Camp Monsters - Sasquatch - Part Three

Episode Date: July 15, 2021

Our third full season of Camp Monsters will start in September, thanks to our sponsors at YETI. In the meantime, we figured we'd give you a handful of stories to tide you over. And while you think you might know everything there is to know about Sasquatch, this is a personal account. A story that'll have you crawling under the covers questioning whether or not you really believe in monsters. Follow along every month and chime in with what you would do in the narrator's shoes. Drop your thoughts in the comments section wherever you listen to podcasts or email your suggestion to [e-mail]. Season sponsor: YETIArtwork by: Tyler Grobowsky, @g_r_o_b_o

This is an REI Co-op Studios production. You'll be safe, if only you can make it to the campfire. There it is, up ahead through the trees. We're waiting for you, but... Will you make it? This is the Camp Monsters Podcast. Our third season of full-length episodes will begin in September, thanks to REI and our sponsors at Yeti. Between now and then, we've decided to tell a four-part story about Bigfoot, the Sasquatch. A story we've been saving for years because it was too long to fit into a single regular episode and well because it happened to me and like any very intense experience my memory of it is vivid but fragmentary sometimes i need your help to

piece together just what happened like at the end of the last episode when i asked you what you would have done if ro had asked you to go with him out into the San Francisco night. At this point I should explain that this is the third episode in a four-part series, and I urge you to listen to the first two episodes in order. But if you'd rather not, it may suffice to tell you that Roger was an old, straight-laced looking man I made a nodding acquaintance with in a San Francisco bookshop some years ago. And one night, in that same shop, he told me of an encounter he'd had with Sasquatch back in the 1970s when he was living in the rural hills of Northern California. Roger grew more and more agitated and frightened as he told the tale. He'd just

reached the part where he was running from the creature, trying to get back to the campfire where his friends sat, when he suddenly stopped telling his story and asked if I'd go with him so that he could show me something. And I put the question to you. Would you have gone with Roger out into the clammy night? Or urged him to tell the rest of his story there in the well-lit bookshop? Based on the responses we got in the reviews section and from emails sent to podcasts at rei.com, most of you would have gone with Roger to try to help him. I knew he had a brave audience, and I'm proud to say that's just what I did. I agreed at once and stood up, ready to go. Roger looked uncertain then, like he regretted asking me, but he put on his coat and soon we were walking quickly through the foggy streets.

Uphills and downhills and across hills going sideways. If you've been to San Francisco, you know how it goes. I tried once or twice to make conversation, but the night around us was fairly crowded and Roger kept his responses short. We'd walked a mile or more and turned off into a quarter where the streets were narrow and steep and relatively quiet before he started to speak. Roger said, Have you noticed? No one who goes looking for one has ever seen a... you know... A Sasquatch, I said, forgetting his sensitivity to that particular name for the creature. Roger winced, and at the same moment, a strange long wail echoed down the narrow street,

and a trick of some neon lights in the storefront cast a tall shadow behind us as I glanced back. Of course, strange shouts and long shadows are common, rather mild symptoms of the night streets of San Francisco. But we walked a little faster, just the same. Roger seemed shaken, so I tried to keep him talking. I guess you made it, right? That night, you made it back to the fire? Roger turned his head back toward me as he passed through the orange glow of a street lamp, and though he didn't slacken his pace, I could see a sad smile on his face.

He was silent just long enough that I didn't think he was going to answer. And then he spoke in a murmur. I did. In a way. I hardly remember it. I mean, my body made it back to the fire, back to my friends. But my mind... You see, ever since then,

in flashes, at certain moments, even here in the city... He shook his head once, emphatically. I know it isn't real, you know? I know it didn't happen. I'm hoping you'll help me prove it isn't real. I know the truth. But I have my whole life as evidence that there might be another kind of truth, too.

All I ask is you consider it. And, well... And here he snapped his head away from me and stopped walking, staring into the empty, black depths of a narrow breezeway between two buildings. I couldn't see anything there but darkness, nothing moved. The only sound was the hum of the city at night. Then Roger carried on, just as abruptly as he'd stopped, talking as he walked. I know the truth.

