Eliza’s two younger sisters. In the logic of Mystic’s design, the idea was to keep them close to the camp’s office, dining hall and Rec Hall, a two-story building for campwide gatherings.

But much of the Flats sits in a Federal Emergency Management Agency-designated flood zone.

Escaping from ‘Giggle Box’

Eventually, Amelia fell back asleep. When she awoke around 7 a.m., she and the other girls discovered they were stranded. The bridge that links Senior Hill to the Flats was made impassable by rushing water and downed trees.

“We were so hungry. We were starving,” she recalled. They searched for food but Mystic’s strict policy forbidding girls from keeping snacks in the cabins was working against them. “As the day goes on,” Amelia recounted, “we were like, ‘Does anyone have food that they smuggled in? You won’t get in trouble. We just need food.’ ”

They joked about the storm, believing that they had borne the worst of it while the younger girls on the Flats had been spared. (Despite its name, Senior Hill isn’t much higher than the Flats). This notion was reinforced when counselors—either misinformed or trying to prevent panic—told them that the younger campers were all fine, and had ridden out the storm in Rec Hall.

As they awaited rescue, the girls were unsure whether they would be swimming or hiking to safety. They were also fearful that another storm might come. One of Amelia’s friends, Harper Lawrence, was particularly worried: her twin eight-year-old sisters, Hanna and Rebecca, had been in adjoining cabins, Twins I and II, on the Flats. Other girls had younger sisters there, too. Some tried shouting to them across the divide.

Don’t worry, they were told, the younger campers were happy and fed, and had evacuated to Mystic’s newer campus, Cypress Lake, just up the road. “We should have been a lot more panicked in the situation but we genuinely didn’t know that anything was wrong,” Amelia said.

Caution tape was draped across the dining hall entrance at Camp Mystic, in Hunt, Texas, after the flood.

A Black Hawk helicopter flying over the Guadalupe River near Camp Mystic looking for any survivors of the flash flooding.

As they bided their time, Amelia and some of the girls wondered aloud about what kind of training their counselors had received. The girls believed their counselors had been trained to deal with a mass shooting but it appeared to these campers that they didn’t know how to cope with a flood. That seemed odd. After all, Camp Mystic had suffered catastrophic floods in 1932 and 1935, soon after its founding, that washed away most of its cabins. A major flood hit again in 1987. Smaller ones were commonplace in the years in between.

Just two days before the floods, the camp passed its annual inspection by the Texas Department of State Health Services, which also signed off that it had a required emergency plan for disasters or other serious medical threats. A written plan of the emergency procedures was posted on-site, and all staffers and volunteers had been made aware of the plan during staff training or briefings, according to the report.

State rules also require that “campers shall be instructed as to their actions in the event of fire, disaster, or the need to evacuate.”

Amelia recalled no particular preparation for the campers—as to how they should react or where they should seek shelter. Some were as young as seven years old. “Everybody thought flooding was a possibility but we never got training,” Amelia said. Camp Mystic didn’t return a request for comment.

‘Wiggle Inn’: Floating on mattresses

The first helicopter touched down around 3 p.m., on July 4, and evacuations commenced. It was slow going, Amelia recalled. The aircraft could only accommodate a few people at a time.

Among the first to go was a grandmother who had served as a gatekeeper for Mystic. Amelia understood that the woman’s nearby house had been washed away and that she had been clinging to a tree for hours with a broken leg and ribs. Then came a diabetic camper who seemed to be on the verge of passing out.

The order of evacuation was supposed to be youngest to oldest. But it did not always work that way and tempers flared when new girls arrived and jumped the line. “It was hectic,” Amelia said. “There were counselors but no one on that hill was over 21 years old.”

Eventually, larger Black Hawk helicopters would join the effort. When Amelia’s turn finally came around 4 or 5 p.m., she climbed aboard and was handed a pen and paper and told to write down her name, age and her parents’ phone number. A cabinmate beside her seemed to be hyperventilating. She refused Amelia’s hand but then seized it as the helicopter lifted off.

They were whisked to the field of a nearby high school, which was now a landing zone. The girls were photographed and had their personal details entered into a database. Then they passed through a medical station, where Amelia and Harper bumped into a counselor in the cabin where Hanna, one of Harper’s sisters, was staying.

“I asked her: ‘Do you know where Hanna is?’ ” Amelia recalled. “She responded with: ‘I don’t know where any of my girls are.’ And that’s the first time I heard of counselors not knowing where campers were.”

Amelia reassured Harper that her sisters were fine—they were probably just in another part of the building. But in the recovery center grim stories were circulating. Much of the talk centered on the cabin known as Bubble Inn, and Eastland, Mystic’s beloved longtime director.

Inside Bubble Inn

Amelia heard about the girls from Chatterbox, one of the youngest cabins, who were passed through a window and then clambered—some barefoot—up a rocky hill in the dark. Amelia was now beginning to understand the screams she had heard the previous night.

“This is the part that makes me sick,” she said. “Because the whole time we were told that the Flats were safe and accounted for in Rec Hall. Like, we were told they were playing games in Rec Hall and that they were perfectly fine.”

A camp photographer who lent Amelia her phone to call her parents told her about her own narrow escape: She had been in Kozy, a staff space abutting the office, when she was swept away by the waters and forced, with others, to cling onto the poles at the nearby volleyball court. They removed their shirts and tied them together to form a rope so that they could climb back onto the building, the photographer said.

Frames hung from a wall stained with flood marks after the disaster at Camp Mystic.

All around Amelia, girls were crying; many hysterically. Some petted the emergency responders’ service dogs.

Amelia sat beside a first-year camper, Lucy Claire, whom she recognized from the dining hall. The girl, clutching a teddy bear and sobbing, had been in the same bunk as Hanna Lawrence.

“She’s freaking out,” Amelia recalled. “She’s like, ‘I don’t know if my parents are going to come.’ I’m like: ‘Lucy Claire, you know I love you. You know your parents love you. They want you—they’re probably on their way right here.’ ”

She braided Lucy Claire’s hair trying to distract her.

Then she asked: “Have you seen Hanna?”

Around 8 p.m. that evening, Amelia was finally reunited with her father. On Friday, she was to have her first grief counseling session. Next week she will travel to Dallas for the Lawrence twins’ funeral. As a tribute to them, she has painted a cross with their names—Hanna and Rebecca—a heart and a sun shining over Mystic-like hills.

Much still remains unknown about that night, when at least 27 Mystic campers and counselors were swept from the earth by a rush of water seemingly beyond their imagination. Many families have remained quiet. They were still too shaken, some said. Others seemed reluctant to say anything that might mar the reputation of a cherished Texas institution—one that unites generations of adoring mothers, daughters, aunts and nieces.

Why did Amelia speak?

“I think it’s really important,” she said, “that people understand what actually happened.”

Amelia Moore at Camp Mystic last year.

Write to Joshua Chaffin at [email protected], Patience Haggin at [email protected] and Peter Champelli at [email protected]