There are so many good places to hide in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. Is someone (or something) watching you from behind the trees and shadows? Meet this week’s monster: the Hidebehind.
What is the Hidebehind supposed to be? Just what it sounds like: a creature you never see directly, that always ducks back behind the nearest tree or rock when you turn to look at it. It sounds harmless enough, but so does any nightmare once you’re awake. And there are places where it can be a bit harder to awaken. Places where dreams come closer to reality. Places like the forests of the Pacific Northwest where the idea that something may be just behind that tree, watching you, drawing back when you turn your head to look, seems a bit too plausible.
Go ahead. Take a quick look over your shoulder. There’s nothing there, of course. But then, the Hidebehind wouldn’t be there for you to see, would it?
Season sponsor:
Season artwork by Tyler Grobowsky.
The deep, dark forest. You’ve heard of it. Little Red Riding Hood set off through the deep, dark forest. Hansel and Gretel, Goldilocks: all had their share of hard times there. In this episode we’re going to talk about another, lesser-known denizen of the deep, dark forest: a creature called “the Hidebehind.” Kind of a silly name, isn’t it? Sounds like something from a fairy tale, from a harmless old children’s rhyme.
But if you go deep enough, in a forest that is dark enough, you may find yourself wondering about the Hidebehind. You know the kind of forest I mean. Or maybe you don’t. Out in the Pacific Northwest you can travel for miles, for days on end, through some of the thickest, most remote woodland in the world. The forest here is as deep as forest gets. Most of it is pleasant, welcoming, wonderful… but there are some places where the trees grow thicker, and the sky seems fainter and farther away. Where rain stains the gray trunks black and drips silently on an ancient carpet of pine needles that absorbs every sound. And the trees-- the huge trees lean in all around, crowding you, cutting your vision down to a few feet in every direction. The thought starts buzzing around in your head: in a place like this anyone or anything could sneak up on you, unheard and unseen… and you find yourself wondering if something already has. After all, these deep, dark forests of the Northwest gave birth to the legend of the Hidebehind. And did something just… duck behind that next tree?
We’re about to find out.
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 that you ought to know about the wilderness you love to visit.
These are just stories, of course. They’re based on things people claim to have seen-- or in this case, to have not seen-- but anyway, witnesses can be mistaken. Listen to this story and decide for yourself: it couldn’t possibly be true… could it?
Not much to see out there tonight, raining like it is. No moon, no stars, just the sparkle of the raindrops in your flashlight. Glad they built these picnic shelters with a fire pit in the middle. Nice to be able to dry off for awhile.
I guess we shouldn’t complain-- it’s the rain that feeds this forest. That’s what all these towering old trees are reaching up for-- the rain. They catch it in their needles, filter it down to their roots, and drip the excess off the end of their branches so erosion doesn’t wash them away. These trees are rain-catchers, perfectly designed to thrive in the rain.
But I’m not. I catch the rain in my hair, filter it down my back, and somehow always seem to collect it in the seat of my pants. I’m perfectly designed to be miserable in the rain. I’ll take this cozy seat by the fire anytime over a rainy night in the woods. I’m sure a lot of people would agree with me. I know at least one other person who certainly does. She didn’t always feel so strongly about it, but… a rainy night like this a couple of years ago changed her mind.
Of course it wasn’t raining at the start of her story. It wasn’t night yet, either. It was a sunny morning on the trip of a lifetime, on horseback up and up into the deep reaches of the beautiful mountain forest. The trees grew thick and the trail wound between them, and as Laura rode her horse Blaze easily along, she listened to her friend Jason spin a yarn for the little group.
It seems when Jason had told his grandfather Brandt about this trip they were planning, Grandpa Brandt had a warning for him. Fifty years ago, he said, he’d been up in this same area, cruising timber-- that is, estimating how many board feet of lumber might be got out of each acre of this old forest. He and his partner separated in order to cover more ground-- but Brandt hadn’t gone far when he stopped and listened, then called his partner’s name. It wasn’t that he’d heard something, exactly… it was just a feeling he got that someone was near. No one answered-- and he walked on-- and the forest got thicker.
Then as he walked the shadows… the shadows started acting funny. All these years later, he said he’d never known anything like it. The woods up there were ancient and thick, filled with shadows-- and from the corner of his eye he’d seen one of those shadows move: reaching out for him. He’d whirled to face whatever it was-- but there was nothing there. He stopped and stared into the empty woods, listened to the quiet, then he pressed on. And the shadows closed in all around him.
