Camp Monsters - Squonk

Episode Date: October 8, 2026

After a hiking accident leaves her stranded in a violent storm, Nellie catches a glimpse of something in the woods that shouldn't be there..Listen to REI’s Wild Ideas Worth Living podcast.This episode is sponsored by Altra. Shop amazing products by Altra 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 You thought you knew every footprint in this forest. You grew up out here after all. These hills are your home and your livelihood. If anybody knows all the creatures of these woods, it should be you. And you aren't superstitious. You aren't one to be awed by strange things. There must be an explanation. That's all.

There must be a reason that these two tracks look the way they do. That's all. So you lean a little further over those strange prints. You look a little closer. You call to mind all the wounded, misshaping creatures you've seen or ever heard of. You think of the animals you know and you try to envision how one of them could be twisted up enough to leave prints like this. There's always a simple explanation. If you can just figure it out. The kind of explanation where you look back and laugh and wonder why you ever felt so... So...

Not scared. No, no. Scared isn't the right word for it. Just wary. Aren't the woods quieter than they usually are just now? You listen and you hear no birds singing. No rustle and peck of other animals doing. their work. Well, a lot of things could cause a little stillness like this. The wind's still

whispering in the treetops. This silence doesn't have anything to do with these strange prints, no matter how fresh they look. See? Oh, now the silence is broken. There's a sound from just up ahead, just beyond those bushes up there. It's a, well, there, there. Well, there, there's a... Well, there's a... That's the cry of a... Well... It's not quite like anything you've ever heard out here before. I'll get a little closer to it, maybe. Take a few slow steps forward.

It kind of sounds like... It almost sounds like... ...like the Camp Monsters podcast. Oh, man, just a perfect, perfect night around the campfire. I'm so glad to see you back here, even after I botched up that kayak trip last week. Who knew dried goat pellets could keep campfire burning all night long? I could have done without the smell, though. This fire, now, this smells about as good as a campfire can.

These are well-seasoned hemlock logs we're burning, harvested right here in the magical woods of Pennsylvania. Once you get away from the cities and farms, there's a lot of wild, wonderful country out here in Pennsylvania. And these northern Appalachian Mountains mean adventure. They call these hills the Alleghenies as they string their way through here. Deep valleys turning blue and purple as the sun sets behind them. orange sky fading through pink and red as the cool of the evening deepens. Yeah. You can really lose yourself back in these beautiful hills.

Of course, you don't want to really lose yourself, but you won't, I know. Because no matter how experienced you are, no matter how short and easy and familiar the hike is that you intend to take, I know you'll follow all the basic safety rules, like, well, like bringing more than enough water with you, even when the weather doesn't seem that hot. Because if you don't, you might end up like Nellie not long ago, standing at the edge of a high, steep hill, almost a cliff, standing stock still and swaying, but not realizing that she's swaying. swaying so close to the edge. Standing locked knee and staring at the ground and trying to figure out with her hot head pounding and the salt sweat drying and her body feeling all clammy now even though she knows she's burning up.

Standing, staring at the ground and trying to make her dusty brain figure out where this water came from. Water. Nellie wished she had some to drink. She finished her only canteen, a long way back. It's been such a cloudy day, low thunder overhead. She thought it would be much cooler. Thought it might even rain. She brought a jacket in her daypack. Instead, it just kept getting hotter and hotter, more muggy and still all the long mile she hiked. This wet ground was the first Nellied seen all day, but... But where did it come from?

It was only wet right there in one streak across the trail, not like a stream, but like the path that a dripping animal would make. But what kind of animal made tracks this big? Bear, that's the only thing around here big enough, but the smudged prince didn't look like that. And each muddy track was filled with, what, with water? Or some clear, liquid. She didn't want a canteen full of that, whatever it was.

But look at the way the tracks go right over the edge of the trail there. Well, maybe it's, well, the hill must not be as steep as it looks. And Nellie stepped a little closer to that steep edge. And she stood. staring at the ground, staring at those strange tracks. She stood there, tired, hot, thirsty, so thirsty. Swaying a bit. Swaying.

