Camp Monsters - Augerino

Episode Date: November 8, 2023

BONUS EPISODE from the Camp Monsters live show at the REI Flagship store in Denver, Colorado. Join host, Weston Davis, as he shares a personal story of his encounter with the Augerino, a wormy-snake-like creature attracted to water who bores tunnels through the earth... Thank you to this season's sponsors: Benchmade, Roark, Keen and Fjallraven. 

This is an REI Co-op Studios production. On the night of Saturday, October 28th, fans of the Camp Monsters podcast braved a blizzard to come to the beautiful REI flagship store in downtown Denver, Colorado, on the banks of the South Platte River, and hear a brand new episode of the podcast performed live by yours truly, Weston Davis. Many thanks to the whole REI Denver team for the great work they put in, hosting a wonderful event in spite of the weather. With the storm raging outside, the adventurous fans and I huddled snugly around a digital campfire and told a story. What you're about to hear is the result. That's what I'm talking about. Yeah.

Yes. And I would like to thank all of you for coming out in the first blizzard of the year. That really separates the true fans. People that really sign up for it. So thank you for coming out. I am

Weston Davis, and I am the host of the Camp Monsters podcast. On Camp Monsters, we travel the wild places of this country, telling tales of the unexplainable things that lurk just beyond the firelight. The things that crash away through the brush right before your flashlight beam falls on them.

Folks must like the stories that we uncover because we just finished our fifth season, and plans are already underway for our sixth. We've done more than 50 episodes so far, and yes, some of them are based right here in Colorado. Back in our first season, we did an episode called The Slide Rock Bolter, about a creature that clings to steep, rocky mountain slopes and comes down in a landslide on its unsuspecting victims. And in our third season, we did an episode we called The Traveler,

which took us into the wilderness of tunnels beneath that big and kind of eerie Denver airport that I flew through last night, where we met a very strange traveler indeed. Lucky for us, Colorado has no shortage of mysterious creatures to tell tales about. In fact, I've been hoping for an excuse to tell this story. I've been saving it up, kind of. It's about a very Coloradan creature called the Agarino. When you hear about the Agarino, mostly you hear about it like a goofy tall tale. It's one of those stories that maybe a bored cowhand would make up to scare a greenhorn. About a big, wormy, snake-like creature that bores tunnels through the earth. And, oh, the agarino's attracted to water, too, so any time that there's

a leak in an underground pipe or in an irrigation ditch, that sort of thing, of course, the agarino might be to blame. Sure, if you can believe that kind of thing. But the fact is that I personally have a hard time thinking about the Ogarinos just a tall tale. Because of something that happened a long time ago. Back when I was just a baby. My father was a civil engineer. You see, he specialized in hydraulics. And when he was fresh out of college, the first job he could get was right here in Colorado, tramping and traveling all over the

state to inspect the dozens of dams that dot Colorado's remoter regions. It meant a lot of driving and a lot of hiking, but they were young, and it was an adventure for them. Once I was born, they took me along, camping out here and there and everywhere under those bright Colorado stars. And the night of our story was just another one of those nights. It was late summer, coming on fall, not particularly cold, just a little chilly in the nighttime.

My mother and I were asleep in a little campground beside a river up in the mountains a river kind of like the river outside of course we can't hear the flowing of the river in here tonight, but if you'll humor me for just a second and close your eyes take a deep breath and imagine I bet we can conjure it up And close your eyes. Take a deep breath and imagine.

