See All<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\nAlexa, 31, now volunteers at a camp for girls who have lost a parent or sibling. Claudia Sullivan, 75, moved to the Texas Hill Country because of camp, became a teacher because of camp, wrote three evocative, intelligent books about camp. These are clear and plausible connections, though among the skills gained at Camp Mystic is the ability to connect any life achievement to these annual four-week sessions. A lobbyist was better able to take her political opponents in stride because Mystic had taught her to see her work as part of a \u201ctribe game.\u201d A woman could better endure the deaths of her father, mother, and two siblings because she was prepared for disappointment after \u201cnot making war-canoe stern as tribe captain.\u201d<\/p>\n
There are more than a dozen camps within 20 miles of one another in Hill Country, many of them on the banks of the Guadalupe River. You\u2019re a La Junta family or a Heart O\u2019 the Hills family, or maybe you just aspire to be. Mystic wasn\u2019t the camp of private planes and air-conditioned cabins; that was Waldemar. It wasn\u2019t the most rustic; that was Longhorn. It was, the owner of a competing camp told me, a place associated with Christian innocence, a certain idea of wholesome girlhood.<\/p>\n
They remember lying in bed, the sound of oscillating fans, the scratch of an armadillo outside the cabin. The scent of rain on dry land. They remember the smell of bathing suits drying on a clothesline and the way their washed clothes were so starched they\u2019d have to peel them apart. They remember the night sky arcing over them. They existed outside the reach of television; the night that men walked on the moon, Claudia lay on a verdant hill, stared up at the stars, and imagined.<\/p>\n
They remember and so they go back, again and again. Reunions are withheld until former campers turn 35; middle-age women reconvene in cabins, lower themselves into the river, talk of divorces and wayward children and breast cancer.<\/p>\n
The gates were closed. Time stopped. A spell was cast. They remember the water of the Guadalupe. It was motionless in early morning, recalls Claudia, \u201clike glass.\u201d \u201cLook at the river,\u201d she told a group of girls in 1970-something. By that time, she was a counselor. \u201cIt\u2019s still asleep.\u201d She was the camp\u2019s theater director, and she was putting on a play; the play was, as it happens, Peter Pan. Around 9:30, the river would wake up, ripple in the wind, and at certain moments, a sweet floral scent swept toward the camp; it reminded Claudia of a perfume old ladies of the time wore, Jungle Gardenia.<\/p>\n
The girls were out on the lawn under the shade of the cypress trees that marked the boundary between Mystic and the outside world. \u201cCome smell it,\u201d Claudia told the little girls.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat is it?\u201d Someone asked.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s the gardenia fairy.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cClaudia,\u201d a girl asked. \u201cWhat does it mean?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt means,\u201d she said, \u201cthat something wonderful is about to happen.\u201d<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/e1568dfecf40c323b103b162fe40b23ae9-0726FEA-CampMystic-IMG-3045.rvertical.w570.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n Katherine Ferruzzo, Chloe Childress, and Eloise Peck.
\n Photo: Courtesy of the subjects\n <\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/878dc7dca6948eabfc34a9c9414cc53aab-0726FEA-CampMystic-Ellen-and-Gwynne-Gett.rvertical.w570.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n Ellen and Gwynne Getten.
\n Photo: Courtesy of the subjects\n <\/p>\n
Nine months ago, on the Fourth of July, Jennie and Doug Getten slept late in their spacious home in Houston. Jennie had been with girlfriends, and Doug, a partner at a major Texas law firm, had been at a work dinner. When Doug woke he realized he had missed a voice-mail from Mystic, where their girls, Ellen, 9, and Gwynne, 11, had been since earlier that week. \u201cHi, Doug. This is Paige, the Austin rep at Camp Mystic. If you wouldn\u2019t mind just calling our office or calling me back whenever you get a chance,\u201d she said, and gave the number, \u201cjust as soon as you can.\u201d<\/p>\n
The voice-mail was from 10:07 in the morning, the tone calm, distantly professional, the level of urgency you might expect if your child had had an issue at school. Whenever you get a chance. Jennie sat on the stairs, not particularly concerned, though as she had said good-bye to Ellen she had worried terribly about sending her youngest daughter away for four weeks. As Mystic\u2019s bus was about to leave, Jennie had forced her way on to hug Ellen one last time, to the annoyance of the woman in charge. \u201cMom!\u201d Ellen had said. \u201cWhat are you doing? I\u2019m fine.\u201d Earlier in the summer, Jennie had called one of the camp\u2019s directors and spoken to her at length about Ellen\u2019s tree-nut allergy. Ellen was an ebullient, strong, freckled 9-year-old who loved to eat; on a trip to Italy, she had become obsessed with the idea of finding the best Bolognese. She often had pasta sauce on her clothes.<\/p>\n
Jennie called Paige from Austin, who was, according to the Gettens, a parent volunteer rather than a member of Mystic\u2019s staff. \u201cI just wanted to let you know,\u201d Jennie recalls being told, \u201cthat Ellen is unaccounted for.\u201d Paige from Austin had no further information.<\/p>\n
Jennie and Doug weren\u2019t sure what to do with the words unaccounted for. It sounded to them just like chaos at a camp of some 550 girls, a kind of extended administrative issue. Should they wait until the girls were located?<\/p>\n
Jennie texted Mary Liz Eastland, one of the camp\u2019s directors. \u201cHas Ellen been found?\u201d she asked. \u201cNo, have not found her yet. We\u2019re missing all the Bubble Inn,\u201d Mary Liz wrote back, referring to Ellen\u2019s cabin. \u201cWhere did they go????\u201d asked Jennie. \u201cThey were evacuating with Dick and water came up very fast,\u201d said Mary Liz. Dick Eastland, Mary Liz\u2019s father-in-law and the camp\u2019s owner, was also missing.<\/p>\n
\u201cI didn\u2019t even know it was raining,\u201d the father of a camper would later say. It was humid but stagnant in Houston, as if the mist could not gather itself for a proper downpour. Jennie and Doug took off in their bigger car because they\u2019d be returning with two girls and their two capacious trunks full of clothes. They drove through River Oaks, their neighborhood, Houston\u2019s most desirable \u2014 manicured hedges, boxed gas flames, mature trees over grass clean of fallen leaves \u2014 300 miles west, toward the rolling plains of Hill Country. On the four-hour drive, they were fielding calls from friends and fellow parents. Twenty-seven girls were missing, which was, in its way, comforting: The camp could not truly have lost 27 girls. Jennie did not begin to panic until she picked up the phone and heard someone from her church. It was their minister. \u201cI want to pray with you,\u201d he said. Why? thought Doug.<\/p>\n
The Gettens did not know their River Oaks neighbors, Wendie and Matthew Childress, but Chloe Childress had been to camp for ten summers straight and was, at 18, one of two counselors charged with overseeing Ellen\u2019s cohort in Bubble Inn. By the time the Gettens woke up the Childresses were already on their way, having abandoned plans for a Fourth of July at their club. Matthew had resisted driving to Mystic \u2014 surely this was all over nothing, surely they didn\u2019t want to spend all day in the car \u2014 but Wendie, concerned by texts from other moms, had pressed. Chloe was comically capable, highly social. Matthew called her his \u201cmachine.\u201d<\/p>\n
The parents were told to gather at Ingram Elementary, a school 13 miles and a 20-minute drive from the camp. The Childresses arrived a little after 1 p.m., among the first parents to show. There were tables and laptops to log parents in when they arrived and water and clothes and blankets. Matthew began to feel very nervous, though he still knew basically nothing about the scope of the flood that had enveloped the town he was not in. He did not want to wait by a pile of blankets in another town for his missing daughter; he wanted to speed toward the river and start moving trees. But others had tried and gotten nowhere. The roads were blocked, impassable.<\/p>\n
More families spooled into the school\u2019s gymnasium. Matthew knew about a quarter of them, including his brother and sister-in-law, there to collect their daughter. Matthew paced. He walked into the AC, then out into the 100-degree heat, in and out, did loops in the parking lot, past the playground, past the yellow buses, all of it under the shadows of passing helicopters. People hugged him awkwardly, and he could tell they knew he was marked in some way; parents were talking about which girls were unaccounted for. It was a strangely social place to live through the worst day of your life.<\/p>\n
By afternoon hundreds of parents had arrived to reunite with girls who would be helicoptered from the camp and bused into the school parking lot. Around 3 p.m. a city employee got on the loudspeaker. \u201cOkay,\u201d she said, \u201cwe\u2019ve got these first five girls coming.\u201d Matthew went back inside and was hit with a blast of AC; maybe they would say Chloe\u2019s name, maybe she had been found after all. When the last of the five names was called, terror shot through his body. \u201cHoly fuck,\u201d he said and grabbed his sister-in-law\u2019s arm. \u201cI might never see my daughter again.\u201d He started to weep.<\/p>\n
This was now his cycle. He would be normal seeming, chatty, for 30 minutes, surrounded by people he knew with whom he could converse, at which point he would break down, sob, grab someone.<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/b37e46ce70593bd23c2225068b41ad776d-0726FEA-CampMystic-Linnie-McCown-IMG-945.rvertical.w570.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n Linnie McCown.
