Camp Monsters - The Letiche

Episode Date: October 7, 2020

You’re out swimming when you feel a pinch on your leg. Is it a harmless fish or something a bit more sinister? Meet this week’s Camp Monster… The Letiche. A creature that lurks in the swamps and bayous of Louisiana. Season sponsor:YETISeason artwork by Tyler Grobowsky. 

Our sponsor for this podcast is Yeti. And instead of sending us a script to read, they actually sent us what they described as a care package. We knew something was up when they asked for our address. And the next thing we knew, there's a Yeti cooler being delivered to our office. We open it up and smoke starts pouring out. But everything inside is cold. Turns out it's dry ice. And

everything inside isn't just cold, but frozen solid. And they sent this cooler all the way from Austin, packed with a few local items. Full brisket, ready to be cooked. Sausages, ribs, pulled pork, some cheeses from Texas hill country, even ice cream. There's enough food in here to last until Thanksgiving, although that's not likely to happen. So yeah, Yeti, you could have just sent us a script, but hey, thanks for the cooler and food. This is an REI Co-op Studios production. The swamps and bayous of Louisiana are a difficult place for humans. A natural wilderness, thick with vegetation and legends.

Somewhere out there, amongst the live oak and cypress and Spanish moss, the ponds and lagoons and slow-winding creeks. They're tales of a nightmare under the water. A nightmare called the Letiche. You've probably met a harmless relative of the Letiche when you're out for a swim in your favorite lake or pond. At least, you've probably felt it. That little pinch down in the murk, that nip you feel on your legs or back, and when you look, there's nothing there. Well, it must be some kind of fish, right? Just curious, they won't hurt you.

When you're swimming with a bunch of friends, you can all have a laugh about it. But if you take a quiet dip in the evening, have you ever let a doubt creep into your mind? It's a funny feeling,

those little pinches down under the water. And isn't it strange that you can never quite catch sight of the fish that does it? And sometimes, doesn't it feel like the pinches are coming quicker? Getting sharper? Becoming more and more aggressive. Once you let a little fear in there's no telling how your mind will magnify things. And that could be an explanation for tonight's story.

Parts of it, anyway. But as the light fades and the water grows darker things begin to happen that aren't so easy to explain. It fades, and the water grows darker. Things begin to happen that aren't so easy to explain. This is the Camp Monsters Podcast. The wild places of this country are haunted by mysterious creatures. Creatures you might only have heard whispers of.

Every week we amplify those whispers, tell the old tales, relate the recent encounters, and share all the strange stories about the wilderness you love to visit. These are just stories, of course. They're based on things people claim to have seen and heard and felt, but witnesses can't be mistaken. This episode is a perfect example of that. So listen to this story and decide what you believe. I'm sure you'll agree that the reasonable explanation must be the right one. Because the other explanation, the blood chilling one, that couldn't possibly be true, could it? Phew. On a night like this, I guess I wouldn't mind having my blood chilled a little bit.

This Louisiana bayou is hot. No matter the season or the time of night. No kind of weather for a fire that's for sure we'll just sit here in this cozy little house boat and listen to the bugs buzz around the light outside a boat is the best way to get to see the bio country well the only way really water runs through this place like the spine of a book, with a million little streams and swamps and inlets branching off like the lines of a story. A million separate stories, in fact.

Every little spot out here has a story of its own, If only we knew what it was. I do know one of the stories. It starts along a rusty old chain-link fence at the end of a clearing a couple miles from here, where the last of the developed land runs out and disappears in the moss and trees and waters of the bayou. There's a little summer camp in that clearing, right on the verge of the wilderness. And this rusty old fence is the dividing line,

the bleeding edge beyond which the grass grows long and the light grows dim under trees draped in Spanish moss. Cam was standing against that fence, his fingers in the wire, staring into the evening woods. He was trying to glimpse the old gray boards of a shack that was back there, deep in amongst the trees. He'd seen it before, when he was younger, but now the undergrowth had grown a little bit and he wasn't sure, was that it? Or just part of

another cypress trunk? Lila had just finished telling the old story about the shack to the young campers, who were now walking quickly away from the fence, with many a backward glance, toward the dining hall for dinner. She'd told that same old story, the one he'd heard right here a couple years ago when he was a camper, the same one he'd told dozens of times now that he was a counselor. But there was something about the way Lila had told it this afternoon that really took him back there.

