Any idea how something like this could happen?

If you plan to buy more investment properties down the road, I think it's a good idea to start with an LLC.

I thought of a good idea and that would be to start flipping houses and pull the camper to each house while I work on it.

It seems you have a good idea of what goes into a project.

You may have an inaccurate idea of the time scale involved when people say "rinse & repeat".

During our initial walk-thru the house, it had a HORRIBLE smell in the kitchen, an equally horrible smell in the family room (pet urine), and we found that the kitchen drawers and cabinets were infested with bugs - we had no idea what they were. 

That's a solid idea...

@Cole Hagen my feedback would be: 1) don't commit income tax fraud by purposefully under-reporting your income, I may be wrong, but I'm pretty sure the IRS rule is that other/misc. income in excess of $600 must be reported, and 2) if you ignore 1) and do chose to not report it, it's probably not a great idea to post about the fact that you're considering doing so on a site where you have your full name posted, how easy would it be for a Google search to turn that info up or for someone to report you to the IRS based on this post?

Does anyone have any fancy ideas, wisdom, or conversation that will educate me going forward.

Not that I agree with such laws, they're often meant to keep out "undesirables" who are unable to rent a whole house, like minorities and young people.