\n Photo: Courtesy of the subjects\n <\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/618efee40c82d877435079a8942767986f-0726FEA-CampMystic-Photo074.rvertical.w570.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n Lila Bonner.
\n Photo: Courtesy of the subjects\n <\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/c82e7335c2d863c0c047dd2536d96fab51-0726FEA-CampMystic-Cile-Steward---July-3.rvertical.w570.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n Cile Steward.
\n Photo: Court Exhibit, Will and CiCi Steward v. Camp Mystic, via Travis County District Court\n <\/p>\n
\u201cThank you, Jesus, for saving my girl!\u201d a grandmother cried as she hugged a child. What about my girl? thought Michael McCown, the father of a missing 8-year-old named Linnie. Some of the parents of the missing asked to be put in a separate room so they would not have to watch barefoot children reunite with their weeping parents, but Matthew Childress would not set foot in this separate room; it felt like giving in to something he was fully committed to resisting. No one had told Jennie Getten affirmatively that her older daughter was safe. When she finally appeared, Gwynne was wearing someone else\u2019s T-shirt and her sleeping mask on her head. Her legs and Crocs were muddy. They could hear other mothers crying. Gwynne clutched her mother and let out a guttural wail. \u201cI don\u2019t know where Ellen is,\u201d she cried. \u201cI don\u2019t want to be an only child.\u201d<\/p>\n
Some of the parents were powerful people, but this was and would remain for many months a situation where the normal levers of power ceased to function. As Doug Getten was driving to Mystic, he reached out to Senator Ted Cruz, who was on vacation in Greece. Cruz called back within the hour and said he was about to discuss the flood with the president. Doug would also be in contact with Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick and Representative Wesley Hunt. He was assured that there were resources ready to help. There were helicopters standing by.<\/p>\n
A city employee pulled aside some parents. They broke into sobs and were walked out of the room. Matthew wanted to pull off his skin.<\/p>\n
He called her Chloe Madeline, ChloChlo, Chlomax, which became Max, which became Maximus. She was both a rule follower and a chaos agent. She was a proud dork, a slinger of factoids. \u201cStudies show!\u201d she would say, sticking a pointer finger in the air, ready to lay down some instruction. She was given to jump into a split; \u201cFilm this,\u201d she\u2019d say to someone the moment beforehand. She\u2019d convince everyone to go out for karaoke and then hog the mic. She\u2019d convince everyone to play a drinking game, cheat at shotgunning drinks, then claim she had won. She was a chronic joiner \u2014 tennis, cross-country, cheer, Honor Council \u2014 and a prolific winner of awards at school. In fourth grade she won an award for \u201cwell rounded\u201d students who showed \u201cleadership\u201d; she was delighted to win and admitted later that she had assiduously planned her win, getting perfect grades, being seen helping others, jumping up to help the teacher with any minor task. She was a 17-year-old with a LinkedIn page. She was Matthew\u2019s running partner and concert date. She suffered from anxiety she had inherited from him. Was it his OCD that had driven him to the habit of kissing her face 17 times? This started when she was a newborn, on one of those endless days when she woke up so early and the hours between naps seemed interminable. She did not want to be kissed 17 times as she grew older, so Matthew merely said \u201cSeventeen!\u201d as she went off to bed. She shouted it back: \u201cSeventeen!\u201d<\/p>\n
In retrospect, <\/strong>parents of the unaccounted for would notice that none of the Eastlands was present at Ingram. Dick and his wife, Tweety, had for 40 years run the camp, had raised their family on the camp, and now lived alongside their three boys, three daughters-in-law, and numerous grandchildren on the camp. Mary Liz, whom Jennie Getten had initially texted, was a daughter-in-law, someone who had started off as just another camper and ascended through marriage to the level of Eastland.<\/p>\nTwice, Jennie had to be put in an ambulance; she was having panic attacks. There was a rumor that the girls had been found on an island with Dick. There was a picture of this island with the grainy faces of unidentifiable girls. Matthew called a friend and asked her to open the picture on her laptop and zoom in; he couldn\u2019t make out anything on his phone.<\/p>\n
\u201cJust tell us where you think they are,\u201d Jennie texted Mary Liz. \u201cThey\u2019ll send the helicopters to find the island and these girls. Just tell us where you think they are.\u201d Mary Liz did not respond.<\/p>\n
Late that night, the parents were taken even farther away, to Kerrville\u2019s Trinity Baptist Church, a full 30-minute drive from the camp, and told to wait in a gathering space that resembled an airport lounge. It was freezing inside and 100 degrees outside. Parents curled up on the floor, laid themselves on couches, found a pew.<\/p>\n
It had been through Matthew, not Wendie, that Mystic and the Eastlands came into the Childresses\u2019 lives. Matthew\u2019s mother and sisters had gone; he\u2019d been visiting the place since he was a child, and he had expected his grandchildren would go there as well, though unlike most of the other parents who send their children to Mystic, Matthew does not identify as religious. He identifies as logical. His brain, he told me, \u201cis like a filing cabinet.\u201d He was three weeks into a new job as the chief operating officer of a law firm; Wendie is a corporate litigator. Most of Chloe\u2019s friends\u2019 mothers did not work, but Chloe had grown up in a household where the parents split parenting duties equally, and Matthew felt that had been healthy.<\/p>\n
That night Matthew closed his eyes and opened them and it was 5:30 a.m. He began to sob, which made his wife sob; he curled up next to her. The mother of Bubble Inn\u2019s other counselor, Katherine Ferruzzo, came over to them, lay next to them, and hugged them. The distance he had traveled in 24 hours, when he\u2019d gotten up for a day of drinks at the club, was unfathomable.<\/p>\n
It would be okay, he thought, as long as his phone did not ring. If his phone rang, it would all be over. The word no one wanted to hear was Grimes, the name of the funeral home where the bodies were being taken to be identified. Matthew did not want more platitudes. He wanted information. He wanted numbers. He called his most logical, straightforward friend and talked for an hour. He took a shower. He imagined Chloe on a limestone bluff reassuring younger campers. Perhaps she was alive in a tree. Perhaps she was unconscious but breathing. By this time, no one believed in the island anymore. Everyone knew Dick Eastland was dead.<\/p>\n
\u201cHave you heard any updates?\u201d Jennie texted Mary Liz. \u201cNo, I have not.\u201d \u201cWell, can you please ask the sheriff\u2019s office to please update us?\u201d \u201cYou\u2019re getting all the information at the church.\u201d \u201cWe\u2019re not getting any information at the church,\u201d Jennie said. \u201cWe have no information.\u201d<\/p>\n
A picture was circulating of girls walking to the safety of the two-story rec hall through the rain. The picture was a comfort to Caitlin Bonner, who was waiting at home for news of her 9-year-old, Lila. Caitlin had gone to Camp Mystic for ten years. She had been a counselor at Bubble Inn, where her daughter was staying this term. She knew where those girls were walking; they were walking right near Bubble Inn. Surely, Lila was therefore alive. Lila loved the color purple, all animals, and hugs. She had been voted \u201cBest Manners\u201d by her cabinmates.<\/p>\n
