Camp Monsters - The Firwood Reflection

Episode Date: September 16, 2021

Can you see your reflection in the window? Like a ghost standing just outside in the night, looking back at you. It’s a trick the light plays, when you’re inside looking out on a night as dark as this one. One of many tricks light can play — some stranger than others. That’s what must be the explanation behind this story — it must be a very specific trick of reflecting light that has only ever been observed in a little lake in a little park that’s out there in the darkness. The park is called Laurelhurst Park, in the Laurelhurst neighborhood of Portland, Oregon. The lake is called Firwood Lake. And the thing that people see in it… well, no one knows quite what to call that. The most popular name, the one we will use, is the Firwood Reflection. And something about it isn't quite right. 

This is an REI Co-op Studios production. you. 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. Can you see your reflection in the window? Like a ghost standing just outside in the night, looking back at you. It's a trick the light plays when you're inside looking out on a night as dark as this one. One of many tricks light can play, some stranger than others. That's what must be the explanation behind tonight's story.

It must be a very specific trick of reflecting light that's only ever been observed in a little lake and a little park that's out there in the darkness. The park is called Laurelhurst Park, in the Laurelhurst neighborhood of Portland, Oregon. The lake is called Firwood Lake, and the thing that people see in it, well no one knows quite what to call that. The most popular name, the one we'll there, in the darkness, in the park where it all took place. But, of course, you can't see any reflections outside when it's this dark. You can't even see the water.

And it's raining out there tonight. There's no shelter in the park to speak of, and no fire is allowed. And since we rented this little cottage just across the street, overlooking the park, I thought maybe we'd light a fire in a fireplace for a change. And listen to this story from the comfort of these overstuffed couches. Need another blanket? Most of the creatures we talk about on the Camp Monsters podcast are terrifying from the first glance. One look and you're running away as fast as you can go. But that's not

the case with the firwood reflection. People who've only glimpsed it once have even been intrigued and enchanted by it. For them, it's just a brief, unexpected, mildly pleasant experience. But for those who've returned to it, those who've sought the firwood reflection out, who've seen it more than once, it becomes clear that something is not quite right. That there's something very sinister about whatever it is that lives in Little Firwood Lake. The whispers about the Firwood reflection began, innocently enough, almost 100 years ago. Back then, the queen of the city's annual Rose Festival was crowned on a decorated float in the middle of firwood lake it was the perfect

place because the lake is so small it's never been more than a pond really you can stroll slowly around the whole thing inside of 10 minutes it's so small that thousands of people could gather in the park and get a good view but the lake prevented them from crowding in and blocking the spectacle from those behind them. Sometime in those early years, the rumor sprang up that Firwood Lake could predict the future. That is, the story went that if young contestants vying to be crowned Rose Queen came and stared into the lake late in the evening, in the weeks before the coronation, their reflections would reveal whether or not they'd win. Well, a harmless enough kind of tale. The sort of thing a newspaper reporter of the time might

have invented to help fill up a little column space. Superstitions like that spring up around almost any kind of competition. But in 1926, something, well, something went very wrong. One of the contestants for Rose Queen was found dead in Firwood Lake the morning before the coronation. In the weeks leading up to the crowning, she'd gotten in the habit of walking down by the water most evenings. No one had seen her go in the night before. no one knew quite what had happened. The coroner decided it was an accidental drowning, though it was hard to imagine how that could happen in a lake that was never more than a few feet deep. The newspapers speculated she'd gone to look at the decorated floats, fallen in, and somehow become trapped underneath them. That was the most plausible

explanation anyone could come up with. The whole festival was cancelled in the wake of the tragedy, and in 1927 the coronation was moved to a different park, Washington Park, and it never again took place on the waters of Firwood Lake. But ever since then, every decade or so, there's been some similar tragic incident, and the waters of pleasant little Firwood Lake, those waters have grown a strange reputation. For Dylan, it all started with a smile. But we'll hear about that in a minute.

Dylan had grown up near Laurelhurst Park. When he was little, he used to feed the ducks on Firwood Lake. He'd never heard any bad stories about the place. In the summer of 2009, when he was 15, it became a kind of refuge for him. Things were tough at home, so he spent a lot of time at friends' houses and just out in the neighborhood, wandering around. Toward the end of that summer, he happened upon a little spot that he really liked. It was a tree that grew sideways out of the shore of Firwood Lake, that grew over the water so he could climb out on it and sit with his back against a branch,

with the lake below and behind him and the brushy, private shore in front. He felt safe out there, like he could see everything coming. That feeling would be proved dramatically wrong. But to Dylan, at first, well, the place was music to him. Literally. He'd sit out in the tree with his headphones on, listening to music that would take him away from himself. Not the songs and the bands we've all heard on the radio. No.

