Camp Monsters - Tailypo

Episode Date: October 4, 2023

An old man at his cabin in Appalachia finds a dried-out old relic of a strange experience long ago. A hunt in the nearby woods that ended in a terrifying, near-fatal encounter. All these years later he'd found the old relic again, where he'd tucked it in the back of his safe. It brought back a lot of memories. And, as it turns out, that isn't all it brings back.This episode is sponsored by Fjallraven. Check out all of their amazing gear in store or at REI.com. 

This is an REI Co-op Studios production. It was a bobcat you saw back there. Sure, a bobcat doesn't have much of a tail. That's why they call it a bobcat. All it has is a little bump on its rump, like a tail that's been bobbed. And a bobcat has great big glowing eyes and dusty-looking gray fur and long claws. So... So that must have been what you saw. Creeping toward you in the flashlight's beam back there. That's all it was.

A bobcat. That's all it could be. There are bobcats in these woods, so... So you've seen a bobcat. And... And it isn't. And it isn't following you. Wild animals don't do that.

They run away. They're more scared of you than you are of them. They're more scared than you are. They're more scared than you are of them. They're more scared than you are. They're more scared than you are. Even at night. Even when your flashlight is dying.

Even a bobcat as big as that one. A bobcat that can stand on its hind legs. Stand up as tall as you are. Taller. And then walk toward you

on two legs. A bobcat that can look at you and grin and then and then speak. I don't think that was a bobcat. What did it want? What did it say? In that voice, like a thin, rusty growl,

did you, did you, did you just hear it again? In the darkness so close to you. Too close. Did you hear? I want my telepone. my chili bone. And I want my Camp Monsters podcast. quite a way to start the fifth season of camp monsters isn't it even if we make it to the campsite by nightfall we won't be able to start a fire in this rain

now maybe it'll pass on. These early autumn storms can leave just as quickly as they come. Until then, I'm glad we found this old house. Well, that's the way it is all through Appalachia. One minute you're hiking through the wilderness of a state or national park, and then suddenly you pass some little farmhouse that's been squatting there since

long before the park was ever dreamed of. Like this one. This old clapboard ruin might be a hundred, a hundred fifty years old. Huh. Doesn't look like it's going to last many more years, though. Been abandoned a long time, wouldn't you say? At least this old vine-covered porch is still sound. Keeps the rain out, even if the leaves cast everything in these eerie green shadows. I heard a little story that they tell around

here, about an old man living in a house like this. Well, a house the same age as this, in the same area, but that one wasn't falling down. No, this old man's house was snug and well kept. He was alone inside of it on a rainy afternoon, just like this one, sitting in a big leather armchair in front of a roaring fire and holding a... well, what is that he's holding in his knotted old hands? Strange. Ugly thing, isn't it? It almost looks like one of those fly whisks that people used to make. You know, the ones tipped with hair from a horse's tail, but... No, it isn't that.

It's long and thin. Curved and stiff. Covered in coarse, gray, black, dirty-looking hair. Filthy. Feral. What is it? Well, the old man would tell you it's the tail of a wildcat. You know, a mountain lion, a cougar.

But you'd be forgiven for thinking that mangy old fur stick didn't look like the tail of any cougar you'd ever seen. The old man's wife had told him that from the very beginning, way back when he got it. But then, shouldn't he know better? Shouldn't he ought to know what sort of critter the tale came from, being that he was the one who was out there that night all those years ago? And some night it was, too. The old man sits there in his chair in front of the fire and stares down at the ragged thing in his hands without really seeing it,

while the glass eyes of his hunting trophies stare at him through the stormy late afternoon light. He runs the smelly, rough fur of the tail slowly over his palm, and behind his ancient eyes, he's thirty years younger again. And it's night, and the dogs are barking crazy. He ought to call them off. It was time to be getting home, and though he carried his little varmint gun in the crook of his arm, he hadn't really expected to get anything that evening. He'd just like to work the dogs a bit, keep them in shape. But as the last of the light had faded and night had fallen in, the pack had caught hot on the trail of something, baying and scrabbling up and up the rocky ridge, through brush and ragged autumn trees,

crying, crashing through the thickets like they were fixing to tree the devil himself. And now, from the way they were carrying on, he could tell that they had something cornered up the hill somewhere. Well, he owed it to the dogs to see what they had for him. But the last little way up was rough going. Steep slope, sharp, dark rocks seemed to change shape and move just as he was about to step on them. The moon was wrestling with clouds, scudding silently across its face, driven by a wind much stronger than the thin, dying autumn breeze

that sometimes breathed through the trees around him. The moonlight was playing tricks, making things seem closer and then further away than they were. Still, up he went, and up, until the ridge finally flattened out and an ancient stand of gnarled old trees crowded in around him. Massive trunks reached for each other with thick, low-hanging branches, black in the moonlight, covered with the stout twigs that clung at the man's clothes as he passed, with persistence, like they were clutching at him, trying to turn him back. Now he was getting close to the riot of dogs ahead. They were barking and circling, yowling and clawing around the base of the biggest, darkest,

blood-ugliest tree he'd ever seen. The trunk was a thick, lumpy mass, its limbs as large as another tree's trunk, twisting and turning in on each other, intertwining at the tips, like a dark cage, and wrapping everything for yards around. The man stepped under the limbs of that tree, and all the night sounds of the woods seemed to fade away, while the noisy keening and whining and scrabbling of the dogs sharpened in volume and quickened in urgency. The man chambered around in his rifle and stood for just a moment, listening to the dogs.

