Camp Monsters - The Mill Thing

Episode Date: September 30, 2021

Tonight we're camping out in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Surrounded by fall colors, woodsmoke and the sound of a distant river. A river that holds more than just fish and cool water. If you follow that river a few miles downstream, you'll come upon an old mill site. Nothing special, just a ruin of what once stood there. The locals know that the fishing around that site is no good. They also know that whenever they go there, a deep chill runs up their spine. That old mill site stays a lonely place. A lonely place with a history. A devastating fire. And a young woman who saw something... inhuman. Thanks to this season’s sponsor, YETI for supporting the podcast.Artwork by Tyler Grobowsky (@g_r_o_b_o)

This is an REI Co-op Studios production. No matter how dark the night, no matter how fast you run, no matter what is chasing 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. And these are the White Mountains of New Hampshire. And they're every color but white this time of year. The only thing brighter than our campfire are the hills around us, with the setting sun on them, glowing yellow and orange and red, purple. The chill in the air, the smell of the trees with the wood smoke mixed in.

If there was ever a better place and time of year for a campfire, I've never known it. We might as well be in a photo on a postcard. Oh, and of course the Pemajawasset River, glinting down there in the valley. So many rivers have their source up here. The Ammanusik, the Androscoggin, the Shakurowa. All of them great for fly fishing or drift boating, or just sitting on the bank beside a covered bridge and watching the water sparkle by. If you follow that river down there, a few miles downstream, you'll come upon an old mill site. It looks like any other ruined old place all tumbled down to the foundations. But where most other abandoned buildings in this area have been reclaimed by the forest, nothing much at all grows in that ruined down river.

I guess that would be hard to explain, if anyone cared enough to try. But no one does. It's so remote, no one really goes out there. Everybody local knows that the fishing on that bank is no good, and on the rare occasions when out-of-towners wade that far from the highway, they never last long. They slip on the slick old mill race and fill their waders, and then they have to walk sodden back to their cars. Or they lose the grip on their rod.

They all swear a snag or something snatched it right out of their hands, and they have to splash away after it downstream. So that old ruin stays a very lonely place. But there are still stories attached to it. Stories that come down from the days when the mill was operational. Stories of a creature without a name. Something the workers used to call simply him, or it, or the mill thing.

Something like a man, but, well, we'll hear about that. But he, whatever he may be, is still talked about. He's still the reason that the locals leave the place alone. But why was a mill ever built out here to begin with? Well, because of the river. Nowadays we just see the beauty of these little rivers, but 150, 200 years ago, people came here who saw something else in that flowing water. They saw power. In those days, electricity was just a theory. Steam was barely strong enough to pull a couple

dozen people down a slick steel track. Water. That was the only thing with enough power to drive the machines that this breed of New Englanders dreamed up. Fantastic machines that we can hardly imagine today. Machines as big as the buildings built to house them. Hundreds of feet long, three, four, five stories of red brick and windows. Rooms filled with gears and belts and driveshafts, machinery. And somewhere, dashing in between all that clashing, whirring iron, were the people who tended the machines. Homespun people, mostly. Young people from the farms around. Barefoot country boys stepping onto factory floors that could peg and awl a thousand boots a day.

Girls in hand-stitched dresses, working sewing machines that could lock more seams in an hour than their mothers had sewn in a lifetime. It was natural that these workers should bring their old farm life superstitions into the new world they were making. So every factory and mill had at least one ghost or troll or gremlin to call its own. And every factory hand and mill girl had at least one story to tell of the inexplicable things that would happen in the dark corners of the great buildings, out there in the tangle of the machines. Those legends mostly died out with the old factories. Electric lights banished shadows from the production floor, and workers born and raised to factory life didn't hold the buildings and machines in such superstitious awe.

Sure, in the bigger towns like Nashua and Manchester, where they've turned the old factory buildings into offices and condos, someone might still tell you a scary story about the time their favorite coffee mug disappeared from the kitchen. But that's about it. Well, this place, downriver from us, that place is the exception. The mill is in ruins, has been for 150 years or more, but some part of the past still lives down there. Some very, very unpleasant part. Anna and Siobhan and Maile hadn't planned to stumble on any ruined old mills that day last summer when they did.

