Camp Monsters - Fresno Nightcrawler

Episode Date: October 25, 2023

One night in Fresno, California, Mateo's security camera caught strange, pale, billowy, disembodied legs walking across his front lawn. But when he looked out the window, there was nothing there...This episode is sponsored by Benchmade. Check out all of their amazing gear in store or at REI.com. Sign-up for the Camp Monsters LIVE show in Denver on Saturday, October 28th from 5:30-7pm MT.

This is an REI Co-op Studios production. When your dog starts acting funny, staring and growling in an empty spot of air, that's nothing to be scared of. That's just something that dogs do. And when the neighbor lady, you know the one, when she stops you on the street in the morning

and tells you that she sees things creeping around your house at night, well, isn't she the kind of person who sees things everywhere? It's nothing for you to worry about. And when you're coming back from taking the garbage out, crossing your dark backyard at night, and you get a sudden rush of that feeling that something horrible is about to burst out of the bushes over there and chase you down. Well, that's silly. You're just tired.

But when your dog wakes you up, whining, in the middle of a dark midnight, and you roll over and look, and you see it. You see with your own eyes something that you know for a fact can't possibly be there. What then? What do you do? Do you stand your ground and try to convince yourself that you must be dreaming? But if you're dreaming, why can't you wake up?

And you know, you can't wake up from the Camp Monsters podcast. Usually we wrap our season up in some wild, exotic location. On a remote beach somewhere, or deep in the mountains with the trunks of ancient trees like pillars all around us. So tonight, for this final episode of our 2023 Cat monster season. Tonight we're having a barbecue in our producer Jenny Barber's childhood backyard. Just outside of Fresno, California. Pass me that mug, will you? Is this my drink?

Probably. Anyway, we're all friends here, right? It's a nice backyard, as backyards near Fresno go. An old swing set over there, some flower beds, a little pool with a diving rock, and this well-loved grill with some Italian sausages on it. Sizzling. The heat of summer is over. There's a little crispness in the night air. The dark sky up above. And down here, just enough light from the back porch and street lights and this little fire from a propane fire ring. And I've got a good stick

to whittle on while we tell a story. I've always found it interesting that when we tell these stories, everyone sees something different. I mean, we all hear the same story, the same words and sounds in the same order, but the visions that these words conjure are different for each of us. And I guess that's a big part of what tonight's story is about. Some of you have probably already seen pictures or footage of tonight's creature. A video of it went viral a couple years ago, but that was just the beginning of the story.

Since that first encounter, there have been multiple new... Oh man, is that me? Oh, I'm so sorry. I always, I mean always, turn my phone off before I tell these stories. Just a second, I'll shut it off here. Oh, well, this is kind of perfect, actually. It's my doorbell. Yeah, I got one of those camera doorbells that sends me an alert whenever someone comes to my door.

But every once in a while... Oh, look at that. See? Every once in a while, it goes a little funny. It sends me a video like this one a couple seconds video of my completely empty porch you know the first few times it happened i reviewed the video closely trying to catch sight of whatever set the motion sensor off a squirrel maybe or a breeze in the hedge, a bug crossing the lens, but there was never anything. Never anything that I could see, anyway.

Just an empty porch and the night beyond. A glitch in the system, I guess. But sometimes, sometimes I wonder. I wonder if another set of eyes might see something I don't. Might see something standing out there on my porch. You don't see anything in this video, do you? Mateo didn't see anything in his backyard that night when his dogs woke him up. His was a nice, peaceful backyard on a nice, peaceful autumn night, just like this one. Not far from here, in Fresno, California. Mateo was peeking in his backyard through the slats

of his window blinds. The light from his back porch always looked so yellow at night. In the glow, he watched the whole backyard carefully, looking for movement, and didn't see a thing. But there had to be something out there. Mick whined again, and Chevy leaned against Mateo's legs those were his dogs Mick and Chevy not small dogs either big pit mixes that usually slept quiet

in their little shed in the backyard only sometimes raising a fuss when some rookie raccoon found out on the run that this was a backyard to avoid but tonight Mateo had never seen his dogs like this and found out on the run that this was a backyard to avoid. But tonight? Mateo had never seen his dogs like this, both slamming through the dog door whining,

racing to his bedroom to cuddle and cry him awake. But there was nothing out there in the backyard. Mateo opened his window. Couldn't hear anything either. Just the faint hum of traffic on the highway. He took Chevy and Mick's heads in his hands and tousled their ears while he cussed them for cowards. What was it, buddy?