I bet we can conjure it up. Imagine a shallow river of cold water. Not too big, just rippling, burbling over the rocks. It's a nice, peaceful sound, isn't it? The perfect kind of sound for a mother and baby to fall asleep to. My father, meanwhile, on that night years ago, he was sleeping on the same river, but ten or so miles upstream from our campground. In fact, he was sleeping beside the source of the river, where it sprang from the outlet pipe of an old earthen dam. He hadn't dragged us all the way up to that dam because the trail up to it was so long and rugged. The road that had been

hacked up that valley when they built it back in the 1890s was long gone. The dam itself had been abandoned almost as soon as it was built, when that era's silver boom went bust and a lot of people were harshly awoken from their get-rich-quick dreams. In the century since it was built, this dam had mostly gone back to nature. In fact, it was hardly recognizable as a dam when my father first saw it. The face was all grown up in grass and low scrub, and there were even a few small pine trees growing at the top. Well, it was almost night when my father reached the dam,

so he set up his tent by flashlight right there beside the top. He figured he'd finish his inspection the next day and then hike back down to us. But he was wrong. He didn't have any trouble going to sleep that night, snug in his sleeping bag inside his tent, listening to the gentle burble of water from the dam's outflow pipe, and tired out from the days-long hike. He drifted right off.

But then sometime in the middle of the night, his dreams snuck away from him, and after a long while he realized that his eyes were open. He couldn't see anything. It was a cloudy night, and darkness was complete, but... Isn't it funny how sometimes the softest sounds will pull you gently out of sleep, just as surely as the loud ones jolt you awake. Your sleeping mind begins to whisper to you that something... something isn't quite right.

So he woke up and lay there in the darkness listening. And outside the tent, beneath the sounds of the river, so faint that he wasn't sure it was anything at all, he thought he heard a sound. Like something moving, slithering quietly across the dry dirt outside.

No, no, he wasn't scared. No, not even a little bit. I mean, he'd spent a lot of time out in those mountains, and he knew that the night is full of creatures. All kinds of curious little camp robbers that sneak around looking for the trail mix you forgot in the bottom of your backpack, or that tube of toothpaste you accidentally left next to the camp stove. So he kept listening.

Not frightened, just curious. Every once in a while he'd catch another stealthy sound. He was just about to call out, to scare whatever it was away when he felt the tent move, just a little bit, and he heard something slide softly across the fabric right next to him until there was something pressing at the tent just beside his head. Well, the nearness of that tent noise startled him, and he struck out with the back of his hand against the spot where the sound was coming from, and as his knuckles hit the thin tent wall, they bounced against something on the other side of the fabric. Something firm and smooth and definitely alive.

Hey! Hello! He called out, his heart jumping now. It was a silly thing to say, but you don't really care what you say when you know you're all alone in the middle of the wilderness. You just say anything to try to startle the creature away. He rattled the tent with a few more soft blows from his hand, but he didn't feel anything out there anymore. Still, he was surprised that there'd been no crashing away through the underbrush, no sound of some shaken animal retreating from the strange little talking box that was his tent.

He listened, and after a long, long pause, he thought he heard that same soft sound again. Something moving stealthily across the dirt outside his tent. Only this time, it didn't seem to be coming from just one place. He heard it first here, then there, in front, to the sides, behind him even, like there was a herd of things moving carefully all around his camp. Well, some creatures are more bold than others. If you've ever had a gang of camp-hardened raccoons invade your site at night, you know how hard it is to scare them off.

They've learned that we humans are all sound and fury, signifying nothing. You have to really get out and show them that you mean business. So he grabbed his flashlight and he crawled to the door of the tent, zipped it open, and he slipped outside. Once he was clear of the tent, he stood up. Outside was total darkness. Clouds covered the moon and stars. He couldn't hear the sounds anymore, but he could feel something. Close. Something waiting. Listening.

Just like he was. Something out there in the darkness. But he didn't click his light on right away. See, he was formulating a plan in his mind he was going to wait for whatever it was to make another sound and then he'd point the light in that direction before he flipped

it on he wanted to be sure to catch whatever it was to catch it in the light before it could scuttle off and his plan worked, sort of. In reverse, anyway. Because just then, something brushed against his leg. Just brushed it, just the The lightest touch. Something cold and smooth and slightly slimy. The touch shocked him. He hadn't expected anything so close. He started to yank his leg away.

