SHOCKING Storms Hit 99-Year-Old Texas Camp: Teen Counselor's Dramatic Experience!

By John Woodrow Cox The first drops of rain had yet to fall when Ainslie Bashara, a counselor at Camp Mystic, noticed that one of the younger girls had begun to tear up. They were walking back to their cabin, Giggle Box, as another storm swelled over the Texas Hill Country. The girl feared what was coming, so Ainslie wrapped an arm around her. “It’s just heat lightning,” Ainslie, 19, recalled assuring her that evening. “There’s nothing to it.” It was just past 9 p.m. on July 3, the start of Ainslie’s night off from tending to Giggle Box’s 16 “littles.” She popped inside to grab her backpack just as the girls, all between 8 and 10, began to brush their teeth and slip on their pajamas. Ainslie said goodbye and headed out for a break with friends. By the time she came back, shortly after midnight, she had to sprint. The storm had begun to pound the 99-year-old Christian camp situated along the Guadalupe River. The cabin was no more than 600 feet from the bank. Advertisement Advertisement Ainslie had arrived a week earlier for a month-long stay. She couldn’t remember a time when Mystic hadn’t been part of her life. Her aunt and older sister had attended, and she’d started at age 7, spending 10 Julys riding horses and catching perch, exchanging friendship bracelets and learning about Jesus. Her younger sister, entering her last year as a camper, had begged Ainslie to return this summer as a counselor. So now, inside Giggle Box, she changed out of her wet clothes and into shorts and a T-shirt, quietly sliding into her bed in a corner near the front door. The girls lay still in their beds, some snuggled with stuffed animals. Ainslie stared out the window. A native Texan, she’d seen hundreds of summer squalls, but this one felt heavier. The thunder cracked like fireworks inside the cabin. Advertisement Ainslie couldn’t sleep, braced for a frightened camper to slink over in need of comfort. The lightning lit the room like flashbulbs, and at each strike, she scanned faces around the room. Then she noticed a car pass by, a bizarre sight at that hour. She glanced at her watch: 1:58 a.m. Advertisement Advertisement She soon heard another noise that, at first, felt out of place. Two nearby cabins housed Mystic’s youngest campers, and the 8-year-olds had started shrieking. Ainslie, a rising college sophomore and her cabin’s oldest counselor, hurried across the room to her two co-counselors, who’d each just graduated from high school. Both were restless. “This storm is really bad,” she said, preparing them to help console their girls if they, too, began to break down. Advertisement They always left the windows open to keep the cabin cool, and now, as Ainslie lay on her bed, she noticed older kids from another cabin running up the road with blankets and pillows. “Are we staying or leaving?” she yelled through the window. “Stay in your cabin!” she recalled a staff member shouting back. All the girls in Giggle Box had woken up, she said, and they were terrified. “We need to leave,” the girls started saying. “We need to leave.” “Our cabin is safe. The other girls’ cabin is not,” Ainslie tried to explain. “That’s why they’re leaving, but we are staying.” Rain spit sideways through the windows, so she and the other teens climbed onto beds to shut them until someone noticed water pooling in the cabin, spreading across the floor. The counselors told the kids, all in pajamas, to put on shoes and, if they had them, rain jackets. Ainslie cracked open the door and a mass of water muscled through. She heaved it shut. The teens slid a trunk in front of the door as they told the girls to stack all their clothes and personal items atop their beds. Advertisement Much of Ainslie’s material life was stuffed in bins beneath her own. Her backpack and car keys. Her favorite outfits, for Sundays, when they got to dress up. Her Tecovas cowboy boots. Her Mystic memory box, with the Bible she’d been given 12 years ago, now plastered in sticky notes and neon highlights and tucked with letters from her late grandmother. And the sticker she’d earned after catching her first fish with camp director Dick Eastland when she was 8. And the 10 buttons from every birthday she’d spent at Mystic, that she planned to wear later this month when she turned 20. Advertisement Advertisement “It’s your happy place,” Ainslie said. “You want to have all your happy stuff with you.” A staffer outside removed the window screens and left, presumably to aid other cabins, so Ainslie rushed to her dresser and pulled out a headlamp her dad had given her to read nighttime devotionals. She turned on the porch light and peered through the window at the water below, believing it couldn’t be deeper than a foot or so. Advertisement “Okay, we’re going to go out,” she told the girls around 3 a.m., but the first in line, a 9-year-old, was afraid to jump. So out Ainslie leaped, and when her bare feet touched the ground, the water, rushing past with such force it felt like rapids, creste...