Every so often, someone would start wailing and then the quiet would resume. At 10 a.m., there was to be a press conference. Someone wheeled a TV out to where the parents were waiting. Onscreen, a man in a giant white cowboy hat, the sheriff, read off another screen, his phone. He spoke uncertainly, mispronouncing words and jamming one sentence into another like a child forced to read aloud at school. \u201cTragic incidents like this affect us all,\u201d he said. \u201cAppreciate y\u2019all.\u201d He assured them there would be other press conferences later.<\/p>\n
Michael McCown woke up at a friend\u2019s house on July 5 and could not bring himself to go to the church as he had been told. He\u2019d already spent a day waiting at the school. He\u2019d already been called to Grimes, where he stared down at a little girl who was not Linnie and thought, What now? Instead of going to the Baptist church, he drove to Walmart. He bought a five-gallon bucket, a rope, towels, rain boots, and a machete. There was one road into Hunt, and it had been largely cleared by Saturday morning. It all looked to him \u201clike a war zone, like Ukraine,\u201d but he did not allow himself to think about what that might mean for his daughter. Cypress trees lay on their sides, whole root systems exposed. He saw trucks folded around tree trunks. He drove past the shattered remains of the beloved Hunt Store, where campers often grabbed a burger on their way to Mystic, past what had been the post office that processed mostly camper mail from Hunt to home, past a distance marker that read UVALDE: 88. The road hugged the river and beyond the river rose a wall of limestone. When he reached the camp two game wardens stood in his way. He told them his 8-year-old was in there and he was going in. \u201cBe careful,\u201d they said.<\/p>\n
Linnie had taken a bus from Austin to camp; Michael had never seen the place, the tightly clustered stone-and-wood huts in which campers slept, the vaulted log-cabin structure where they dined, the once-green, now brown expanse from which rose limestone bluffs. Among the fallen trees was a smattering of stuffed animals and brightly colored clothes, neon pink and green, as if they had been dropped from above, each item carefully labeled with a child\u2019s name. He knew the name of his daughter\u2019s cabin, Bubble Inn, and asked a couple in a car \u2014 he thought they were caretakers \u2014 where that was. Inside, he found Linnie\u2019s shark watch and her capybara stuffie.<\/p>\n
He was in shock, running on adrenaline. Michael left behind everything he had bought at Walmart and walked downriver in a kind of fugue, over trees and boulders in a light rain. I\u2019m just going to walk this river until I find something, he thought, one step at a time, one boulder at a time. The river smelled of dead fish. At the edge of the property he came across Dick Eastland\u2019s black Chevy Tahoe, crumpled, the windshield punched in, wet tree debris on the roof and bumper. Michael kept walking. Linnie was an uncommonly beautiful brown-haired little girl who loved to dance, who taped pictures she\u2019d drawn all about the house, who had dyslexia and, once, in the presence of another girl struggling to read, put her hand on the girl\u2019s back and said, \u201cIt\u2019s okay, we\u2019ll read it together.\u201d Michael had thought there would be snakes, but there were no snakes. There were no mosquitoes. Ahead of him was an overturned cypress tree, and in the bit of space between the root system and the trunk he saw something, a pair of legs. It was a little girl, nude, face down. He walked around the body. It was not Linnie. He flagged down some emergency responders, helped them free the body from the tree, and headed back toward Linnie\u2019s cabin. He felt there wasn\u2019t much more he could do. He got in his truck and drove the 30 minutes to join the others at the church, where he would be the only one among them to know how bad things really were.<\/p>\n
Jennie Getten still believed, firmly, that Ellen was alive. She had just won second place in a swimming competition; she was strong. At 3 p.m. they wheeled the TV out again. Matthew Childress wanted to know precisely what the first responders had seen as they scanned the river. The parents held hands.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat I have observed in this community over the past 24 hours,\u201d said Governor Greg Abbott brightly, \u201cis what I call quintessential Texas.\u201d He went on about quintessential Texas \u2014 unity, gratitude. \u201cWe know that President Trump, he loves Texas, for one. He\u2019s deeply concerned,\u201d said Abbott. \u201cI want to express my thanks to President Trump for his entire administration \u2026 He always tells me about his love for the people of the State of Texas.\u201d<\/p>\n
Matthew felt sick. Kristi Noem was there too, talking to an audience that included parents waiting for news, any news, of their little girls. \u201cPresident Trump is absolutely heartbroken,\u201d Noem said, \u201cand the loss of life is absolutely devastating to him and Melania.\u201d She continued to talk about the president, who was not there, and his concern. \u201cYour city manager has done an extraordinary job,\u201d said Representative Chip Roy. \u201cYour sheriff has done an extraordinary job.\u201d He couldn\u2019t \u201csay enough\u201d about Abbott and Noem. It went on like this for 33 minutes, at the end of which Matthew knew nothing he had not known before.<\/p>\n
Matthew sat on the floor slamming back bottles of water. Parents were angry; why were they being stonewalled? There was another press conference that evening, this one with local officials. Afterward the officials came to the church to speak to the parents. They told them what their schedule would be like the next day, where and how they would continue to wait. As an official was speaking, the aunt of a missing 8-year-old interrupted. \u201cAt least tell us how many people you have found alive,\u201d she said. \u201cYou\u2019ve not told us even that.\u201d<\/p>\n
After a brief silence, the Kerrville city manager took the microphone. \u201cZero,\u201d he said. \u201cWe have not found anyone alive.\u201d<\/p>\n
Matthew went to the bathroom, and when he came back, the Eastlands had appeared: Tweety, Mary Liz, and Edward. Mothers hugged Tweety and murmured condolences for Dick. Edward sat down next to Wendie; Mary Liz was sitting at her knees. If Matthew had known then what he came to know later, he would have asked them to leave.<\/p>\n
The Eastlands stayed for less than half an hour, and shortly after that Matthew felt his phone buzz in his pocket. He held it up to show Wendie and the other parents that someone from Kerrville was calling and picked it up. He heard the word Grimes. The moments after that are lost to memory. He dropped the phone and collapsed. A little later his brother drove him a mile and a half to a worn-down two-story white brick building called Grimes Funeral Chapels. He was taken to a back house to view the body. \u201cClose that gate!\u201d someone said, and through an open gate, before anyone could close it, Matthew saw many body bags.<\/p>\n
Chloe was blue and cold, and at first he did not recognize her, so transformed was she by her submersion in the Guadalupe. She smelled of brackish water. He did not know this yet, but her body had traveled over two miles downriver, where it was found on the riverbank behind a club called Crider\u2019s. Her face was bruised. It had not, he concluded, been a peaceful death. He walked out of the room and sat in a chair and cried. Some security guys came to help him up, and in the moment he assumed they were just being helpful, but later he realized they needed him to move on; they had to \u201ckeep this flow going,\u201d given how many bodies were stacked up. He was letting them lead him out when he thought of something, shook them off, and walked back into the room. He opened the door, kissed her bruised face 17 times, and left.<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/1647bf792c1245c5ef7dc4113379703cc3-0726FEA-CampMystic-Drawing-by-Cile-Stewa.rvertical.w570.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n A Twins-cabin camper\u2019s remembrance of the flood.