Brandt was a lumber man born and raised, the woods were home to him, the only things he feared out there were the real hazards that a logger should fear: falling limbs and faulty equipment. But that day, up in that particular stretch of dark old timber, Brandt couldn’t help but remember the stories the old loggers had told about a creature that lived in the thick woods, always managing to hide from view... until it was too late. A creature they called the Hidebehind. Some said it was just a mischief maker, sneaking up to steal hats or gloves or tools left laying around-- one minute something was right where you’d left it, then you’d turn your back and it was gone. But other folks had darker stories to tell, stories of accidents without explanation, of disappearances. Terrible things that they blamed on the Hidebehind.
And the more Brandt thought about that creature, the closer the shadows seemed to come. And the closer they came, the faster Brandt moved, until he was cursing and crashing through the underbrush down the ridge, shouting and running until he broke into the open down by the creek-- and even then he didn’t dare look behind him until he was waist-deep in the swift-flowing water. When his partner followed Brandt’s calls and found him standing out in the middle of the creek, Brandt made up a story about an angry black bear chasing him, and used his wet clothes as an excuse to clear out of the woods for the day. And he’d never come back to that particular trail. He’d warned Jason to be careful on his trip up into these woods… and to stick together…
Well, Laura knew Jason’s grandpa Brandt-- he was too good a storyteller to pass up the chance to mess with Jason and his friends before they took a long trip in the deep woods. She looked around as the sun turned the treetops far above into a glowing green lattice that filled the forest with golden light. Such shadows as there were sure didn’t seem very frightening to her.
But light is a funny thing... especially when it fades. The clouds rolled in suddenly as they rode, as clouds will do in the mountain forest. And the rain joined them when they stopped for lunch in a little clearing beside the trail. They ate quickly, put their rain gear on, and re-tightened the saddles against the wet. Then they pushed on.
The trail wound toward the head of the valley, climbing now over broken ground, up rough switchbacks. The clouds came down into the treetops and brought even more rain with them, and the light grew dim and dreamlike. And the trees-- the trees!-- the trunks of trees big and small, close and closer, made a varied-texture wall that seemed to lean in all around them. The horses labored over roots and rocks and the group spread out-- Laura’s view of the others flickered and faded amongst the trees, and for long stretches it felt like just her and her horse Blaze struggling through this huge, dim, quiet forest, alone.
But… not quite alone. All of a sudden a strange feeling flooded over Laura, the feeling that there was someone close by… someone unseen and… unpleasant. Blaze must have felt it too, because he stumbled and pressed his ears back; then began to swing his head from side to side as he walked like he was looking all around for something. The patterns on the rough bark of the trees moved, changing shape as they passed, and every time Laura turned her head to one side or another she got the feeling that she’d just missed something-- that something she’d seen in the edge of her vision had moved out of sight before she could focus on it. It was unnerving, and it was all she could do not to cry out to the others to slow down, wait for her, keep her in sight. She wasn’t far behind-- but in this close gray world, shrunk so small and grown so frightening, she was far enough.
“Easy! Easy, Blaze!” The horse had been struggling steadily up the rough grade, but as they began to round a big old Douglas Fir he started violently, and began to shy backward and away from the tree as far as the narrow trail would allow. “Easy now!”
Blaze did not go easy. Snorting and tossing his head in fear he backed and pranced until he ran into a tree trunk on the far side of the trail-- Laura had to move her leg to keep it from being caught between horse and tree. When he felt himself trapped on that side, unable to back further, Blaze pitched forward and bolted. Caught off balance, trying to keep her leg from being crushed, Laura just managed to throw herself forward onto Blaze’s neck. But as he dashed past the large, dark tree that had spooked him in the first place, Blaze locked his legs and stopped as suddenly as he could, letting out a terrified neigh.
The sudden halt nearly threw Laura forward off the horse. She slipped up over his withers and clung to one side of his neck, with her face hanging down toward his belly and the ground. And as she hung there, she got the strangest glimpse of… no, it must have been a shadow. It was the color of a shadow… but the shape… well... in that instant, far down on Blaze’s belly, almost out of her sight… she thought she saw a long, thin, shadowy hand. The hand of something clinging under the belly of the horse itself.
She instinctively recoiled from the vision, and in that same instant Blaze reared up on his hind legs-- and Laura felt herself being thrown. If you’ve spent any time on horses you know the feeling: that helpless moment of stillness suspended in air, when you’ve lost your grip and you’re left with nothing but the hope that the ground isn’t as hard as you remember.
