People call it the Mogollon monster — a Bigfoot of sorts, known to haunt the Arizona desert. It's a creature that arrives at night ... a shadow that reaches out to grab you when your back is turned.
If you’re looking for a beautiful sunset, go to the Mogollon Rim in Arizona. They call it the Rim because that’s what it is: the rim of the giant Colorado plateau, where it drops off into the pine forest lowlands below. Most of the Rim is National Forest, so you can drive or hike or bike or even ride horseback to countless viewpoints where you can watch the descending sun turn everything a glowing red.
But you know this episode isn’t about beautiful sunsets. It’s about what has sometimes been seen along the Mogollon Rim after sunset. When it gets dark out. When the shadows start to lengthen and take on shapes ...
People call it the Mogollon Monster, a Bigfoot like creature sneaking around in the wilderness out there. But those who have seen it, they don’t like to describe it at all. Because describing it takes them back out into the dark desert night, into an all-surrounding darkness ... a darkness that suddenly reaches out to grab them.
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Series artwork by Tyler Grobowsky.
If you’re looking for a beautiful sunset, go to the Mogollon Rim in Arizona. It runs from Flagstaff, two hundred miles southeast all the way down to Show Low and Springerville. They call it the Rim because that’s what it is: the rim of the giant Colorado plateau, where it drops off spectacularly into the pine forest lowlands below. Most of the Rim is National Forest, so you can drive or hike or bike or even ride horseback to countless beautiful viewpoints where you can stop and watch the dying sun spill its blood down the sky, lighting the rocks and mesas and everything a glowing red.
But… you know this episode isn’t about beautiful sunsets. It’s about what has sometimes been seen along the Mogollon Rim after sunset. After sunset the shadows start to lengthen… take on shapes. The light fades quickly, out in the desert, and the night gets so dark up here the stars cast shadows. Cast shadows that… sometimes… start to move.
People call it the Mogollon Monster, and those who have not seen it describe it like Bigfoot: like it’s just another hairy ape-man sneaking around in the wilderness out there. But those who have seen it… they don’t like to describe it at all. Because describing it takes them back there, in a way… back out into the dark desert night… into an all-surrounding darkness… a darkness that suddenly reaches out to grab them.
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 gather and repeat those whispers: the old tales, the recent encounters, all the strange stories you ought to know about the things that lurk in the wilderness you love to visit.
These are just stories, of course. They’re based on things people claim to have seen and heard and felt, but… well, witnesses can be mistaken. Listen to these stories and decide for yourself. They couldn’t possibly be true… could they?
We’re in luck, you know. To have this fire. Normally this time of year, the area is parched, there’d be a fire ban on. Don’t let the pine trees fool you-- this is a desert, after all. Luckily we got some unseasonable rain out here the other day-- you can still smell it on the air, that sharp sudden green of the desert after a rain. So we can have this little fire.
And a little fire is a good thing to have, out here. We’re in the middle of one of the largest “dark sky” areas in America. Without this fire, when the sun goes down the stars are the only light there is-- no big cities glowing on the horizon, bouncing their lights off the atmosphere. If you keep your eyes on the sky it’s great-- the whole sweep of the universe laid out above you.
But on a really dark moonless night out here, without a fire, I think you’ll find you can only gaze up at the sky for so long before you feel the need to glance into the darkness around you. It’s silly of course-- you can’t really see anything down here, the darkness is too complete. But if you stare into it long enough, you convince yourself that you can see just a little bit by the starlight. Most of what you see is in your own eyes-- those little floating, moving spots; grainy jumping patterns of green and red that aren’t really there at all. But somewhere close by, in the shadows that the starlight doesn’t reach… didn’t you see something move?
There’s a man alive today who will tell you that he did. Stanley is his first name-- people call him Stan. He’s an old man now, but back in 1973 he was a young soldier, driving with his buddy Jim late at night on their way back to Navajo Army Depot in Flagstaff, after a fishing trip in the Superstition Mountains. It’s back roads all the way between those two places, little two-lane highways through nothing in the middle of nowhere. Blacktop humming along under the tires, centerline flashing by in the headlights. And beyond that: darkness. Pine trees. Desert.