They hadn't even planned on stopping by the river. They were heading miles up the road, up into the heart of the White Mountains. But before civilization ran out entirely, they pulled into a gas station just beside a bridge. Anna and Siobhan stretched their legs while Mailey gassed up the car, and the view up the valley in the early morning light was so beautiful. They all decided to park the car at the station and follow a little trail down toward the river, just to see what they could find. It was 2020, after all. The first summer of the pandemic, and the three roommates were already bone tired of being cooped up together.

Wilderness Adventure was their antidote to that weariness, so every available weekend they were in the mountains all over the northeast, exploring the great outdoors. But the first mile or so on that little trail was not so great. They could hear the river flowing off to one side, but the undergrowth was so thick that it was all they could do to follow the overgrown little path through it,

ducking under low branches and pushing through encroaching leaves as they went. It was slow going, and the way was so shaded that they didn't notice when the sun disappeared behind clouds. As they finally broke through into a big rocky clearing beside the river, a light rain began to fall, even though the whole sky had been blue when they left the highway. They didn't mind too much, though, because in the clearing they could all recognize that they'd come to something interesting.

Out beyond some rocks and cinder-covered wasteland was the broken heap of an old building, lying in jagged piles beside the river. And it was just a heap, not a wall still standing. Pieces of old machinery jutted out of the ruins, like branches of some creeping plant, bleeding rusty sap. But these weren't just old driveshafts and gear housings left abandoned. It was impossible to tell what they were, because they'd been twisted into all kinds of unrecognizable shapes by some incredible force. Here a column of corroded iron as thick as your leg pointed brokenly up toward the sky

from a massive base of warped and mutilated boilerplate. There a string of half-melted gears and drums lay in a continuous broken pattern, like a creature of iron that had fallen from a height and died, shattered. And then there were the bricks. The familiar, mellow old reds and pinks of the bricks were stained here with black. Anna picked one up and scraped it with her pocket knife, but the black was baked into it, and she noticed that many of the bricks were blackened on broken faces, like they'd been shattered by an intense heat that burned on long enough to discolor them. There was a fire here, Anna said,

and Maile and Siobhan nodded and were quiet, because anything that can twist such thick steel and make solid bricks explode deserves a bit of silence. But the river was running fresh and high beside the ruins, and soon they were exploring and laughing, taking pictures. The shots looked epic on the rain-spotted screen of Anna's camera. The gray, close light was perfect for the setting, and their rain-slicked hair and clothes seemed perfect too. Not that they had a choice in wardrobe, since they'd left their jackets in the car back when the morning was bright and sunny.

They didn't spread out quite as far as they usually did, though. There was something about the place that made them want to keep the others in sight. Something made each of them turn more than once to look when they heard one of the others moving toward them, only to find no one there at all. They were on the edge of the old foundation, right where it dropped down toward the river when it happened may they had just handed the camera to anna they took turns behind and in front of it anna raised the camera to loop the strap over her neck when, somehow, she fumbled it. She felt like it had been plucked right out of her hands. Mailey heard the first of the sickening series of shatters that the camera made,

bouncing down the bricks and rubble toward the river. She turned around just in time to see the camera tumbling and Anna scramble falling after, still reaching for it. The sound of Anna landing on the rocks was different than the sounds the camera had made, but it was even more sickening. Anna landed at the base of the old brick foundation with her foot pointing in a direction it certainly should not be. When Maylie climbed down to her, Anna had a terribly concentrated look on her face, rocking gently and clutching her calf while tears blinked in her eyes. Siobhan ran up and stood beside them with all the helplessness of the moment written on

her face. Maile came over to Anna and knelt down and no one said anything for a few seconds. Then Siobhan cursed quietly and Mailey looked up to see her holding her phone and saying she didn't have a signal. Mailey pulled hers out, but she couldn't get any bars either. Then Anna spoke up. I know her face was gray and her teeth clenched. The first thing she did was make a joke about her clumsiness. She hissed the joke out, and it wasn't funny, but it made the others laugh with pure relief that she was still cracking jokes. Siobhan announced that she was going to try to find a spot with a better signal.