What's the matter, huh? It's alright now, it's alright. The dogs quieted down and looked up at him with those big shining eyes that so clearly said, If you say so, Dad. But when he gave them a little shove away, they didn't make any move to return to their shed or even leave the room. They just stood by the door when their tails hung down, staring at him. So Mateo cussed himself for having dogs like these. And he stretched and stood up

and shuffled toward the back door to go and show these mutts there was nothing in the backyard. Nothing for them to be scared of. And Mateo picked up his phone. No reason to do that, I guess, just to walk out into his own backyard, but it's a habit most of us have, right? He just picked it up and gave it a glance as he shuffled sleepily through the house. And he clicked that notification from the app that linked to his security system.

And then he stopped, standing there in his kitchen, and... And Mateo saw what you've probably already seen if you looked up the Fresno Nightcrawler before starting this episode. He saw a pair of long, pale, disembodied legs without a torso or a head, walking with a strange, slow gait across his backyard. But what made that sight even stranger was that Mateo was now standing right in front of the big sliding glass doors that opened onto that yard. And looking out there, he could see nothing at all. He was

looking right where the legs on the screen legs, and there were no shadows. So, it must be some kind of glitch, right? Mateo was in the security camera business. He had quite a few cameras around the outside of his house, as a way of testing new equipment and different setups. He'd never seen an error quite like this before. But it was obvious to Mateo that what he was seeing on his screen must be some kind of glitch in his system. That's all it could be, right? The eerie, disembodied leg slowly passed out of the frame of Mateo's security camera,

right up to the sliding glass doors where Mateo was standing. But there was nothing really out there. Mateo reached for the handle on the sliding door and hesitated. One of the dogs whined from where they'd curled up under the kitchen table behind him. Mateo stared through the glass, out at the yellow-lit emptiness of his own backyard. And there was nothing. There was nothing really there. So, he rolled the sliding glass door open. The explosion of sound almost sent

Mateo leaping through the glass of the door in front of him. But it was just Mick and Chevy springing up under the table, barking, knocking chairs over in their haste to retreat further from the open door. An involuntary shout lurched out of Mateo, and they turned and shouted at the dogs. The sudden noise from the usually soft-spoken Mateo quieted them, though they slunk down the hall as fast as they could. Mateo turned to face the empty doorway again. Then he stepped through it, and took a couple of steps out into the backyard.

Out into the empty backyard. Okay, that thing with the dogs had been a little freaky. And being out there, he did get a strange thrill up his spine, like there was something close, something watching him. But he knew that was just his imagination. Mateo looked all around. He looked in every corner of that backyard. Well, no, just like he thought. There was nothing out there. Except, except Mateo thought he saw an opportunity.

Mateo is the one who came up with the name, the Fresno Nightcrawler. Of course, that wasn't really accurate. The legs didn't crawl so much as they slowly strolled, but Mateo understood the internet well enough to know that a mysterious creature named the Fresno Nightstroller just wasn't going to attract many hits. Hits and views were what it was all about for Mateo at first. So he came up with the name Fresno Nightcrawler and he invented some of the origin stories that are still floating around on the internet's back pages. That the video originated with a man named Jose submitting it to a local TV station in the early 2000s.

Then Mateo processed the footage from his security camera to make it look grainy and old. Everything looks scarier and more mysterious when it's grainy and old, doesn't it? And he posted the video anonymously wherever he could. And it took off. The internet, truly the strangest creature of our times, well, the internet grabbed hold of Mateo's Fresno Nightcrawler and ran with it.

Mateo sat back and watched the hits and shares from the video pile up and up and up. And just when he was wondering what the follow-up would be, what he could possibly do for his next trick, Mateo was delighted to discover that his security cameras kept repeating that same glitch all around his house each night. At different times, from different angles, his camera would catch a nightcrawler. Sometimes two, sometimes more. More and more as the nights went on. And they became brighter

and more vivid. And as the nights passed, more of their figures were starting to become visible to Mateo. Above their legs they had ghostly bodies, billowing like white flame. And then beside those he could see jagged, grasping, almost skeletal-looking arms that didn't match their graceful legs at all. He still couldn't see any heads. Not yet, anyway. And it was funny, although it really wasn't. He felt sure he'd start to see the heads soon. And that when he did, something was going to change for him. If you fall deep enough down the Fresno Nightcrawler internet rabbit hole, you can find some of these follow-up videos that Mateo posted. And we'll talk about it in a minute,

but you may or may not notice something very strange about them. But whatever you notice, it won't be nearly as strange or as terrifying as what finally happened to Mateo. At least it was quiet that night when it all happened. It was the first night after Mateo had talked a friend into keeping the dogs for him. They'd been really testing his nerves lately, whining all night with their eyes on the windows.

