The Breathing Church

This happened in the summer of 1995. I was seventeen, part of a youth group out of First Baptist in Valdosta. Our youth pastor had this idea to take us camping for a weekend, get us out of town, do some team building or whatever. He'd found this spot through a friend of a friend, some private land out past Enigma, if you can believe that's a real town name. Enigma, Georgia. Population nothing. There were eight of us kids plus Pastor Tim. We drove out Friday afternoon in the church van, took forever to find the place. The property had this old church on it, abandoned since the 1800s from what the landowner told us. Small thing, white clapboard, steeple half collapsed. Windows all boarded up. We set up our tents maybe fifty yards from it, in this little clearing. I remember Kyle Drummond was upset because he'd wanted to bring his girlfriend and Pastor Tim said no. That's got nothing to do with anything, but I remember it. We had hot dogs for dinner, told ghost stories around the fire. Typical stuff. It was a new moon that night, pitch black once the fire died down. No light pollution out there. You couldn't see your hand in front of your face. We all turned in around eleven.

I woke up to this sound. Took me a second to figure out what it was because it was so slow. This deep, drawn out creak. Then silence. Then another creak. Over and over, real steady. Like breathing. That's the only way I can describe it. Like something enormous taking long, slow breaths. I unzipped[ my tent and looked toward the church. And I swear to you, I watched those walls move. The whole structure was expanding outward, then pulling back in. The wooden boards were flexing, bowing out like ribs. The roof was lifting and settling. moon camping nights are the darkest - Autumn' In the moonlight I could see every board, every nail, stretching and contracting. The rhythm was perfect. Slow and steady. In, out. In, out. I couldn't move. I just crouched there at the opening of my tent, watching this dead building breathe. The sound it made, that creaking, it was like the whole thing was alive and sighing in its sleep. I don't know how long I watched before I heard someone else rustling around. It was Amanda Reyes from the tent next to mine. She was standing outside, just staring at it too. Neither of us said anything. What do you say?

One by one, everybody woke up. The sound was impossible to sleep through once you noticed it. All eight of us kids ended up standing in a line, watching that church pulse in the dark. Pastor Tim never came out. I don't know if he slept through it or if he was awake in his tent pretending not to hear. We never asked him. The breathing went on for maybe two hours. None of us moved. None of us went closer. We just stood there like we were hypnotized, if that makes sense. At some point, the rhythm started slowing down. The expansions got smaller. The creaking got quieter. And then it just stopped. The church was still. Dead still, like it had always been. Nobody wanted to go back to their tents. We all just sat down right there in the grass and waited for the sun to come up.