He started to push the button on the flashlight, but before he could do either, something grabbed him around the ankle and ripped him off his feet. He landed heavily and the first thing that he felt was that surge of panic that you get when the wind's been knocked out of you and your lungs refuse to bring in any more air. And while his body stayed concentrated on trying to... trying... And while his body stayed concentrated on trying to breathe, his mind flashed full of an angry red question. What was it? What was it?

What could it be that had grabbed him like that out of the darkness and pulled him down so forcefully? He could feel it still wrapped around his ankle. It didn't feel like it had fingers or claws, no. It felt hard and round, cold, powerful. Something like a large snake if you catch one and you feel it writhing and sliding stony strong through your hands. Finally. Finally, he started to gasp and wheeze and breathe again. And you realized he was being dragged. Dragged

down the hill. He could tell by the slope. Down the hill and out onto the top of the dam. He was being dragged by whatever it was that still had his ankle locked in that cold iron grip. He tried to kick at the

thing, but he only struck air, and the dragging seemed to get a little faster then. His hands were free, though, so he started to twist around, gasping, grasping, sweeping the ground, feeling for a rock to grab up and then smash down to that thing around his ankle. His hand felt something. He said it's skittering. He lunged after it, had it. It felt not a rock, but the flashlight,

still dangling from the lanyard that he'd slipped around his wrist. He snatched it up and switched it on, and whatever had hold of his ankle relaxed and was gone instantly, immediately. He flicked the light down that way and saw something pale flash away into the darkness, followed it with a beam.

He aimed the light further out along the narrow top of the earthen dam onto which he'd been dragged, and out there, out there on the dam, he saw... What did he see? My father, he was an engineer, you understand. He liked things that fit together, that followed patterns and rules, were predictable. He loved to explain things. And what he saw out on the dam that night,

he never could explain. He said the closest thing was like when you kick apart a wet log, like the fat, white things that you find writhing inside. Writhing to get away from the light, get away from the fresh air, writhing back into the rot in the ground. Things like that, but much, much, much larger. Some long ones, like tentacles, waving blindly in the air, as thick as his arm, and other fat, round ones as big as prize hogs at the fair. A sickly, pale, pulsing expanse of these things covered the top and the face of the old dam. And he wondered, was he looking at a herd of these horrible creatures, or were they all the slimy appendages of one terrible beast?

Whatever they were, they hated his flashlight and they were fast. Just a single flash from the light and the whole huge array of them began to shrivel and shrink, even as he watched. He realized they weren't simply disappearing, they were sucking swiftly back down into the ground, burrowing back into the dark, into the earth of the dam itself. In half a second there was nothing to see. The creatures were gone, the face of the dam was just earth again. Half a second more and there was nothing to hear either. That whispery, sliding sound of shifting dirt had settled into silence, and it was gone. All those strange, horrible creatures were gone, and had they ever been there? Was he dreaming? Sleepwalking?

The night was so still, so quiet now, it was hard for him to believe what he'd just seen. But there was still a sound. Familiar sound, quiet, but much louder than it had been before. Water. The sound of running water. Water cascading from the outlet pipe, but also... He stood up. With his flashlight still shining down on the face of the dam where the creatures had been.

And then he got another shock. Because all over the dam he saw water. Burbling from everywhere that those terrible creatures had burrowed. Water bubbling up and trickling down, cascading ugly mud and sheets, seeping, saturating, springing from all over the dam at rates that seemed to increase, even as he watched.

For a moment he could hardly comprehend what he was seeing, but the truth began to force its way into his mind. Total, catastrophic failure. That's what he was seeing. He was witnessing the first stage of it. A complete collapse at any moment of this tired, old, neglected dam, and there was no telling how much time was left. Hours at most.