Well, she'd better step back now. She got a funny feeling like she's sliding. Sliding, sliding, slipping, fighting for balance, clawing back at the verge, clawing at the edge of the trail. And then tumbled. Over and over down the dusty near cliff, crashing through bushes, bouncing off rocks, trying to curl into a ball to protect her head but being slammed out of it against the rough trunks of trees, hoping against chance that one of the many sudden blows isn't about to knock her out,

and leave her lying helpless. No. No. After lying a long time with her eyes tight shut, she realized that she wasn't tumbling anymore. And the crashing, sliding noises all around her had stopped, and she was still, she was still conscious. She lay there a while longer, with that stuffy pressure feeling of blood in her nose and the taste of it in her mouth. Her heart was hammering. She was breathing hard, face to the ground, sucking in dust. She tried moving her head and found that she could, and she rolled it over to one side.

I'll clean her air now. not so much dust, and she blinked her eyes open and looked, nothing to see but dirt and leaves and branches, bushes, sticks. After a while she raised her head and turned and looked the other way. Saw more of the same, but then, through a slim chance clearing in the bushes and the tree trunks, Nellie could see, could see all the way up the slope, way, way, way up, the way she'd just tumbled down.

She could see up and up and up, farther than she'd ever imagined she could have fallen, way, way, way up until a screen of bushes cut off her view again. But as far up as she could see, nearly couldn't see any hint of the trail. It was up even further. It was up beyond those bushes. And if she couldn't see any hint of the trail from where she lay, then even once searchers started looking for her, and even if they happened to guess that she might have traveled the trail above,

anyone who searched there wouldn't be able to see any hint of her, lying way down here, calling feebly. Her phone wouldn't help, even if it had survived the fall. There was no signal in this valley. She was sure of that. No help from the phone. So she'd have to move. She had to make it at least somewhere that they could see her.

She tried moving one arm, and it worked, and so did the other arm. Together they pushed her torso slowly off the ground, enough for her to pull one leg under her. And then the other... Oh! Oh, the ankle! Oh, the ankle. Oh, there was something wrong there. Then they rolled over into a sitting position and... Oh! That foot did not want to roll at all.

It hung down to one side at an odd ankle, and the pressure of it hanging by her mashed and splintered sinews sent a spike of pain up her leg that jabbed right in the bottom of her heart. She quickly shifted her position and the spike pulled back a little, but now, now every passing second ebbed the adrenaline of the fall a little more, and the pain from her ankle flooded in. A couple more breaths and she was wondering if a swift blow to the head on a log or a rock would have been a more merciful way to lose consciousness than simply passing out from the shock of this shattered ankle. Down here in the dusty shadows at the bottom of this overgrown valley. Oh man, oh man, oh man, oh man, oh man. It was like throbbing fire down there. Like her foot was resting in a fire that burned brighter at every surging rush of the world. blood from the rapid beating of her heart.

Was the evening really grown so late already? Or with storm clouds overhead getting thicker and darker? Just a darkness behind the red fog that was creeping into the edges of her vision and the pain lights that glowed behind her eyelids when she squeezed them shut. She heard herself calling out for help, trying to call. call out for help. But she knew it wasn't nearly loud enough. The branch of the trails she'd chosen to hike that afternoon wasn't well traveled enough, and the hour was too late. There was no one that was going to find her until sometime next day, at the very earliest, if she was lucky, lucky. One way

or another, she was going to have to move. An hour later, did never see her down here. They'd never see her. Never. Never. There was a dry roll of thunder from the heavy clouds above and panic, struck like lightning in the tangled, tender dry forest of Nellie's mind. They were never going to find her down here. They could. They would never see her. They were never going to find her down here. Never. She had to move. She had to move now. She had to go. She had to go right now. She had to go now. Now! Nellie pushed up with one arm and the other grabbed a branch, and her good leg moved beneath her, and her foot found the ground,

and drove her upward into a stand. She turned her face to the hill, and swung her bad leg forward, and she felt the grinding, wrong weight twist of her ankle as it folded up beneath her. And then it was like she was falling down the slope all over again, except it didn't take as long when there wasn't any sound. There was just a wave, just a wave of searing darkness, blacker than night that knocked Nellie down a mountain of pain, tumbling her over and over and over again until she stopped feeling.