Dylan liked the tracks put out by the hungry young groups who'd hustle their way through Portland's dingy, sweaty little clubs on tours that would take them up to Olympia, Tacoma, Seattle. Dylan loved to go and see them whenever he could get into the places they were playing. He was even in a band, too, that practiced in his friend Sylvia's basement. But they hadn't even settled on a name to call themselves, and anyway, Dylan knew they weren't very good. Well, Sylvia was good, but the rest of them weren't. He wasn't. But out there on that tree over Firwood Lake, the music in his headphones made a soundtrack to the movies in Dylan's head. Movies where he was the reluctant, tragic hero. Where the music and the camera angles

and the jump cuts made clear all the feelings that he was never able to communicate in the real world. They were beautiful things, these movies. Epic and painful and beautiful. What he wished, what Dylan wished more than anything was that he could show something like them to other people, but the songs and the stories he wrote down always turned out lousy, and the poems even worse, and he didn't have the patience to learn how to edit a video to send his grandma for her birthday, much less a whole movie. The frustration he felt made him turn his headphones up, and made the scenes in his head even more vivid and urgent and alive.

That's what he was really watching, the day it first happened. Sure, he was staring down at the water, watching the reflection of his foot kick his face over and over again as he swung it back and forth. But with the music in his ears and the movies in his head, he wasn't really seeing himself down there at all. Until the light changed.

It was late evening, with the last of the day draining from the sky. A ray of the dying sun streaked over the city and through the trees and lit up Dylan's face. And all at once, what had just been his own dark silhouette down there beneath his feet was transformed into a golden mask of himself peering up out of the water. Dylan leaned forward. Wow, that light or the lake or something. It was incredible. It made his face look, well, not like his face. Not like the face he was used to, the pasty and pimply face he saw in the bathroom mirror every morning. This reflection looked sharp and smooth and dramatic. Rugged, even.

Yeah. Boy, there was something about that light. And as Dylan stared at his reflection, soaked in that golden light, he felt... Well, it seemed like some of the reflection soaked back into him. He knew it was just a trick, just a momentary vision, but as he stared, he couldn't help but feel more capable, more confident. He looked better than he'd ever seen himself before,

and for just a moment, he felt that way, too. He started to fit this new face, this new self, into the movie he was making in his head. Then his reflection smiled at him. Smiled when he hadn't. Dylan pulled back and his hand shot up to his mouth instinctively. As if to feel whether there was actually a smile there. No. There wasn't.

And he was sure there hadn't been. Of course, a hand jumped up to his reflected face as well, but even as he watched himself rubbing his lips, Dylan could swear that the surprise he felt looked more like amusement in the eyes down there in the water. He pulled the hand away from his mouth, snapped his fingers a few times, rubbed the side of his face, and his reflection did all those things just the same. Dylan decided the little smile must just have been his imagination, a trick of the light, some of the movies in his head creeping down behind his eyes. Then the last rim of the sun fell behind the trees, and the reflection flashed a grayish-green and faded, and for an instant, just a fraction of a second, Dylan thought he saw something moving in the water below the featureless shadow that his reflection had become.

It was probably a catfish. The lake was full of them. The brief glow that he'd felt looking at his reflection in the water faded as quickly as the sun had. Dylan couldn't hold on to the memory of the way that he'd looked, couldn't picture it in his mind When he finally went home and buzzed on the light over his bathroom mirror You could hardly believe he was looking at the same face as the one he'd seen in the water He sneered at himself

And the reflection that sneered weakly back at him Confirmed all his old low feelings And he laughed bitterly at himself, and the reflection that sneered weakly back at him confirmed all his old, low feelings, and he laughed bitterly at himself. But he couldn't help going back, back to Firwood Lake. He told himself it was phony and it was vain, and anyway, the reflection didn't appear every time. More often than not, there was nothing to see in the water but water.

But as the summer turned to fall, Dylan spent more and more evenings down Lowerhurst Park, sitting in the tree that grew out over Little Firwood Lake, listening to music and staring at himself in the water and waiting waiting for the light to change waiting for the rush that came when for just a little while

he could recognize in his reflection something better than the self he saw in his head those times when the lake would show him who he wanted to be, who he wanted to be who he wished the world could see then when the glimpse and the glow

faded away with the setting sun Dylan would sit there in the dark for a long time and walk slowly home feeling worse than ever about the difference between what he saw in Firwood Lake and what he thought he really was. He stopped showing up at Sylvia's to practice with the band. At first he'd call and make some excuse but after a while he just stopped going. Sylvia made a big thing out of it, confronting him in the hall at school, calling and texting to pester him about it.

