A camp catastrophe. I'm Jason Horton.

I'm Rebecca Leib.

And this is Ghost Town.

Off of State Route 17 in the Catskill Mountains of New York, there's a summer camp.

It looks like you might imagine a vacated summer camp looks like.

Green hills, rundown cabins, campy signage, and overgrown trails.

But this isn't some typical wet hot American summer type nostalgia.

This is the old home of America's longest running weight loss camp for kids.

Between 1968 and 2021, the camp took in thousands of kids.

Some lost weight, some found love, but others endured injuries,

assault, and trauma on a whole other level.

This is the story of Camp Shane.

A lot of information from this episode came from this incredible

piece on the camp in Bloomberg Business Week by David Govy Herbert.

Please go check it out. There are photos and more quotes.

It's awesome, super comprehensive, if you want to hear more.

To tell this story, though, we need to go back to 1923.

That's when Selma Ettenberg was born in Brooklyn to immigrant Jewish parents.

She was smart and beautiful, observant, and ambitious,

but was not allowed to attend college like her older brother.

Instead, Selma married a soft-spoken kind of pushover guy named Irving

and had three kids, Leslie, David, and Diana.

...