When Nellie woke up, it was full night. She was crying. She'd never woken up crying before, didn't know it was possible, but it is, and now she knew that. Nellie was learning all kinds of things that she never wanted to know She could tell she was crying by the way her face was twisted up And how the breath was heaving its way out of her body She couldn't feel any tears on her face because that was soaking wet already Soaking with rain hard rain She couldn't see anything at all in the darkness, but she could hear

She could hear the roar of the rain on the treetops above The million tiny hammers of it on the leaves of the bushes around, and the rippling, never-ending splash, and the puddles, in the sheets, and the streams of watery mud that swirled and flowed across the forest floor all around it. There were no animal sounds. Every animal would sense enough to build a burrow was in it, and those without a burrow were huddled in tight balls like Nellie was,

curling themselves against this stormy misery, and very probably crying in their sleep like she had been. It might have been thunder that woke Nellie up because just then there was another twisting flash of lightning and it must be close because it burned bright right through the thick forest canopy. And there was that electric sizzling sound that you hear when lightning is really right on top of you,

too close for comfort. The thunder followed instantly in a chest-punching peel. Nellie was terrified. First of the lightning, ripping through the forest so close to her, but then... Then of something else. Because she'd had her eyes momentarily open when the lightning flashed, and now she was trying to make sense of the frozen scene that was fading from her retinas. Lightning cuts things up, you know.

It blasts away shadows so that everything's flat, makes the cold colors electric, blows the warm colors away. In the lightning, she saw the lattice of criss-crossing limbs, slashing black in front of the lightning's camera-flash sky. She saw all of that, but the only thing she could really see was the thing that couldn't really be there. It was a shape, a low, round, dark, hideous shape. It must be either a bear or a wild hog, but it wasn't.

It wasn't either one of those. It was... It was horrible. But now the lightning was gone. And now they was left in perfect darkness again. And if she could see nothing before the lightning flash, you could see even less now that the brightness had blinded her. She could still hear, though.

And now she heard a sound that snuffed and moaned and grunted and sloshed. sloshed through the rain and the puddles nearby. No, not just nearby. There. There. Right there. Right where she'd seen. Right where the lightning had shown her.

Shown her that thing. Some breaths are more than breaths. And some stillnesses aren't stillness at all, because within them, you know that things are going to explode into violent action in the next instant. Nelly sucked a full breath in through her teeth and just had time to raise her arms up by her head as the rain continued its deafening symphony of muddy sound

in some primal sense told her that terrible, terrible things were about to happen. The lightning again. And terror frozen in it. Terror right beside her now paces away. Hideous. Hidious. Hidious doesn't actually begin to describe the creature that nearly saw. It was like looking at a terrible smell, one of those so bad you swear you can taste it in

back your mouth. The thing was bigger than a bear but with naked skin, a putrid, grayish, greenish, bluish model but yet managed to look pale. Here and there grew greasy patches of black, wiry hair. A crooked. could snout with yellow, misshapen teeth sticking out at jagged angles, four squat, fat, twisted, hooved legs, and eyes. Eyes much larger than a bear or a boar. Great big, flat eyes of a color should never be able to tell by lightning flash, but they were red-rimmed with a yellowed white all around them,

with nightmare pupils swollen from searching, ever wide-eyed, wide-eyed in the wet darkness. She could smell it. Now, it was that close. Smell its breath and its skin. Earthy and cold like rain-washed clay, like the mud left on the fields after a flood. She could hear it now, and there was no mistake, and there was no pretending that the sounds were just an illusion of the wind and rain.