But... But I have my whole life as evidence that there... Well, that there might be another kind of truth, too. All I ask is that you consider it. And... Well... And as we continued on through the misty night, he began to tell me of an account he'd recently stumbled across in an old medical journal.

I'd tell you the name of the journal or the author of the article if I remembered either, but I'm glad I don't. I don't ever want to encounter the tale again. He was penned by a doctor in the late 1800s who found himself battling an outbreak of a peculiar kind of hysteria, or distemper as he called it, in some lumber camps in Humboldt County, Northern California. The timber fathers up there began to balk at going to their work in the woods, making one excuse or another, and it eventually came out that there were stories going around, rumors that there was some kind of wild man in the woods stalking them. Anyone who was slow at their work was fired, of course, but after a few days the same symptoms would show up in their replacements, and once word spread it proved impossible for certain camps to find anyone willing to work in them. When the bosses were convinced it was a creative form of radical

labor agitation, but the doctor was certain it was something more, because he was treating several men who continued to be persecuted by visions of the wild man, even after they had returned to towns or cities. These subsequent experiences were usually not direct sightings of the creature itself, but feelings of surveillance, complaints of a strong odor, faint footprints, or scratches on surfaces that the patients felt were signs of the creature's presence. So far the tale seemed harmless enough.

Roger was obviously using it to tell me that he still suffered from some kind of Sasquatch delusion, even here in the city. He'd found this obscure old volume and saw his own situation reflected in it. Okay. But as Roger kept talking, the tale took a bizarre turn. First, the doctor, having exhausted all the conventional medical treatments of the day, attempted to help some of his patients rationalize their fears away by taking them on a supervised trip back into the woods where they had suffered their initial encounters with the wild man.

Far from being an outdoorsman himself, the doctor managed to get separated from the group and briefly lost in the woods. And though he didn't go into any detail, he wrote that in the brief time that he was lost, he experienced something that gave him a first-hand appreciation of the terror that his patients lived with. After that, according to Roger, there crept into the doctor's account a different kind of empathy for these patients. The doctor began to suggest that perhaps there was some truth behind the phenomena that they continued to see and experience. At first this empathy was presented as merely another attempt at treatment,

just an experiment in humoring the patient's delusions in order to diffuse them. But as the account continued, the doctor admitted that he could no longer bring himself to exclude the possibility that some of the things his patients described might have a basis in reality. He began to hesitantly put forward the idea that perhaps there was something more than mere delusion behind their experiences, that there may even be some kind of real creature responsible, but one that only certain people could see. The doctor theorized that if there were such a creature, perhaps the ability to see it might somehow be contagious, that this special kind of vision was something that the men had caught

from the woods or from one another, and might be something that they were capable of spreading. Finally, the doctor admitted that he himself was afraid he'd fallen victim to this contagion, and in prose that became increasingly unpolished and erratic, began to describe the things that he saw and sensed. Strange scratches and faint footprints around the doors of his home and office. A figure following him that would slip around a corner and disappear when he doubled back. A horrible face he'd caught glimpse of peering into his window one night.

I was about to gently poke a few holes in Roger's retelling of the old doctor's story when Roger did it for me. It's all ridiculous, of course. Some doctor starts to share an illness with his patients and then writes about it. It doesn't prove anything except the fragility of the human mind, and that's... He said, stopping and looking right at me, for the first time since we'd left the shop.

That's just what we're going to prove tonight. He looked at me with eyes wide with desperate hope and continued quietly, with slow emphasis. I'm going to show you something that isn't there, and you won't see anything. And then, I'll know for certain what must be true. That none of it's real. Not the doctor's story or mine, that none of it has ever been real. What could I say to that? I looked back into his eyes and nodded my head and said,

Okay, or uh-huh, or something. We were stopped beside a wooden door and a tall brick wall that masked the space between two stately old apartment buildings, or two wings in the same building. They were probably only six or seven stories tall, but their bulk disappeared into the foggy infinity above us, pierced here and there with yellow light from distant windows that seemed to float, unsupported. Roger produced a small flashlight from his pocket, and a key, rattled the key in the door and opened it. Opened it onto one of the many little miracles that hide among the never-halting, ever-changing hustle of San Francisco. It was a garden. An impossible garden that filled the long, narrow space with thick foliage.