Laura felt herself being thrown, and she’s sure she would have been… except in that moment she was seized by an all-consuming terror. A terror of what she thought she’d seen under the horse… or rather what she hadn’t seen. She found herself overwhelmed by the hysterical need not to see any more of whatever was under there-- filled with an instinctive knowledge that she couldn’t survive if she saw any more.
She grabbed for the pommel and missed, felt herself falling, shut her eyes tight and began to scream through clenched teeth-- then felt an electric jolt as she was yanked up by her left hand that was still unconsciously gripping the reins so tightly that she couldn’t feel them.
Her weight and momentum on the bit in his mouth yanked Blaze’s head to one side and threatened to bring him rolling down on top of Laura. “Let go!” she thought. Dropping to the ground from here would be far less dangerous than pulling the horse down with her. She felt the strain transmitted through the reins, felt Blaze’s muscles torque and shiver… then the delicate balance begin to crumble, the horse begin to come over on her. “Let go!” her mind shouted at her. But she didn’t want to-- she couldn’t. There was something down there, under the horse… something waiting for her…
“Laura!” the sound of the other rider’s voice was like waking from a dream. “Hey!” Laura forced her fingers to open, and she dropped. She landed on her backside with a perfect view under Blaze. There was nothing there, of course. Blaze pulled his head back to center, staggered, and recovered without falling on her. As Laura struggled to her feet Blaze stood there working the bit in his sore mouth and looking at Laura resentfully, as if to say the whole thing was her fault.
After that Laura kept her eyes on the rider in front of her, riding closer than she normally would and forcing a steady stream of conversation on them. Blaze was nervous and keyed-up, she could feel it… she felt the same way. Luckily they didn’t have much farther to go.
She was glad when they reached that night’s campsite, but… apprehensive too. She’d expected a clearing, a meadow, some sky, a break from all these trees-- but the campsite was just a scattering of flat clear spaces along a little stream, which wound over and around and through the roots of the massive old trees that dominated the place.
It was a beautiful, beautiful spot-- normally Laura would have appreciated it. But she was tired of trees, tired of the close dimness of the forest-- and by the time she collapsed into her tent that night, she was tired of more than that. Setting up camp and making dinner in the rain is no fun, but having to first unload and clean and feed and water and hobble a string of horses who would much rather be in a warm stable is positively exhausting. The rain didn’t take any pity on them either, growing steadily harder as the afternoon washed away into evening and the evening drowned in night.
But it did feel great when Laura could finally change into some fairly-dry clothes and climb into her nice, snug sleeping bag. She only heard the rain pattering on the tent for a few moments before she was off beyond hearing.
There’s something about that constant sound of water, though. Like the sound draws it out of you. Makes you dream of water, wakes you up thinking of all that water you drank with dinner. Makes you wish you hadn’t. Especially when taking care of your midnight water problem means crawling out of a cozy sleeping bag into clammy darkness, finding your light and your coat and cramming your warm feet into cold, wet, stiff boots.
But nature calls, and at the rainiest hour of the night Laura had to answer. She unzipped the tent just a little bit, shining her light out into the night. Raindrops streaked through the beam like icy sparks, flashing bright enough to make it difficult to see anything else out there. She thought she could just make out a tree trunk. Surprise surprise.
She crawled out of the tent and turned to zip it closed again. As soon as she turned her back on the night she shivered with a feeling like she’d had as a kid, running to get out of a darkened room-- that old feeling of darkness reaching out to grab her. But she fought the feeling back. She’d already had a lesson earlier that day about the dangers of allowing fear to run away with her. And she wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice.
Laura got the tent zipped and turned to face the night: slowly, deliberately, calmly. The rain pittered and pounded on the hood of her jacket, each drop making its own sound. Her light slowly traversed the little world between the big dark trees. Nothing there but the rain, flashing across her light. She was alone, she was sure of it… but every step she took away from the tent increased the irrational feeling that she wasn’t.
The soft percussion of the rain on leaves and puddles splashed like a thousand stealthy footsteps all around her. She thought she heard a sound beneath the rain, spun around-- and was surprised at how close the tent still was behind her. She felt like she’d stumbled out thirty yards, and there stood the tent barely ten feet behind her. How far is far enough from the tent on a rainy night? She decided she’d go just a little bit farther. She turned, took a step-- and felt something wet and cold on her face.