Made him feel like a little kid again, listening in terror for the first time. He thought about that as he kept his eyes on the woods, and he enjoyed the little thrill of fear he felt when a mockingbird suddenly swooped out of the branches and away he felt another little thrill when lila suddenly spoke up behind him i made him jump a little scared she asked with a playful smirk in her voice. He turned and the same expression was on her face. Terrified, Cam said, and leaned back against the fence to try to show that he wasn't.

She didn't seem to believe him, though. You ever been back there? she asked, open-faced, without any other preface. Straight to the point, Lila was, almost ready to surprise. Cam didn't know quite what to make of her. No, he replied, it's off-limits. Then he shut his mouth and scowled at himself. It felt like the wrong thing to say. Lila laughed and smiled. It is, it is, she said, looking across the clearing at the campers and the other counselors disappearing into the dining hall. But she let that trail off, then shrugged at him and walked away Walked away down the fence line Into some bushes

Cam just leaned there Unsure what he was supposed to do next And then Lila reappeared On the other side of the fence She came up to him Sca Scared? she asked quietly. Then she turned and began to creep through the long grass toward the trees. Wait, Cam said and hurried into the bushes. He found the hole along the bottom of the fence, pushed the wire back, and just got through,

tearing his shirt a little in the process. Lila watched him struggle with a smile on her face. And as soon as he stood up, she said, Race you to the shack. And just like that, she was gone, like a deer through the underbrush. Cam didn't even try to keep up. He walked slowly after, picking his way through the bushes that grew dense along the fence line,

thinned out once he got under the trees. The birds and insects were singing, the late afternoon sun slanting unexpectedly here and there through the canopy of leaves. And just a little further in, the grass grew dense over the rough shapes of old rotting branches and things, tripping him up and slowing him down. The ground between the grassy bumps was soft, and Cam felt and smelled the old mud under his feet as he passed. Up ahead, through shrouds of gray Spanish moss, he caught his first clear glimpse of one side of the weathered old shack. Maybe it was the sounds of the bayou around him, or that spot of orange sunlight that moved across the boards of the shack as the breeze stirred the branches high above. Whatever caused it, Cam started to think about that old story that Lila had told so well,

and he started to play with the idea, to pretend almost, that he was the old man in the story, coming back across the bayou to his lonely little shack with evening falling over him. And as he moved out of the grassy mud and climbed the small bank that the shack perched on, the pool came into view. Just below the shack, just like the story said, the pool that was so still, it looked like solid glass, so dark it seemed it couldn't have a bottom.

Cam was moving slowly along the bank toward the little shack that perched on crooked wooden pilings, its doorway dark and windows empty. The thin leaves that blew from the willows crunched under his feet, and his eyes kept being drawn to the black water of the pool. If it were just a little later, just a little darker, he could almost see the old man out on the pool, balancing in his homemade pirogue. That's a sort of flat-bottomed bayou canoe. Balancing with a torch and a bracket out over the water and a fishing spear in his hand,

waiting patiently for the shapes that would loom up in a bracket out over the water and a fishing spear in his hand, waiting patiently for the shapes that would loom up out of the murky water into the light. Cam was almost to the shack now. There was no sign of Lila. But down by the water here there was a break in the cane and the reeds that surrounded the pool, a little hump of dry land that jutted out into the deeper water. The foundation of an old dock long rotted away. Cam stepped out onto it, looking out at the water.

Just at that moment, a cloud hid the sun, and that terrible part of the story came back to him when the old man, peering down into the torch-lit water at his feet saw a shape begin to rise toward him a shape unlike anything he'd ever seen and as Cam stared down into the water at his feet a shape unlike anything he'd ever seen. And as Cam stared down into the water at his feet, with the story playing back so vividly in his head, suddenly he thought he saw... What?

Down deep, almost beyond the light. What was that? Just... Just an old bleached branch. Sure. But... Did it move? Maybe the light changed, or the current swirled and the water got murkier, but...

When Cam leaned over and looked down, there was nothing to see. Nothing down there at all, nothing but black water with no bottom. Still, he could have sworn he'd seen something down there, something pale that had moved back into the darkness. And the sort of fun thrill of fear that had been growing ever since he'd first seen the shack and started reliving the story of the old man,

that fear suddenly darkened and began to turn into a different feeling entirely. A feeling he couldn't control that made him stand up straight and start backing away from the water. That made him want to get away from this place. But his eyes seemed stuck,

staring down deep under the black water at that place where he was sure something had moved. Where he felt sure something pale and thin and terrible would move again. Suddenly, toward him. An enormous sound filled his left ear as a wayward mosquito flew into it, making Cam twitch his head so that the corner of his right eye just barely caught sight of something pale moving toward him. At the same instant, he heard a little splash in that direction.

