Camp Monsters - Tommyknockers

Episode Date: October 11, 2023

Lara just moved into a new house in an old coal-mining town in West Virginia. One night, she begins to hear sounds behind the walls of her basement bedroom. Knocking, knocking…This episode is sponsored by Keen. Check out all of their amazing gear in store or at REI.com. 

This is an REI Co-op Studios production. Knock, knock. Who's there? Who's there? Who is it? Who is it? What is it? What is it? There are places where you ought to feel safe. Alone and snug in your own bed at night. That's one of them. Breathing deep.

Drifting off. When behind the sound of your favorite podcast you think you hear you pause the show and listen and no no it must have been nothing you lay back and your heart relaxes you close your eyes and there it is again.

Clearer this time. Louder. And your mind races to try to explain it. What could that sound be? What would make it? Not the pipes or the vents or the house settling.

No, it's not a noise like that. It's slow. Deliberate. With a pattern to it. Like an animal or... And you realize that... Whatever it is... The sound is coming from inside your house, just down the dark hallway, coming

closer. You curl down tight under the covers and wonder, if you scream, will anyone hear you? In time? But if you hide, won't it find you anyway? Anyway? Well, fear makes the decision for you and you lie there, frozen, as it closes in. Lie there. Listening.

To the Camp Monsters Podcast. Welcome back to the fire. We almost didn't have one tonight. Not out here, at least. We had to get special permission from half a dozen state agencies to do this. They get mighty nervous about visitors out here after everything that happened. Definitely not the kind of place to ever venture on your own. That's what all those signs on our way in were about

And they mean it Why? Because this is a very dangerous area It must be Look out there, away from the firelight for a moment Let your eyes adjust We're in the middle of the woods, aren't we? Well, yes, but look again.

See that long, straight clearing? That's an old road. And close beside it, sidewalks, tilted by tree roots, half hidden by leaf litter, and some old concrete steps going nowhere. The building they led to is long gone. All around us, where we sit here, a low concrete wall. The foundations of a demolished house. Sad, isn't it?

Eerie. This was a town decades ago. Over a thousand people lived here. But then... To be continued... place that people have left. No one abandoned Centralia. They were driven out. Driven out after that night, 40 years ago, when Laura heard a sound above her bed. Laura didn't really like it here in Centralia. She thought the town stank. And it kind of did. It kind of does.

Not everywhere, not all the time. But sometimes you'll catch a breath of that heavy, earthy, smoky smell. That scent with a little bit of sulfur on the edges. There it is. Smell it? It's not pleasant. But Laura's father would always remind her that it was that smell that put a roof over their heads. Laura's father was a coal mining engineer.

But he wasn't incendiary to mine anything, no. Like so many others, he was hired to try to put the fire out. That's where the smell comes from. That's what you're smelling. The fire. It's underneath us. Right now. Under the ground, all around us.

Smoldering its way through a hundred years of coal shafts that sleep beneath this whole valley. You take millions of tons of buried coal, introduce oxygen from the old mines. You've got the ingredients for a slow burn that could go on for hundreds of years. No one knows exactly how it got started. People burning trash near the mouth of one of the countless mine shafts that crisscross the area, or a lightning strike, or maybe just spontaneous combustion, decay heat. Whatever started it. By the time Laura's family got here in 1981, the state had been trying to put it out for 20 years already. But what no one understood was how truly dangerous things were getting.

Until that night, when something woke Laura up. Laura thought it was the smell at first. It was late summer, coming into fall, but still warm enough for Lara to sleep with the window open. The smell was strong that night in Lara's little basement bedroom. Strong enough she wrinkled her nose and rolled over. Thought about getting up to close the window. But that seemed like such a pain. And she was so cozy. And she was falling back into sleep.

Then suddenly she was wide awake and listening. Because there had been a sound. Soft. Unfamiliar. Not like the sounds the house usually made. Like like someone knocking

slowly on the front door. Except it didn't sound like it was coming from way upstairs. It didn't sound like it was coming from the front door. It was such a gentle knocking, and she'd heard it so clearly, almost as if... Lara sat up slowly in the darkness. She sat up and turned her body and stared at the wall directly above the head of her bed. Because it sounded for all the world like the knocking was coming from right there, from just behind the wall above her head. And there it was again, so faint she could barely hear it, but distinct, slow, deliberate.

Some people think in words. Some in numbers or colors or moods. Some lucky few think in music. Laura thinks in shapes. And as she sat there staring at the darkened wall, shapes streamed through her mind. The jumble of rectangles that was her house, split level, built against the rough triangle of a gentle hill

with the little square of her bedroom tucked on the underside of it. The window across her room that was just above ground level, open onto the backyard and the woods. So, behind the wall, above her bed, was... was... Lara relaxed a little bit when she figured it out. Sure, okay.

