Camp Monsters - Crackle Hands: Part 1

Episode Date: October 23, 2025

On North Carolina’s Hatteras Island, Claira thought she knew the way back to camp. But the trail twists into something unfamiliar—something watching, waiting, and older than the forest itself. What she finds in the dark might not let her leave...Listen to Mermaid of Moon Lake: Part 1Listen to REI’s Wild Ideas Worth Living podcast.This episode is sponsored by Brompton. Shop amazing products by Brompton in stores or at REI.com.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

REI Co-Op Studios It isn't night yet Not quite There's still a little light up there in the sky, it's just It's just that so little makes it down here Through all these close growing trees Close It sure is close in here

Thickest woods you've ever been through This is the way back to camp, isn't it? You don't remember it being so overgrown When you passed this way before If you passed this way before no no you couldn't be lost you couldn't be lost way out here in the woods so far from anyone else so far from help this is the trail this has to be the trail it isn't that overgrown not just all these little branches up here at eye level they all seem to be right at eye level so many of them so hard to dodge in this light

A twig snaps somewhere nearby, draws your attention. It must have been one of these ones that just caught in your hair. They crackle and break as instinct jerks your head away. And right into another grasping clutch of twigs, this time jabbing right at your face. You stop, stand still, lower your head, push the branch away. You shake your hand then as the web of twigs. seems to grasp at it your eye caught one of those little twigs right in the eye you blink blink on the tears stream so that your nose starts to drip but there's still a little piece

of bark or stick right in your eye you can feel it oh you can't get it out you rub at it gently oh That just makes it worse. You try pulling your eye wide, blinking, burning, blinking and burning, and weeping. And then more twigs snapped nearby, thicker ones, louder. And how can that be? You aren't moving anymore. You aren't even trying to shove away the twigs and branches that you can feel on the back of your bowed neck. Little sticks crawling across your skin, tracing small paths.

Even as you stand still, there must be some breeze that you can't feel, but they seem to be the twigs and the branches. How could there be more and more of them now? Gatter, brushing, scraping against the back of your neck. You crouch down, lower and lower, but you can't get away from it. The sticks and twigs drag across your skin as many as before, even more now, more and more every minute, catching in your hair, jabbing at your back. And a little further away, but not far. Those branches keep snapping, snapping. Something is coming through these lonely, empty woods.

Something large is coming closer. come toward you the tears still streamed from your crouched over face but you're about to stand and blindly bravely face those approaching sounds anyway when you feel and smell a moldy breath right at your ear and it whispers wetly well come to the camp monsters park Welcome. Welcome. Welcome back around the campfire. Back into our little circle of warmth in these vast, dark, cold woods. I say that like those are bad things. Dark? Oh, sure it's dark out here. But look up at all those stars. Cold? Well, maybe it's a little chilly, but smell that crisp autumn air.

And anyway, these woods aren't as vast as they feel tonight, pressing in around our little campfire here. But we are on an island, after all. And nowadays they call it Hatteras Island, one of the barrier islands just off the coast of North Carolina. Exposed. as they are to the sea and storms and winds and whims of the wild Atlantic Ocean, these islands are changing all the time. People have changed them plenty, too. Before the shipyards got hungry for masts and spars, knee braces, and decking, these big trees around us would have been a whole lot bigger.

And up until the last century, people used periodic fires to keep the undergrowth down. so that heavy brush that keeps flickering our firelight so close around us, well, it wouldn't have been so heavy. Except in one place, deep in the heart of these islands' woods. Out there, the brush was always thick. Somehow the fires never reached, never burned that place. And the people who'd lived here since before time began, began, knew not to venture in there.

What was it? What inhabited that place, kept it so wild and dark? Well, the legend isn't unique to this island. Up and down the eastern seaboard in certain places where the forest grows particularly dense. You'll hear whispers of this thing, this power. It goes by different names in the thickets where it lurks. In a lot of places, in these modern times, people don't know what to call it. Around here, those who know about it call it cracklands.

Clara, however, had never heard any such thing. even many islanders today haven't but clara wasn't from the island she was a tourist a visitor from the mainland and she was bored well this trip wasn't her idea after all it was one of those family vacations that her parents had cooked up Hatteras island was perfect for her parents quiet isolated with miles of sandy beaches flocks of seabirds beautiful sunrises, beautiful sunrises. I mean, how can you call it a vacation if you're getting up before sunrise? Claire had stayed true to her intention of not seeing any of those. Oh yes, yes, Hatteras is a beautiful island. Even Claire would admit that. But after almost a week,

she was looking forward to going home, back to her friends, back to her normal life. Of course, as it turned out, life would never quite get back to normal for Clara ever again. She'd taken the long trail back from the beach. Some of the trails go straight down to the sand, but at the very back of the campground, there's one that follows an old road into the woods. And once the road peters out, the trail keeps going. meandering through the thick forest. She'd first tried the trail earlier in the trip out of, well, you guessed it, boredom. But she liked that it led to a quieter, less visited stretch of beach.