The road had been climbing for some time, up the Mogollon Rim, when Stan pulled over and Jim got out to answer nature’s call. It’s the same on any road trip: the further you get from the nearest bathroom, the worse you need one. So Jim went out into the night somewhere and Stan was sitting in the dim glow of the dashboard lights, looking out at the little patch of dust and rocks and yellow grass that the headlights lit up.
After a little while-- what was taking so long?-- Stan switched on the radio and worked the dial back and forth, trying to pick up the last of the Phoenix stations or maybe something out of Prescott. All he got was static and the eerie blips and whoops and wails of too-distant broadcasts. One little spike of interference sounded like a scream-- so much like a scream that Stan switched the radio off and tried to listen to the night outside.
The passenger door on Jim’s side was standing open. Stan could smell the cool pine-and-sage desert night, but the blackness out there was impenetrable. He turned off the dash and headlights to try to let his eyes adjust. But eyes can’t really adjust to darkness that complete. Human eyes can’t, anyway.
“C’mon! What’s the hold up?” Stan shouted out into the darkness. He didn’t really expect a response, and he didn’t get one. Maybe he’d misunderstood the nature of Jim’s need-- maybe it was the sort of thing that takes a little longer to complete. Stan sat staring and listening into the dark, which only seemed to get darker. The night air continued to float cool through the open passenger door. Now that the lights were off, that breath of air was the only way Stan knew that the door on that side was open. He couldn’t even see that far.
Another stretch of time passed-- a minute? a few minutes?-- and Stan began to feel uneasy. But it wasn’t just the time passing that made him feel that way. There was something else. He should call out to Jim again, ask him just for a shout that he was okay. He should slide across the front bench seat and out the passenger door, get the flashlight from the glove box and shine it around out there… but suddenly he didn’t want to do either of those things. Some instinct made him want to keep very quiet and still.
And Stan realized that the smell of the night had changed. Maybe… maybe the wind had shifted, but now the air from the passenger door tasted warm and very dusty and… and something else, Stan couldn’t quite place it. Slightly… metallic? Like hot metal, like a copper mine, like… like that taste you get when you’ve been hit hard in the mouth.
And just when uneasiness was starting to turn into real fear... Sten felt the tremble and heard the vinyl seat sigh as Jim got back into the car. How he’d found his way back through that pitch dark was more than Stan could figure out-- of course he never should have turned all the car’s lights out, come on!, what had he been thinking? Stan smiled and tried to think up some combination of joke and apology that would cover the situation. He started the car and the lights sprang on and he turned to Jim and said--
No. No, he… he didn’t say anything. He sat and stared, frozen, at two huge, black, glassy eyes reflecting the lights of the dashboard, lights that seemed tremendously bright after the darkness. Two huge, glassy eyes surrounded by a fringe of black fur, and in the bottom of the fringe were teeth: small, sharp, bright-- and the fur around them was wet and shiny. Then Stan started back so quickly that his head slammed into the driver’s side window hard enough to crack the glass, and when his mind returned to his body he was being dragged across the seat and into the blackness of the night by a strong, hard hand.
He kicked at it. He kicked and kicked over and over and over; he kicked and pulled and twisted until suddenly he was free and scrambling across to the driver’s side door again, smacking into it again and then scrabbling desperately for the latch. He opened it just as he felt long, narrow fingers hot on the back of his neck, and as he started to fall out the door they closed on his collar and pulled him back. He twisted and fought and felt skin and bones and iron sinews under a hot mat of hair and he couldn’t see anything-- just the color of the night.
He finally fell free, whether because of his struggles or because of the dazzling headlights of an approaching truck he didn’t care. He crawled and scrambled around the open door of the car, and then he was up, sprinting-- sprinting up the road straight into the approaching headlights. Beautiful, beautiful light.