The crawlspace. The wall above her bed backed onto the crawlspace that filled the other part of the basement Right, the little hatch into the crawlspace was hidden behind that picture in the hallway that led to the stairs In fact, funny thing, but on her way down to her room that night Lara had noticed that picture jutting out from the wall more awkwardly than usual. The plywood hatch that was hidden behind it had popped open, just a fraction of an inch.

Lara hadn't given it a thought at the time, just shoved it back in. She figured that a draft from under the house had popped the hatch open, some difference in the air pressure down there. But now she wondered. And she dismissed those alarmist thoughts as quickly as they came. And there was nothing in that crawlspace except all the things that are always in a crawlspace, and any one of them could make a knocking sound. Maybe there was a draft back there, and it was gently blowing something against the wall above her. Or the heating ducts were knocking as the furnace warmed them, or those vents. She'd never given a thought to those little vents that opened at intervals around the top

of the foundation. They must open into the crawlspace. She remembered seeing them from the side yard, right at ground level. Crosshatched by thick wire screens that were gooped with old house paint and half-woven with weeds. She'd never looked closely at those vents. Never noticed if one of the screens was damaged or missing or bent back. Inviting critters to creep down there. Maybe some little creature had made itself a bedroom, just behind the wall from hers.

With visions of a cuddly raccoon family, Lara leaned forward slowly, quietly, until her ear was pressed right against the wall. She could hear the faint crinkle of her own hair against the plasterboard, feel the coolness on her cheek. Her ears were her eyes through the night, through the wall, searching, searching for those little scrabbling, snuffling sounds that all living creatures eventually make when they think there's no one listening.

But Laura was listening. And listening. With her breath shallow and her ears keen. And once she thought she heard... No. Not a sound, not a movement, she just, she could feel that something was there, just behind the thin plaster, waiting, just like she was. So Lara reached to knuckle up, slowly, to rap on the wall and startle the raccoon or whatever it was, just as it had startled her. And then it would rustle and move and she'd hear it.

So she reached up and she rapped the cool plaster with a sharp little... Laura couldn't tell you how she got out of bed, but now she was out, standing on the balls of her feet, glancing between the darkness of the window and the pale light reflecting from the closed door, trying to decide on the best escape. This wasn't right. This wasn't... This wasn't right at all. The wall had jumped against her cheek from the force of those blows. Nothing. No animal. No animal could do that. No animal would do that. All she could think of is that there must be some one down there in that crawlspace,

just inches away through the thin partition. Some person, for some reason, sliding through a torn foundation screen to hover on the other side of her wall, and maybe... How long had this been going on? Maybe they'd been doing this for a while. Night after night. Maybe...

Maybe they'd been sneaking out of the hatch there in the hallway on other nights. Creeping across the cold basement floor to her door while she slept. Opening it. Slowly. She slept, opening it slowly. Lara already had one leg out of the window when she changed her mind. There was nothing behind the house but the blackest woods. And when she thought of trying to run that way, she felt the jagged fingers of unseen branches tearing at her face. And imagined the sounds of someone chasing her through those trees.

Getting closer. Catching up with her out there in that lonely darkness. Her only other option once outside would be to run around to the front of the house, but that would take her right past those little vents that led to the crawlspace. In the dark, she'd never see an arm that reached out to trip her, to grab her fallen legs, to drag her in. She pulled herself back inside the room and closed the window very, very slowly. Listening to the silence. The silence behind the wall.

She tried to conjure up the shape of the crawlspace in her mind from the one time she'd shown a curious flashlight around behind the hatch when they first moved in. Thick black plastic on a high dirt surface, just a couple of feet below the cobwebbed joists of the floor above. Dust and darkness and that stale, strong, old dirt smell. She hadn't stayed to look for long, but she'd seen enough to wager now that if she ran, she could make it down the hall, past the hatch and up the stairs

before the mystery behind the wall could scramble across the crawlspace and catch her. Having made up her mind, she was across the room in an instant, flinging open the door and running down the hall, conscious, for some reason, of the sound her feet made, slapping on the linoleum that felt so strangely warm beneath her. The long hall made a sharp turn down there by the picture that covered the hatch. So she hit the wall beside the picture

with both arms, braced to spring off of it, and as she did, she turned her head and saw the stairs right there, just past where the picture hung. She felt the thrill in her heart that told her she was going to make it. And then the stairs disappeared.