By long practice, he'd learned to hear what they were telling him, so when he swung his flashlight up toward the limbs above, the light jumped right back at him off of those... those eyes. Big, milky silver with huge pupils retracting back to vertical slits as the light bounced from them so brightly that it dazzled him. So he couldn't hardly see the rest of the critter at all. Great, big eyes, close, on a branch, above and to one side of him, just out of reach of the dogs. Must be a bobcat, the man thought, simply because he'd never seen a bobcat's eyes before. And these eyes looked like nothing he'd ever seen.

These thoughts flashed through the man's mind in an instant, even as he raised the little rifle. Bobcat or not, those eyes had the slits of a predator and were too close for comfort. At that range, a harassed and panicked animal was capable of any desperate thing. It could even launch itself down at him. But as he stared into those eyes, there didn't seem to be anything like panic in their cold, clouded gaze. The man's rifle found his shoulder just as the eyes winked out and the dogs all howled and yammered at once. Holding the light and the gun's forestock together in one hand, the man caught a flash of dirty gray fur plunging through the air toward him and he snapped off a wild shot. Something heavy and hot and steel strong under a rough layer of fur struck him full in the chest. The light went flying.

The gun was ripped from his fingers by claws that tore a deep rent in the flesh of his hand. He tripped and tumbled backward over the rocks and instinctively tucked in his chin to protect his throat from the inevitable bite. But as the back of his head landed smack into a sharp rock, the force of the blow knocked smack into a sharp rock, the force of the blow knocked him limp for a moment. And that was all it took. Something was on him.

Claws on his chest and legs. His arms up, hands full of bristly fur, pushing and twisting and punching feebly at something relentless, unyielding. Hot froth flecking his face, hot, horrible breath lunging for his neck. It was the dogs that saved him. Like a single growling body, they pounced onto the creature atop him, which shook and twisted its tensile body around to strike and bite at them. There was nothing for the man to do but lay very still

while the storm of paws and claws and horrible yowling screams struggled and stamped all across his... and then off of him. And he was up, on his knees, ripping pants and flesh as he scrambled across the jagged rocks, hands feeling desperately for his light or his rifle. If he didn't find them soon,

he felt sure the thing would get the better of the dogs. They were game, as game as dogs could be, but as he listened to the battle behind him, he could hear them losing ground against the beast. He could hear the uncertainty growing under their growls. His groping hand brushed something plastic just as the sounds of the fight changed. Flashlight. Snatching it up and clicking it on and not pausing to turn toward the battle, but sweeping quickly, quickly, quickly across the ground as rocks behind him shifted against each other under stealthy footsteps, bounding toward him, and the dogs began to howl.

There, a glint of gunmetal and polished wood, and now he's snatched the rifle up, fumbled it into his shaking hands, turned light and muzzle toward what was running up behind, saw it coiling to spring onto him again, pulled the trigger. But why? Why wasn't there any sound? I mean, there was sound. There was almost every sound in the universe swirling around him just then at a volume that made his ears wither and his guts shake. Dogs howling.

Blood pounding in his ears. Horse breathing. Something screaming. Him screaming. Branches breaking. Rocks tumbling. Every sound. Every sound except the crack of the rifle.

And it wouldn't be time to find out why. He'd never know. Because coiling for a bound toward his throat in the pool of the flashlight was... Was... Well, it was a wildcat. A mountain lion. A big one. Nothing else it could have been.

The man was so shook in that moment that even after, he wouldn't be able to recall just exactly how the cat had looked. You know, how big it was and all that. But it must have been a really big one because he could remember exactly how seeing it made him feel. How everything inside of him turned to water and then froze so hard it was like he was more than frozen. Like he couldn't move and didn't remember what moving was. Couldn't think and didn't remember if he'd ever tried to. But his hands. Good thing his hands could do their own thinking.

