Former Trails Carolina camper recounts stay at embattled ‘wilderness therapy’ camp; ‘I have nightmares that I’m still there’

TRANSYLVANIA COUNTY, N.C. (WGHP) — After a camper’s death was ruled a homicide, other former campers are coming forward to talk about their experiences at Trails Carolina.

Monroe Nichols, now 21, is from Ohio. While struggling with anxiety and depression during her senior year of high school, Nichols spent around 77 days at the wilderness camp in Lake Toxaway, North Carolina, from January to the end of March 2021, including her 18th birthday.

“I was falling behind, and my parents were concerned about me graduating on time or being able to go to college. At the time, my parents felt it would be beneficial to my mental health to get out of the school system for a break, and I’ve always been a huge nature lover,” Nichols said.

Her love of the outdoors and need for therapy made the combination — wilderness therapy, as Trails Carolina is advertised to be — seem logical.

Trails Carolina worked with children ages 10 to 17. It described itself on its website, which is no longer accessible except through a web archive, as being “dedicated to helping teens work through behavioral or emotional difficulties, build trusting relationships with their family and peers and achieve academic success.” The camp charged up to $715 a day in tuition and a $4,900 fee for children to enroll.

Nichols’ parents drove her to North Carolina under the pretense that they were going to buy a car for her sister. She did not realize she was being taken to the camp until she arrived.

Many of the people with whom she attended the camp told her that they had been “gooned,” taken from their homes and transported to the camp by strangers hired by their parents.

This was also how a 12-year-old boy, who suffocated to death at the camp in February, and a former camper , then-12 who later filed a lawsuit alleging that Trails neglected to prevent sexual assault, were taken to the camp.

Nichols described her overall experience at Trails Carolina as “horrible,” but she said she believes other campers had it worse.

“I was almost an adult and became an adult while I was there, so a lot of staff members were very lax on monitoring me,” Nichols said. “I can only imagine how some of my groupmates that were treated far worse feel day to day.”

Health and Safety

Nichols said they were consistently under-fed. They were served meals — usually rice, beans or quinoa — in measuring cups, a practice that Nichols believed campers struggling with eating disorders found particularly difficult. Female campers were given a maximum of two cups of food, and male campers got three cups, which she said was not nearly enough for the amount of physical activity they did each day.

“If you asked for seconds too many meals in a row, staff would shame you,” she said. “At first, we were allowed a Ziploc of dried fruit per week or two, but they eventually took that away because it was ‘too much sugar.’ Occasionally we got apples or oranges, and we would get into actual fights over the best fruit because we were so malnourished.”

Nichols also recalls eating toothpaste in a desperate bid to get sugar.

“I couldn’t keep the food we were given down because of stomach problems and would often throw up meals. I wasn’t given replacement food until the last couple weeks of my stay and was punished whenever I got sick,” she said.

For drinking water, Nichols said were expected to use bandanas to “filter” stream water to drink, she said, the same bandanas they wore while hiking. The bandanas were frequently sweaty, bloody and dirty, and campers often got sick from drinking dirty water.

Nichols is still in contact with some of her former groupmates who also had negative experiences at the camp. She shared statements which she says were provided by these former campers on the condition of anonymity.

“We were forced to drink water from an unfit water source,” another camper said, according to Nichols. “It looked like iced tea even after it was filtered. At least three people got giardia, and we weren’t allowed any sort of rest.”

Giardia is a small parasite that causes giardiasis , which can involve weeks of diarrhea. People can be exposed to the parasite through feces, unclean drinking water or infected animals.

In terms of personal hygiene, campers were only allowed to shower once a week and were not given proper soap or deodorant. Nichols said that several campers suffered from yeast infections due to the unhygienic conditions.

“At one point, I had a massive mat in the back of my head because I can’t brush my hair unless it’s wet and we rarely got showers,” a statement attributed to a former camper said. “I begged them to let me cut it out, but, instead, I was forced to painfully brush it out dry in the freezing cold, and it took me four hours.”

Nichols added, “We also weren’t allowed to use the bathroom most of the day. If the staff didn’t decide to set it up, we had to hold it. We were drinking a ton of water and a lot of us ended up wetting ourselves. Staff would force us to wear the soiled clothes anyways as a punishment, or, other times, because we had so few clothes, students just had to wear them out of a lack of options.”