She could hear it snuffling for her. Hear the odd whimpering sounds it made as it breathed, the sloshing squelch of it through the mud. Any instant, any instant she'd be able to feel it. Feel it as it found her, as it touched her, as it sprang and sank its teeth into her. But as it came, as it came closer and closer, Nellie's hands were busy.

Without any help from her fear, frozen mind, her hands were sweeping the ground, feelingly, casting around in the mud beside her. for something, anything to defend herself with a stick or a rock. Suddenly there was a rock under her right hand, jagged and slick, stuck deep in the sucking mud. She could feed it, but she couldn't budge it. Was it too large to move? Or with a little work could she...

Her hand was digging, digging desperately around the rock, yanking. digging some more. She felt the rock shift, ever so slightly. And her hand tried to get her brain to listen and care and help. To shift some of her weight and get more leverage and try again. Try to pry the rock from the earth. But her mind was frozen between pain and fear. The fear of that sound kept coming closer.

Closer. Closer. Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle. shift went the rock. A little more. Each time our hand rocked it. A little more each time our hand yanked on it, slipped off and bent a fingernail back in the mud and slopped in, grabbed it again, yanked again and again. It was so close. It was so close to coming free. And the sound was so close now, almost here. It was a race, and her mind began to clear a little as it wondered what would come first. The rock come loose that might protect her, or at least make a fight of it,

or the hideous creature that she glimpsed in the lightning's glare, and was close enough now that she could feel its cold, earthy breath on her skin. With one last effort, Nellie heaved herself over a little, over and up a little, and she exerted just enough extra pressure on the rock in the mud it with a sudden sucking sound, it came free. Perfectly sized, perfectly balanced. The perfect weapon. And they pulled it free of the mud, and then she... And then with a sudden incredible pressure, a squelching sound,

she felt her hand with the rock in it, driven back down, deep into the mud, by something hard and heavy, that felt just like the only thing it could be. The hoof at the end of a head. heavy, twisted leg. Nellie felt that cold, muddy breath right on her face. Then the real battle began, a hopeless struggle between vastly unequal forces. Nellie struck out again and again and again with her only free fist, bouncing it uselessly off a huge, rough bulk of fat muscles.

She grabbed and twisted and scanty handfuls of that long, oily, wiry hair, which either slipped unfeeling from her grasp or slid wetly out of the body of the beast. She gouged desperately at where those muddy eyes should be, but she was justly frightened with a jutting, misshapen teeth that she knew could crop off a finger or three as easy as anything. Then she fell. Those teeth, those teeth that took hold of her now that stepped right at the back of her neck,

like a mountain lions would do, searching for the base of the skull, seeking that crushing, killing squeeze. Well, it missed with the first bite. She must have felt its breath on the back of her neck at the last instant and surged forward so the creature's strike missed her spine by millimeters

and instead sank into the mass of twisted fabric that was her bunched-up daypack that had slid up behind her neck. But that wouldn't protect her long. She thought those giant jaws would release her, for an instant and then bite again, but they didn't. Maybe the thing was going to reset its jaws without fully release, just chew her into position for the killing stroke.

But it didn't do that either. She felt a hoof come off her hand in the mud as the beast began to move, keeping her pack clamped tightly in its jaws and dragging her with unbelievable, irresistible strength. She struggled and tried to slide out of the backpack straps, but she couldn't. They were twisted far too tight. There wasn't anything she could do. The dragon seemed to go on forever.

There were surges and stops and twists and tightness, snaps and crushings as she was dragged over and around and through the thick brush. At some point her bad ankle caught awkwardly in the wye of a branch, and then there was another long period of semi-darkness where she faded in and out of the painful consciousness that yes yes cold earthy breath was still on her neck yes the savage sobbing strain of beastly wheezing and muddy sloshing still filled her ears

yes she was still being dragged dragged nearer and nearer to the creature's lair it was a sudden stillness that shook her out of her trance not a long stillness just just a moment's worth. But it was nearly complete stillness. The roaring of the rain had stopped. And when Nellie opened her eyes, or came back to consciousness long enough to realize they were already open,

she saw shapes around her, leaves and limbs, the shadows of moonlight. The storm was over then, for the moment. The moon was shining. She could still feel the backpack straps twisted, tight around her shoulders. She could still hear the sad whimper of the beast's breathing. That was the only sound that broke the stillness in the night.