In their place was a swirling vortex of earthy colors, browns and tans, and a knot of black. And it took Lara the eternity of a heartbeat to realize that she was looking at the plywood on the back of the hatch to the crawlspace. The hatch that had just sprung open. And in that same eternity, Lara realized that from the corner of her eye, she could see into the darkness of the crawlspace. And in that darkness was a face. A face like thick, old, baggy leather. Ring of a dark beard, coal smoke eyes, and arms, long, heavy arms, streaked with earth,

smelling of earth as they wrapped around her, clamped vices on her arms and neck and the back of her hair. There were actually huge hands with wide, hard fingers. Pick and shovel hands, like she'd known all her life growing up around mines. Hands smooth from the hard work of the world, crooked and cold at a joint or two where an accident had crushed them years ago. And as those hands and those arms pulled Lara up and up into the crawlspace, she fell away from her basement. And she fell into that long, dark shaft of unconsciousness

that extreme shock will sometimes open. When Laura finally landed, she was four years old again. Or was it five? And the same kind of working hands that had grabbed her were now patting her friendly on the back, and a wiry old knee was bouncing her, and eyes like pale smoke smiled kindly into hers. That's right, she remembered it all now.

It was a great uncle,cle, or a great-great-uncle. A Welshman he was, almost as old as the hills he'd spent his life mining, by the look of him. Old enough now that they'd never let him underground again, he said. Except that one last time. And so before he went, he'd tell Laura all about it. And then, she remembered, stories that poured out of him. Stories more like dreams than any dream she'd ever had. In tales that kept her spellbound, well past bedtime, the old man took Lara stumbling with him beside the ponies he'd tended when not much older than Lara was then. He'd first gone to work in the mines.

And like those ponies, never leaving the deep, dark tunnels of memory, he showed her the places he'd known. The glitter of gold in Australia, and a dusty sparkle of raw diamonds as big as her fist from a thousand feet under the African veldt. And he hushed her, quiet, shh, so the Germans wouldn't hear as they mined, not for gold or for silver, but for men's lives, under the great muddy guns of the Somme. Some might say she was too young to hear such things, he said.

But everyone deserved to hear the truth. Then he told her another true thing. The last tale of the night. He told her how he'd been saved, as a lad, by a Tommy. Not the Tommies that were soldiers in the Great War, no. He'd become one of those himself later on. No, this was years before, back home in Wales.

And the Tommy that had saved him was a Tommyknocker. Did she know what a Tommyknocker was? What she ought to do. Because it was good to know there were things in the world that most people never see, and to respect them just the same. Most miners had never seen a Tommyknocker, but they didn't need to. They knew they were there. Little people. Spirits, or fairies, she might call them. Funny creatures of the earth, way down deep.

They live in the dark places, past the end of the old worked-out galleries where no one ever goes. And they stay just beyond the burning of the miners' lamps. But you can hear them, if you listen. Moving and whispering and, sure, knocking, down there in the far darkness. Where you know nobody is. And they have their tricks, too.

Moving tools that you've left, even just beside you in the dark. Or changing the signs and the marks. So if you don't know the road back to the lift, you're apt to lose your way. But he'd learned young and he'd learned well to always be polite to them, and to throw the last of his lunch out into the darkness for them. And it wasn't long before they paid him back. He was still a boy then, not big enough to work on the coal face yet. So that day they had him tending the bells. That is, it was his job to sit in the darkness just behind where the men were working the face,

and to mine the wire that ran through pulleys tacked to the rough timber props. That wire ran all the way back to the lift shaft, and then up, and at the surface the wire was hooked to a set of bells, and that was all the miners had to communicate with the world above. But that morning the bells were kinked. He could tell from the feel of the wire when he tried to send a ring upstairs that the message couldn't get through. So he set about tracing the wire back down the long level, under the low wooden props, tracking it with his dim lamp and feeling it with his fingers

as it ran through the pulleys, giving it a tug now and then, still feeling that same resistance. He'd gone all the way down the long, low level, almost to the lift shaft, when over the distant sound of the men working the face behind him, he first heard it. He turned his light away from the wire toward the sound. At first he didn't see where it came from, and then he did. Squatting on top of the great black bulk of the lift cage was a little old man. Or something like a little old man, but with legs too short and arms too long. Skin like loose leather, a shade lighter than the earth. The creature smiled, showing teeth as brown as the rest of him, and then it released the place where it had been pinching the bell wire.