Staff would not provide adequate medical care for the children camping there, often not reporting or not treating injuries that the campers suffered, according to Nichols.

“A girl in my group fell and hit her head during a hike and was knocked out by the impact. When she woke up, she was just told to get up and keep going and never received any medical assistance,” Nichols said. “A girl with Tourette’s had a serious tic attack and started punching a tree. Staff simply stood there and watched, yelling at her to stop but not helping. Eventually, we had to pull her away ourselves because her hands were torn up and bleeding, and the entire group received a punishment for touching a fellow student. This girl ended up with her hand seriously injured and had it wrapped up for weeks.”

She said the camper’s hand was never X-rayed.

Another camper reportedly had to get surgery after leaving Trails due to an injury sustained at the camp.

Nichols herself said she “pulled something” in her chest during a panic attack and was told to “walk it off.” For weeks, she says she experienced pain when she tried to breathe.

Statements that Nichols said she received from others who attended the camp describe multiple campers being ill to the point of vomiting with no medical care, a camper who had recently recovered from an injury fell while hiking and ended up needing crutches and multiple campers reporting bloody stool, which, in at least one instance, was dismissed by staff as menstruation.

“A girl came in with a severe [eating disorder], could not have been more like 90 pounds max, and was still expected to carry the same weight as us and hike the same amount of miles,” said a former camper, according to Nichols. “They gave her a small backpack because she was super short, but it had the same amount of stuff/weight.”

The statements referenced anecdotes that former campers had heard from others, such as a girl who had fainted multiple times and was given only a helmet by staff. Another girl reportedly could not keep food down but was forced to continue hiking.

“She later developed Bell’s palsy, and they didn’t take her to see a doctor,” the statement said. Bell’s palsy is a type of temporary facial paralysis linked to other conditions or illnesses, such as exposure to toxins, infection or high blood pressure.

In a lawsuit filed in February 2024, a former camper alleged that her groupmates developed pinworms from unclean water and claimed that she got staph infections and a UTI due to unsanitary conditions. She said she lost a significant amount of weight due to a lack of adequate food and was deprived of a shower for more than a week when she arrived.

“Trails Carolina conceals incidents of physical neglect, child deprivation, injury and sexual assault and battery between children from the public, including Plaintiff and her family, for the deceptive purpose of lulling parents into a false sense of security when entrusting their children to Trails Carolina’s exclusive custody and care,” the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit is currently ongoing.

Allegations of abuse

According to Nichols, staff members were, at best, poorly trained and ill-prepared and, at worst, callously abusive.

“Staff were verbally abusive and would often pit us against each other. Frequently, whenever an individual would do something ‘wrong,’ they would instigate more conflict by involving others in the problem. We were yelled at and mocked for being upset and told to just get over it because we were ‘the ones who put ourselves in the situation,'” she said.

Nichols discussed how one of the therapists was notorious for her verbal abuse, infamous for referring campers to other facilities instead of signing off on them going home.

“One of her patients found out they would be going to a boarding school instead of home and understandably began to cry. [The therapist] mocked them for it openly,” she said.

Nichols described Trails Carolina as “absolutely criminal” in the lack of proper training given to employees. She said it seemed as though staff “had no idea what they were getting into.”

“Some of them realized how horrible the place was while watching my group,” Nichols said.

She said she did not believe that all staffers were actively malicious and noted that some had noticed her unhealthy weight loss and snuck her food.

“We were gaslit and broken down until we believed we deserved what we were going through. You’re a different person at Trails. You have to be. It’s fight or flight 24/7 and your only goal becomes surviving,” Nichols said.

Restraints

In an autopsy for a 12-year-old boy who died in February at Trails Carolina, the medical examiner’s office ruled the death homicide by smothering. He died zipped into a bivvy bag, a type of lightweight single-person tent, which was improperly arranged, according to the report.

The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services had cited Trails Carolina for improperly restraining campers before in 2023 and in 2019.

While she was at the camp in 2019, Nichols recalled that Trails staffers were hesitant to make any contact with campers at all, saying, “Staff were very jumpy about touching students whatsoever and would avoid it as much as possible, even if a student was being injured or injuring someone else, which in my opinion is better than excessive force, but it was clear they just didn’t know what they were really doing.”