Since then, she'd been back and forth on it several times, and though the trail always had a dusty, forgotten feeling, she'd never had anything strange or frightening happened to her there before. But this time she'd stayed on the beach A bit later than she'd intended And though the trail wasn't much more than a mile long The light was fading quickly And she was beginning to feel the first little fingers of concern

About being caught by darkness Out here in these lonely woods Not that anything would happen It's just that the trail got narrow in some places That might be hard to navigate in the dark just as the first of these thoughts were beginning to play along the edges of her mind she saw the shadow of a little trail branching off the main one she'd never noticed it before but now she wondered

well clara prided herself on her sense of direction it seemed to her that the faint trail was bound to be a more direct route back to camp well she hesitated obviously if she was wrong, she'd just have to backtrack here, and then night would definitely fall before she could get to camp. But just then she glanced over her shoulder and saw the moon beginning to rise over the trees behind her. A great big, friendly moon that would help light her way if she had to be out a little later than she'd like. So she decided to chance it, and she turned down that faint little vestige of a shortcut, a shortcut that led right into the thickest heart of the forest.

And it wasn't long before she was safely back in camp. Hmm? What? Oh, yeah, well, I guess we did kind of build it up like something scary was going to happen there. I mean, Clara did feel kind of creepy a couple of times on that shortcut. It was close all through there. With places where the trees closed completely overhead, it was more like a tunnel than a trail. Even where the trees didn't quite close, the trail seemed even darker than it should have been, with evening not quite gone. She'd kind of freaked herself out once or twice, imagining that she heard twigs and the bushes around her keep snapping, even though she'd stopped moving.

I mean, that hadn't really happened, obviously. I mean, even if it had, it was just an animal or something, right? Moving around. The brush on that shortcut was so thick. In a few places, she kind of had to turn sideways and bull her way through all the scratching little sticks that had tangled in her hair, dragged across her skin. It seemed like they were trying to grasp and grab,

like they were trying to hold her back. And then there was that one other odd thing. She'd just come through one of those really tight spots. And she was moving maybe a little faster than she normally would, partly because of the descending darkness. Partly because she had one of those chilly feelings like you sometimes get for no reason. Those feelings like someone's watching you. But you know you're in some place where no one else is.

Anyway, she was going along the trail, shuffling her feet in the sandy soil and she kicked something loose. Not a bit of stick or a rock. You know how sometimes you can tell right away that it isn't? It felt more solid against her foot than wood and it slid along too smoothly to be a rock. She saw it there on the trail ahead of her and stooped to pick it up. Oh, there's a little round of heavy metal like a, like a medallion or something. Or a piece of a necklace or a bracelet.

maybe. It was a little too wide and smoothly rounded at the edges to be a corn, a little rougher than that, too. She couldn't see clearly in the low light, but she could feel that there were designs lightly stamped on its faces. Huh. And it was warm, too. Warm like it had been lying out in the sun for a while, which of course was impossible on this shady trail. Or maybe maybe warm like if someone had been holding it in their hand and had just dropped it a moment ago then that feeling washed back over Clara stronger than she'd ever felt it before that feeling that she was being watched that there was someone just ahead of her on the trail someone who had dropped this thing this medallion and now was hiding watching waiting

She stood still and she listened, waiting for the shuffle of feet or the snap of a twig that would send her running in the opposite direction. But nothing came. And after a few breathless seconds, the feeling passed off, and she noticed the first nightbirds making low calls in the trees. Had it been completely silent a second before? Well, her panic felt suddenly silly and unreal. She clutched the little medallion she'd found in her hand and strode off down the trail. Back in camp, she stepped into the big screen tent to escape the mosquitoes that were beginning to find her in spite of her repellent. She clicked on the lantern and she held the little medallion thing she'd found under the light.