It winked, and then reached up to a great timber bulk above its head and... And on that third knock, Lara's ancient relative had felt himself lifted up from behind and thrown through the air toward the Tommyknocker in the lift shaft. Just lifted and thrown, like a great breaking wave might lift you from your toes and spin you toward the beach. He never heard the roar of the blast from down the level behind him. The blast that brought the weight of a thousand mountains down on the heads of all the poor fellows working the face. The first sound

he heard when he came back to his senses, half buried in rock and choking on coal dust and bad air, the first sound he heard was the long scream of the steam whistle up on the surface, echoing down the shaft. The steam whistle, screaming for help from all who could hear it. And Lara could hear the scream of that old steam whistle she could actually hear it leaping out of the old man's story tearing through the hearts of everyone in that Welsh valley of long ago the sound of it seemed to release a pressure that built up inside of her

and whenever she imagined it would pause, as if for breath, she'd grow desperate, literally gasping for it to begin again, to bring attention to the tragedy underground, to bring... Help. Help. Help. Help! Help! help help

and Lara screaming down there in the crawlspace of her house did bring help her parents found her down there back in a far dusty corner with her face staring right down into a sinkhole that had just begun to open underneath their house. She quieted before her father could get to her, knocked out by the deadly gases that were beginning to pour invisibly from the fissure, and it was all her father could do to drag her back to the hall without passing out himself. They escaped, her whole family out into the night, away from the lethal fumes

that poured from the sinkhole and soon filled the house. But they never would have made it. They never would have woken from their sleep at all if Lara hadn't... well, if she hadn't had that nightmare. If she hadn't walked in her sleep.

Well, crawled in her sleep, somehow, right to the source of the danger. Some kind of instinct. That's how Lara's engineer father explained it to himself. See, he was never comfortable with things he couldn't understand. He didn't believe in things he couldn't see. But Lara does. She knows better. And whenever she goes down underground, into a cave or a mine, or even into a deep basement,

she always whispers a little thanks. To the ones she hopes she'll never need to see again, but who she knows are there. To the Tommyknockers. It wasn't long after Lara's house was condemned that the whole town of Centralia was condemned as well. The sinkholes opening at random above the smoldering mine fires were becoming too dangerous, too numerous, too unpredictable. The town was not safely inhabitable anymore. So, look around. All you can see tonight is all there is to see.

A crumbling grid of roads through scrubland that every day grows closer to the forest it'll soon become. The last remains of old home foundations, now so covered in fallen leaves and vegetation that they almost seem a part of the ground. And under that ground? Smoke. Heat. Fatal gases. And maybe, still maybe, something else. The Tommyknockers. The ancient ones who live for tricks and warnings and...

Don't worry, I'm sure that was just a woodpecker or something. and warnings and... Don't worry, I'm sure that was just a woodpecker or something. Just a very slow, very sleepy, nocturnal woodpecker. It was... It was pecking something... under the ground. Maybe we'd better put this fire out and head back to our campground outside the Centralia mine fire area. I mean, whether Tommyknockers are real or not, if they were real, they might be trying to... I think it would be reckless not to listen to them.

It never hurts to heed a warning when you get one. Camp Monsters is part of the RAI Podcast Network. Toiling endlessly in windowless caverns deep underground, never to know the kiss of daylight, is our tireless mind pony and engineer, Nick Patry. Risking life and limb on the unstable coal face of podcast production are our producers Hannah Boyd and Jenny Barber, plus our content strategist Lucy Brooks they loaded 16 tons and what do they get

up on the surface executive producers Paolo Motilla and Joe Crosby man the controls of the lift our only link to the outside world a little do they know that down there on top of the lift cage, hunched and bearded and horribly wrinkled, squats yours truly, writer in voice Weston Davis. And I'm just about to... When this season of Cat Monsters ends, remember, the stories don't have to. Check out Weston and Nick's new Buried Legends podcast. Terrifying tales that would be, maybe should be forgotten, if they could. But the past has a way of reminding the present that nothing stays buried forever.

If Whispers had an archive, the Buried Legends podcast would be it. Search Buried Legends on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, or however you listen. And be sure to subscribe now so you don't miss an episode. Buried Legends launches this November. 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 what makes that knocking behind your wall at night. Next week, well, next week it'll be 1959,

and we'll be watching The Late Show at a drive-in theater in Honolulu, Hawaii. Sure, there's a scary movie on the big screen that night, but nothing nearly as scary as what's waiting for us when we open that door behind the snack shack some faces you never forget no matter how much you want to see you then but before you go please subscribe if you haven't already leave a nice review and keep spreading the word about Camp Monsters. The great thing about a digital campfire is that the more people

crowd around it, the cozier it feels. It's your interest and word of mouth that keeps us recording. So thank you.