Now that they were gone, he was hoping he'd be able to sleep a little bit better than he had been. But that wasn't how it turned out. The night crawlers were really active that night. The backyard camera showed a crowd of them, wandering silently around the yard and bunching up beside the sliding glass doors like a mass of moths around a porch light. Mateo sat slumped in a chair at his kitchen table, staring at his laptop, almost hypnotized by the strange, headless figures on the screen that seemed to crowd and clack all around the glass door a few feet away. The curtains

were drawn across the door now. He'd started doing that with all his windows, because it seemed to help that feeling of being watched that kept creeping up on him, even though there was never anything actually out there when he looked. Whenever these creatures were, he could still only see them on a screen. There he went again. More and more often he caught himself thinking about these night crawlers as real things, as existing outside of the tiny electrical signals that leapt from his cameras to his screen. But he really knew better.

He knew how sensitive those signals were. The night crawlers, those ghostly images he was seeing, they were just a glitch somewhere. He knew that. They were a distorted reflection of passing headlights on his camera's lenses, or electrical noise, feedback affecting the wireless signals that beamed the camera's images back to his system. Mateo didn't know exactly how to explain all the technical details, but all he knew was that every time he looked out his windows, there was nothing actually there in the yard. And he knew that wouldn't be true, even if he went and looked right then.

There wouldn't be anything out there. If he stood up and stepped over to those sliding glass doors and he pulled open the curtain, there wouldn't be anything there but night. He knew that. He was sure of it. He'd done it countless times before, and there'd never been anything. There never would be. In fact, in fact, he ought to look again.

Just to loose that silly knot that was tightening in his stomach. Just to chill that film of sweat that he felt on his skin in spite of the air conditioning. Mateo stared at his computer screen and for another moment he watched the haunting little glitch figures that he knew weren't real, and then he swallowed on his suddenly dry mouth and stood up.

The dingy old curtains hung there, limply. One. Two. Fingy old curtains hung there, limply. One, two, three slow steps away. Mateo moved carefully, feeling the cool linoleum beneath his feet. He paused with one hand on the rough, dusty fabric, and he tried to laugh at himself, laugh at his fear, but he couldn't quite do it. He almost turned away, but then he made himself take another short step right up close to the door, so his nose was almost touching the curtain when he yanked it violently aside.

And there it was. A face just inches away from his own. And before Mateo could even react, the face split wide open as in a silent scream. And then Mateo did scream, and he leapt back from the window so quickly that he rammed into the kitchen table and almost knocked it over. He heard things rolling, tumbling off the table, the sound of something breaking. And then...

And then he could only laugh. And he could only laugh at himself. Loud and long and louder. All convulsing, paralyzing laughter. Finally. Finally. Laughter at his fear. Laughter at all that silly, overwhelming fear that had him so keyed up that he could scream at his own reflection in the glass.

Which is exactly what he had done. Because the face in the window had been his own. Of course. Obviously. Of course. Of course. Oh, man. Oh, he laughed. Oh. Oh. He laughed so hard at himself, he doubled over.

He had to grab the table to steady himself. Oh. It felt good. Oh, it felt so good. It felt so good to be such a fool. All these games he'd been playing in his own mind, these monsters he'd been building up for himself, and this world of screens. It felt so good to have it all vanish. Just vanish, like something with a plug yanked out. Out of batteries, falling suddenly dark. Oh, he ought to get out more.

I had to go on a vacation. Back to nature or something. Oh, the laughter had started so stranglingly hard it was silent. And then it settled down into great howls and yelps. And finally it was just good, clear, uncontrollable laughter. Mateo was still chuckling when he picked up his phone. He decided. He wanted to take a picture.

It seemed hilarious and appropriate right then that he take a picture of the blank darkness of the sliding glass door and his own reflection in it so that if he ever began to take himself or anything else too seriously ever again, he'd be able to look back at this picture of a dark doorway, blank, except for the faint reflection of himself in tousled pajamas, and he'd be able to laugh his way right back out of it. So he picked up his phone, he flipped on the camera, and he raised

the screen up so it was focused on the sliding glass door just a few feet away. The sound that glass makes when it shatters is a very, very distinctive sound. It draws attention. You remember it. It sticks in your mind when you hear it. That sound sticks in Mateo's mind. And it's about all that sticks. It's about all he can remember from the rest of that night, and for several days and nights afterward. Just the sound of a whole pane of sliding glass door, shattering, violently, all at once. All Mateo can remember is that sound