She scrambled back up onto the ruins and out of sight. Anna started to shiver, and Maylee put an arm gently around her shoulder for what little that could do to keep her from the cold. Maylee tried to talk to Anna, just to keep her mind off the pain, but when Anna answered it all, it was in short little bursts that obviously came hard for her. She was in that kind of pain that throbs until your heart feels smaller and your breath comes quicker. And when you've started to grow numb to the throb, a lightning bolt stabs through you and forces your focus back to the hurt.

You don't have anything to say. You barely have anything to think through that kind of pain. So Maylie stopped trying to talk to her and just sat in silence beside Anna, shifting now and then in search of some less uncomfortable way to sit on that cold, wet tumble of bricks and rocks beside the river. Time passed unevenly, as it always does when you're waiting for help in a tough situation.

Maylie's eyes wandered idly over the scene, and without thinking anything about it, she found her gaze drawn to a little half-ruined culvert a few yards down the shore, which she could just see over Anna's shoulder. It would have been a big brick-lined drain back when the mill was in operation, dumping waste by the ton, but now it was long dry, half filled with rubble. May they couldn't see very far into it, just far enough to see that it wasn't completely collapsed, that it still bore back into the bank,

heading for some nether region beneath the old mill. Something about that thought made her shudder involuntarily and kept drawing her eyes back to that culvert. The little darkness she could see in there seemed to stare back at her, and she gave a visible start when she thought she heard a sound coming from it. A sound she could just make out over the rushing water. A faint, unpleasant sound. Somewhere between a gurgle and a whimper. In the next instant, she realized she'd been mistaken. The sound wasn't coming from the culvert at all. It was coming from Anna.

Anna's eyes were closed and her face was ashen, and Maylee could see the muscles dimpling her jaw as she clenched it. The whimper grew just a little louder, and Maylie gave Anna's shoulders a little squeeze of reassurance. She was going to say something reassuring too, when she stopped and listened, and leaned forward and asked Anna to repeat herself. Anna had said something in a high, murmuring whisper, too quiet for Maylie to hear. For a while, Anna didn't say anything, didn't move at all, hardly seemed to breathe. Maylie brought her head close to Anna's, with her ear next to Anna's mouth. And then she heard her say

in a high, impossibly small voice. So small it sounded like it came from a long way away. There was a fire. I know, Maile said. She squeezed Anna tighter, rubbing her arms. That was a long time ago, okay? Okay, this was bad. Anna was starting to drift, starting to come unmoored. Maile didn't know much about shock, but she knew this wasn't a good sign. Help is coming, Mailey said, and looked up and down the river, hoping that was true.

The sound, the whimper, continued, and when Anna spoke again it was even softer than before, and Mailey had to lean her ear down again to hear it. It was a big fire, she said. Such a big fire, burned for days. She stopped for a while then, and Malie hoped she was done and would be quiet But then Maylie felt a little jolt Pass through Anna's shivering body And the voice cut plaintively through the whimper

Still quiet, but with more force this time Althea didn't start it. And then, for the next... How long was it? For the next space of time, Anna told a story. In stops and starts, sometimes so quiet it would fade into the rushing of the river and Maylee would hold her breath until she could begin to make it out again. It was the story of the mill that they were leaning against. A cotton mill, Anna said it had been. And it was the story of the people who worked there.

Young women, mostly. Farm girls, 15, 16 years old, walking into this brick building that was five times larger than the biggest barn they'd ever seen. For them, for girls like this Althea that Anna kept mentioning, it was a new world, a different world, a new life, exciting and frightening. The factory, the whole place humming, vibrating faintly, filled with the familiar smell of leather mixed with the novel tang of machine oil and bearing grease

warm with activity and friction. The shouts of the foreman and the other workers mostly drowned in the clatter of the machines and the whir of the great belts. And those belts every room on every floor cross-hatched with them, taut bison-hide loops that ran from the spinning line shafts in the ceiling down to the machines. Belts that ran so fast you couldn't see them moving. They seemed to hang still, just swaying slightly from side to side.