Minutes, probably. His mind raced, and he pictured what was downstream, how far the flood would travel, and what it would take with it. He thought of my mother and me, sleeping snugly in our camper by the riverside, right in the path of that wall of water that was about to hurtle down at any moment. Of course, this was a decade or more before cell phones. His only hope was the bulky old radio in his truck that was parked miles down the rough trail. And even as he turned to run for it, he had a sinking feeling in his heart that

even a dead sprint all the way down that trail through the darkness, he couldn't get there fast enough. It was too far. He'd be too late. He'd get to the radio just in time to crackle out a warning about a tragedy that had already happened. But, as it turned out,

he wouldn't even get that far. Because as he turned to run, as he took that first leaping step, the ground behind him disappeared. The ground on top of the dam where he stood, the ground so solid an instant before, it softened, liquefied, turned into a flowing mud and sluiced away. So he slipped, slid down into the shallow hole, managed to keep his balance in the mud up to his ankles, and he started to scramble across, back toward his campsite, toward the trail. But when he tried to raise his foot, he felt the mud sucking against him. The mud. And that smooth, strong tightness again.

Winding around his ankles, just like it had outside the tent. Quicker than a snake bite, stronger than before. That thing had hold of him again. He flashed his light down there, hoping to drive it away, but as the light hit the top of the muck, it couldn't penetrate any further. And down below that, he could feel the pressure on his legs increasing as the thing began to drag him again. But this time, the only direction it was dragging him was down. The mud was thick and the pressure strong, almost unbearable, pulling him down into the soft ground. And the further he sank, the more things, tentacles, worm-like bodies wrapped writhing around his legs. There was a little pine tree jutting up just from one side of the hole,

and he sagged toward it, wrapped his arms around it. He lost his balance a little bit, and his light went down in the mud, and when he wrestled it back up, it was out. And as soon as that light was out, he began to feel the tapping, slow-wrapping sensation of thin, strong things reaching out of the mud for him. He could feel them on his

hips and his shoulders. A single slimy touch creeping up his neck, onto his face. He held onto that tree trunk as tightly as he could, but the tree was muddy and his arms were muddy. The weight and strength of the gripping tentacles was growing all the time. It was more than he could resist. His arms, tight as he could make them around the tree, slipped and slipped again.

His chest was in the ground now, only his head and arms above. His muscles shook and burned, but he couldn't. He couldn't hold on. He tore his fingertips, grasping at the tree's rough bark as it slid away from him, and he didn't give up until his head slipped below the mud. He was under, now he was under the earth, and those strong, soft tentacles, half worm and half snake, were wrapping and sliding all around him. He tried to twist away, tried to turn his head against the heavy, encasing mud,

but he could feel more and more of the thing slithering cold and slow around his face, pulling his head back, further and further, and down, always down, down where the mud was even thicker. Pressing against him on every side. Trapping him.

Crushing him. His wildest flailings were slow motion in that drowning mud. Only one arm was still free enough for the creatures for him to move it. And in one last spasm it brushed against something. Something smooth and slick and rounded and cold, but different. Solid and still. A root. A tree root. To grab it would be hopeless. He'd just be torn free again. So he thrust his whole arm over the root and shoved it well back into the tangle

of other roots he felt behind. And in a moment, his arm was stuck there, wedged by the pressure from the creature that kept pulling him down and down. Well, not many seconds had passed before he regretted that arm-in-the-roots decision very much. The pain in his trapped limb shocked quickly past anything he'd ever experienced before,

past what he thought was possible. He knew something had to give. Those terrible, enwrapping things were pulling him down harder than ever. There was no sign of any easing. Either his arm would break, or he'd pass out, or both. But somehow it seemed to matter less and less to him now. As the time since his last breath increased and the time before that final darkness diminished, everything became confused, unfocused. The mud was so thick all around him it was impossible for him to hear anything, so he felt rather than heard the tremble of that sickening wet pop that must be his arm breaking. Terrible. Terrible. But then there was another popping sound, deep, violent, and another, and another, and he realized it wasn't his arm that had broken.

The roots of the tree were giving way. An instant later, there was a tremendous thundering crash that shook the mud all around him in a sudden rush of something cold and liquid. He kicked his legs. Feebly, in the suddenly watery mud, he found he kicked his legs. Feebly, in the suddenly watery mud, he found he could move them.