Oh, cool. It was a coin after all. Oh, a super old one, bigger and rougher than modern coins, made of silver, heavily worn, blackened with age. She leaned closer to inspect it. It had a crowned head on one side with words around the edges that were mostly worn off. On the other side it had a cross with a sort of shield thing, with more worn words around it. If there had been a year stamped on it somewhere, Clara couldn't see one now,

but her heart thrilled as she remembered the incredible swashbuckling history of these islands. Pirates and smugglers and some people even thought that Hatteras Island was where those lost colonists from Roanoke ended up. How did that story go? Sometime way back in the 1500s or... Clara whirled her head around toward the sound. It wasn't allowed. sound. Like a short, quiet, unpleasant laugh. Clara was sure it had been a laugh.

From just out there in the dark, close where the woods crept up to the edge of their campsite, where the stretching twigs of the brush almost touched the tent. Clara stared, but full night had fallen outside now, and the lantern light bounced off the screen walls of the tent. She couldn't see anything beyond them. Well, maybe it had just been the sound of two dry sticks rubbing together funny in a breeze, or maybe brushing it against the fabric of the tent. Yeah, it had been kind of a dry sound. That must have been it.

Anyway, now there were voices approaching from the other direction. Her folks coming back. Her parents were interested in the coin Claire had found, but, well, of course, they quickly pointed out the obvious. You could buy replica coins like that in every souvenir shop up and down these islands. Clara actually argued with them about it. You know, one of those battles you fight so hard because you realize right away that you're wrong. Clero was fighting against her own common sense as much as anything, arguing out of, well, embarrassing. for getting so excited about the coin.

She dug in and made it a real brawl, even though both her parents conceded early. They didn't care. Sure, honey, maybe it is the real thing, all right? How neat that would be. Don't patronize me. You always do this! Eyes hot and sandy feeling from holding back tears

that would have only embarrassed her more. Clara lay on her sleeping bag long after her parents had gone. on to bed, turning the coin over and over in her fingers. What a silly, stupid thing to fight about, really. She must be bored. What did it matter anyway? Real or not real? It was still just something someone lost or threw away, whether yesterday or 500 years ago. It didn't make much difference. The dream began before Clara even realized she'd fallen asleep. She knew exactly where she was,

although none of her surroundings looked quite the same. She was in the woods again, and it was late evening again, and she was walking down that same little path again, the shortcut, but in the other direction. Heading towards the beach? No.

She wasn't going there. She was going somewhere else, somewhere in the woods, and she needed to get there quickly. Should have been there already. It was important. It was vital. She'd been running. She'd been running away from something, desperately. But she wasn't running anymore.

Because she was close now to where she was going. She should keep running. She felt like she needed to keep running. but caution slowed her down. Fear of what was behind her thrust like needles into her back, but wariness of what was ahead pressed her to a slow walk as she neared her destination. Yes, this forest was definitely different than the one Claire had walked through in real life. The dream trees were enormous.

The undergrowth was much thinner everywhere, except except in the part of the wood she was walking towards the part the little path led to it was very very thick up there but she kept walking toward it steadily cautiously she was supposed to go in there she knew she was supposed to go in there the others she felt like crying for some reason, but she didn't. The others. She didn't see anyone up ahead or any sign of anyone. Was that right? How could that be right? Shouldn't they? Shouldn't someone? The closer she came to the dark thicket ahead, the slower her steps moved. She stopped and listened.

she started forward again every time she moved every time the fabric of her dress dragged across the leaves and twigs that were growing thicker and thicker on every side she heard she was certain she heard voices coming from up ahead coming from up there whispers familiar whispers she could almost make out what they were saying But whenever she stopped, the voices did, too. Were they, were they hiding from her? In there? Further? Hiding, just a little further?

A cry from behind her that shocked her back into a run. Run it, down the little path, narrower and narrower, into the scrub trees and bushes that grew higher and thicker. thicker, twigs, dragging across her face, breaking in her hair, catching in the corners of her panting mouth, sticks, ripping in her running ribs, tearing at her tripping legs, jabbing broken blood from her face, searching for her squinting eyes, until the sticks between branches, snapping into her, catching, stopping, slamming her down. she cried out then not a scream but deeper a thrashing rasping animals sound and then she tripped

it fell heavily into an open space a small clearing her hands driving deep into a mold of dead leaves still moist slimy under the surface she lay there for a time on the ground dazed still relieved to be out of those bushes out of that grasping thicket and then lying there she began to call out softly softly for the others she listened for their answers and she she thought she heard so too but faint fading like they were already through this horrible thicket in a way like they were like they were leaving her here. She looked into the dimness toward where she thought the voices were calling in reply.