She wasn't being dragged anymore. The creature was taking a break then. Unless... Unless they'd reached their final destination. Unless the deadly blow was just about to fall. As soon as she thought of that, she felt the creature's jaws. shift, felt a momentary slack in the fabric around her head, and it all happened faster than she

could even perceive. It was beyond thought, beyond her control. She hadn't even realized that the rock, the precious rock, the one she'd pried at such pain from its perches in the mud, she hadn't even realized that that rock was still gripped tightly in her hand. She didn't feel herself begin to whirl, thrusting off her good foot, multiplying every, ounce of her weight and speed and strength into force, driving behind the hand that held that jagged stone. All she was aware of was a sudden tension in every muscle in her body, like a spasm that she had no control of, involuntary.

And then, it became a shuddering crash as the blow landed square and strong on the neck of the beast, and a fat lot of good that did. There wasn't any satisfying crush or splinter of bone Except maybe in Nellie's hand that held the rock There wasn't a stagger or a heavy fall The creature gave a brief, alarmed, almost mournful cry And then those jaws tightened again And Nellie's ears filled with the squeaking bone-on-bone squeal of long yellow teeth

grinding together And the thing lifted her completely off of the ground and she thought of that terrible thing that her cat did to mice sometimes, swinging them up and slamming them down to still their pitiful struggling. But somehow the creature must have lost its grip at the top of its swing because the hold on her pack was suddenly gone and Nellie felt herself floating, flying through the moonlit night air and then landing with a sliding, rolling pain like she was bouncing across a field full of jagged rocks.

But she was loose, though, wasn't she? She realized that after a moment of stillness, at the end of her long, landing roll. She sat up and scrambled instinctively back and wondered what she could possibly do to defend herself now. The rock had gone flying away from her in the air. Her hands were empty. She was in a clearing or something

because the moonlight was bright all around her. she felt so helpless and exposed. She stared all around, and in a too short instant she saw the beast coming up to her over the crest of a ledge, coming up a steep hill onto the little flat area that she landed on. It heaved and slid and waddled its way up, its ugly little hooves sending a cascade of rocks and dirt down the hillside behind it.

She could see blood trickling down its loose, leathery neck where every ounce of her desperate strength had managed to make one little nick in its thick, thick skin. Then the hideous thing made it up onto the flat, and right away it spotted her. It stared with its wide, muddy eyes, and it popped its big ugly jaws.

And then the creature opened its mouth wide. The wider than it seemed possible. She saw all its long rows of horrible, dull, yellow, teeth. She saw its gaping, pendulous throat. It crouched back on its haunches and then it, it began to cry. But what? To cry. Yes, there wasn't any other word for it. Its flat, muddy eyes squinted and filled until tears poured down its ugly, mottled cheeks. Half-strangled sobs, choked out. of its gaping mouth, horrible, guttural sounds at once repulsive and pathetic. It was only then that Nelly realized where she was.

Gazing at the wretched creature and then beyond it, she saw the alternating glow and shadow of moonlight on the trail that she'd hiked in on. At first she couldn't believe it, but she knew this trail so well. She recognized that stump and that familiar boulder. She was back up the slope, back on the trail, back on the well-traveled way. The thing must have hauled her up hundreds of feet of steep, thick brush to get her here. How would it... Why would it...

There was only one explanation. And before Nellie could even consider it, the crying creature was shaken by an especially explosive sob that sounded like... Oh! And tears. shook from its streaming eyes and a little snock flew out of its nose. For a disgusting second, Nellie thought some of it had splashed on her, but then she realized it was just starting to rain again,

though the moon was still shining. The creature cried on, even harder than before. It's the squawk, Nellie thought in disbelief. It couldn't be, but it had to be. Nothing else fit. Nothing else even began to make sense. The squawk, the famously ugly, tubby, shy, harmless North Appalachian crypted with a penchant for violent weeping, especially when misunderstood.

