A 25-year-old New York woman says that a weekend at Great Wolf Lodge weekend she took at age 10 triggered the first panic attack of her life and a lifelong struggle with mental health.
Her video is the latest in a wave of “what happened to me at Great Wolf Lodge” storytimes circulating on TikTok, and her own framing is unambiguous. “Great Wolf Lodge ruined my life,” she says, in the first line.
The nine-minute, five-second video was posted by Kristinaa (@kriistiinaa4), a Long Island creator whose channel mixes opinions, coffee and slice-of-life storytimes. It has drawn more than 331,200 views.
She took the trip to Great Wolf Lodge with her soccer team.
“I was fine. Up until this point, okay, I never had one anxiety attack, very rarely got sick,” she says. The cough started on check-in. The water park went well for the first few hours.
The turn she describes came at a concession stand, where the smell of cookies and cream ice cream tipped her into nausea.
“Ooh, I really don’t like the smell,” she recalls. “Like, it was making me so nauseous and I’ve never had that before.”
At dinner that night her hearing dropped out and her chest went heavy. “It felt like I was losing hearing and it felt like everything around me was continuing, and I was just frozen in time,” she says. She vomited at the table. The Pepto-Bismol her mother had bought from the gift shop came back up bright pink in front of the waitress.
“I cried myself to sleep that night,” she says. “I remember so vividly laying there watching George Lopez and every two seconds I would like move and I would get that same feeling again.” The next morning the family left early. “The second that we left that hotel, I was perfectly fine. It was like nothing happened,” she says.
She puts the incident at the beginning of a longer arc of mental health issues.
“The reason why I say that ruined my life is because that was the start of my anxiety,” she laments. “That was the start of my emetophobia.”
The condition Kristinaa names is real and reasonably common. Cleveland Clinic defines emetophobia as “an excessive and irrational fear of vomiting or seeing someone else vomit,” classified as a specific phobia in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and able to trigger “anxiety and panic attacks after exposure or anticipated exposure.”
The clinic notes a distinction between primary emetophobia, where there is no triggering event, and secondary emetophobia, which develops after a traumatic vomiting experience. Kristinaa’s account is a textbook description of the secondary kind.
The setting also matters. Indoor water parks have a documented air quality concern that has nothing to do with mood or the supernatural: chloramines, the byproducts that form when pool chlorine reacts with sweat, urine, skin cells and other organic material from swimmers. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes that chloramines “irritate skin, eyes, and the respiratory tract (including the nose) when they turn into gas into the air above the water, particularly indoors.”
That mechanism is the reason indoor pool air can feel heavy and chemical, and a number of commenters under Kristinaa’s video — including one identifying herself as a former Great Wolf Lodge lifeguard — flagged exactly that smell.
Great Wolf Lodge has had documented public health incidents in the past. In one widely reported case, the Minnesota Department of Health investigated a Cryptosporidium outbreak traced to a Great Wolf Lodge location, with affected guests reporting “diarrhea, stomach cramps, vomiting and a low-grade fever” after their stays.
The chain responded with hyperchlorination of the water park, and the state conducted an online survey to identify additional cases.
Those documented incidents are mainly waterborne or foodborne, not the air quality complaint Kristinaa describes, and they don’t establish anything about her trip.
The thread has produced a long bracket of competing explanations: mold (by far the most repeated), chlorine fumes, bedbugs, norovirus, anxiety, a fringe of “demonic activity” and “dark energy” replies, and a steady minority pointing out that they and their families have had perfectly normal stays.
“I’ve stayed at GWL 9 times and never once had any issues,” wrote APerson. “We’ve been multiple times to the one in Canada and love it,” added another. A purported current GWL lifeguard, on the other hand, who was posting as Lauren, wrote that chlorine vapour buildup in indoor parks is real enough that staff she works with deal with it routinely: “If you work more than 8 hours, you’re sick for the next 3 days.”
Another commenter suggested that while there might be correlation, it’s not likely that Great Wolf Lodge caused her anxiety.
“I’m sure you were legitimately sick. Waterparks harbor all sorts of illnesses that cause GI upset,” wrote Meg. “But you were also right in the age range for early onset OCD. So it is likely that this was more of a coincidence or maybe a trigger rather than the actual cause of your long term struggles.”
A 10-year-old having a first panic attack in an unfamiliar, chemically heavy, high-stimulus environment is consistent with how panic disorders and specific phobias often debut. Whether Great Wolf Lodge caused that or simply happened to be the room she was standing in when it arrived is not something a 15-year-old memory can settle.
The chain has real, sourced public-health incidents to account for and a real indoor-air-quality issue endemic to the format, and the company’s reflex to “shut down” implied by Kristinaa’s closing line is not what the record supports. We are left with a story about how anxiety arrived in a person’s life, and the place that has become her answer when her family asks where it came from.
BoardingArea reached out to Kristinaa via TikTok direct message and to Great Wolf Lodge via email. We’ll be sure to update this if either responds.
@kriistiinaa4 I honestly am flabbergasted #greatwolf #greatwolflodge #anxiety #scary #storytime ♬ original sound – Kristinaa
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Sounds like someone needs professional help.