I hope you never hear the sound of a fully-loaded fuel tanker locking up its brakes and starting to jackknife. The roar and grind and hiss of the brakes, the scream and shudder of the tires starting to slew slide sideways. The oaths of the driver fighting to keep the rig from rolling. The truck did finally stop, stalled sideways across the highway, and the driver managed to peel his fingers from where they’d fused with the steering wheel. He climbed out of the cab and then he had to deal with the bleeding, hysterical soldier that he’d almost run over. He couldn’t really make sense of the guy’s story, so he got on the CB radio and summoned the state patrol.
By the time the state troopers arrived Stan had calmed down enough to communicate that Jim was missing-- had never returned to the car. He kept his encounter with the… thing… to himself. Who would believe it anyway? He said he’d tripped and hit his head, looking for Jim in the night. The troopers were calm, having had lots of experience with soldiers on leave. With their big flashlights blazing they set off for a slow stroll through the brush on the roadside, confident they would find Jim hiding from his buddy as a prank, or maybe curled up sleeping under a sagebrush.
What they found instead was something quite different, something much more alarming. One of them almost stumbled into it: a hole, a shaft just large enough for a man, that plunged straight down into the earth. A ventilation shaft for an old, abandoned mine. There were bootprints leading from the car toward it, and the confused marks around it of someone sliding-- or being dragged, Stan thought to himself-- into the hole.
Arizona has always been a heavily-mined state, and unmapped, abandoned mines dot the landscape-- no one knows how many, estimates range from at least 100,000 on up. So the discovery of the open mine shaft set off a sadly familiar flurry of activity, and by dawn the road was crowded with police and rescue trucks, and a special team had been flown in from Phoenix by helicopter. After some preparation, they lowered a man slowly down the hole on a rope.
Any miner will tell you: your eyes play tricks on you, underground. Broken rock looks the same whether it’s on the floor or ceiling or on a wall just in front of your face-- it’s hard to judge depth, to tell shadows from shafts, and the far edge of a bottomless pit can look just like the rest of the ground in front of you, in the strong light of a headlamp. That’s why there are so many recorded instances of people in abandoned mines walking right into open shafts, and why it’s so often reported that they don’t make a sound as they fall-- by the time their minds have processed the meaning of the rock suddenly flashing past them they have... reached their final destination.
For the first one hundred feet or more this shaft pressed close around the rescuer-- even when he didn’t bump it with his back or elbows he could feel the rock there, tight all around him. When he reached the first “level”-- the first place where a horizontal tunnel met the shaft-- it was directly behind him. You or I would probably have missed it, and been lowered right past. But the rescuer had years of experience: he was an old miner himself who’d learned to feel a mine with all of his senses and to trust those feelings. So when the air changed behind him he gave the signal for the lowering to stop, and using his hands on the rock, turned himself around to face the void.
Like I said, your eyes play tricks on you underground. Shadows jump around as your headlamp moves, and your mind seeks patterns in the shadows-- creates fleeting faces and figures that aren’t really there. You or I would have jumped a bit, gasped maybe, recoiled at the sight of a strange dark silhouette turning and loping off down the tunnel in front of us. And after that, when the reflection of our headlamp kept glinting back at us from down the tunnel at the very end of our light-- glinting like the reflection off a pair of huge black eyes-- we probably would have given the signal to be raised up... and the whole way to the surface we would have feared the feel of something dark and unseen grabbing at our dangling feet.
But the rescuer was experienced. He saw that strange dark shape retreat down the tunnel and dismissed it instantly as one of those things that you think you see underground-- one of those shadow tricks that isn’t real because it can’t be real. He didn’t give it a second thought. And the glinting he kept seeing, off away down there… that didn’t bother him either: things glint underground, minerals that have been hidden from light for millions of years sparkle in glory when the glow of a lamp touches them.