Oh, and how could you not be misunderstood with a face as fearsome and unfortunate as that? It must have been the squawk's tracks that you'd seen on the trail up there, wetting the path with its own tears. And then the poor squawk had trundled across. her during its weepy wanderings in the dusty valley bottom. And it had gone to all kinds of trouble to drag her back up onto the trail, and when all it had gotten in return was a solid whack on the neck with a rock. Not so much as a thank you.

Nellie felt appropriately chastened, but the squawk sobbing had gained such momentum. It was doubtful it would hear Nellie, even if she'd shouted her apologies. The squawk was hunkered on its ill-matched haunches, positively howling, interrupted now and then by one of its tremendous convulsive, snot-shaking, skit-hs. She was crying so hard now that the tears were streaming from its eyes, and was it just the rain that was really beginning to come down now, or were tears actually starting to stream out of the squawk's entire body?

As the squawks' pitiful tantrum reached its peak, there was a sudden flash of light, and with one last tremendous cry of... The creature seemed to melt right before Nellie's eyes. Simply burst into a torrent of water and run away down the hillside, just as the legends said that it could. Another flash of lightning followed fast on the heels of the first, and there wasn't any squatting there at all.

just a small torrent of rainwater running down the trail and then the wind picked up where the squawks moans had left off and the rain poured in as heavy as the poor squank's tears but through the rain and her own pain nearly saw a light shine around the bend way way down the trail she heard a worried voice away down there calling her name no she'd been missed

and friends had come searching for her. Thank squawk she was on the trail, easy to find, easy to rescue. Nellie's ankles on the mend now, and as soon as she recover, she intends to hike these beautiful Allegheny mountains again. But she'll be more careful to come prepared next time, to bring enough water in a good first aid kit, extra layers and emergency shelter, and a good flashlight, etc. And if she ever sees another set of strange, large waterlogged tracks across her trail, she won't be frightened.

Because now she knows just what makes tracks like that. Now, I guess it's almost time we made tracks to our tents and our cozy sleeping bags. But let Nellie's story be a reminder to you. Hiking safety rules like taking enough water and the right emergency gear along with you on any hike, they're no joke. No matter how easy or familiar the trail you're about to tackle, give the wild the respect it deserves, and follow all of the hiking safety fundamentals.

For more on those, visit rei.com. All right. Now it's getting late. Time to douse this fire. Say good night to all these Pennsylvania stars and save a story for next week. Next week will be in Maryland. Not so deep in the woods this time, no.

just out there on the edges of suburbia. Well, you know suburbia. Nice houses with nice wide lawns that nice, familiar critters like deer, I sure love. Oh, everybody loves deer right back. Graceful, beautiful creatures, aren't they? You don't normally see them out so late at night, though. They don't usually show up so close behind you, unexpectedly, standing so still, staring at you.

Their eyes don't usually glow like that, do they? The sobbing and squawking on tonight's episode was handcrafted by yours truly, writer and host Weston Davis, when he realized that we only have one more episode of cat monsters this season. And as my tears hit the dust, they spelled out the names of our executive producers, Paulo Motila and Joe Crosby, whose silent sufferings are louder than any sob could be. But not so loud that our intrepid sound designer Nick Patry couldn't capture them without maxing out his levels.

There's nothing that Nick can't do, except convince our senior producer Jenny Barber to give him more Camp Monsters episodes to edit. Come on, Jenny! Nick's not ready to go back into cryogenic storage yet. The stories we tell here on Cat Monsters are just, stories. Sure, some of them are based on tales as ancient as East Pennsylvania Hills, but it's up to you to decide if that really was a squawk you saw, or maybe just a huge, ugly raccoon that started crying and then dissolved. Thank you for listening and for spreading the

word about camp monsters. Please, please keep it up. And we can't wait to see you one more time this season. Right back here, around the campfire.