Fire has always been a danger in certain parts of southern California. And in Ojai, fire isn't the only thing you need to be concerned about.
In our final episode of Camp Monsters, season three we're heading to Ojai, California. Unlike our usual campfire, we're gathering around an electric lantern because the hills surrounding us are tinder-dry, a fire waiting to happen. Once a wildfire gets started, it moves fast. Fire has always been a danger around here. The story we're telling tonight starts with one: the big Ojai fire of 1948. A fire that birthed something... dangerous.
Thanks to this season’s sponsor, YETI for supporting the podcast.
Artwork by Tyler Grobowsky (@g_r_o_b_o)
This is an REI Podcast 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.
I can’t believe that this is it-- our final gathering for this season. Thanks to all of you for listening, subscribing, posting so many great reviews and spreading the word about this podcast. You keep us recording. Thanks for taking the time to come and share the campfire with us.
Except… there’ll be no fire tonight. Here in the hills above Ojai, California, there’s a burn ban on, so we’ll have to content ourselves with this electric lantern. No complaints, though-- there’s good reason for that burn ban. These hills are tinder-dry: once a wildfire gets started it moves fast, and there’s no hope of stopping it-- it’s just a fight to save what you can and wait for the next rains to come.
Fire has always been a danger around here. The story we’re telling tonight starts with one: the big Ojai fire of 1948. The morning after that fire started, a man named Joe woke up in his car, parked on the side of Ojai Avenue. That was not an unusual place for Joe to wake up. He was what your great-grandmother might have called “a rounder”: a man with plenty to say and nothing to do; a busy tongue and a short temper. He had a wife and three kids who lived in a little cabin out on Sulphur Canyon Road, up in the hills, but he spent most of his time in town, telling tall tales about his greatness and wasting most of his money keeping himself in a state where he could believe his own stories.
When Joe woke up that morning, he didn’t immediately recognize that anything was wrong. The town was clouded with smoke-- but Joe’s view of the world on any given morning was usually pretty bleary. It wasn’t until he saw two separate fire engines scream up the Avenue that he thought to roll down his window and ask a man who was running past what was going on.
“Fire in the hills!” the man said, then ran on. Joe started the car with a sinking feeling in his heart, and turned down Montgomery Street onto the Creek Road. He drove faster and faster, as every glimpse he got of the hills in the direction of his home in Sulphur Canyon revealed nothing but fire and smoke. But they stopped him when he reached the little bridge over San Antonio Creek, just before Creek and Hermosa Roads meet. Two State Highway Patrol cars were pulled across the road there, keeping everything but fire engines out of the hills. Joe pulled over to the side, but before the Patrol officers could walk around their cars Joe was out of his and running full speed past them, across the bridge.
The officers tried to stop him. They tried to warn him. But Joe’s mind echoed with a lifetime of self-made disappointments, welling up in his ears as the imagined cries of his family: “Help! Help!” He’d never done anything but let them down-- this last failure on his part was too much for him to bear, too much for him ever to face. Tragedy had-- at least temporarily-- galvanized Joe into some semblance of the man he had always wanted to be. If he was too late to save his family, he’d at least share their fate.
The Patrol officers didn’t follow Joe past the bridge. They had a job to do. Joe cut uphill through the brush, and went on running well beyond the limits of his strength. He had nothing-- just nothing-- left when he crested the ridge and saw the blow-up, the brush-fed firestorm that was racing up the hill to meet him. He didn’t have the energy or the will left to turn and run. He wanted to collapse but there was an awful wind ripping the air in from the top of the ridge to feed the fire, and that wind kept Joe on his feet and pulled him, staggering, down into the very mouth of the inferno.
So Joe decided to run-- he decided to run right into his doom. It was courage and weakness and reckless grief all mixed into one. He screamed, and gave all the last breath in his body to the fire. And as the flames hit him, and he hit the flames… in that last instant Joe felt himself transformed. All the lies and doubts, the pain and petty jealousies that he’d let dominate his existence were burned away… and all that was left in those last searing seconds was a sadness almost beyond measure. Not for what he was leaving behind-- but for all the things that he could and should have been. All the good he could have done in every little way, if only he’d let himself do it.
And then Joe ceased to exist. And the legend of the Char Man was born.