\n Photo: Court Exhibit, Will and CiCi Steward v. Camp Mystic, via Travis County District Court\n <\/p>\n
It had been the deadliest American flash flood in 50 years, with 137 killed across RV parks and riverside hotels, campgrounds and vacation rentals. Water rose in some places more than 20 feet in 45 minutes. Other camps were submerged, other cabins ripped from their foundations, but no other camp reported a single death. In one case an 8-year-old at summer camp survived the flood, while at a nearby RV park, her father, mother, and two brothers were washed away.<\/p>\n
From the beginning camp alums had trouble disentangling their grief from their intense loyalty to Dick and Tweety Eastland. \u201cNEVER have I EVER felt unsafe at Camp Mystic nor have any of us EVER seen the river rise to this extent,\u201d wrote Mary Beth Weatherford in a widely shared Facebook post. The media, she said, was causing divisiveness. \u201cThose cabins, Twins I and II and Bubble Inn are NOT CLOSE TO THE RIVER! \u2026 This was an unforeseen tragedy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dick had loaded his truck full of girls and died alongside them; weren\u2019t he and Tweety also therefore victims? \u201cThe most selfless man I think to ever live,\u201d a counselor called him on Fox News, her voice breaking. Edward had been swept away with the girls of the Twins cabin but had survived by holding on to a tree. The water had come on so fast.<\/p>\n
Dick\u2019s family had owned the camp for more than 80 years, and Dick and Tweety had run it since 1987. \u201cRock stars,\u201d Mimi Schwartz called them in a 2011 Texas Monthly article about various members of Dick\u2019s family suing one another. \u201cTexas\u2019s most socially ambitious helicopter parents cultivate them, honor them, and praise them, partly because they are good company\u201d and partly because of the waiting list; it was common to hear Mystic girls say they had been placed on the list when they were born. When you dropped off your girls at camp, Tweety would be there, dressed in green and white, and Dick in his khakis and white collared shirt. On your way out, Dick would shake your hand and look you in the eye and say, \u201cThank you for trusting me with your daughter.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tweety was small and thin and blonde and had been for decades wearing the same bright-red lipstick; she left it on your cheek when she kissed you, and she meant to. She wandered the camp surrounded by a pack of admiring little girls who would grow up to be part of her world, and when those girls became women who lost husbands or parents, she was known to materialize at their sides, ready with the right words delivered in her southern lilt. As a camper, you might take a cooking class with Tweety, but only when you ascended to counselor would she share the recipe for her famous cookies. \u201cShe taught you how to be a Texas lady,\u201d one former camper told me. \u201cShe\u2019d go to one cabin almost every night, and come and do devotionals with you, and teach you how to be a lady.\u201d She wore red nail polish, and you could wear red nail polish too; Tweety\u2019s red polish was for sale in the commissary. \u201cThey were gods,\u201d a former camper told me, \u201cuntouchable. I was always in awe of their ability to play off that they knew who you were.\u201d When they went out in Houston or Austin or Dallas, they were surrounded by a network they had created, the Mystic mafia. \u201cYou would come up to them and be like, Tweety! Oh my God, hi!\u201d<\/p>\n
Dick, 70, stout and balding, wore bifocals when he read a prayer at vespers. \u201cLike a character out of the \u201920s or \u201930s\u201d was how one Mystic mom put it. Dick rode around camp on his golf cart, and as he passed a girl, he\u2019d stop to take her to the next activity. It wouldn\u2019t matter if you were 20 feet from your destination; he\u2019d wait for you to load your stuff and get in. Over time Dick taught thousands of girls to cast lines into the lake, paying special attention to girls who struggled. A mother told me Dick spent 30 minutes helping her friend\u2019s child overcome her fear of touching a fish. \u201cAnd he\u2019d make the biggest deal if a girl caught one,\u201d Dick\u2019s son Britt told me when I visited the camp in February. (The Eastlands declined to make Tweety available or answer any questions directly pertaining to the Fourth of July.)<\/p>\n
On the first day of camp each girl pulled a piece of paper from a hat and was assigned to one of two tribes, Tonkawa or Kiowa. The season would end with \u201cwar canoe,\u201d in which girls donned war paint and Native American headdresses and raced in the Guadalupe. Sundays they dressed entirely in white and bookended the day with Scripture: devotionals in the morning, vespers in the evening. It was the camp\u2019s greatest honor to be named a \u201cJames Eastland cup girl\u201d at the end of a term and a lesser but substantial honor to be an \u201cM girl.\u201d Campers could not call home; they wrote letters. There was a history, and one competed to know it. \u201cWhat is the elevation of Camp Mystic?\u201d was a question the girls were asked in a trivia game in the days before the flood. 2,200 feet. What was the year of the great flood? 1932.<\/p>\n
This last summer was Dick and Tweety\u2019s 50th wedding anniversary. \u201cThe campers had all done skits where they had re-created their wedding,\u201d the mother of a camper told me. \u201cAnd Dick and Tweety both participated.\u201d The mother spoke to Dick and Tweety for a while before she left with her daughter, a week before the flood. \u201cAnd I just thought this was such a love story. And I left feeling all warm and gooey inside.\u201d<\/p>\n
One week after the flood, a 41-year-old -Mystic alum named Ashley Smith was interviewed on television in shorts and an AC\/DC T-shirt. Smith had very nearly died in an Airbnb and had been transported to a church, she later told me, where she helped care for bewildered people who had been mangled by the force of rushing water. She toweled the hair of a young man with a deep, dirty gash in his leg and in the depths of the church found choir robes to cover people whose clothes had been ripped from their bodies. On television, she turned the subject to Mystic. \u201cThere\u2019s no other place on earth I would want my little girl to be,\u201d she said into the camera, \u201cwhere she is loved so much they would die trying to save her.\u201d<\/p>\n
At camp the girls had written letters home and sent them on to the post office that no longer existed, which is to say the parents returned home to letters written by their deceased 8- and 9- and 10-year-old daughters. Doug and Jennie Getten could not bring themselves to open Ellen\u2019s letters; they remain sealed. Eight-year-old Blakely McCrory knew her family was preparing for a move and clearing out the house, and she had concerns about her toys. \u201cDear Mommy,\u201d she had written, and then, down the side of the letter:<\/p>\n
\nP.S.<\/p>\n
please don<\/p>\n
t give my Bar<\/p>\n
bie<\/p>\n
dream<\/p>\n
house<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
When Matthew Childress got home to Houston he opened Chloe\u2019s door. \u201cThis door is never to be closed again,\u201d he told his family. If it were closed, they might come to fear the room. It would be full of ghosts. They would never have the courage to walk into it.<\/p>\n
Edward Eastland asked if he could play a song on his guitar at Chloe\u2019s funeral and was slotted to do so until Matthew learned more about the timeline of events at Camp Mystic in the early hours of the Fourth of July. The first flash-flood warning had reached Dick at 1:14 a.m.: LIFE THREATENING CONDITIONS EXIST. MOVE IMMEDIATELY TO HIGHER GROUND. Around 2 a.m., a pair of counselors walked to the office and warned staff that their cabins were flooding; they were sent back to their cabins to shelter in place. Chloe had probably died around 4 a.m. \u201cIt\u2019s like, Wait a minute,\u201d Matthew told me the first time we talked. \u201cThere\u2019s three hours. What the fuck is happening?\u200a\u201d He told a friend to tell Edward he would not be part of the ceremony, was not to sit with Chloe\u2019s friends, and was not to \u201chold court.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI went to seven funerals in one week,\u201d Jennie Getten told me later. They were navigating \u201ca level of darkness I didn\u2019t even know was possible,\u201d said Blake Bonner, Lila\u2019s father. Heaven\u2019s 27 is what they called the dead, which led many people to make the mistake of thinking there were 27 sets of grieving parents when there were, in fact, 26; Lacy and John Lawrence had lost 8-year-old twins.<\/p>\n
It became clear early on that not all the parents would move through their pain in the same way. There would be parents who could not get out of bed. There would be parents who turned to religion. Matthew\u2019s grief was directed outward. He wanted information. He wanted to know. He learned that he had sent his daughter to a camp situated on a 100-mile stretch of land with thin, rocky soil and bedrock that did not absorb rising water; he learned that this stretch was called \u201cflash-flood alley.\u201d He learned that the camp itself was situated at the confluence of the Guadalupe River and Cypress Creek, making it particularly susceptible; he learned that cabins were washed away when it flooded in 1932 and that it had weathered major floods in 1978 and 1987, when ten children died evacuating from a neighboring camp. He learned that in 1984, because of flooding to which everyone had apparently become accustomed, Tweety was airlifted from the property so she could give birth to Edward, her fourth son; for years, Edward was called, as a result, \u201cChopper.\u201d Matthew learned with a growing sense of horror that Camp Mystic had appealed to FEMA in 2013, 2019, and 2020 to reclassify 30 structures listed as lying in a floodplain. FEMA granted the appeals.<\/p>\n
