Timeless camp traditions included pranks, which inevitably involved the bed. Pranksters followed their mothers, aunts, cousins and sisters into the antics that were handed down for years to make their cabin mates and counselors lives more interesting. The short-sheeting of beds was the most popular prank over every summer session, which was either taken well or not, depending on how tired the person was on the receiving end of the prank.
“We did get into a lot of mischief,” laughed Pat O’Tool. “We, or maybe it was I, collected twelve frogs and put them in one of the counselors’ beds. We also decided that the counselor with the name Muriel Funk was a name that we could adjust, so to speak. We called the camp “Muriel Funk’s Home For The Mentally Impaired”.
“We used to stay awake at night thinking of pranks to pull on our counselors when they had the night off, “laughed Liz Anderson (1973-74). “We were so mean. We greased the doorknob, we put balloons between the boxspring and mattress and they would pop when she got into bed.”
Audrey Delcourt (1968-69) said the girls were always trying pranks out on her and she recalled the spider web made with string, lathered in toothpaste, which she spotted before heading into the mess.
“I saw it, stood back and waited for the campers to get into it,” she laughed. “On the last night they put my mattress on the ceiling and croquet balls in my inner spring. The lights were out and the bed was made, and I climbed in and had these wooden balls in my back and they all had the best time laughing. I got them all settled and we sang a sweet song.”
It was a goal every summer to think of something new, besides short-sheeting beds. Tracy Topping (1962-63) was part of the group who wedged some croquet balls under the mattress. “The counselor could not figure out why the bed was so lumpy and uncomfortable and we could hear the balls work their way through and fall to the floor with a clunk.”
Beverley Schlatter (1944-49) said it was the era of short-sheeting the beds when she was there. “We did it to the girls if we didn’t like them or just to be devilish and we were little devils. There were some ferns that grew in the woods that were prickly. We remade the counselor’s bed with these ferns and we were hysterical with laughter, since she had to remake the bed, but she didn’t think it was funny. It was an innocent era, though, and much more disciplined than these days. We knew right from wrong and knew we would be punished if we did anything really bad.”
Coleen Gasta had cornflakes in her bed in the sixties and recalled that Billy Breezy and a couple of sisters were responsible for the prank that she did not find funny. Other prankster memories included sticking sleeping hands in warm water, in hopes they would pee in their sleep. (Anne Schupak 1966 and Dana Foote 1974-77) Katie Hinderliter (1968) said the girls would empty the trunks and put them in another hut or switch beds top to bottom or into a different area of the hut.
Sisters Veronica and Pat Burkhart camped in the fifties and had many prank memories. Pat swears it was her sister that put June Bugs in her short-sheeted bed, which petrified her, but Veronica would probably deny it.
Probably the most noteable bed prank of all time happened to Sue West in 1975. “One night Chris Lamb, some counselors and myself went into Hale or Tawas and when I returned, the stars were out and we hung out for awhile. When I went to get into my bed, my bed was gone! I said, what the heck, where is my bed? The whole bed and all my stuff was gone. I walked the property with a flashlight looking for my stuff. The last place I expected to find it was the raft in the middle of the lake! There it was. The bed was made with my teddy bear on it and my trunk was at the foot of the bed. We had to take the canoe out, and it was way out, and we laughed all the way and back!”
Were you part of the giving or receiving end of pranks?