He couldn't see why she cared. She was the face of the band, she was the one people talked about, and she could get a better musician than he was any day. He got so tired of fending her off that one day he started to try to tell her about what he'd seen in Firwood Lake, but, well, it didn't make any sense when he tried to talk about it. It was embarrassing anyway, so he just stopped and changed the subject. Meanwhile, the weather was getting colder. The sunsets were cloudier and shorter, and Dylan's mood was getting darker. Whenever he wasn't at Firwood Lake watching the water, he was beginning to feel antsy, anxious, sometimes almost desperate. He couldn't make sense of what he was doing, where all this was going. He couldn't help himself.

Even when he made a whole different set of plans for the afternoon, he'd find himself drawn down to the lake just before sunset, just like always. Like he was bound every night to end up there. And things started happening with the reflection as well. He'd gotten used to the little smile he'd sometimes catch it flashing at him. He convinced himself it was an unconscious tick he had, a nervous little smile that he wasn't aware of. But then, well, one time he heard a splash in the water not far away.

Probably one of those catfish again. And when he moved his head to look at it, he could have sworn that his reflection didn't move at all. In the edge of his vision, it seemed like it just kept staring straight at him with that eerie little smile at the corner of its lips. When he looked back at it again, the reflection moved right along with him, so he must have imagined it, but it certainly wasn't as pleasant as before. The more he saw of the reflection, the less he liked it. After a while, he decided that what he glimpsed down there wasn't some kind of perfect self, just a different one, a self that was twisted around somehow.

He still thought of it as a better version, but only because his opinion of himself in real life kept falling. And of course, that kept him coming back to Firwood Lake for just one more look. Every time he came back, he told himself it was the last time. But when the last time finally came, it wasn't his choice. It was late one evening on the first really cold day in September,

unseasonably cold that year. The frost was on the grass before the sun had even finished setting, crackling the ground and the fallen leaves of the coat of diamonds that sparkled orange in the last of the light. Dylan had left his phone somewhere, so he didn't have his music. He'd only worn a sweatshirt that day, and the frost felt like it was freezing its way into his bones.

He didn't care. He was slumped up in his tree, staring down into the water a few feet below, waiting. He thought he'd missed it. The light had faded to the point he assumed the sun must be down already. He found he didn't care much about that, either. He'd just stay here a while longer, until the real dark came. And then? What then?

He didn't know. But he must have been wrong about the sun. Because as he sat there, staring down into the shadow of his face in the water, his reflection suddenly lit up golden. More perfect than the first time he'd seen it. More perfect than he'd imagined it could be. Than he'd ever imagined he could look. He forgot about the cold, and his favorite

song started playing in his head, as strong and loud as if he were playing it with Sylvia's band, as sweet as if he'd written it himself. He leaned down toward the water, slowly, in case the sunlight was just in one place and wouldn't shine on him anymore if he moved. But it followed him all the way down until he was hanging as far as he could without falling out of the tree. Smiling, for real now, at his own golden reflection rippling down there like a living thing in the water beneath him. Then the light faded all at once as that last little ray of sunshine drowned behind the trees. And as it went, Dylan's reflection in the water changed from that glorious sunny radiance to the grayest, nastiest reflection of himself he'd ever seen.

Then even that disappeared. But rather than simple darkness replacing it, Dylan still saw the shadow of a face in the water. His face? No. No, not his face. Not anyone's face. Like a skull, but not of anything that had ever been human. It was like the vision of a scream carved into rotten, waterlogged wood.

For a moment, he thought that's what it must be. An old piece of sunken driftwood he'd never noticed before, down there under the water. Until it began to move up toward him. Dylan tried to pull himself back onto the safety of the tree trunk, but he was hanging down so far, and in his first jolt of fear he'd slipped and lost most of his leverage, so it was all he could do now to keep from sliding off the tree entirely, into the water, face to face with whatever it was down there. Then as he hung on, unable to haul himself up, staring in tense horror at that

wooden-looking face coming up below him, he became aware of two long, thin, slimy things like sticks more than arms, dripping with algae and slop from the bottom of the pond, reaching slowly up on either side of his head. He tried to turn his face away to curl up toward the tree, but before he could he felt cold, thin hands wetly grasping the back of his head and gently, but with steadily increasing force, pulling him face down toward the thing in the water. He fought. Dylan fought with every last reserve of strength he had, but it was like fighting against the lake itself. The mucky grip around his head never tightened, never seemed to strain as he strove against it, but when he tired, there it was, pulling him down just as gently and insistently as ever, growing stronger as he weakened.

Finally, the tip of his nose broke the water. He blinked and felt the drag of surface tension against his eyelashes. Then his fingertips lost their last desperate purchase on the tree, and his attempt to cry out was silenced by a mouth full of slimy water. He doesn't remember anything else. He's glad he doesn't. When Dylan had blown off band practice again that night, Sylvia decided to hunt him down. She'd given him too many chances and he'd thrown them all away. When she found him this time, she was gonna tell him off and throw him out of the band for good. She'd already called a few friends, and she'd checked all the places they used to hang out.