His heart sank and his teeth clenched, and he leapt and spun to face the thing so quickly that he lost all control, and his knees gave out and he ended up falling backward. He seemed to fall for a long time. And he had all of that time to gape at what had made the little splash. With his mouth open and his eyes staring wide. So that by the time he crashed down into the reeds and mud and water at the edge of the pool, all the fear that had been darkening into total panic inside of him was suddenly replaced with a mixed up, indecipherable surge of every other kind of feeling possible.

Cam looked away and felt an embarrassed smile spread across his face. Scared? Lila asked, standing there in the shallows of the pool, smiling down at him. Cam didn't say anything. What could he say? She'd just watched him jump three feet in the air and collapse into the mud, terrified. Lila stood there another moment, with Cam looking sheepishly away from her. Then she ran a few steps and plunged into the dark water. And the pool that had been so still a moment before, now filled with her ripples and laughter. She swam for the far shore of the little pool while Cam just sat there in the mud, looking sideways with that silly grin stuck on his face and every emotion under the sun shining through his racing heart.

And then he made his choice and plunged in after her. And they had a great time. The setting sun cast the whole scene in a golden glow, shot through with gems of orange where beams of light broke through the trees and fell on Cam and Lila, laughing and splashing, swimming around the little pool. Even the old shack seemed to soften and mellow, like an elderly face smiling at the memory of innocent pleasures.

One last time, there and back, Lila said as the sun finally set and the light changed to twilight. I'll let you win this time. Cam couldn't resist, but she didn't let him win. And then it was over, and they were back beside the bank, looking at each other, holding on to a big cypress root that dangled in the water there. Neither said anything until Cam suddenly started and said, Ouch!

Kicking his legs and looking down into the murky water below. Lila laughed. The little bluegills do it. They'll pinch you if you stay still. I guess you'd better get out, she said, smiling and looking at him. He smiled back at her and said, Well, how about you get out and... Ouch!

Lila laughed again as he kicked his legs harder and grabbed down at his calf, invisible down there in the dark water. Some bluegill. How big were these pinchy little fish? Okay, okay, she said when she'd stopped laughing. I'll swim across again while you get out. Deal? And before Cam could respond, she'd pushed off of the big root they'd been holding onto and disappeared under the black water, her head bobbing up a moment later, further out, heading for the far shore.

She never made it, though. Cam had scrambled out of the pool and was contemplating the unpleasant prospect of cramming his wet skin back into his muddy shirt when he heard a splashing in the water close behind him. He turned and there was Lila, grinning mischievously up at him from the water as close as she could get to him without coming out herself. But in that moment, Cam was neither angry nor embarrassed. In that moment, Cam barely registered she was there at all. His eyes were filled with the thing just behind her. The thing that has filled his nightmares ever since. In the water, just behind Lila's shoulder, appearing just beside her laughing face, there was another face. A face just like he'd imagined from the story Lila had told.

A small, leering, pale face. White as mottled soap, white as death, the size of a small child's, plastered here and there with the faintest, sickly traces of slimy brown hair, hanging down from its scalp and seeming to drip from its chin like algae. It had electric blue eyes staring from wide, wild, lidless sockets, and where lips and cheeks should have been, they were just blunt, yellow, crooked teeth that seemed frozen into an evil grin. As Cam stared in naked horror at the thing, its teeth slowly parted,

and Cam thought that blood began to pour out of its mouth before realizing it was the creature's tongue, livid red in shocking contrast to its pale and hideous face. And as he watched, frozen, the thing reached above the water with two pale hands, human-like but long, long and narrow with sickly-looking brown fingernails at their ends, like something soaked too long into filthy water. Only an instant had passed since he'd first seen the thing. Less than a single heartbeat, if Cam's heart had been able to beat. And just as Lila's smile faltered in reaction to his face, just as the first hint of alarm began to flicker in her eyes.