Officially there were no casualties of the 1948 Ojai fire. Unbeknownst to Joe, his family had already been evacuated-- along with everyone else in those remote hills-- in advance of the fire. No one who had known Joe in life could believe that he would have run up to his own destruction just to try and save his family-- no one who had known him could imagine him running for any reason. The Highway Patrol officers never bothered to report that one strange incident in a day full of them, and when the local police found Joe’s car abandoned by the side of the road, his family assumed he’d run out on them again, as he’d done many times before-- when he never returned, they weren’t particularly surprised.
But in the months and years following the fire, strange rumors began to collect around that little bridge over San Antonio Creek, the one where Joe had stopped and abandoned his car. People said that if you stopped by the bridge late at night-- turned your car off and walked out onto the narrow span… you would hear something crashing through the bushes on the nearby hillside. Or if you listened closely to the wind through the leaves you could make out the faint voices of people calling for help. And if you echoed them-- if you cried “Help! Help me!”-- then the Char Man himself would scream his unearthly scream, and come charging out of the brush beside the road, running at a superhuman speed onto the bridge toward you, hoping to catch you before you made it back to your car.
What would the Char Man do if he caught you? No one could agree, because no one ever seems to have been caught by the Char Man. No one could even agree on what the Char Man was supposed to look like-- some said he wore bandages and burned-up clothing, others that he was just bones and seared skin. Like that ghost in the bathroom mirror at a slumber party, everyone claimed to have heard of somebody who had seen the Char Man, and that something terrible had then happened to that somebody… but somehow that somebody could never be found.
Except perhaps in one recent case, that one where Marco should never have come. It was a summer or two ago, and he drove up in a car with three other kids-- older kids. New friends, Marco thought, a little proudly. The tough kids-- tough like Marco. But Marco was going to find out that these other kids weren’t tough-- not really. Not like Marco was. He was going to find that out the hard way.
It was night-- the middle of the night-- when they finally pulled up beside the little bridge over San Antonio creek, and they all got out of the car. They had driven a long way-- they weren’t from Ojai, they were from further south in Ventura County, but everyone knew the legend of this bridge and the Char Man. And they were bored, and new enough behind the wheel that driving anywhere was a kind of thrill on its own. So they’d decided to come to the bridge and challenge the legend.
They walked away from the lone street light that shone at the corner where they’d parked their car, out onto the bridge itself. They were laughing and joking, roughhousing in a way so casual it revealed their nervousness more clearly than anything else could have. Then when they reached the middle of the bridge, one of them standing in the middle of the group worked up the nerve to shout the supposedly magic words: “Help! Help me!” And they all went quiet, listening.
At first, Marco thought he heard something stir up high on the hillside above them, something quiet like dirt and rocks sliding downhill under someone’s foot, or branches rustling against something as it passed by. But it must have been the wind, or the others must not have heard it, because the brief silence that followed was broken by loud peals of laughter, and other shouting voices: “Help! Help! Oh help me! Help me! A-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!” Marco shouted something like that himself, even louder than the others, so loud that his voice broke. The others laughed and laughed over that, and teased him until he shouted it again, and seemed genuinely angry when his voice didn’t crack that time.
They were getting bored. They’d driven all this way, spent the better part of their night getting here, challenged the legend of the Char Man and found out that if he did exist, he wasn’t tough enough to face a group of guys as hard as them. So the time had come: now they had to find something to do, or start the long drive home.
Somebody decided that the thing to do was to dare Marco, since he was the new guy, to go down into the blackness underneath the bridge, and cross over to the other side. The whole group picked the idea up-- they said they’d all done it before, so he had to do it now. And when Marco looked down, just fifteen feet or so, into the mostly-dry bed of the creek, and hesitated-- then the whole group was on him, teasing him, harder and harder, rougher and rougher, until Marco felt miserable and wondered for the first time what he was doing there. This wasn’t much fun at all.
But Marco knew he wasn’t really scared of the nothing that was down there. And he said so, and agreed to prove it. So the others walked with him back to the end of the bridge where their car was parked, and Marco hopped over the rail and went down the dusty slope without looking back at the others who were shouting fake encouragement and predictions about how scared he was feeling.
The truth was, Marco wasn’t feeling that scared at all. Enough orange light reflected down off the bushes and trees from the streetlight on the road above that after a few steps he could make out the ground in front of him. Once the guys stopped their shouting behind him, Marco could hear the insects singing in the bushes, feel the life of the nighttime hills buzzing all around him-- there was none of that quiet or tension that might suggest anything nasty hiding in the bushes, or stalking up on him.