So he kicked again and again. And he surfaced, gasping. Shook his head in the cold night air. The tree on top of the dam, the one he'd been clinging to, the one whose roots had held his arm,

the tree'd fallen, and its torn-up root ball had opened a hole right across the dam's top, and now the water behind the dam was pouring over and through. And as fast as it had appeared, the ocarina was gone, fleeing the flood that was carrying everything before it washing the dam away the dam and my father with it

down that steep dark valley he fought a fierce terrible battle with rocks and trees and other invisible things that swirled and crashed through the flood threatening to crush him at any moment. He gulped the cold night air every time he managed to claw his way back to the surface of the watery mud, never knowing which breath would be his last. He was certain. He was certain that he was about to be killed, but even in that certainty, he was glad that if he had to die that night,

it hadn't been back there. Back in the earth, back under the mud. Back in the grip of that horrible thing. The Augurino. And you know, the Augurino wasn't the only monster that was encountered in those mountains that night. Just minutes after the dam had failed, in a hillside cabin a mile or two downstream, and high enough above the river to be spared by the flood, an old couple were awakened by a terrible bellowing. A creature more mud than man came rushing out of the night to pound on their door, begging for a telephone.

It was my father, of course. Washed by luck or fate onto one bank of the flood with only minor injuries, miraculously. He'd scrambled out and ran, staggering for the only light he could see. And obviously I'm sitting here today, so you know my father's warning got through just in time. My mother and the other campers were rousted out of their slumber and herded up the nearest ridge through rushing, muddy water, already up to their knees. My mother carried me. Says I slept through the whole thing. My parents' camper was washed away. They lost everything,

but they couldn't have gotten any luckier that night. Both of them. Lucky enough to survive the agarino. Now, if you read the official history of that damn failure, based on the report that my father filed, you'll read a lot of technical jargon about age and neglect,

flaws in the initial design and placement of the dam, defects in the soil and the geology around it. There isn't a word in that report about what he saw, what he experienced, what he survived. Not a word about the Algarino. How could there be? He was a young engineer. He wanted to keep working in his field, not be laughed out of the profession. So the real story of what happened that night has always stayed in the family. Until now.

So next spring, when you're up in those mountains, drifting off to sleep in your tent, and you think you hear a sound just outside. A quiet sound, like something sliding softly across the dirt. Maybe just stay in your tent and click on a flashlight. Of course, if you do that, I guess you'll never know for sure if it really was the otterino out there. Then again, aren't you better off not knowing? There you have it. All the adventures you can have on a snowy night in Denver. Special thanks to our sponsors who make this all possible.

Benchmade, who were raffling off pocket knives with the Camp Monsters logo and artwork on the blade for the occasion. Keen, whose boots and shoes were attracting oohs and aahs. Feeleraven, everyone was trying on their stylish, sturdy backpacks. And Rourke, maker of high-quality clothing perfect for any adventure. Thanks for listening, and we hope to see you around the fire at a Camp Monsters live event in your neck of the woods soon. Until then, subscribe if you haven't already, leave a nice review, and keep spreading the word. As always, thanks to our trusty engineer Nick Patry for his skill with the snow shovel. To our senior producer Hannah Boyd and producer Jenny Barber

for making so many snow angels. To our content strategist Lucy Brooks for the hot chocolate. And to executive producers Paolo Motula and Joe Crosby for knitting us all such cozy scarves. Thanks for another great season, team. Thank you for listening to this season of Camp Monsters. And remember,

just because the campfire's gone out doesn't mean the stories have to end. Subscribe to the new Buried Legends podcast that Nick and I are cooking up. The first episode drops in November and you won't want to miss it. If Whispers had an archive, the Buried Legends podcast would be it. We'll tell terrifying tales that would be, maybe should be, forgotten. If the past didn't always remind us that nothing stays buried forever. Search Buried Legends wherever you listen to podcasts.

And subscribe now so you don't miss an episode.