No, the thing that did bother the rescuer were the marks in the dust, on the edge where the tunnel met the shaft: blood and a mixed-up scrabbling like someone had struggled there-- struggled to hang on to the ledge, presumably. That would have been a good sign, a sign that Jim might have managed to slow his fall by bracing against the walls of the narrow shaft, then grabbed this ledge and hung on. But what bothered the rescuer was that the marks were only on the ledge… further in was nothing but the indeterminate prints made by animals, bats and other cave-dwellers. If Jim had struggled on this ledge, he hadn’t struggled for long. And the shaft below kept dropping vertically away into the endless darkness. The rescuer peered one last time down the tunnel, as far as his light would reach-- saw that trick of movement down there again, and called “Hello?” even though he knew it was nothing. Then he shook his head and gave the signal to keep lowering.
A rope that you’re suspended from, a rope that your life depends on, is a living extension of your body. You feel every strain and stretch and tremor in it. Another hundred feet down or so, the rescuer felt something. Strange… Then he felt it again, like his rope was catching and scraping violently against something, twanging against a ledge or rock. He looked upward at the tiny fleck of light from the world so far above him. He didn’t remember any projections, any place where the slope of the shaft would bring his rope into contact with the walls. But there it was again, even rougher, even more dangerously insistent.
He gave the signal to stop lowering, and that feeling of scraping pressure against the rope stopped… for a second. But then it happened again, and it didn’t feel quite like anything he was used to. He was hanging almost still, but he could feel a grinding tremor in the rope like something was rubbing and catching against it. Someone topside, fiddling with the rope in an unnecessary attempt to guide it? Or something mechanical, something rubbing inside the winch?
That last possibility shook him, and rather than have them start to attempt repairs while he was dangling from the lifeline he gave the signal to hoist him back up. As he rose he tried shifting his position, pushing with his hands and knees against the close rock walls to try to get the rope to a place where it would stop rubbing. But it just seemed to get more insistent until he passed that pitch-dark level with the bloody ledge-- somehow that ledge must have been the culprit, although it didn’t seem possible, because once he was past it his rope rose clean and easily. And a good thing, too, as his team told him when he regained the surface. Because some of the rope as they’d reeled it in had been torn down to a strand or two thick. Whatever was down there was sharp as a razor.
They never did find the bottom of that hole. Other rescuers went down and came back up again. They lowered a camera, which didn’t see anything but rocks and shadows. They sent down food and survival supplies, and let them drop when they reached the end of the rope. There was never any response to shouts and whistles, no sign of life at all down there except... except for the tricks the shadows played.
After a few days they reluctantly called off the search. A week or two later a crew came and sealed up the shaft, for safety’s sake. Stan put in for a transfer to a unit based at Fort Bragg, and got it. It’s been a lot of years since then, and Stan is an old man now… but last I heard he had no plans to retire to Arizona.
It’s been a lot of years since then, but… down through all that time, every once in a while a strange report will trickle down off of the Mogollon Rim. Some campers in a remote patch of pine forest, or a stargazer out on the plateau will think they see something more in the shadows than what ought to be there. And of course like any wilderness area, the Mogollon Rim has its annual share of disappearances…
Seems like our fire has just about disappeared. Let’s leave it like that and let the stars take over. We’ve got a little sliver of moon, too. Funny how much light it seems to give, when there isn’t any other light around. And funny how deep the shadows are, in the moonlight. Like you could slip and fall right into one… or be dragged in, I suppose.
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 is you spreading the word about this podcast that keeps us recording. Thank you.
Next week someone will stumble out of the dark and into the dim glow of our campfire… someone with a warning about an ancient creature that likes to lurk just beyond where the firelight reaches. It’s been given many names over the centuries, but the one that’s stuck translates as “carries away dogs.” Prepare to be carried away.
This season of Camp Monsters is brought to you by Yeti. The new Yeti Tundra 65 cooler is just big enough for the Mogollon Monster to hide in… so how bad do you want that beer?
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 campfire. See you next week.