And then she remembered the last time she'd confronted him about skipping practice, he'd mumbled some weird nonsense about Furwood Lake. There was no way he'd be down there on a freezing cold night like this, but once she'd been through every other place you could think of, she headed down there, for lack of any better ideas. Sylvia had already walked around the lake three times and was just about to leave when she heard something down in the water. Nothing much, just a little splash. She peered through the bushes toward the lake and saw something out there, floating. She went toward the water down a dark, narrow trail, rough with roots and undergrowth. And as she got closer, she saw what it was, and guessed who it was, and she

began moving faster and faster until she hit the water at a dead run. The deep muck of the pond bottom sucked her shoes off, and she fell face first into the icy shock. She surfaced and yanked her hands free of the slime, struggling and paddling and sliding her way through the stinking mud that churned up in her wake. When she got close enough, she grabbed one of Dylan's legs where he floated, face down in the water, and she tried to pull him over to her, but she couldn't gain any purchase in the slick ooze beneath her she struggled out beside him and tried to roll him over to get his face above the water but with nothing solid to set herself against she couldn't do it she

let go of his body and took his head in her hands and as she twisted it to one side to try to coax him toward the air it almost felt like there was resistance like he or something was fighting to keep his face down in the water but she took this as a good sign a sign that there was still life in him and with a supreme effort she managed to wrench his face out of the water and she began to slowly drag him through the watery muck back toward solid ground. Sylvia had been calling out ever since she hit the water, and as she dragged Dylan back to the edge of the shore, a woman who'd been walking her dogs was waiting there, offering her jacket, and a passing jogger was calling an ambulance.

They hauled Dylan up as far out of the water as they could get him, and then Sylvia knelt down at his side, unable to feel a pulse through fingertips, numb and shivering with cold. But there was still a pulse there, and before the ambulance arrived, Dylan had begun to cough and moan. It was many years before Dylan ever ventured down to the shores of Firwood Lake again. He did, though, on a visit back to the old neighborhood. Part of the reason he felt like he could was because the lake had changed drastically

In 2011, the city had paid to drain the whole thing and dredge out the bottom They said they did it to prevent the growth of toxic algae, but Dylan had heard that just before the decision was made to dredge There had been a sharp increase in incidents, accidents in the lake that had eerie similarities to his. He wondered what they'd found

down there, buried in the muddy bottom. Dylan walked in the sunlight along the once familiar shore. The tree was long gone. Part of the revitalization had included clearing excess brush and trees from the shoreline. But Dylan came to about where it had been, as near as you could figure. And just from a spirit of boldness, just to prove that it didn't have a hold on him anymore,

and because it was the middle of a very sunny day, Dylan leaned out over the water and looked at his reflection. And Firwood Lake was up to its old tricks. He was older, grown up, with a few lines around his eyes and even a touch of early gray starting at his temples. But for all that, Dylan liked what he saw. Once again, the light here was something special. Once again, it made him look...

No, he realized. It wasn't the light. He looked good. He liked what he saw. He liked who he was. And then his reflection smiled up at him. A friendly, toothy grin.

But it was a grin that began on Dylan's face, not down in the water. I don't know if the city found anything in there, down on the bottom of Furwood Lake, but it's been fairly quiet since the dredging project. Just a nice, pleasant little duck pond once again. A relaxing place to stroll around as the sun goes down on a crisp autumn day, and the evening sets you aglow with that rich orange light. But maybe just take a selfie. No reason to go down and admire your reflection in the water. Well, I hope you haven't fallen asleep on that nice, comfortable couch there. Enjoy it while you can. Next week we're heading to New England to meet a creature that will make you decidedly uncomfortable.

You'd better rest up for that where are you staying oh you all rented a house where just a quick walk through the rainy night across Laurel Hearst Park huh past the lake hmm well of course you can sleep on that couch. I'll get you another pillow. Camp Monsters Podcast is part of the REI Podcast Network. Our engineer, Nick Patry, has been splashing around in the mud for weeks now. He says it's to get the right sounds for the episode, but I'm starting to think he just likes it. Our executive producers Paolo Motula and Joe Crosby have spent countless hours staring

pensively into bodies of water, trying to see into the future. And the face that always appears to them belongs to our senior producer, Chelsea Davis. And whenever I think the firwood reflection has really got me this time, they send our podcast production intern, Kirsa Berg, in there to haul me out. Thanks, Kirsa. This episode was written and performed by yours truly, Weston Davis

And a reminder that these stories are just stories They're based on things people have said they've seen and experienced But you'll have to decide how much to believe Special thanks to you for listening and downloading and subscribing and reviewing this podcast. It's you spreading the word that keeps us recording. Can't wait to join you again next week.