She could see a sliver of sky that way, an early moon rising in the gray purple dusk, a late wind driving wisps of clouds across its face. And there, in front of the moon. It was funny how the first of the moon. branches of that tree came together in front of the moon almost almost like a head a person's head but with no body beneath it just just sticks and branches and more sticks and but it was strange as she sat up her perspective changed strange how those sticks came together until it did almost seem like

there was a body there, but nothing like a person's body, no. Long and thin it was. And the head was changed now too from this angle, pointed, devilish. The movements of her own head made it seem like the head and body she imagined were moving too, like the head was twisting around and look, very startling, unsettling. And now that you'd sat up all the way, it looked, it looked like there were arms on that body as well. Bundly, thin boughs of arms with a thousand long fingers at their end, moving, like the legs of amylopee, crackling, crackling like a million tiny twig snaps

and reaching. Reach. Reach. Not for her. No, no. Not for her. Not for her, thank God. Reaching.

Reaching down beside its body, down to where its feet would be. With a press of scrubby twigs was thick as brooms and black as midnight. It reached down and pressed its squirming fingers in there. Then with a wrench, it pulled the thick bushes aside. And in the gap was a human face. A face she recognized in the dream, staring out at Claire with eyes bulging and frozen terror. And then the stick creature, the crackle hands.

Let the bushes spring closed around the face, hiding those dead eyes. And another set of eyes appeared. Huge eyes. glowing red up in the long, pointed head of the creature. Red glowing eyes and that terrible head of sticks that now turned toward Claire again and reached its writhing fingers swiftly toward her.

She was about to wake up. She could feel it. This was the height of terror. This was the part where she woke up, screaming. Screaming like no other dream. dream had woken her in years ever since she was little. And just as those fingers reached your face, just as she felt, thousand cold, dry twigs start to drag rough across her skin. She did wake up. She did wake up, screaming, thrashing. And she felt for her sleeping bag to pull it up

around her. She reached with her other hand for the lantern to turn it on. And there were just two problems. Neither of those things were there. One hand plunged into a cold, slimy mold of dead leaves. The other recoiled from the feel of dry, brittle branches like thick bushes, just beside her. She was awake now. She knew that. She was awake. This wasn't a dream. She was awake. She was awake. She was awake. She was awake. but she wasn't in her tent anymore

she was out in the woods somewhere out where the woods were so thick she couldn't see anything at all but she could hear just fine she was awake and she could hear

and she could hear the crashing of something coming through the bushes Something coming toward her quickly. Well, now I'm afraid we'll have to leave Clara right where she is for tonight, right at the height of suspense. It's time to douse our fire. Join us next week around another campfire for our very last Cat Monsters episode of this season. where we'll find out whether Clara manages to escape from her waking nightmare,

or if she's doomed to join the faces smothered in the dead stick thickets, victims of that creature the deepest woods that some call crackle hands. Even deeper in these dark woods, something else is crackling. But that's just our sound designer Nick Patry, nervously popping his knuckles as he works late in his remote outer bank's cabin, struggling to find that perfect stick-snapping sound for this episode. Wait a minute. The sound of his knuckles popping. That's perfect!

Back at the campground, our senior producer Jenny Barber turns this episode over and over in her mind. She doesn't care what executive producers Joe Crosby and Paolo Motela say. She knows that Crackle Hands is real. Sure enough, just then, she hears something stumbling through the midnight thickets, crashing through the dry, bony twigs, making an unearthly cry. But it's just yours truly, writer and host Weston Davis, lost on his way back from the campground bathroom. You'd think they'd mark these trails better.

Special thanks to the Davis boys for helping inspire this week's episode. They've been clamoring for a cracklehand show for years. We've said it before and we'll say it again and we'll mean it every time. Listeners like you are the reason that Camp Monsters exists. And many of you dedicated listeners have been asking for Camp Monsters merch. Well, you spoke and Camp Monsters was listening. Follow the link in the show notes to see how you can help spread the word about Camp Monsters by rocking some amazing Camp Monsters merch, only while supplies last, so don't wait.

And as always, remember, the stories we tell here, or just that. Stories. Well, sure, some of them are based on figures people claim to have encountered in the deep woods of North Carolina, and maybe woods near you. But it's up to you to decide how much is really. how much is just Nick popping his knuckles. Ouch, Nick, that sounds like it hurts. Thank you for listening.

Thank you for leaving good reviews and for updating old good reviews so that the internet algorithms like us. Thanks for spreading the word and thank you for bringing ever more listeners to our little story circle. Camp Monsters is made for you. Thank you. We hope to see you again soon. Back here, around the campfire.