While his mind was still a terrified blank, his hands were remembering that he hadn't cycled the gun after the first shot. Before it was knocked out of his grasp and shaking. One palm slippery with blood from the deep claw wound. His hands were struggling to rectify that. They found the knob at the end of the bolt handle. They fumbled with the action, jammed it, yanked it free, and twisted it home. The old man had the barest memory of something huge and dark, changing its planned spring at him into a flying leap to one side,

just as he brought the rifle to his shoulder and fired. And then... Well, it's strange the sounds a big cat can make. He'd never heard anything like it. A scream, high and terrible, boiling with blood rage and... Now, you don't have to believe him, because he isn't sure he believes in himself, but he could almost swear there were words in there. Like a tongue and lips moving in the way of the scream, forming it into words.

That's impossible. It's funny what your mind will do when you're under that kind of strain, imagining things like that. And after the scream came a crashing through the bushes that diminished with incredible speed, followed at ever-increasing distance by the hysterical baying of the unnamed remnants of his dogs. And there he was, years later, sitting in his chair by a warm fire, not far in distance, but decades in time from the scene of that desperate action. And all he had to show for the adventure now was a long silver scar on one hand and this shriveled old tail. He'd found it there, still hot and dripping, lying where his last shot must

have clipped it off of the leaping creature. It took him half the night and miles of rough country to round all the dogs up, and dawn was streaking the sky by the time he'd finished tending all the wounds, the dogs and his own. And then to top it all, his wife, well, maybe he'd been wrong to have told her the story the way he did, to have pulled that severed tail out of his jacket at the end, just to shock her. But she was such a level-headed woman, born and bred in these hills and fed on the game of them, seeing plenty of fresh kills and carcasses and pelts and things like that. But when he pulled that tail out, she liked to jump through the roof. And then she stood there with her face draining paler and paler. And she half whispered and half yelled at him some kind of silly, silly hill folk story barely fit to scare little kids.

Something about a creature named the Tailie Poe that was sure to hunt them down to get its tail back if he didn't throw it out into the forest this very instant. Well, he'd been fixing to do just that. Toss that ratty old tail out the back door for the dogs to chew on. But she got so wild and so pushy about it, so desperate for him to do it immediately, and so nasty when he joked about keeping it forever as a trophy that... Well, he had to admit he'd got a little ornery about it. A bit stubborn.

In the end, he'd just flat refused to part with it. So he cured the fool thing and dried it out over a smoky fire. And then, well, by that time, he regretted his childishness and the trouble the whole thing had made with his wife. So he just stuck it far in the back of a big old safe that his wife's granddaddy had hauled out to the place way, way back in the last century that they hardly ever opened. He'd practically forgotten he even had it. Couldn't say what it was that had made him decide to clean out that safe today, all these years later while his wife was away in town. Anyway, he better put the strange old tail away now. His wife could be home any time. In fact, maybe that was her coming up the long drive now. Anyway,

something was coming. The dogs down in their kennel were going wild about something. He'd better shake a tail. He'd better shake a tail if he was going to get that tail tucked away in time. He sure couldn't move like he used to. But no, no, his hearing wasn't gone yet, and you could tell from the way the dogs were talking that it wasn't her they were calling to. A stranger, the dogs said, and something else. Something they didn't like about this stranger. But then they weren't much use to visitors they didn't know, and not many ventured out this far. And now there were footsteps, soft on the front porch, someone at the door.

The old man saw their shadow cross the curtains that covered the little front window. He waited for them to ring or knock, but nothing happened. Hello? He shouted and was surprised at how high and old his own voice sounded. He thought he heard a response then. A small voice saying something beyond the door, but the dogs were still making such a racket he couldn't be sure. So he set the old ratty tail on the end table, heaved himself up out of his chair. I'm coming. And the words

came back to him with a strange, thin sound. Just a funny echo from the big, empty house. He thought. He shuffled across the room as quickly as he could, which wasn't very quickly. The shadow still loomed in front of the little window, and when he finally reached the curtains, he lifted a corner to peek outside. And when he did, a strange and terrible thing happened. He went back in time. Outside that window he saw the past. He saw the past, clearly, for the first time. And suddenly he was back there, under the crooked fingers of that broken tree, on that night so long ago with the dogs howling just like they were now. He went back there and for the first time he remembered exactly what he'd seen when he picked

up the flashlight and whirled around. From out of that darkness where his memory had been blank for so many years, the terrible truth sprang at him. It wasn't a mountain lion that had crouched there that night. Not a panther, a cougar, a bobcat. No, it was... It was something like a big cat, sure. A head like a cat, but huge and scarred. Twisted. Scuffed and matted fur.

Dark grey. Dirty looking. Pointed, tufted ears. Torn in places. But the body... The body was like an ill-shaped human. All stooped and lean. Slinking in a death-quick crouch. And the eyes...

