Trails Carolina property for sale amid assault lawsuit and investigation into camper’s death

LAKE TOXAWAY, NC (WGHP) — Amid a series of legal troubles that began with the death of a pre-teen boy, a North Carolina camp for troubled youth has put its property up for sale.

Lake Norman Realty has listed the 32-acre property at 500 Winding Gap Road in Lake Toxaway for $3.2 million. This address is the site of Carolina Trailsa besieged wilderness therapy camp where a child died in February. The camp was subsequently charged with sexual abuse and ordered to close by the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services.

A flyer of “The Nichols Company” has more details about the property. The Nichols Company is a commercial real estate and property management firm based in Charlotte.

The problem with Trails

Trails Carolina was a wilderness camp in Lake Toxaway, North Carolina, that served children ages 10 to 17. On its now-defunct website, the camp advertised itself as “dedicated to helping teens work through behavioral and emotional challenges, build trusting relationships with their families and peers, and achieve academic success.” The camp accused up to $715 per day in tuition and a $4,900 stipend for children to register.

The camp had previously faced a lawsuit over the alleged sexual assault of a former camper, which has since been resolved, and a Camper died while in camp care in 2014The real trouble for Trails Carolina began in February 2024, however, when a 12-year-old boy died within hours of arriving in North Carolina from his home in New York, throwing the camp into a grim context.

The sheriff’s office and NCDHHS quickly seized children from the camp and suspended the camp’s activities, which marked the Trails Carolina 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 not cooperating with the investigation.

According to an autopsy report, the coroner ruled that the boy had died by asphyxiation. The boy had been forced to sleep in a bivy bag with an alarm on it so that counselors would know if he tried to unzip the bag. Due to the nature of his death, the OCME considered it a homicide, although the police investigation is ongoing and no one has been charged.

Within days of the camper’s death, another former camper has sued the camp in a federal lawsuit alleging that she was sexually abused by a fellow underage camper and that the camp failed to intervene. She also alleged that there was severe medical neglect. A judge recently dismissed the camp’s attempts to have the lawsuit dismissed in whole or in part, and the court scheduled a new hearing for September 12.

In response to these issues, former campers have spoken about their experiences at Trails CarolinaHe described it as a nightmarish experience, with incompetent and inadequately trained staff starving and overworking their young charges, denying them medical care or even access to clean water.

Although the camp has appealed the revocation of their permit, The sale of the property seems to imply that the closure will be permanent.

Trails Carolina is just one of the camps owned by Wilderness Training & Consulting LLC, an Oregon-based company “that is part of an organization of for-profit affiliated companies doing business as Family Help & Wellness,” according to details in the lawsuit.

Trails Carolina, WTC and Family Help & Wellness largely conform to the template of the “problem youth” industrywhere teenagers are often forcibly removed from their homes and taken to a wilderness camp for behavioral problems ranging from relatively minor issues such as truancy to more serious problems such as sexually disordered behavior.

Troubled teen industry

In a 2021 report written for the University of New Hampshire, The researcher writes: “Adolescents are sent to these institutions for a myriad of reasons, ranging from serious mental health issues to more mundane forms of misbehavior (e.g., truancy). Parents are often manipulated through fear tactics into believing that their children desperately need these types of institutions, and are then manipulated into not believing their children when they say something bad about the institution.”

“Survivors report physical violence, exploitation (human trafficking) and various forms of psychological abuse, including harsh discrimination and LGBTQ+ conversion therapy.”

People who attended these camps also spoke to The Guardian in the past about the experience, in which one young woman described being painfully restrained for self-harming behaviour and how she covered her sleeping bag with a tarp tied to the floor with heavy hot water bottles to prevent her from running away during the night.

According to The Guardian, restraint abuse is common in these types of facilities and was one of the reasons Trails Carolina was fined by NCDHHS.