However, she did recall the use of the so-called “burrito” method. This form of restraint involved counselors rolling a child in a tarp and the counselor laying on top of the child through the night. This method was referenced in the lawsuit filed in February , and Nichols provided a statement from another camper who said they “experienced the whole getting-wrapped-up-in-a-tarp thing for the first few days, and the other kids in my group had to do it as well.”

The NCDHHS “statement of deficiencies” filed against the camp stated, “Seclusion, physical restraint and isolation time-out may be employed only by staff who have been trained and have demonstrated competence in the proper use of and alternatives to these procedures. Facilities shall ensure that staff authorized to employ and terminate these procedures are retrained and have demonstrated competence at least annually.”

In the missive sent to Trail Carolina after the child’s death, NCDHHS wrote, “Further, we want to remind you that the use of restrictive interventions must be reported as outlined in the IRIS manual for which Trails Carolina is subject and must adhere to.”

The misuse of restraints, according to The Guardian , is prevalent in these kinds of facilities.

Parental Communication

Campers at Trails, who were by and large minors, were heavily restricted in how much they could communicate with their parents. The NCDHHS noted deficiencies in this area during prior checks on Trails Carolina.

According to the lawsuit, the victim claims their outgoing mail was intercepted and that staffers were dishonest with her parents when she tried to tell them that she had been being assaulted by other campers.

Nichols had a similar experience, saying that staffers told her that they would not mail her letters unless she re-wrote them.

“I’d gone into too much detail about how little food we were getting, and they wanted to censor it,” she said.

Trails Carolina staff would allegedly tell campers that they would be forced to stay longer or be referred to another facility if they complained about the conditions to their parents.

“Our parents had no idea what was going on because they made it impossible to know,” Nichols said.

The allegations against Trails

“The camper’s death was what initially spurred me and some others to talk about our experiences in hopes of preventing another,” Nichols said.

During her time at Trails Carolina, they knew about the death of Alec Lansing , a camper who died in 2014 after running away from Trails Carolina, breaking his hip and succumbing to hypothermia. The tragedy was used as a cautionary tale, she said: “Don’t run away, or you’ll end up like him.”

When Nichols heard of the camper’s death in 2024, she was terrified.

“I remember crying and sending an article to my groupmates, and we all had a talk about what may have happened and how terrible we felt for this kid. It’s been a topic off and on for us since the death and brought up a lot of unresolved and buried anger,” she said.

It was his death that inspired her to come forward and talk about what she’d experienced at Trails Carolina.

The plaintiff in the sexual assault lawsuit attended Trails Carolina in 2016, five years before Nichols and her group. Nichols said she had not heard of anything like that happening to her groupmates while she was at the camp, but she did say staff appeared to be aware. Staff reportedly said that they had single-person tents due to campers being sexually assaulted when they used two-person tents.

“Based on the way counselors talked about sexual assault happening in the past, it seems to be well known within the company,” Nichols said.

According to the lawsuit, “Trails Carolina, by its corporate policies and practices, acts, failures, condonations and omissions, and [a counselor] were directly responsible for, and created an environment that enabled [the victim’s] abuse and neglect, as well as the abuse and neglect of other girls who are too victimized and afraid to allow their voice to be publicly heard.”

Troubled Teen Industry

Trails Carolina appeared to follow the model of “wilderness therapy camps” that are part of the larger “troubled teen industry.” This industry has long been at the center of controversy due to questions about efficacy, methodology and the loose regulations around them in certain states.

“Staff openly told us that the purpose of Trails was to break us down to our lowest so we had nowhere to go but up,” Nichols said. “It was intended to be brutal and traumatic. We experienced a lot of emotional, medical and physical neglect.”

The lawsuit corroborates this, stating, “Trails Carolina conditions the children to adhere to the practice of strict obedience of its employees and encourages an environment of ‘breaking down’ the children, creating an environment of fear and silence.”

Nichols believes it’s important to focus on the industry itself “where fault actually lies,” not the parents who may have been misled into sending their children to camps like Trails Carolina.

“They straight up just lie to people about what Trails is,” a statement attributed to a former camper said, claiming that the camp misrepresents the types of activities and the living situation the campers are in.