The eyes were the worst part. Slitted and pale, but that wasn't so bad, no. But the worst part was that behind the eyes was something more than animal. Something calm, calculated, patient. Something old as these Appalachian mountains. Something that had survived, often hurt, but never killed. And the eyes told him it would always be that way. After he'd fired that last shot, and after he'd severed the tail and the thing had screamed that terrible scream,

there had been words behind that high, desolate cry. There had been words. And he could hear them now over and just in his head. The same quiet words were whispered now, inches away, where rancid breath fogged the window glass and those terrible pale eyes stared directly into his. The face that was so close outside broke open into a growl that must also be a laugh. And then the thing dashed off the porch along the front of the house and out of sight. And as soon as thoughts could fight their way through paralyzing terror,

the old man tried. He tried as hard as he could to remember. To remember if he'd locked the back door. And he didn't think he had. The dogs were hoarse with baying in their kennels. He thought of rushing down to them, but the lawn was long, and his fastest rush wasn't very fast anymore. He thought of the car, but the keys were across the wide room behind him.

He thought of a weapon, the nearest one in the cabinet on the back wall. But his phone. His phone was there on the little table beside his chair, beside that horrible old tail. Not far. If he could get there. If he could just get there quickly enough. That big room had never seemed so long. It was ridiculous being this old.

It would have been just a few brisk strides in years past. And now he was stuck. Shuffling, shuffling, shuffling, like in one of those terrible dreams where you can only move in slow motion. As he rounded the couch, the back door came into view, and he saw the light widening and widening as it swung open. But now here was the table. There was the phone, almost in reach. He lunged for the phone, landed against the table, leaned on it to try to catch his balance, and then tumbled down with it onto the thickly carpeted floor. But something shattered, and he hit his head. His glasses fell off, and he was as blind as he'd been that night, so long ago.

Once again, he found himself feeling across the ground for the thing that might save him. There were coasters, shards of glass, the soggy chill of a spilled drink, and then that rough, dirty feel of the old tail, long hairs clinging to his wet fingers. Something was moving now, across the room, toward him. Swiftly, silently, he could only see the shape of it. He could only see its outline, its horrible color. And then his fingers touched the cool oblong of his phone and he snatched it up and he mashed the button over and over until he heard the little siren that meant the phone was dialing 911. But before he could hear the operator pick up. He heard a little voice crouch down

right above his ear. I'll have my daily bow. As a first responder, you get that call all the time. An old man's fallen and he can't get up. When you get there, it's nice to find the back door open, like this one was, so you don't have to force entry. But the old man's hit his head on the way down, so the things that he's trying to tell you don't make any sense. He's very agitated, very confused, terrified. Who knows, maybe he was like that already, before he fell.

Dementia, you know. Hall hallucinations of some horrible creature after him. Horrifying delusions. It was very sad. The old man never made it back to the cabin. His wife and family decided to keep him somewhere he could receive the full-time care that he so suddenly needed. And they say that the cabin was left to nature, abandoned, just like this one, to slowly rot back into the earth of these mountains that have seen so much. Whoa, what was... Probably just a door or a window shutter in this old house behind us, right?

Moving in the breeze. Say, how's that rain looking? Harder than ever, huh? Well, I don't know about you, but sometimes I chill easier standing in the dry than walking in the wet. I mean, what I'm saying is, how about we hit that trail again? What do you say? We can leave this old house alone to its shadows and secrets. Camp Monsters is part of the REI Podcast Network.

Hunched in that armchair, appreciating the sounds that the fire makes, is our engineer, Nick Patry. Our producers, Jenny Barber and Hannah Boyd, and our content strategist, Lucy Brooks, have all gone into town, leaving Nick alone,

except for two faithful dogs. Now, Nick names his best hounds after famous executive producers. So when Paolo Motilla and old Joe Crosby set to howling out there in the night, Nick goes to the window and tries to see what could be bothering them. But he can't see anything out there.

He certainly can't see yours truly, writer and host Weston Davis, slinking stealthily through the mud on all fours, getting closer and closer to the window. Nick, look out! When this season of Cat Monsters ends, the stories don't have to. Check out Weston and Nick's new Buried Legends podcast. If Whispers had an archive, this would be it.

We dive into terrifying tales that would be, maybe should be forgotten, if they could. But these pasts have a way of reminding the present that nothing stays buried forever. Search Buried Legends on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or however you listen And be sure to subscribe now so you don't miss an episode Buried Legends launches this November And as always, the stories we tell here are just that Stories Sure, 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 how to explain away that high, lonesome cry you heard pierce the Appalachian night Next week we'll be in a place Well, you might call it a ghost town, but I wouldn't A ghost town is a place that people drifted away from once the jobs and dreams and futures all fizzled out. But the people were driven from the place we're going to next week. And now all that's left there is the thing that drove them out.

The thing that's waiting. Invisible. Underground. Do you hear it? We'll see you next week. Please subscribe, if you haven't already. And even if you left a good review before, try leaving another one.

Every little bit helps. It's your interest and word of mouth that keep us recording. As always, thank you.