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. The address is the location of Trails Carolina, a controversial wilderness therapy camp where a child died in February. The camp was subsequently hit with a sexual abuse lawsuit and was ordered closed by the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services.

A flyer for “The Nichols Company” provides 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 family and peers, and achieve academic success.” The camp charged up to $715 per day in tuition and $4,900 for children to enroll.

The camp had previously faced a lawsuit over alleged sexual assault by a former camper, which has since been settled, and a camper died while in the camp’s care in 2014. But Trails Carolina’s troubles really began in February 2024, when a 12-year-old boy died within hours of arriving in North Carolina from his home in New York, casting the camp in a harsh light.

The sheriff’s office and NCDHHS quickly seized children from the camp and suspended the camp’s operations, which Trails Carolina described 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 uncooperative with the investigation.

According to an autopsy report, the coroner ruled the boy died of 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 ruled 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 filed a federal lawsuit against the camp, alleging that she had been sexually abused by another underage camper and that the camp had failed to intervene. She also alleged severe medical neglect. A judge recently denied 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 light of these issues, former campers have spoken about their experiences at Trails Carolina, describing it as a nightmare, with incompetent, undertrained staff starving and overworking their young charges, denied medical care or even access to clean water.

Although the camp has appealed the permit revocation, the sale of the site 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 fit the template of the “troubled youth” industry, where teens are often forcibly “removed” from their homes and sent to wilderness camp for behavioral problems ranging from relatively minor issues like truancy to more serious problems like 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 variety of reasons, ranging from serious mental health issues to more mundane forms of misbehavior (e.g., skipping school). 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 have visited such camps in the past also told The Guardian about their experiences. One young woman described being painfully restrained for self-harming. Her sleeping bag was covered with a tarp tied to the floor with heavy hot water bottles so she couldn’t walk 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.