According to Nichols, her parents believed Trails Carolina was of a higher standard than other wilderness therapy programs. They believed Lansing’s death was the only known issue with the camp.

“Compared to some of the other programs with pages of problems, they figured this one must be safe,” she said. “I think the recent death at Trails really highlights how even the ‘good’ places aren’t actually good. They’re just skilled at hiding what goes on.”

Concerns about kickbacks

Nichols said she believes some referrers have a financial stake in pushing parents toward similar programs.

North Carolina has laws against what is referred to as “fee-splitting,” with the North Carolina Medical Board reporting that it is illegal “in most instances” to pay or be paid “solely for the referral of a patient” in North Carolina. Similarly, the American Psychological Association says it goes against the APA’s Ethics Code “to give or accept fees or other forms of compensation for patient referrals.”

Claims of illegal fee-splitting schemes have become a commonly held suspicion in communities dedicated to troubled teen industry , alleging that professionals, particularly “educational consultants,” may get kickbacks from these camps. Embark Behavior Health defines educational consultants as “professionals who provide advocacy, assessments, guidance and support for families who are researching behavioral or mental health treatment for their struggling pre-teen, troubled teen or young adult.” Breaking Code Silence , an organization of troubled teen industry survivors, describes educational consultants as people who refer children to these treatment centers and “charge upwards to $4,000 to recommend their affiliated wilderness and residential programs.”

“In a lot of cases, parents are trying the best they can — these companies pay therapists, hospital staff, school staff, etc. commission when they refer a kid,” Nichols alleges. “It’s so easy for parents to fall into the troubled teen industry trap because of how hard it’s promoted, especially when they’re told by a trusted professional that wilderness therapy is the best option.”

“They have a chokehold on the industry that isn’t discussed enough,” she said.

Doubtful efficacy

Research has found that wilderness therapy camps, which critics have traced back to an abusive cult known as Synanon , do not work for a majority of the children who live through them.

In a report written for the University of New Hampshire in 2021 , the researcher writes, “Adolescents are sent to these facilities for a myriad of reasons, ranging from severe mental health symptoms to more mundane forms of misbehavior (e.g., truancy). Parents are often manipulated through fear tactics into believing their children desperately need this type of facility, and are then manipulated to not believe their children if they say anything bad about the facility.”

A study conducted for the peer-reviewed research journal Global Studies of Childhood found that 90% of former attendees to the types of programs that comprise the Troubled Teen Industry rank their experiences negatively.

“I hope any therapists involved who know what they’re in are deeply ashamed of themselves,” Nichols said.

The impact

Nichols was sent to Trails Carolina for issues with anxiety and depression that made her struggle in school. Unfortunately, in the years since she left Transylvania County behind, she has not yet found relief from those issues.

“My experience at Trails Carolina continues to affect me years later,” she said. “I’ve kept in touch with most of my group members, and all of us seem to have a consensus on how much it’s caused us to struggle. It feels like it happened a week ago, not three years ago.”

She was diagnosed with PTSD after her time at the camp, and this has become a daily struggle for her, coping with flashbacks, panic attacks and other symptoms of severe anxiety.

“Sometimes, if I see a food item we used and I’m not expecting it, I’ll have episodes. That’s how bad the experience was – I can’t see the brand Sunkist without preparing myself for it,” she said. “Certain words, certain smells, certain images and foods and tones can all trigger a reaction from me, and I have to take medication in order to come down from an attack. I have nightmares that I’m still there, or that I get sent back again. There isn’t a single day I live without thinking about Trails Carolina.”

It’s also impacted how she relates to people. She says she now has serious trust issues and suffers from paranoia, constantly worried she’s done something “wrong” without knowing it.

“I have to apologize to others constantly in fear of making a mistake. I try to preemptively solve problems that don’t exist because, in my mind, I didn’t know I’d caused enough problems to be sent away,” she said.

Even years later Nichols says she has not truly had in-depth conversations with her parents about what happened at Trails Carolina. She says her parents lacked experience with in-patient mental health treatment, so they trusted people who told them wilderness therapy would be her best option, and they were “shocked” to learn about the alleged abuse.

“I don’t think any parent wants to hear that something they did to help their child caused significantly more damage,” Nichols said.

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