\u201cCabins were in the goddamn floodway,\u201d Rob Young, a professor of coastal geology at Western Carolina University and the director of a program that studies flood patterns, told me. Young could not sleep for two nights after reading the news. \u201cIn the floodway, we expect velocity, a charging river. Someone should be in jail.\u201d The notion that the flood was not predicted, he says, is \u201cbullshit\u201d: \u201cIt was predicted. It was absolutely predicted.\u201d But expert opinion \u201ccollapses at the local level.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jennie and Doug waited eight days for someone to find Ellen. They never saw her body, and Jennie is not certain it was \u201cwhole.\u201d The search-and-rescue team sent her a pink Croc on which Jennie had placed a name sticker to help Ellen keep track of her shoes. Most parents to whom I spoke, regardless of what question I might ask, would begin their story with the strangely casual call from Mystic and continue walking through the days until they\u2019d found their child\u2019s body; this span of time composed a nightmare that closed with the terrible relief of certainty.<\/p>\n
A week after Matthew and Wendie left Kerrville, another counselor dropped off Chloe\u2019s backpack at their doorstep. Wendie unzipped it, surrounded by a few friends. Inside were earbuds and sunglasses. They found a three-ring binder, a counselor manual. Wendie\u2019s friend flipped through it. There was a page that read EMERGENCY INSTRUCTIONS and on it a single paragraph about rising water: \u201cIn case of flood,\u201d counselors in Chloe\u2019s part of camp must \u201cstay in their cabins unless told otherwise by the office. All cabins are constructed on high, safe locations.\u201d<\/p>\n
As he reflected on these instructions, it seemed to Matthew that he had taught his daughter to follow the rules, she had done so, and it had killed her.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe river is beautiful,\u201d Dick had once said, in a line that would be quoted in many forthcoming lawsuits, \u201cbut you have to respect it.\u201d He had advocated for a flood-warning project in the \u201980s after the ten children died, but the system was no longer operational by 2000. \u201cThis is just a pure tragedy,\u201d the mother of a camper who had been to Mystic earlier in the summer told the San Antonio Express. \u201cNobody is responsible for anything bad that happened here. This is just a freak event. Nobody is at fault.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tweety had rendered Mystic significantly more religious than it had been before her arrival, and it was to biblical language that she turned when she did reach out. \u201cDear Katie and Clark,\u201d she texted Katie and Clarke Baker, parents of 8-year-old Mary Grace, \u201cWe are grieving with you. All I can say is trust in God\u2019s sovereignty \u2026 he will not let you down. I love you.\u201d Tweety sent the text to at least three other families; for each of these families, the text began \u201cDear Katie and Clark.\u201d<\/p>\n
The families formed a dad group text and a mom group text. One dad was in the mom group as well; this was Matthew, \u201cjust so I can hear and see what\u2019s being discussed and keep myself educated,\u201d and \u201cto politely remind the moms that these texts are discoverable.\u201d Some of the parents had in common a measure of privilege beyond what you might infer from the ability to pay $8,000 for four weeks of summer camp. The father who lost twins is a partner in the same law firm as Doug Getten; his wife is a partner in another major firm. Blake Bonner is a partner in a Dallas-based private-equity firm. Davin and Anne Lindsey Hunt, who lost their daughter Janie, are heirs to one of the largest oil fortunes in Texas.<\/p>\n
\u201cI woke up sad this morning,\u201d Matthew might tell the dads. \u201cWhen do you get sad?\u201d They shared theories as to what had gone wrong. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t until after my daughter\u2019s funeral,\u201d Blake told me, \u201cthat I realized I didn\u2019t know a single thing about what happened that morning.\u201d Why had Britt Eastland waited until 7:22 to call 911? Why had they believed for so long that 27 girls were \u201cunaccounted for\u201d when at least one of those girls was thought to be dead in her cabin by sunrise? Edward had likely watched girls wash away downriver. Why had he sat with parents at the Baptist church and allowed them to believe their daughters might still be alive?<\/p>\n
To some families it was already beginning to seem as if the Eastlands had an unsettling ability to move on. A friend sent Michael McCown a picture of Tweety, smiling and dressed in white, at an event where she was handing out \u201cM\u201d awards to campers who had survived the flood and would otherwise have received them during the camp\u2019s closing ceremonies. The event, Michael noticed, was held on the same day as his daughter\u2019s funeral, which Tweety had attended. Only one of the Heaven\u2019s 27 families was from Kerr County, and it was this family alone, closest to the Eastland\u2019s orbit, that left the text group as it grew angrier.<\/p>\n
In late July, Matthew was introduced to a lobbyist. He, the other parents, and sympathetic lawmakers quickly drew up SB1, a camp-safety bill that would require camps to keep cabins out of floodways, to have evacuation plans, and to provide walkie-talkies in the cabins. The legislation was law 18 days from the moment it had been introduced, which everyone figured was probably a record. The way this news was processed was interesting. In early September, the Today show\u2019s Jenna Bush Hager, whose mother had once taught drama at Mystic, conducted an early interview with 12 grieving parents. The parents cried on-camera against a backdrop of their daughters\u2019 pictures. Cile Steward had still not been found. \u201cEvery phone call, every text, your heart stops,\u201d says her father, \u201cbecause you hope it\u2019s news that they\u2019ve found your child.\u201d<\/p>\n
Halfway through the seven-minute segment, the background music rises an octave and the tempo picks up. \u201cLast night, the bill was passed,\u201d says Hager. \u201cOur girls\u2019 legacy,\u201d Blake Bonner says, \u201cis not that they died in vain.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt shows you that change is possible,\u201d Hager tells her co-hosts, \u201ceven in a polarized country. Change is possible.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYep,\u201d says her co-host.<\/p>\n
\u201cRemarkable,\u201d says Hager.<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/6fc2f8ef94c4f3f9f054fcd62f5fb68268-0726FEA-CampMystic-1991-080-e13799645306.rvertical.w570.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/1b102c4a9c85c25d206a82617e6c519c89-0726FEA-CampMystic-Dick-Eastland-fishing.rvertical.w570.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n Dick and Tweety Eastland in 1991, soon after they took over as Mystic\u2019s directors. Over the years, Dick was known for teaching thousands of campers how to fish while Tweety led many of the camp\u2019s defining traditions. Photo: CampMystic.com Archives.\n <\/p>\n
\n Dick and Tweety Eastland in 1991, soon after they took over as Mystic\u2019s directors. Over the years, Dick was known for teaching thousands of campers ho… more
\n Dick and Tweety Eastland in 1991, soon after they took over as Mystic\u2019s directors. Over the years, Dick was known for teaching thousands of campers how to fish while Tweety led many of the camp\u2019s defining traditions. Photo: CampMystic.com Archives.\n <\/p>\n
Camp had been dangerous and now it was safe. Hadn\u2019t that been what the parents wanted? There was one lesson people were particularly primed to draw, and it was not about measured reflection on the past or the imprudence of building in a floodway. \u201cThe people there are quite resilient,\u201d a Fox News host told a surviving counselor as he closed his interview. \u201cAre you confident they will rebuild and make Kerrville better than ever?\u201d<\/p>\n
In the fall former campers started receiving photocopied handwritten pages in the mail signed \u201cTweety Eastland and Family.\u201d \u201cOur dear Mystic girls,\u201d the letter read. \u201cMy family and I want to thank you for all your care, prayers and letters at this painful and sorrowful time for us and our beloved Camp Mystic. Continue to be strong and courageous. You are Mystic girls. The Lord is near. Where there is nothing, there is God. All shall be well. Camp is even more beautiful in heaven. Can you imagine the heavenly chorus of Dick and our precious Mystic sisters, singing songs together?\u201d The letter went on to explain Tweety\u2019s devotion to Saint Francis and to assert that Tweety and Dick had visited, twice, Assisi in Italy. In its invocation of their daughters (\u201cprecious Mystic sisters\u201d) alongside the man they partially blamed for their deaths, the letter struck some parents as obscene. (\u201c\u2009\u2018Camp is more beautiful in heaven\u2019 \u2026 what?\u201d was Matthew Childress\u2019s response.)<\/p>\n
Tweety\u2019s missives seemed to emerge from an alternate reality in which they all grieved equally, stricken by tragedy for which they were all comparably blameless. This was increasingly not the lens through which the parents were looking, and it was certainly not where they were in September when the 26 families received an email with the subject line \u201cA Message From Camp Mystic\u201d from Tweety, her sons, and all of their wives.<\/p>\n
\u201cOf primary importance, we will be building a memorial at Camp Mystic dedicated to your precious daughters.\u201d A paragraph down: \u201cCamp Mystic Cypress Lake, which sustained no damage from floodwaters, will be opening in Summer 2026.\u201d \u201cThe Lord,\u201d she reminded them, \u201cis close to the broken hearted.\u201d<\/p>\n
It had not occurred to the Bonners, the Gettens, the McCowns, or the Childresses that a Mystic camp session in 2026 would be open to debate. Blake Bonner had interpreted the email as an opening to a conversation, but two hours later the Eastlands had emailed the entire camp community with news that camp was indeed open for business. It was the Stewards who responded most forcefully. \u201cYou are preparing,\u201d they wrote in response, \u201cto invite children to swim in the very river that may still hold our daughter\u2019s body.\u201d<\/p>\n