For a moment, when he reached the bottom of the creekbed and found a stretch that was free enough of bushes that it seemed like he could follow it across to the other side of the bridge, Marco paused. It wasn’t that he was scared, exactly-- but though he could faintly make out the ground on the far side of the bridge in the same faint light that reached the side he was on, the space under the bridge itself was in complete darkness, so black that once he stepped under it he couldn’t see his footing, and more than once he stumbled on the jagged rocks of the creek bottom. He kept looking up into the blackness of the slope above him, up where the bridge and the hill met, thinking he heard something moving up there. Once he even stopped, right in the middle of the space under the bridge, in the darkest place, and turned to face the invisible sounds uphill-- but when the sound of Marco’s moving quieted, the sounds up there in the darkness were quiet, too. Probably just some animal that lives up there, Marco thought. And he kept moving.
Marco made it to the light on the far side of the bridge. He made it to the slope over there, and up the sliding rocks of the slope, feeling tough and triumphant. He almost made it back to the road, back to the point where he could poke his head up above the rail and see the car shining over there across the road, under the streetlight-- when things went very wrong. Marco sensed, rather than saw, something moving in the darkness right where the bridge met the top of the slope. Something darting out of that darkness… toward him. He turned away, hunched his shoulders and braced himself for whatever was about to happen-- and heard a horrible, high-pitched scream burst the night. Hot, rough hands grabbed his face from behind, and pulled him back toward the space under the bridge.
But like I said, Marco was tough, and he didn’t cry out. Frankly, he’d been expecting something like this as soon as his re-appearance on the creek bed on the other side of the darkness hadn’t been met by shouting and taunts from above. When he didn’t hear any of that, Marco knew something was up-- knew the other guys were hiding somewhere, trying to scare him. So when they sprang out screaming, and yanked him back like that, Marco didn’t yell or run away. He turned and fought-- and that was the worst thing that he could have done.
He was supposed to scream. The other guys had told themselves that Marco would scream, try to run, maybe cry, even. Then they, the older guys, the “tough” ones, would all have a big laugh and get to feel smart and powerful awhile. But when Marco fought back, and didn’t cry out or seem really scared at all-- just angry-- then the only way for them to get to that powerful feeling-- guys like them, guys who were supposed to be “tough”-- the only way they knew to get to that feeling was to force the fear out of Marco… the only way they knew how.
But Marco was too proud and brave for his own good. By the time the other three got him to the point where fear overtook anger, where Marco needed to cry out and beg them to stop-- things had gone too far. If Marco made a sound the others didn’t let themselves hear it-- and they kept going, on a mad momentum of their own.
Marco doesn’t remember this. He was past the point of remembering anything. But finally, as he lay there curled up under blows he could only just barely feel, jolts that only reached him from a long way away across a world smothered under a dimming red haze, he groaned out a few words, in a whisper so quiet that even Marco couldn’t hear himself say them: “Help,” Marco said. “Help me.”
And then Marco heard a scream that he thought was his own, but wasn’t. A loud scream, impossibly loud-- deep and desperate and terrible. A scream that had to be human, but seemed more than that-- out of control, a sound wrenched from a body against its own will-- a scream of blinding pain, pain beyond knowing. The blows on Marco’s body stopped as everyone stood in stunned silence, waiting for the horrible sound to trail off. But it never did.
On and on, louder and louder, with a breath as endless as the torment it uttered-- a note of pain that never ceased. But though it never ceased, it did move-- down the slope beside the bridge, toward them, accompanied by crashing in the underbrush that would have sounded loud if it hadn’t been drowned to insignificance by the scream.
Marcos “friends,” the ones who were attacking him, the “tough” guys who thought they’d stared down the Char Man and won-- they all ran away up the slope as fast as they could, slipping in the loose rocks and pulling at each other to try to take the lead in the rush for the car. Even Marco, staggered and stomped as he was, dragged himself up the slope after the others. One arm was shattered but his legs were merely shaky, and he found his feet when he heaved himself over the rail and onto the road-- just in time to see the car’s tires spinning in the dust as the other three drove off over the bridge and down the road as fast as they could go, with one of them still struggling in through an open rear door.
Marco tried to run after them. He tried. But he only made it a few steps before he knew that it was no good. He couldn’t go very fast-- and he couldn’t make it very far. His head was spinning: he would fall onto his knees-- maybe onto his face-- if he kept up the hopeless pursuit of the car. And whatever he had to face-- as the sound of the endless scream raced up behind him-- he wanted to face on his feet.