But they were moving, faster than you could see. And they were waiting. Waiting to snatch away fingers. Waiting to catch unruly hair and wind it up onto the shaft until the flesh stretched off faces, unrecognizable. You have to be quick, the manager had told Althea the first day she'd started. You have to be smart and pay attention, then you'll be fine. But after a few months, Althea had begun to wonder,

like many others had before her, will I be fine? The other girls were so pale and quiet. When they got off shift, 14 or 16 hours, depending on the season, they just sat and sat in the dining hall of the dormitory. They sat and sat, quiet and worn, like old people. Maybe it's the food, Althea had thought at first. The food was much simpler than on the farm.

Althea used some of her pay to buy extra eggs to keep her strength up. Maybe it's the food. Or maybe, maybe it's something to do with what the other girls whispered about at night when the lights were out. About that thing in the back room on the second floor. The room with just a few high windows, where the light was always bad. A machine room, it was, just before the spindle loft. A place you just hurried through,

never stopped. But the girls said that's where he was. At first, Althea thought the he that they were talking about was a foreman. She'd heard there were some who'd make trouble.

So she asked them what his name was, what he looked like. But when Althea asked, everyone went quiet, staring at her. Then one of the younger girls said she thought she'd seen him once, in the back of that room, and that he was pale yellow all over, like a salamander she'd seen once in a well back on the farm. Another girl said that you only see him if he wants you to.

That didn't make any sense to Althea, and she asked again what his name was. They said that he didn't have a name. He lived in the drains under the mill, and climbed up the belt shaft into that machine room when he wanted to cause trouble. Don't you stay in there, they said. When you have to go through that room, go through as quickly as you can. And Althea always did, until that afternoon. It was late one winter day, and what little light there ever was in that room was almost gone.

She'd been sent to the spindle loft by a foreman who didn't like her. All the workers were wary of passing through that dim machine room, so it was a form of punishment to be sent back there Althea was coming back with her wicker basket full of the big wooden spindles and he she hurried through that room well she must have caught the basket on something a jutting bit of machinery maybe anyway she felt it snatched from her grasp, and the spindles went tumbling and rolling all over the floor. Althea knelt to gather them up, and had to crawl around under the whirring machines to reach the ones that had rolled away. She thought she'd got them all, and was about to stand back up when she smelled something. The faintest odor of wood smoke.

And she saw, down there at the very end of the room, a large spindle that had rolled half into the belt shaft in the floor and jammed there against the edge of the belt. And the friction was causing the spindle to smoke. Then Althea was filled with fear, not of the belt shaft or the creature in the stories the girls told, but of that other specter that always haunted life in the mills. Fire. Her very first day in the works, the manager had impressed the fact on her

repeatedly, that once fire took hold in a mill like this, filled with cotton dust and machine oil, nothing in the world could stop it. Althea scrambled on her hands and knees down the dim length of the room,

down to the mouth of the belt shaft where the spindle was jammed. She grabbed it and tried to pull it out. It shifted, but there was resistance, like something was pulling it back down, the force of the belt against it, maybe. Althea inched her body closer to the shaft so she could get a better grip on the spindle. She held her head back, away from the screaming belt. She was about to give the spindle another heave when... When she felt a hand close over her grip.

It wasn't a touch like she'd ever felt before, like she'd ever wanted to feel. It was soft and slimy, like a broken blister, like a salamander. She screamed, a scream that was lost in the noise of the factory, and she tried to pull her hand away. And then there was a blaze of light as the end of the spindle against the belt burst into open flame, and Althea saw a face just below hers in the shaft. It was a broad, yellow face, smooth and hairless and sickening. As Althea caught sight of it, the pupils of the big, yellow eyes narrowed into slits against the glare of the fire, and the wide mouth sprang open in a wicked sort of smile, revealing long rows of small, pointed teeth.

Then the creature turned to scuttle back down the belt shaft, releasing Althea's hand. When it let go, the spindle shot out of Althea's grip and ricocheted behind some machinery across the room, where the fire immediately caught in the cotton dust there. Althea crawled over as quickly as she could and in panic tried to beat out the flames with her apron and her bare hands. When she realized her dress was on fire, she rolled to try to put the fire out, but then it seemed that the fire was everywhere already. The whole room, the whole world was on fire, and Althea's agony began to fade into a deep, deep exhaustion. And she closed her eyes and wished yourself a better world.

