The Christy family were the owners and operators of Camp Crystal Lake, a New Jersey summer camp that became the site of a series of murders in the 1950s and 1980s.
History
The Christys established their summer camp in the small town of Crystal Lake in 1935, consisting of local teenagers and adults as its councilors and staff. The camp had a high reputation for its first twenty-one years of existence until 1957. In that year the Christys hired Pamela Voorhees as their new cook, allowing her son Jason to accompany her to work. Jason drowned in the lake and disappeared when the two on-duty councilors, Barry and Claudette, went inside to have sex. To avoid further scandal the family shut down the camp for the remainder of the season. Pamela broke down after her son's disappearance and was institutionalised for six months.
In the summer of 1958 the camp was re-opened and, cleared of wrongdoing, the Christys rehired Barry and Claudette as councilors. Believing Pamela to have recovered from her son's death, she too was rehired. This proved to be a fatal decision for the business on 4 July, when she killed the two councilors when they again left the children to have sex. With an unsolved double homicide on the camp's record, the Christys were again forced to close. Over the next decade or so the family struggled to re-open the camp, but their attempts failed due to a campaign of arson by Pamela and a case of "bad water". Her attempts to ruin the business succeeded, and the camp became notorious in the town as a black stain, with some believing it to possess a genuine "death curse". With this the Christys gave up and abandoned the business, though still owned the lakeside property.
Another member of the Christy family, Steve Christy, gained interest in the property in 1978, and spent three years and $25,000 out of his own pocket to refurbish the camp. On June 13 1979, having refused to heed veiled warnings from Pamela, he and six councilors were murdered on the eve of the camp's reopening.
Legacy
Though the Christys always had the best of intentions, their trust of Pamela Voorhees led to the death of two counselors and the camp's closure, spoiled, and accursed reputation which led to forty-five years of murder, pestilence, arson, and supernatural occurrences that took places on its grounds, perpetrated by Pamela and then her fallen son Jason. It is not known if the locals placed any blame on Christys or deemed them responsible for any of the murders either in the past or the future, but as it had been their camp it could be said that they may share some of the blame, indirectly. Nothing is known of their status or whereabouts by the late seventies or whether they kept up-to-date on the happenings of their former camp, or what line of business they went into afterwards. However, the truck driver named Enos claimed that Steve Christy's "folks" had become "crazy and broke" by the time of his attempt to reopen the Camp Crystal Lake in the late seventies and early eighties.
- Steve Christy (deceased)
- David Christy (deceased)
- Louise Christy (deceased)
- Alice Hardy (deceased)
- Bill (deceased)
- Brenda Jones (deceased)
- Ned Rubenstein (deceased)
- Jack Burrell (deceased)
- Marcie Stanler (deceased)
- Annie Phillips (deceased)
- Barry (deceased)
- Claudette deceased)
References
- Friday the 13th (1980)