Forty-eight-year-old Katherine Howe let memories of the summer of ‘87 rush back to her on Friday.
As the world woke up to the news of missing girls who’d been swept away from their summer camp cabins in violent flood waters on July 4, Howe was transported back to when she was 10 years old and staying in one of the same cabins at Camp Mystic, called Bubble Inn.
“It’s a waking nightmare,” Howe told The Barbed Wire.
The private Christian all-girls camp was founded in 1926 in the Texas Hill Country on the banks of the Guadalupe River. Nearly 100 years later, the camp announced that it was grieving the deaths of 27 campers and counselors.
Before dawn on Friday, the river swelled 26 feet in 45 minutes. It demolished businesses and homes, carried off RVs full of families, and overturned vehicles before smashing them into trees. Then the rushing water passed the South Fork of the river, where it washed away two cabins filled with the youngest Camp Mystic girls, age 8, with their pajamas and stuffed animals.
For Howe, the details of the destruction were devastating. And eerily familiar.
Nearly 40 years ago, as Howe slept in Bubble Inn on July 17, a 29-foot flash flood hit Comfort, Texas — just 15 miles away.
The storms produced a “train-effect, one following another” and dumped 5-10 inches of rain in the upper headwaters of the Guadalupe River basin, the National Weather Service said at the time.
The nearby Pot O’ Gold Ranch, another Christian camp, was in the surge’s trajectory. The river at Comfort crested at 31.50 feet, the ninth highest crest in recorded history, according to the NWS. Hundreds of people along the river and its tributaries had to be evacuated. During the evacuation, the waters swept away a van and school bus carrying 43 teenagers, ultimately killing 10, The New York Times reported at the time.
Howe still remembers it.
“I was on the top bunk,” she told The Barbed Wire, “and I remember being … able to actually glimpse the river through the trees from our cabin.” That visibility, she said, meant that the water had risen to dangerous levels. Howe and her cabinmates were evacuated and spent the night in the recreation hall, which was on higher ground.
“We all stayed at camp,” she said. “Then when the waters receded, I distinctly remember being shocked that everything at the waterfront was completely gone, like all the canoes were gone, all the structures around the waterfront were gone. The diving board was gone. Everything was completely gone. And one of my friends who I was chatting with recently said that she remembered looking up into a tree and seeing a canoe wedged in a tree 30 feet up in the air.”
‘In One Second Everything Changes’
As of Wednesday morning, officials in Kerr County had confirmed 97 deaths, including 59 adults and 36 children, said Sheriff Larry Leitha. Across all of Texas, at least 109 people had been killed in the floods.
“I need to tell my community and those families who are waiting, this will be a rough week,” Kerrville Mayor Joe Herring Jr. said at a morning news briefing on Monday. “Primary search continues, and we remain hopeful. Every foot, every mile, every bend of the river, our work continues.”
The 700-acre Camp Mystic grounds are dotted with cypress, live oak, and pecan trees between and around green-roofed cabins. Last week, it was home to whispers, prayer, and girls giggling in white dresses. Photos of those same cabins now show dirt-strewn water lines all the way up to the rafters in the ceiling, overturned bunks peppered with pink and purple balloons. On Monday, the river and its banks looked like “a bomb went off,” Jake Stovall, founder and director of Gulf Search and Rescue, told CNN.
“In one day, everything can happen, in one second everything changes,” said 19-year-old Silvana Garza Valdez, a counselor at Camp Mystic who was rescued on Friday morning.
“The camp suffered an incredible loss,” Garza Valdez said in a Spanish-language interview with Univision.
When the flood waters hit, Garza Valdez was with a group of girls in the newer part of the camp, Camp Mystic Cypress Lake, uphill and to the south of the cabins overlooking the Guadalupe River.
The camp had just begun its second four-week session of the summer.
“We went to sleep like a normal day,” she said. “Around midnight it started raining in a way I had never in my life experienced.” Garza Valdez is from Mexico, and she told Univision reporters she was working at Camp Mystic as part of an international exchange program this summer.
Garza Valdez said she and her campers waited in their cabins on the hill overnight without electricity, listening to the monstrous sounds of thunder and watching lightning flash temporary daylight in the Hill Country darkness.
The most urgent alerts came just after 4 a.m. and then at 5:34 a.m.
By morning, Garza Valdez said she saw helicopters rescuing other trapped campers. While they waited, Garza Valdez said she told the girls that were evacuated to the higher portion of the camp that they were going to have a “giant sleepover” and had campers make crafts to distract them from the storm.
The girls were eventually loaded onto military vehicles and driven through the harder-hit parts of the camp, she said.
“You could see mattresses in the trees, tables flooded, clothes hanging from the trees,” Garza Valdez told Univision. “It was something I wouldn’t wish on anyone, it was horrible.” In Kerrville, she said she saw houses flipped upside down and cars mangled in the trees.
“It was a big shock to think I could’ve been down there at that moment,” she added. “It was terrible.”
But arriving at the reunification point, to more than two-dozen parents whose girls were missing, was even harder, she said.
“It was the worst part of the day,” Garza Valdez added, “because you could see how the parents were looking for their daughters … I don’t know how to explain how they must’ve felt being a parent and not seeing your daughter there.”
‘Everloyal Kiowa. With a Broken Heart.’
As the news of Camp Mystic and the missing girls spread, Howe and her decades-long friends from Bubble Inn started checking in on each other and trading stories about their frightening experience years ago.