She shook her head and slapped the thing away, stumbling back and shining her light wildly around-- until it revealed the bright green leaves of the low-hanging branch she’d walked into. She snorted at herself in relief and embarrassment, raised her hand to push the branch aside, and as she did she wondered: “Who is that?”
The brightness of the green leaves just in front of the light dazzled her, making the woods beyond difficult to see. But squinting through the shining leaves Laura thought she saw a dark figure… someone standing? No, now they were moving. Running. Toward her.
She shoved the branch up fiercely and shined the light full onto the figure running toward her… Onto the spot where the figure had been a moment before… The spot where she thought she’d seen it... There was no one there now. Nothing. Just the rain. Just the shadows.
She started breathing again, and the sound of it frightened her. It was almost as noisy as the rain, now. She turned her light in a full circle: shadows jumping from tree to tree as she turned, shadows running across the ground when she moved. Only shadows.
She stopped with the light shining full on her tent. Warmth and comfort, so close at hand. She should hurry and get back there. No point wasting any more time scaring herself out here. She took a deep breath, held it. Listened hard. Heard her heartbeat. Heard the rain.
And never heard the thing that grabbed her with such unbelievable strength and pulled her backward into the bushes. She would have cried out but something thin and scaly like the body of a centipede was thrown tight across her mouth. Her light was dropped and gone, she grabbed in the blind darkness for branches that stripped their leaves and broke in her hands. She turned her head but she could see nothing-- only when she reached behind her did she feel something like cold, wet leather stretched over bone, pressed tightly against her and pulling... pulling her…
She grabbed a thick branch and held. She bit into the scaly thing over her mouth and it drew away just long enough for her to let out one desperate scream through the rain. A light switched on inside the fabric of a tent that seemed so far away. Another light, in another tent, barely visible through the trees. Too far. Too late.
Things too long and thin and hard and strong to be a hand wrapped around her head from hair to chin and clamped her mouth shut. Awful, painful, irresistible strength dragged her backward into the night. The branch bent and her hand slipped down it and it snatched away into the darkness, and she got that same sensation she’d had falling off the horse: the same feeling of losing her grip and dropping full-body into panic and dread.
And then for the first time she heard the thing, the creature, whatever it was that held her. Heard its breath grunting quick and short but with a depth of strength, like the snort of an angry horse. And she heard its footsteps, like hooves, stamping and pawing the ground. She was jolted, shaken-- felt the violent motion of the thing, so much stronger than she was.
And then there was a cry, a scream, familiar but not her own. And she dropped, falling hard on the ground. The beams of strong but distant flashlights bounced among the branches overhead. And silhouetted against them she saw the outline of a long, dark face bending toward hers, and she felt hot breath on her face. She reached up with both her hands and…
And cried out in joy when she felt Blaze’s soft, warm muzzle. The noises of the last few moments took on a new sense, and she realized that the creature had never made a sound-- that the grunting breath and stamping hooves and sudden whinny were Blaze’s, coming-- hobbles on his feet and all-- to her rescue. Her friends ran up a few moments later to find her standing with her wayward horse, unharmed except for some odd holes and jagged tears in the back of her rain jacket.
It may not surprise you to hear that, because the logistics of camping with horses are so difficult, Laura has decided to stick to day-rides. Preferably in meadows, on beaches, and through other wide-open spaces. Blaze certainly doesn’t seem to mind, preferring the comfort of his stables at night. Besides, he tends to spook in heavy forest, when the trees close in around him. But then, so does Laura.
Well, I don’t usually spook in the forest… but if I did it would be on a night like this. The fire is burning low now. What do you think? Should we make a run through the rain and the trees to the tents, or…? No, you’re right, it may let up if we wait awhile longer. Let’s stay here where it’s warm and dry and… where there’s nothing to hide behind.
Camp Monsters is part of the REI podcast network. If you’ve been warmed by our little campfire please subscribe if you haven’t already, and take a moment to rate, review, and share. It’s you spreading the word about this podcast that keeps us recording. Thank you.
Next week we’ll wake up in the middle of the night in a bunkhouse at a quiet little summer camp in South Carolina. Everyone else is still asleep, except… except… who is that?
Camp Monsters is recorded around a cozy digital campfire in the Overcast Room of Cloud Studios in Seattle, Washington. Visit them at CloudStudiosSeattle dot 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 Patri. Any growls you hear out beyond the firelight probably come from our executive producers, Paolo Mottola and Joe Crosby. These stories are written and told by yours truly, Weston Davis. Thanks for stopping by the fire. See you next week.