The families were thinking, in a new way, about the camp\u2019s finances, which were private but involved numbers to which they had access. Parents paid around $8,000 for four weeks of camp; there were 550 campers on site during the flood, across two adjacent campuses: 375 at Guadalupe, which had flooded, and 175 a short walk uphill at Cypress Lake, which opened in 2020. A counselor like Chloe made less a salary than a kind of honorarium, around $1,000 for the same session. Polish workers brought over on work visas kept the dining hall running. It was easy to speculate, very conservatively, that the camp was making $10 million a summer. \u201cWhen somebody says, \u2018We\u2019re a family-owned business,\u2019 you think it\u2019s kind of folksy,\u201d Doug Getten told me as his three small dogs caused havoc around us and Jennie wiped tears from her eyes, \u201cand not, like, the Ellisons acquiring Paramount.\u201d There had been in 2011 the widely publicized Eastland lawsuit, in which Dick sued his brother over the complex way Mystic\u2019s profits were shared among the family; the legal battle involved more than $6 million in fees, the brothers\u2019 estrangement, and a profit-sharing arrangement that looked to some of the parents like an attempt to shield assets from future lawsuits.<\/p>\n
Her daughter\u2019s life, Malorie Lytal felt compelled to post on Facebook in December, \u201cwas meant for so much more than to teach Camp Mystic about common sense safety.\u201d The feud between families and the camp was now fully public; the Stewards shared their response with the press, and the remaining families shared their intense opposition both to the opening and to a memorial on which they had not been consulted. It was at this point that the Mystic community closed ranks. Talking in public about the flood promised only backlash; you would offend either the families or the camp and its supporters, who appeared to constitute most Mystic alums. But one could, in conversations held beforehand, find the kind of reasoning at work in those who claimed to support both the parents and the camp. On a podcast called The Determined Society a Mystic mom named Aimee Key described driving her daughter home from camp. \u201cIf I had been in Bubble Inn, I would have drowned,\u201d her daughter said. Her friends Lila Bonner and Eloise Peck had died. \u201cUtterly gutting,\u201d Aimee called it. \u201cKnowing they were in a cabin that my littlest could have been in had anything been slightly different just brought both of us basically to our knees.\u201d \u201cIt just really brings to light,\u201d the host explained, \u201cthe fact that we don\u2019t have any control. Like we, we don\u2019t have control, and that\u2019s a complete freak accident.\u201d Camp Mystic is a \u201ctruly the most magical place,\u201d Aimee said. It was important, she thought, to live \u201cwith faith and not fear.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat\u2019s amazing about the situation,\u201d the host pointed out, \u201cis there was no wrongdoings. Not from the camp, not from the parents, not from the children. There\u2019s literally nothing that anybody could have done to change the outcome, good or bad.\u201d<\/p>\n
Aimee\u2019s attitude toward her daughters was this: \u201cI\u2019ve got to let you go back next summer \u2026 and trust that God hopefully is going to let you come home \u2026 And I\u2019ve got to trust that, or else we just live locked in our little bubble wrap.\u201d<\/p>\n
The notion that fear was an inappropriate response to a flash flood that killed more than 130 people, that to respond by avoiding return to a camp where 27 girls had recently drowned would be to \u201clive locked in bubble wrap,\u201d appeared to be widespread amid former campers, as was the idea that one could \u201cgrieve with\u201d the parents while maintaining one\u2019s place on Mystic\u2019s waiting list. \u201cMy heart is broken for them,\u201d the father of three girls who had been at Mystic said of the parents of the dead, but also he would be sending his girls back; it was \u201cdifferent for each family.\u201d The sky, proponents of the \u201cno wrongdoings\u201d theory would argue, dropped 100 billion gallons of water on Kerr County that day. That the camp regularly flooded did not strike the camp\u2019s defenders as an argument for the families but for the lack of urgency with which the Eastlands had proceeded; floods were normal events, \u201cfun,\u201d multiple former campers told me, because you got to have breakfast in bed. Only two days prior to the beginning of the disastrous camp session, Mystic had passed with no issues an inspection by Texas\u2019s Department of State Health Services. Many alums said that because the Cypress Lake campus was nominally distinct from the Guadalupe campus, it should be allowed to open. The ten campers who died in 1987 were in the process of evacuating by bus when they were swept away; evacuating carried its own risks.<\/p>\n
A former camper who had survived the flood told me nothing and no one could have saved all the girls. \u201cThey say things like, \u2018Oh, well, they should have had real adults in the cabins.\u2019 I\u2019m sorry, you could have had a Navy SEAL in that cabin and he would have not been able to save them all. I know how fast it rose. It wasn\u2019t even raining at one o\u2019clock in the morning, and by three o\u2019clock, we were all fucked.\u201d The risk of a flood was simply a risk with which one had to live. \u201cLook,\u201d she said, \u201cwe put our summer camps on the rivers because that\u2019s where kids have fun. That\u2019s where they canoe and they fish and they swim, and they do all of that, right? And there are risks everywhere. Everywhere. Everywhere we go, there\u2019s unforeseen risks. And I\u00a0don\u2019t want to send my kid to camp in the middle of a city.\u201d<\/p>\n
In November, the Kerrville Area Chamber of Commerce handed Tweety an award to posthumously honor Dick, and in a December 2 email to parents, Tweety stated that girls returning to camp would be taking \u201ca courageous step in their healing journey.\u201d Mikal Watts, Mystic\u2019s pro bono lawyer, argued that the Eastlands had saved 166 girls that night; he told Texas Monthly that \u201chundreds\u201d of families have \u201cliterally begged them to reopen so that the ministry could continue.\u201d<\/p>\n
What comprised \u201cthe ministry\u201d was an open question. Whatever the camp\u2019s Christian priorities may be, economic and racial diversity do not appear to be among them. Mystic, camper turned doctoral student Alexa Fleet wrote in a complex Substack post about her experience, was a place where girlhood was valued and \u201cwhite supremacy \u2026 was inherited gently,\u201d a place the children of the wealthy gathered, strengthened the bonds of privilege, and sorted themselves into the University of Texas sororities they would one day join. When I asked parents about camp scholarships and other Christian-inflected attempts at charity, they mostly looked confused. \u201cAsk if they go help build homes in Central America or water wells in Africa,\u201d one of the fathers texted me. What is the ministry, he wondered, \u201cbesides making millions at a summer camp?\u201d In February, while Britt Eastland and I were riding though Mystic on a UTV that someone had donated to the camp, I asked him to say more about the ministry. He said it was \u201call the activities that we offer.\u201d<\/p>\n
By August, Mystic was participating in a documentary, River of Angels (the producers \u201cfelt called\u201d to make it), and the camp granted access to the parts of camp destroyed by the flood. The filmmaker, Shawn Welling, posted a video on Instagram of what many parents considered to be sacred space, the cabins where their children spent their last terrified moments. \u201cWe do not approve of this documentary,\u201d Jennie Getten commented under the video, \u201cand you are only adding to our suffering.\u201d Welling appears to have deleted her comment and those of other mothers. The video remains up.<\/p>\n
In early November, seven of the families filed three separate lawsuits against Camp Mystic, alleging negligence and detailing bizarre behavior by the Eastlands: \u201cBy repeatedly communicating to Plaintiffs that there was hope that their daughter was still alive even though Camp Mystic and the owners and directors knew dead bodies had been found,\u201d the camp \u201ccaused Plaintiffs to experience severe distress. Defendants\u2019 continuous lies and harassing and confusing statements to Plaintiffs and others were intentionally painful, hurtful, and humiliating.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Houston Chronicle asked readers whether the camp should open in 2026; they \u201coverwhelmingly supported the camp\u2019s reopening.\u201d (\u201cThere is no family I trust more than the Eastlands,\u201d wrote one parent.) When I visited the Childresses and Gettens in River Oaks in February, Doug Getten had recently told someone he wasn\u2019t sure their friendship could continue if he sent his child to Mystic under its current ownership. \u201cThere\u2019s always something,\u201d said Jennie. She\u2019d just heard about a Mystic fundraiser. \u201cWe don\u2019t really go out socially anymore. If we do, it\u2019s to a Heaven\u2019s 27 event.\u201d Her daughter Gwynne heard at school that the camp would reopen and was \u201cextremely distressed.\u201d \u201cThere\u2019s no way,\u201d she said. \u201cThat can\u2019t be.\u201d As we were chatting, we found our way into the Gettens\u2019 open kitchen. Ellen was everywhere. Here was the pink Croc rescue workers had fished from the lake. Here was a picture Gwynne had drawn of her. Jennie opened a junk drawer: a pack of homemade coupons for Mother\u2019s Day. One coupon for a hug. One to walk the dog. Ellen\u2019s door was closed and Jennie had not yet been in the room. Each object demanded a decision no one wanted to make. \u201cThis is her watch,\u201d Jennie said into the junk drawer.<\/p>\n
