Everyone knows that some of the best ghost stories are told while camping. All that’s needed is a dark night, a campfire, and a good scary story. In Alabama, we have the quintessential location for this: a campground that’s rumored to be haunted. It’s called Camp Cottaquilla, a campground just for Girl Scouts, located near Anniston. Camp Cottaquilla was founded in 1947, according to the the Anniston Star. Two well-known ghostly legends surround the camp. Are these legends simply campfire tales? You decide!
The One-Armed Girl Scout
Sometime in the mid 1950s, a group of girl scouts were sitting around the evening campfire as they enjoyed their troop’s special outing at Camp Cottaquilla. This particular group of girls were very competitive – as they had worked for weeks to see who could sell the most boxes of Girl Scout cookies. As the girls sat talking, several bragged about the number of boxes they had sold. When the most ambitious of the girls heard them, she realized that she was a few boxes short of winning. Not to be outdone, she slipped away from the campfire, picked up her bag of cookies, and ran down the curvy, darkened road away from the camp – hoping to happen upon a house or a car where she could sell the rest of her cookies and win the contest.