Then a shadow fell across Anna and Maylie where they huddled on the bank with their heads down in the drizzling rain. A shadow fell, and Maylie's mind jumped immediately to that ruined old culvert beside them, with darkness that seemed to stare back at her. She looked up, and when she saw the figure in front of them standing, smooth and yellow and wet, she gasped. Then nearly laughed when she saw the beard poking out where the hood of the bright yellow slicker closed around the fisherman's face. The man didn't seem to be in any mood for laughter, though. He looked nervous. Mailey noticed he kept glancing around the ruins, especially into the culvert beside where Anna and Mailey sat. Siobhan came running up. Thank you for pulling your boat in, she told the fisherman, and then Mailey noticed

where the man had drifted his boat ashore, just upstream. I flagged him down, Siobhan explained to Mailey. I couldn't get a signal anywhere around here. But the fisherman interrupted her. He seemed to be in a rush. Come on, let's get your friend on the boat, he said brusquely. And between the three of them, they carefully loaded the wincing Anna onto the little craft. It was just big enough for all of them to squeeze in. It wasn't until they shoved off and began to drift away from the ruined mill

that the fishermen asked them what they'd been doing there. They told them the story of their day so far. When they'd finished, the fisherman shook his head. I wouldn't go back there if I were you He said Not a right kind of place Bad things happened there It burned, you know, way back One of the mill girls caught the place on fire

Burned her own self up doing it That's not how I heard it, Maylee said, giving Anna a smirk and trying to catch her eye. Anna told me all about it while we were sitting there. Told about the scary salamander man that started the fire and everything. To Maylee's surprise, Anna looked up, scowling at her. The fisherman gave her a sharp look, too.

Nothing to joke about, the man said. I didn't joke about it, Anna managed through her clenched teeth. I don't know what she's talking about. I barely said a word the whole time. There's a postscript to this story.

Not a long one. Oh, they got Anna patched up and hobbled her back to their apartment on crutches, but the strange thing was the photos. Of all the photos and videos they took around the old mill, none of them turned out. The ones on their phones were all blurry and dim, with a strange yellow haze obscuring them. Most of the photos on the memory card they salvaged from Anna's broken camera

were the same way, except one. Siobhan had taken it, of Mailey and Anna, standing on the shoreline by the old mill. And as Mailey looked at the photo on her computer that night, something in the background caught her eye. It was that crumbling culvert that had ended up sitting beside later, after Anna fell. But it wasn't the blackness of the culvert that attracted Maylie's attention this time. It was a shape inside that blackness.

A pale, yellow shape. Maylie leaned closer to the screen. She was about to zoom in on the spot when she felt a hand grip the back of her neck. A hand soft and slimy, but hot, like a broken blister. She turned around with a start. Of course, there was no one there. But the camera's fall must have damaged that memory card after all, because when Maile turned back to her screen, the picture had disappeared, replaced by a window displaying a corrupted file error. And that was the last Mailey ever saw of that abandoned mill, and whatever it is that lives there. She and the others never got the urge to go back.

Looks like we'll be going back to our tents before too long. The fire is right down to ashes, and the stars are out. The night is so still, if you listen hard, you can almost, just barely, hear the sound of the river. But I hope none of your tents are down there. Sure, it's a nice sound to fall asleep to, but... You know, so many kinds of creatures are drawn to the water when it gets dark. If you wake up in the middle of the night, it might be more than the river you hear. Just outside your tent. Camp Monsters is part of the REI Podcast Network.

Our engineer, Nick Patry, keeps all of our enormous, water-powered podcast production machinery well-oiled and running smoothly. Our executive producers, Paola Motula and Joe Crosby, are the raging river itself, harnessing their awesome power to our endeavors. Inside the mill, our senior producer, Chelsea Davis, is the tough but fair overseer, keeping us to our tasks. And bent over the loom, 16 hours a day, 6 days a week, is yours truly, Weston Davis, who wrote and told this episode. Idle hands are the devil's plaything.

And a reminder that the stories we tell here are just that, stories. They're based on things people claim to have seen and experienced, but it's up to you to decide what you believe and how to explain away what you don't. Thanks to all of you for listening, subscribing, rating, and spreading the word about this podcast. Rain and wind and storm-tossed sea foam are all forecast for our episode next week, so bring a jacket and maybe something warm to drink in a Yeti Rambler mug if you have one. See you then.