It seemed to Matthew Childress that the broader camp community was going through the stages of grief for the camp itself: denial, bargaining, perhaps leading at some unknown time to acceptance that the camp they had known was gone. \u201cThe idea that your daughters will return to the same Camp Mystic is a farce,\u201d Caitlin Bonner told me, \u201cand anyone incapable of accepting that is as delusional as the camp leadership.\u201d The parents had forcefully opposed the planned reopening, but the question of the proper way forward for a family that had built cabins in a floodway and ordered girls to stay inside them during a fatal flood remained unclear. It was the final lawsuit, filed in February by CiCi and Will Steward, that made the cleanest ask. \u201cA place where 27 children died because adults ignored warnings is not a camp,\u201d reads the complaint. \u201cIt\u2019s a crime scene. Camp Mystic was not safe for Cile. It will never be safe for any child as long as the Eastlands are associated with it. They can never be allowed to operate a camp again.\u201d<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/867a3c8e36f33e2b7830e8be998265eedb-0726FEA-CampMystic-Girls-evacuating-the-.rvertical.w570.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/1b4064c421038dc1ea4d9dbd6b3c20b395-0726FEA-CampMystic-IMG-5317.rvertical.w570.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n July 4, 2025, at 3:26 a.m.:<\/strong> Campers evacuate to the rec hall. July 5:<\/strong> While searching for his daughter, Michael McCown saw a canoe in a tree. Photo: Court exhibit, Cole and Allison Naylor, et al., v. Camp Mystic, via Travis County District Court (evacuation); Courtesy of Michael McCown (canoe).\n <\/p>\n\n July 4, 2025, at 3:26 a.m.:<\/strong> Campers evacuate to the rec hall. July 5:<\/strong> While searching for his daughter, Michael McCown saw a canoe in a tree. Photo: C… more
\n July 4, 2025, at 3:26 a.m.:<\/strong> Campers evacuate to the rec hall. July 5:<\/strong> While searching for his daughter, Michael McCown saw a canoe in a tree. Photo: Court exhibit, Cole and Allison Naylor, et al., v. Camp Mystic, via Travis County District Court (evacuation); Courtesy of Michael McCown (canoe).\n <\/p>\nIn February, I drove through Hunt with Claudia Sullivan on smooth new road laid since July. The river was to our left, and though she had been living with this color-drained landscape for eight months, she was continually astonished by the clarity of the view. With the cypress and cedar trees washed away, all the foliage erased, you could see clear to the other side of the Guadalupe. Homes that had heretofore been hidden revealed themselves. \u201cI don\u2019t know where I am when I look at this,\u201d said Claudia, who had spent most of her life here and written several books about Mystic. \u201cI\u2019m in another country.\u201d We drove past the little that was left of the dance hall Crider\u2019s, behind which Chloe\u2019s body had been found, and, a few hundred yards from there, a tree-lined embankment where Linnie\u2019s body had been found. A 63-year-old man named Jeff Ramsey and 8-year-old Cile Steward were still somewhere in the river beside us.<\/p>\n
The SUV kept beeping. \u201cIt\u2019s because I don\u2019t wear my seat belt,\u201d said Claudia. \u201cI just don\u2019t!\u201d When she was younger, you piled into the back of a pickup. You didn\u2019t wear a helmet on a bike. The kids at Mystic were perfectly safe, Claudia reminded me, for 100 years. No one had fallen off a horse. No one had wandered off into the woods. \u201cWe had a big jar of peanut butter on every table,\u201d she said. No peanut-involved deaths.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere used to be 20 vacation homes right here,\u201d Claudia said, nodding toward the river. You could see the slabs. In a yard, Claudia saw someone she thought she recognized, a fit woman in her 60s in a college sweatshirt. She stopped the car and got out. They screamed, hugged, and smiled with profound and familiar joy. The woman had been Claudia\u2019s camper at Mystic when she was a child more than 50 years ago; they\u2019d last seen one another in the \u201990s. The woman had lost her sister and niece in the flood. Her brother-in-law survived by hanging on to a tree. \u201cI learned so much from you,\u201d she said to Claudia, \u201cabout being a good person.\u201d<\/p>\n
As we drove, limestone bluffs rose against the river; these were the bluffs Matthew Childress had, when hopeful, imagined Chloe trapped on. The water had been so powerful it washed away rock. The body of one Mystic camper was found 30 miles away. We drove by the camp, turned around, and drove back. \u201cMystic did everything it knew how to do to the best of its ability. They did what they\u2019d always done before, and it had always worked,\u201d Claudia said. \u201cAnd this time, it didn\u2019t work.\u201d<\/p>\n
It hadn\u2019t occurred to me how hard it might be for a camp family to pivot until my tour of the grounds with Britt Eastland, who had grown up on Mystic\u2019s 750 acres with his brothers, raised his family there, and now oversees Cypress Lake with his wife, Catie, a former counselor. One of his brothers, James, died of heart failure in 2015; the other two live and work at camp with their wives and children. They were navigating their way back to stability in Dick\u2019s absence. \u201cWe ask ourselves,\u201d Britt told me, \u201cWhat would Dad do?\u201d The livelihoods and inheritances of the entire clan are tied up in summer sessions everyone had surely assumed would endure forever, a business whose very mission centered on the cultivation of tradition and therefore resistance to change. I asked Britt about the decision to open camp on May 30, to the enduring horror of so many parents of the dead. \u201cOur faith is strong,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re called to do it.\u201d<\/p>\n
The parents of dead children are a problem. They stand opposed to our most basic and necessary illusions. Was there an underlying condition? we wonder of the child struck down by suicide or sudden illness, laying track between ourselves and tragedy. Were there signs? When Alex Jones refers to parents of murdered first-graders as crisis actors he expresses only the grotesque endpoint of a universal need. \u201cI can\u2019t imagine,\u201d you say to the grieving parent, but this is just the issue: We do imagine. We do.<\/p>\n
In March, the parents were pressuring the State of Texas to deny Mystic a license to operate while state investigations were underway. They had in this the public support of the lieutenant governor, who said it would be \u201cna\u00efve\u201d for the Texas Department of State Health Services to grant a license under these circumstances. The Steward family asked the court for a restraining order that would preserve part of the camp as a \u201ccrime scene,\u201d and both camp supporters and Heavens 27 parents showed up for a hearing in Austin. Some of the camp supporters on the right side of the room were in green, with \u201cI\u00a0 camp Mystic\u201d pins; some of the parents on the left side of the room were in purple, Cile\u2019s favorite color. Camp supporters had brought children; Jennie recognized a girl from Gwynne\u2019s cabin. In an attempt to demonstrate the severity of the flood, the Eastlands\u2019 lawyer played video footage with audio. As the sound of girls\u2019 screams filled the room, parents hid their faces and covered their ears. The lawyer turned off the audio. In the end, the court agreed to a temporary injunction preventing further remodeling to Guadalupe, though nothing in the order would prevent Cypress Lake from reopening for the 853 girls who were, according to Mystic\u2019s lawyer, signed up to attend. These public attempts to close the camp triggered an outpouring of anger from its defenders. On Facebook, Liberty Lindley, the mother of a 9-year-old who survived the flood on a mattress, a story the 9-year-old would be telling in River of Angels, argued passionately for \u201cthe choice to return.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI wish my daughter had the \u2018choice to return,\u2019\u201d responded Katie Baker. \u201cOh wait, she was left in her cabin to drown.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI really do hate that we believe different sets of facts,\u201d said Lindley, who would reference Baker\u2019s \u201chate\u201d and thirst for \u201cvengeance\u201d in her lengthy response. \u201cI beg you to please see that we are trying to honor you in our healing.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s no difference between my interpretation of the timeline and theirs,\u201d Blake Bonner told me, and he was right: There is little disagreement about what happened that night. The disagreement is about who is at fault and how to respond. Parents who opposed the reopening would continue to employ the rhetoric of \u201csafety,\u201d and Mystic\u2019s defenders would continue to argue, probably correctly, that Cypress Lake was and remains a place where children are in no obvious physical danger, but the battle over Mystic\u2019s future raises much more subtle questions than whether cabins should be outfitted with walkie-talkies. Outside the purely legal realm, whether Mystic should reopen in 2026 is not a question of safety. It is a question of propriety, dignity, and, ultimately, shame.<\/p>\n
On the night of July 3, Cile Steward ate fajitas for dinner in the dining hall close to her cabin. The girls of Twins I and II and Bubble Inn had a dance party. Ten p.m., every night, was bedtime. Gwynne Getten, 11, tucked in Ellen, 9. \u201cI love you,\u201d she said. \u201cI love you too,\u201d Ellen said. Gwynne returned to her cabin closer to the river.<\/p>\n
In a cabin called Giggle Box Ainslie Bashara and her two co-counselors were tasked with calming 16 girls. They were 8, 9, 10. \u201cLittle girls are afraid of lightning,\u201d Ainslie told the host of a Christian talk show days later. \u201cSo afraid.\u201d It sounded as if someone were setting off fireworks inside. The windows were open, which, in the absence of air-conditioning, they pretty much always were. Ainslie had no way of communicating with anyone. She had been out that evening, and when counselors returned from a night out, they were required to leave their cell phones at the office.<\/p>\n
Dick and Edward Eastland received the flash-flood warning at 1:14 a.m. and were securing canoes at 1:45 a.m. Around 2:20 a.m. counselors from Bug House and Look Inn, where Gwynne was staying, walked to the office in the rain to tell Dick and Edward that their cabins were taking on water. They were told to return to their cabins and put down towels.<\/p>\n
Some counselors would take it upon themselves to evacuate, and some cabins would be slowly emptied by Dick and Edward, who began evacuating the ones closest to the river around 3 a.m. They did so slowly. The littlest girls, girls like Cile and Ellen and Linnie and Lila, were in Twins and Bubble Inn, further from the river, closer to safety.<\/p>\n
