LAKE TOXAWAY, N.C. (WGHP) — Amid a spate of legal troubles that kicked off with the death of a preteen boy, a North Carolina troubled teen camp has listed their property for sale.
Lake Norman Realty has the property at 500 Winding Gap Road in Lake Toxaway, a 32-acre property, listed for $3.2 million. This address is the site of Trails Carolina, an embattled wilderness therapy camp where a child died in February. The camp was subsequently hit with a sexual abuse lawsuit and ordered to close by the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services.
A flyer from “The Nichols Company” has more details about the property. The Nichols Company is a Charlotte-based commercial real estate firm and property management company.
The trouble at Trails
Trails Carolina was a wilderness camp located in Lake Toxaway, North Carolina, that worked with children ages 10 to 17. On its now-defunct website, the camp advertised itself 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.
The camp had already previously faced a lawsuit over the alleged sexual assault of a former camper, which has since been settled, and a camper died while in the care of the camp in 2014. However, Trails Carolina’s troubles really kicked off in February 2024 when a 12-year-old boy died within hours of arriving in North Carolina from his home in New York, bringing the camp into harsh focus.
The sheriff’s office and NCDHHS quickly seized children from the camp and suspended the camp’s operations, which the Trails Carolina characterized in a media statement as a “negligent and reckless move by the State” and an “illegal and undisclosed” seizure by law enforcement. The sheriff’s office said the camp was being uncooperative with the investigation.
According to an autopsy report, the medical examiner ruled that the boy died by suffocation. The boy had been forced to sleep in a bivvy bag with an alarm on it so that counselors knew if he tried to unzip it. Due to the nature of his death, the OCME deemed it a homicide, though the law enforcement investigation is ongoing and no one has been criminally charged.
Within days of the camper’s death, another former camper hit the camp with a federal lawsuit alleging that she was sexually assaulted by a fellow underage camper and that the camp did not intervene. She also alleged severe medical neglect. A judge recently dismissed the camp’s attempts to get all or part of the lawsuit thrown out, and the court scheduled another hearing for Sept. 12.
In the wake of these issues, former campers have spoken up about their experiences at Trails Carolina, describing it as a nightmarish experience in which incompetent, undertrained staff starved and overworked their young charges, denying them medical care or even access to clean water.
While the camp has appealed the revocation of their licensure, the sale of the property does seem to imply that their closure will be permanent.
Trails Carolina is just one camp owned by Wilderness Training & Consulting LLC, an Oregon-based corporation, “which is part of an organization of for-profit affiliated businesses that does business as Family Help & Wellness,” per the details outlined in the lawsuit.
Trails Carolina, WTC and Family Help & Wellness largely conform to the template of the “troubled teen” industry, which often involves teens being “gooned” away from home by force and taken to a wilderness camp over behavioral problems ranging from relatively minor issues, such as truancy, to more severe issues, such as sexually disordered behavior.
Troubled Teen Industry
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.”
“Survivors report physical abuse, exploitation (human trafficking), and several types of psychological torment, including harsh discrimination and LGBTQ+ conversion therapy.”
People who have attended these camps in the past also spoke to The Guardian about the experience, with one young woman describing how she was painfully restrained for self-harming behaviors and covering her sleeping bag with a tarp that was pinned to the floor with heavy jugs to prevent her from running away in the night.
The misuse of restraints, according to The Guardian, is prevalent in these kinds of facilities and was one of the things that Trails Carolina was cited for by NCDHHS.