And a face The face The face that appeared on his phone's screen Once Mateo raised it to frame the doorway In the instant before the glass shattered A huge face With With billowing white brows above the dark, empty arches where eyes should have been. And a mouth gaping, too open, far too open for any face Matteo had ever seen,

gaping open for a scream or a bite, and the inside of that horrible throat looking like... like it was lined with fabric blowing in a violent gale, ripping and rippling, or worse, maybe like pieces of jagged, broken bone, grinding back and forth together almost faster than the eye could track. The sliding glass door had been shattered from the inside out. That he'd run through it himself somehow. And that was where all the wounds and the cuts on his body came from. But Mateo knows better. He knows that the Nightcrawlers finally made it through the glass that night. He doesn't know how he fought them off. Maybe it's too bad that Mateo never pressed the little red button

that would have taken a picture of that face. Maybe the mystery of the Fresno Nightcrawler would have been solved. But then again, maybe not. You remember I mentioned that if you dig deep enough on the internet, you can find those other nightcrawler videos that Mateo posted. And the strange thing about those is that, for some people,

they are absolute, crystal clear proof that the Fresno Nightcrawler really exists. But other people say they can maybe see something indistinctly. And others can't see anything in those videos at all. The battle rages in the comments section. No doubt the same thing would be true, even if Mateo had managed to take a close-up of that horrible face. Different people would see different things, and some wouldn't see anything. For his part, Mateo's glad that he didn't press that button. That he didn't get the picture. Mateo insists that he'll be very, very happy if he never, ever sees that face again.

Out in the country, over that way, well outside of Fresno, out past the suburbs, past the last row of commuter houses, past even the almond orchards, up in the sun-browned hills where there isn't much. Up there you'll smell pine trees and sage. You'll see deer and chipmunks. You'll follow a narrow trail through the trees and brush up a hill. And you'll come to a sweet, scruffy clearing with a little old cabin in it. With a deep porch out front that sags a little bit to one side.

And on that porch, on that like this, you'll probably find Mateo, watching the stars that we can't see through the city lights down here. Mateo lives up there now, just making a little living the best way he can, helping his neighbors and taking the time to make a little talk with anyone and everyone who happens to pass through that quiet corner of the world. That's how I heard this story. Mateo's not in the security system business anymore.

He doesn't have a single camera. Doesn't have a computer, or even a smartphone anymore. Nothing with a screen. He'll tell you he doesn't use screens anymore. Oh, it's not that he doesn't believe in the things that our screens show the rest of us. No, it's not that. It's just that he knows. Mateo knows that sometimes those screens can show us too much.

We've had all colors and sizes and styles of stories this season on Camp Monsters. We've had so much fun around the campfire with you this year, it feels like a shame to wrap it up. But we're hoping to be back a little earlier next year, with even more great monsters to share. Before we turn this propane fire ring down and say goodnight, maybe you'd like to take one last photo of the group we have gathered around here? But if you do, don't say I didn't warn you if you notice a figure that you don't recognize and can't explain prowling around in the darkness across the yard.

Something that you can't see with your naked eyes. This is Fresno, after all. Camp Monsters is part of the REI Podcast Network. Proudly repping Fresno until the day the Nightcrawler finally comes for her is our producer, Jenny Barber. Nick Patry, our engineer and grillmaster, is responsible for our ambiance. And for these delicious Italian sausages. Just fantastic, Nick. I can almost hear them sizzling.

Our content strategist, Lucy Brooks, is over in the pool, about to do a graceful swan dive off the diving rock. I guess it was a cannonball. Good one, Lucy. And back in the house, our writer and host, Weston Davis Davis leans into the soft glow of a computer screen, staring at the ghostly figures that are closing in on him. Senior producer Hannah Boyd, executive producers Paolo Motila and Joe Crosby. Weston keeps telling himself that they aren't real, that they can't be real. But what do they want?

Another script? On deadline? 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.

As always, the stories we've told this season are just stories. Some of them are based on things people claim to have seen and heard, but it's up to you to decide what you believe. And to decide whether or not to risk taking the garbage out tonight. You never know what might lurk behind that sliding glass door, even if it looks like there's nothing out there. Maybe I'd better wait till morning, huh? Thanks, as always, for listening to Camp Monsters and spreading the word about the show. It's your support and word of mouth that keeps REI bringing us back. So please leave a good review if you haven't already and write to the folks at podcasts at rei.com and let them know

how much you enjoy Camp Monsters. We have a lot of fun making this show for you, and we hope you have a lot of fun listening. Thanks again. We'll see you soon around the campfire.