From their cabins, the littlest girls watched campers walk by them with pillows, toward the recreation hall. One of the girls who walked by these cabins was Gwynne. \u201cCan we get my sister?\u201d she asked her counselor as she walked by Bubble Inn. We can\u2019t, the counselor told her.<\/p>\n
The older girls walked to the rec hall, a high-ceilinged, rickety structure that was really only one floor but rimmed on three sides with a balcony you could reach by sneaking between the wall and an oddly placed staircase jammed against a door. Girls crammed onto the balcony. Water filled the space between and beneath them.<\/p>\n
A staffer outside told Ainslie to stay in the cabin; hers was not directly adjacent to the river. \u201cWe need to leave,\u201d some of her campers were saying. \u201cOur cabin is safe,\u201d Ainslie said, repeating what she had been told. \u201cThe other girls\u2019 cabin is not. That\u2019s why they\u2019re leaving, but we are staying.\u201d Ainslie hopped on a bed to close the glass over a screen. By the time she was finished, the water was as high as her ankles. \u201cEverybody, shoes on,\u201d she said. \u201cWe are leaving too.\u201d Ainslie opened the door and water rushed in. She closed the door and held it closed with the trunks in which girls kept their clothes and journals and stuffed animals. Outside, she could hear screams coming from other cabins. She opened a window; she would push each girl out one by one. But the first girl, a 9-year-old, refused. Ainslie hopped out the window herself. She was shocked to find the water up to her knees. If the girl had gone, she would have been swept away.<\/p>\n
Ainslie carried three or four barefoot girls a few dozen yards to a stone pavilion called Cricket Corner and told them to run from there up a steep, rocky hill from which sheets of rain were pouring toward the cabins. She went back for more. By the time she came for the last group, the water was up to her thighs. She could see flashlights in cabins where the girls had not gotten out. She could hear screams. The water, still rising, smelled like sewage. Between her and a cabin a few feet away were unpassable rapids. When she had all of the girls on the hill, shivering and crying, she told them to pray. They clapped their hands together hard. Can we pray about my stuffed animal in the cabin? Can we pray about the cabin we can see in front of us? Can we pray this rain will stop?<\/p>\n
Mary Liz Eastland evacuated her four children from their house, which was taking on water, to Tweety\u2019s house, but Tweety\u2019s house would also flood. The four children and Mary Liz and Tweety broke a window, escaped the second house, waded around floating cars in a staff parking lot, and found higher ground with Britt and his family.<\/p>\n
A 10-year-old girl who had already reached the rec hall realized that she had forgotten her blanket. She turned back for it and was taken by the river. In the cabin next to Giggle Box, Wiggle Inn, a night watchman named Glenn Juenke pulled little girls onto mattresses and watched them float. The water had swept up anthills, and ants floated on the surface, biting the girls and Glenn. \u201cWho invited these ants to our pool party?\u201d he asked in an attempt to lift their spirits. He scanned the water for snakes.<\/p>\n
In Twins, a cabin steps from Wiggle Inn, girls were sucked out of doors and windows. \u201cLord Jesus, please stop the rain!\u201d shouted Edward Eastland, who was also sucked out of Twins and survived by clinging to a tree. Some of the 8- and 9-year-olds would also survive by hanging on to trees, and one of those girls would later be asked to write an essay in school on the subject of perseverance. \u201cI said I will survive and I did,\u201d she would write. \u201cI kept grabbing branches and tredding water.\u201d<\/p>\n
There would have been a time when Chloe Childress and Katherine Ferruzzo, the counselors of Bubble Inn, could have walked their charges through ankle-deep water to the rec hall, or the commissary, or up to Cypress Lake. There would have been a time when the water was too high for Linnie McCown and Ellen Getten, but low enough for Chloe and Katherine to save themselves. They stayed. Dick Eastland attempted, in his last moments, to evacuate Bubble Inn. He loaded girls, perhaps the whole cabin, into the Chevy Tahoe Michael McCown would later find smashed against a tree.<\/p>\n
In the rickety rec hall, the water rose up toward the girls pressed against one another in the balcony. The building swayed. Girls soiled themselves. \u201cWhere is my sister?\u201d Gwynne Getten asked. \u201cWhere is my sister?\u201d<\/p>\n
Claudia and her campers used to play a game. \u201cIs this the real world?\u201d they would ask of their camp life, or was the real world outside the gates? For as long as anyone can remember, Camp Mystic had been invisible from the road, hidden by a line of cypress trees. Drivers couldn\u2019t see girls in their bathing suits from the road, and the girls couldn\u2019t see passing cars from the lake. The cypress trees are gone now. A stranger driving by sees a line of dated institutional cabins, a lake green with algae, a place made beautiful only through strenuous acts of collective imagination.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf someone builds an apartment building out of balsa wood,\u201d Michael McCown asked me, \u201cand that apartment complex catches fire and you die trying to save people, are you a hero?\u201d Maybe you are. Dick\u2019s heroism played a starring role in Mystic\u2019s self-absolving narrative, but on the Fourth of July, it was not heroism, in particular, that Linnie McCown required. There was at play here something unspoken about different ways of being in the world, country people and city people, a world of relationships set against a world bound by rules. What Linnie needed was not courage but lawyerly caution, a camp sufficiently cowed by the legal responsibility of ensuring the safety of 550 girls that it would not dare place cabins in a known floodway and fail to evacuate them for hours after a warning. No one doubted that Dick Eastland would spend 30 minutes teaching a single girl to fish; it was with this lack of concern for clock time that he earned their devotion and also left them terribly vulnerable.<\/p>\n
Matthew Childress returned to camp on an eerily beautiful day in early October, \u201ctrying to outrun my fears.\u201d The camp seemed so much smaller than he had remembered. He found, in trunks set outside, a small pink blanket Chloe had been carrying with her since she was a newborn, and walked the distance from Bubble Inn to the rec hall: 300 feet, a 60-second walk for an adult. The distance from Bubble Inn to the hill on which Ainslie\u2019s campers had survived was shorter, 70 feet, a 40-second walk. It was safe to walk at 1:14, when the first warning came, and it was safe to walk at 3:26, when a picture was taken of other cabins\u2019 evacuations. Chloe died around 3:50, when Dick\u2019s Apple Watch was submerged.<\/p>\n
Matthew had been coming to this camp since he was a child dropping off his sisters. This was where he and Wendie watched, over ten summers, Chloe and her friends receive prize after prize: \u201cM\u201d girls, Cup girls. This was where the biggest, strongest girls were selected for the great honor of riding \u201cwar canoe,\u201d the final battle between Tonkawa and Kiowa. After the canoe race, every girl would speak. \u201cEvery single one,\u201d Childress told me, \u201cstarts with I want to thank Jesus for making all this possible, and I want to thank the Eastland family. Wendie and I would just kind of chuckle about it. Like, What a scam. This crazy cult.\u201d<\/p>\n
Looking back now, he sees something else: the cultivation, over time, of a bond stronger than reason, a shared identity sufficiently powerful to absorb the needless deaths of 27 of its own. Matthew and his allies had been trying to convince the community to grieve what Mystic had been rather than pretend it could carry on unchanged, but it wasn\u2019t working. Their grief was already being transformed into lore. Someday, perhaps someday very soon, campers in white would together read Old Testament verses and the verses would be taken to refer to the tragedy already receding into the past. It was obvious to anyone who had a passing familiarity with camp culture that the girls would, with time, be rendered into ghost stories, part of the camp history the Eastlands so assiduously crafted. What was the year of the great flood?<\/p>\n
Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism.
\n If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the March 23, 2026, issue of
\n New York\u00a0Magazine.<\/p>\n
Want more stories like this one? Subscribe now<\/a>
\n to support our journalism and get unlimited access to our coverage.
\n If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the March 23, 2026, issue of
\n New York Magazine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A group of Bubble Inn campers and counselors days before the flood. Front row (from left): Lila Bonner…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":400675,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[269],"tags":[75237,442,18,440,24153,19,17,1371,3466,133,2461],"class_list":["post-400674","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-audio-article","tag-climate-change","tag-eire","tag-environment","tag-flooding","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-natural-disasters","tag-new-york-magazine","tag-science","tag-texas"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116281926628936387","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400674","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=400674"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400674\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/400675"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=400674"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=400674"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=400674"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/e81a6f8626dce461f202d94c2a53ccc945-0726FEA-CampMystic-Bubble-Inn-IMG-9631.rhorizontal.w1100.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"package-table-of-contents-photo\"\/](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/3328057d7270f6bd5ea0b28e4ea6c31dbd-0726COV-4x5-CampMystic.2x.rvertical.w330.jpg\")