So he leaned against the railing of the bridge and slowly, shakily turned himself around-- just as the horrible thing burst from the bushes on the other side of the railing and stopped, standing just a few feet in front of Marco. The streetlight fell full on the creature, and in his terror Marco drew himself up as tall as he could, and waited.
The thing stopped its horrible scream-- it seemed to cost it a terrible effort to do so-- and snapped its gaping mouth shut with the sound of bone slapping against bone. Then it stood there with a strange, sibilant whimper dribbling out of its mouth, more heavily laden with pain, somehow, than its scream had ever been.
It looked… just like its name sounds. Like a person burned far beyond the point of any possible survival. All blackened and charred, with great raw, bloody rents in its skin, and flesh missing entirely from places where there should have been flesh. All this Marco took in… but what he was staring at was the face. The lips and gums were scorched away, leaving the teeth looking long and terrible. The nose was gone-- the ears were shriveled. The lidless eyes wept an endless stream of gory tears-- but in those eyes there remained something so human… that it made the rest of the vision far, far more awful than it would have been. In those eyes Marco read a bottomless sadness, and regret-- and a wish that could never be fulfilled.
Then something inside of Marco’s body buckled and gave way, and a darkness came up from the ground and gathered him in.
Marco may be the only person-- possibly ever-- to see the Char Man so clearly. But he wasn’t the last person to see the Char Man that night. Some minutes later a truck of weary firefighters drove by, making the long night trek from one side of a wildfire up in the hills down around to another side that they were hoping to contain. And just as they drove across that little bridge on Creek Road, over San Antonio Creek, they saw… something… some figure running down the middle of the road, right at them.
The driver slammed on his breaks, and when they’d skidded to a stop the firefighters who had been asleep asked “What is it? What’s going on?” while the ones who had been awake said “What was that? Did we hit it? Where’d it go?” And as they all got out to look around they found Marco where he’d collapsed by the side of the road.
He was hurt but coming around, and the firefighters were able to give him first aid and make sure he was stabilized, then give him a ride to the hospital in Ojai. It took them longer than they expected to get there, however, because the road ahead was blocked off by emergency vehicles where a car travelling at high speed had missed a turn and demolished itself against a tree. The last ambulance was just leaving the scene as Marco and the firefighters drove by. In spite of the damage to it… Marco recognized the car.
And I recognize a lot of tired faces in this electric lantern-light. Let’s just shut that off-- a lot easier than putting out a campfire-- and all head to our tents now, to enjoy one last night of camping in these quiet California hills. We’ve had so much fun telling stories this season-- we hope you’ve had as much fun listening. We’ll try to be back soon-- around cozy, indoor, wintertime fireplaces-- with more of our mini-episodes to tide you over until next season. You can help that happen by re-listening to old episodes, buying merch, leaving positive reviews, and telling friends about Camp Monsters. Thanks for all your help so far. And special thanks to Lily of Evanston, Illinois, for telling all her friends about Camp Monsters. Here’s to many more campfires, many more stories, many more friends… and many more monsters. I’m Weston Davis. Thanks for listening.
Camp Monsters is part of the REI Podcast Network. That same bridge over San Antonio Creek outside of Ojai has many other legends associated with it. They say the disembodied hand of our Senior Producer, Chelsea Davis, can be heard on many a quiet night, tapping its fingernails impatiently on the bridge rail, eternally awaiting the next completed episode. The roar of motorcycle engines from both ends of the bridge simultaneously can only herald the approach of the famous Ojai Valley headless riders, our Executive Producers Paolo Mottola and Joe Crosby, who toss their heads to each other at full speed in the middle of the bridge and then ride off into the night. And our Engineer, Nick Patri, is sometimes seen dressed in the clothing of a Victorian-era child, standing forlornly by the roadside at the far end of the bridge… but that isn’t a haunting, it just means his car broke down on the way to his next historical re-enactment. Meanwhile, screaming continuously on the hillside above, is yours truly, Weston Davis, who wrote and performed this season of Camp Monsters. Thank you for listening.
We owe a special thanks to our sponsor this season: YETI. YETI makes gear that’s as versatile as it is rugged. Like tonight: we couldn’t have a campfire but we wanted a hot meal-- well, YETI coolers can keep your hot foods hot just like they keep your cold drinks cold. So: one cooler for the ribs, one cooler for the drinks, and we’ve got everything we need. Thanks, YETI!
And thanks again for joining us for this season of Camp Monsters. It really means a lot to us who put so much work into this podcast. We appreciate you, and hope to be with all of you around the campfire again soon.