The color of flowers exploded in the little light that Roger held as he flashed it ahead of him to help find his way down the narrow path that snaked through the garden's middle. As soon as I stepped through the gate, the buildings on either side disappeared. I mean that the thick bushes and drooping trees on either side hid them from view, but in truth, if I hadn't just seen them, I would have sworn it was impossible that they were there. The garden was a world apart. Even the air felt different.

The greasy bay fog transformed into a soft forest mist. My apartment's just at the end of this courtyard, Roger said in a voice barely above a whisper. Isn't the garden wonderful? I always thought so, until lately. You see, I've been having some... well, we'll see. And with that, he moved on along down the path. We walked for what seemed too long a distance, not far, but further than a courtyard or alley had any right to run here in the middle of one of the densest cities on the west coast.

Once we passed a little door in the side of one of the brick buildings, a red door with a single low watt bulb hanging above it. We saw it through a screen of branches and it seemed to be far off at the end of a different winding fork of the trail, though it was probably only twenty feet away. A little further on, with the door gone and forgotten behind us, Roger stopped suddenly in the middle of the path. He stopped and threw out his arms as far as the thick bushes around the trail would allow, as if to keep me from shoving past him. He was looking down at the ground, pointing his light at a particular spot, and as he felt me step up quietly beside him,

he brought his arms in and bent lower and lower, shining light back and forth across a patch of dirt. There, he whispered, and pointed again at the ground with a little flashlight, and then he gave the light to me. Now please, tell me that there isn't anything there. And I'll tell you. There wasn't anything there. The path through the garden was mostly lined with old bricks, here and there covered with small patches of soil. Roger's light was shining on one of those patches fairly dry in spite of the fog

featureless as far as I could see featureless except for the random scratches and disturbance of people occasionally walking through it I shifted the light around trying to cast shadows from different angles so as to be absolutely sure there was nothing there I began to straighten up as to be absolutely sure. There was nothing there.

I began to straighten up, about to tell Roger exactly what he hoped to hear, when two things happened. As I stood and turned to Roger, my perspective changed one last time, and from the corner of my eye, a shape appeared in the dust, just the faintest

outline, barely discernible. It wasn't a big, clear footprint like you see casts of in the tourist shops and the TV Bigfoot specials. It was just the faintest silhouette of the front section of a bare foot, the toes and the pad, but enormous. I turned my head back to look straight at it, and for a moment, there it was, unmistakable. I say for a moment because even as I turned my focus back to the print in the earth, the second thing began to happen. There was a sound in the bushes beside us. A sound that started small, like someone shifting their feet in leafy undergrowth, but that in an instant grew to a crashing crescendo, the sound of something

large moving through the thick bushes. Moving, it seemed sure, toward us. I wheeled to shine the little light in that direction, and then the world began to spin as the flashlight was knocked, whirling from my hand, and Roger bolted past me, dashing further down the path. Greens, light and dark, flashed in the twirling light, and the color of flowers, and a mass of brown that might have been a tree trunk, but seemed in the crazy light to be moving quickly right toward us. Run, Roger rasped in a choked shout whisper. Run!

And I ran. But which way? Would you have followed the blind sounds of roger dashing into the darkness ahead or would you have stumbled back toward the street the way we'd come leave a review with your choice of action if you're using a service that allows reviews or email your choice to podcasts at rei.com. And thank you for all the responses we've received so far. You really are shaping the story.

Thanks again to Yeti for sponsoring Season 3 of the Cat Monsters Podcast, with full season episodes starting this September. Who knows? Maybe Roger's running further down that dark path because there's an REI down there, fully stocked with the latest Yeti coolers and camp chairs and koozies. What great stuff! No wonder he's running so fast. Thanks for listening, and be sure to join us next month for the last installment of this story, and our final mini-episode before another full season begins in September.

See you again soon, around the campfire.