“The network of parents who are going through this have this weird double consciousness,” Howe said. “At the same time, the amount of fear that you would feel if your own kid was in that situation, and also remembering being a kid in that situation and rediscovering how little these kids were.”
Howe, originally from Houston, has lived on the East Coast much of her adult life, but she told The Barbed Wire it’s hard to forget the magic of summer camp on the banks of the Guadalupe River. She’s a New York Times bestselling and award-winning historian and novelist, and she credits Camp Mystic for helping her discover her love of writing.
All these years later, Howe still knew exactly where her 38-year-old Camp Mystic charm bracelet was, and on July 5, she took it out and posted a photo.
On its chain were three chunky silver charms, custom-made by jeweler James Avery — “very much the thing,” Howe said, among the Texas girls attending the Hill Country camps in the 1980s. Two ‘M’ charms for Mystic, and a final pendant for the cabin affectionately known as Bubble Inn, which housed many of the girls who were swept away in Friday’s flood.
“When something like this happens,” Howe told The Barbed Wire, “I feel like it’s when we really start to understand how deep our networks go, especially at home.”
Fellow Camp Mystic girls commented on her photo sharing they too had the charms. One woman asked, “Tonkowa or Kiowa?”
Mystic girls were divided into one of two teams, blue for Kiowa and red for Tonkawa. Throughout camp — like with Hogwarts houses in the Harry Potter books — counselors and leaders would give points to each team for completing certain events and merits. During weekly bonfires, the red team would respond in unison: “True.”
Howe was on the blue team. Their line was “everloyal.”
Nearly 40 years later a heartbroken Howe responded to the roll call.
“Everloyal Kiowa,” she said. “With a broken heart.”
‘She’s Out There Somewhere With All Her Friends’
In a photo of the 8-year-olds who went to bed Thursday inside Bubble Inn, fourteen girls — all dressed in white — smiled sweetly on a tennis court underneath the shade of a tree.
In the picture, Linnie McCown had her dark brown hair neatly parted down the middle into braided pigtails, her hands resting on her knees.
Her father Michael McCown confirmed to The Washington Post on Sunday that his daughter’s body was found. As soon as he learned of the flood, he drove straight from Austin to the Hill Country, where he told The Post that he registered with authorities, saw a body at the morgue that officials thought might have been his daughter, then drove to the camp to see it for himself.
He said he grabbed charm bracelets — just like the one Katherine Howe has — and pored over waterlogged stuffed animals.
“I’m going to walk until I find something,” he told the newspaper as he searched through sticker-covered trunks, debris, piles of soaked mattresses, felled trees, and mud. He even found the body of another missing girl.
“She’s out there somewhere with all her friends,” McCown said. “She was the sweetest little thing.”
As the hours passed since their cabin was flooded early Friday morning, more and more of them were confirmed dead by their families, including Margaret Bellows, Lila Bonner, Ellen Getten, Janie Hunt, Sarah Marsh, Eloise Peck, Abbie Pohl, Renee Smajstrla, Linnie McCown, and Mary Stevens.
At press time, 10 of their friends and cabinmates were still unaccounted for.
‘We Take Care of Each Other’
At 1 a.m. — three hours before any official warnings from local authorities came through — another camp down the road miraculously evacuated about 70 children and adults, saving them from floodwaters that ravaged its buildings, according to the Associated Press.
Facilities manager Aroldo Barrera at Presbyterian Mo-Ranch Assembly told his boss about the Guadalupe River’s rising water, the news agency reported. Camp leaders acted quickly, packing up children and relocating them to higher ground.
“The buildings don’t matter,” Lisa Winters, communications director for Mo-Ranch, told the Associated Press. “I can’t imagine losing children, or people.”
“We’re a sisterhood of camps,” Winters told the news outlet as she became emotional. “We take care of each other.”
But while hundreds of people were saved from trees, rooftops, and floating mattresses — the list of missing and dead also grew to include those who risked their lives to save others.
That list includes Camp Mystic director and co-owner Dick Eastland, who was beloved among Camp Mystic alumni, and who reportedly died trying to save the girls in Bubble Inn. “Losing Dick after he helped rescue the girls in Bubble Inn has shattered so many of us,” another Camp Mystic alum told The Barbed Wire on Saturday.
The list also included Houston native Jane Ragsdale, the longtime owner and director of another camp, Heart O’ the Hills. Twenty-seven-year-old Julian Ryan died saving his fianceé, children, and mother, reported CNN. Volunteer Fire Chief Michael Phillips, who has served in the role for 30 years, remained missing as of Monday. His vehicle was swept away by floodwaters while Phillips was responding to emergency calls, according to KVUE.
But some of the most harrowing rescues involved teenage camp counselors like Garza Valdez.
“So many lives were saved because of 18-year-olds,” Camp Mystic staffer Brooke Beard told NBC News.
Long-time Camp Mystic counselor Emma Foltz was praised on X by Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry for her “instrumental role” in evacuating 14 campers.
Her “bravery, poise, and care are an example to not only her campers but to all of us,” Jim Henderson, president of Louisiana Tech University, where Foltz is returning in the fall as a senior, told PEOPLE on Monday.
“I cannot say enough about what these young counselors did to calm these girls and to ensure their safety,” said Tara Bradburn, whose 16-year-old daughter was rescued from Camp Mystic, in an interview with Fox Reports. “Those young counselors … saved so many children and kept so many children calm so that decisions could be made to keep other girls safe and move them to safety.”
News Fellow Riya Misra contributed to this report.