The thing flung its long, clammy fingers onto her shoulders and with impossible speed and strength twitched poor Lila under the dark, muddy water. Twitched her under without a sound, with barely a ripple. And she was gone. And all that was left for Cam to see was that terrible, small, white face, grinning its huge, rotten teeth at him, and quivering, it seemed to Cam,

in ecstasy. Then, in an instant, with a splash like the tiniest fish jumping, it was gone. And Cam was gone, too. Maybe he should have jumped in the water. He should have tried to save her, of course. He was always ashamed that he didn't. But what he did or didn't do at that point was far, far beyond his control.

He snatched up his shirt and things and charged back through the reeds and leaves and grass and trees. And the woods seemed full of shapes that ran with him and grabbed after him. He tripped on rotten old limbs and logs and things hiding in the long grass, tripped and fell hard, and sprang up again, battered and bruised and terrified. And all around him, following him, was a sound like a mosquito hovering right in his ear. It wasn't until long after that he realized that sound must have been his own screaming. He tore his flesh in a dozen places, struggling back through the hole in the rusted old chain-link fence, with a thousand formless horrors grabbing at his legs

as he kicked and forced his way through. Everyone at camp who'd heard the screaming was already heading toward the woods when Cam suddenly emerged from the bushes, wild, bleeding, running toward them. He was sobbing, incomprehensible, gesturing and grabbing people by the arm and trying to pull them toward the hole in the fence, faster, faster. If they'd been able to understand anything he was saying, they would have heard the word, Letiche, Letiche.

They had just reached the hole in the fence, and Cam was trying to get someone to go through first, before him, when something appeared and began to creep through the bushes on the other side of the rusted wire something began to crawl quickly toward the hole in the fence something pale something white and cam screamed again But it was Lila, in her bright white camp uniform again now, carrying her shoes in one hand and trying to wring her hair out with the other. And she was angry. Very, very

angry. Because Cam had been looking right at her when she'd slipped, as she thought, lost her footing underwater, and then somehow had gotten caught under those submerged roots or something. Anyway, she'd felt long, thin branches entangling her, holding her under. She'd been really scared. And when she finally managed to fight her way back to the air, where was Cam? Skipped out. Lost his head. Just left her there, drowning. To fend for herself. She gave Cam a piece of her mind.

Dressed him up and down in front of the whole camp. And didn't mind a bit when they both caught it from the head counselor. Who had plenty to say about the risk they'd taken and the terrible example they'd set for the campers. To this day, Lila is a frequent and natural swimmer. Lakes, rivers, bayous, ponds, pools, she'll jump in anywhere and swim like a fish. Cam, on the other hand, you might be able to talk him into

wading in the shallow end of the local pool if the water is crystal clear. But for all that, he still ends up swimming more often than Lila, believe it or not. Every night, at some point in his dreams, he'll find his way through moss-covered trees to the edge of a dark pool, a pool with an old rotten shack at its edge. And try as he might, he can't help but wade down into that water until he's treading it, even though he knows what's in there, even though he knows what's about to happen, what he's about to happen. What he's about to see.

Well, I know what I'm about to see. The wall on the inside of my bunk. Sure glad we're in this cozy boat, rather than out there with the mosquitoes and critters. Oh, and switch off that outside light when you turn in. I hate to think of the poor bugs and fish spending all night circling it, trying to get closer. The bugs and fish and any other things. Camp Monsters is part of the RAI Podcast Network and if you've been chilled

by our story tonight please subscribe if you haven't already take a moment to rate review and share it's you spreading the word about this podcast that keeps us recording so thank you. Next week we'll be going to an unlikely, forgotten wilderness in New York.

No, not upstate. Underground. If we go down deep enough, we're sure to find a lot of forgotten things. Maybe even some things that are better off forgotten. Camp Monsters is recorded around a cozy digital campfire in the overcast room of Cloud Studios in Seattle, Washington. Visit them at cloudstudiosseattle.com. The campfire was lit and is guarded by our very own legendary creature, our producer, Chelsea Davis. The sparks of audio magic are stirred up by our engineer, Nick Patry. Any growls you hear out beyond the firelight. Probably come from our executive producers,

Paolo Motila and Joe Crosby. These stories are written and told by yours truly, Weston Davis. Thanks for stopping by the fire. Well, the houseboat this time. Au revoir, as they say in Louisiana. See you next week. This season of Camp Monsters is brought to you by Yeti. Every cooler they make can handle the extreme conditions you'll find in the bayou,

but we'd suggest the Hopper Backflip Cooler, which you can throw on your back and run with. You know, just in case the Letiche comes a-looking.