In the third episode of our Sasquatch series you'll find out if the narrator followed Roger into the night. If you haven't listened to part one and two, turn back! Start at the beginning and follow along to see what happens next.
Our third full season of Camp Monsters will start in September, thanks to our sponsors at YETI. In the meantime, we figured we'd give you a handful of stories to tide you over. And while you think you might know everything there is to know about Sasquatch, this is a personal account. A story that'll have you crawling under the covers questioning whether or not you really believe in monsters.
Follow along every month and chime in with what you would do in the narrator's shoes. Drop your thoughts in the comments section wherever you listen to podcasts or email your suggestion to podcasts@rei.com.
Season sponsor: YETI
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.
Our third season of full-length episodes will begin in September, thanks to REI and our sponsors at Yeti. Between now and then, we’ve decided to tell a four-part story about Bigfoot-- Sasquatch-- that we’ve been saving for years because it was too long to fit into a single regular episode... and because it happened to me. And like any very intense experience, my memory of it is vivid but fragmentary-- sometimes I need your help to piece together just what happened.
Like at the end of the last episode, when I asked what you would have done if Roger asked you to go with him, out into the San Francisco night. At this point I should explain that this is the third episode in a four-part series, and I urge you to listen to the first two episodes in order. But if you’d rather not, it may suffice to tell you that Roger was an old, straight-laced-looking man I made a nodding acquaintance with in a San Francisco bookshop some years ago. And one night in that same shop he told me of an encounter he’d had with Sasquatch back in the 1970s when he was living in the rural hills of northern California. Roger grew more and more agitated and frightened as he told the tale. He’d just reached the part where he was running from the creature, trying to get back to the campfire around which his friends sat-- when he stopped telling his story and asked if I’d go with him so that he could show me something.
And I put the question to you: would you have gone with Roger out into the clammy night? Or urged him to tell the rest of the story there, in the well-lit bookshop? Based on the responses we got in the reviews section, and from emails sent to podcasts at REI dot com, most of you would have…
… gone with Roger, to try to help him. I knew we had a brave audience. And I’m proud to say that’s just what I did. I agreed at once, and stood up ready to go. Roger looked uncertain, like he regretted asking me, but he put on his coat and soon we were walking quickly through the foggy streets-- up hills and down hills and across hills going sideways… if you’ve been to San Francisco you know how it goes.
I tried once or twice to make conversation, but the night around us was fairly crowded and Roger kept his responses short. We’d walked a mile or more and turned off into a quarter where the streets were narrow and steep and relatively quiet before he began to speak. He said: “Have you noticed? No one who goes looking for it has ever seen a… you know...”
“A Sasquatch,” I said, forgetting his sensitivity to that particular name for the creature. Roger winced, and at the same moment a strange long wail echoed down the narrow street, and a trick of some neon lights in a storefront cast a tall shadow behind us as I glanced back. Of course strange shouts and long shadows are common, rather mild symptoms of the night streets of San Francisco. But we walked a little faster just the same.
Roger seemed shaken, so I tried to keep him talking: “I guess you made it, right? That night? You made it back to the fire?” Roger turned his head back toward me as he passed through the orange glow of a streetlamp, and though he didn’t slacken his pace I could see the sad smile on his face. He was silent just long enough that I didn’t think he was going to answer. Then he spoke in a murmur:
“I did,” he said, “in a way, though I hardly remember it. I mean my body reached the fire, and returned to my friends. But my mind… you see, ever since then, in flashes, at certain moments… even here in the city…” He shook his head once, emphatically. “I know it isn’t real, you know. I know it didn’t happen. And I’m hoping you’ll help me prove it isn’t real. Something so ridiculous doesn’t deserve the time it takes to disprove it, I know that, so I… just… thanks again for coming. I know the truth--” and here he snapped his head away from me and stopped walking, staring into the empty black depths of a narrow breezeway between two buildings. I couldn’t see anything there but darkness-- nothing moved, the only sound was the hum of a city at night. Then he carried on, just as abruptly as he’d stopped, talking as he walked: “I know the truth. But I have my whole life as evidence that there… well, that there might be another kind of truth, too. All I ask is that you consider it. And… well...”
And as we continued on through the misty night he began to tell me of an account he’d recently stumbled across in an old medical journal. I’d tell you the name of the journal or the author of the article if I remembered either, but I’m glad I don’t. I don’t ever want to encounter the tale again. It was penned by a doctor in the late eighteen hundreds who found himself battling an outbreak of a peculiar kind of hysteria-- or “distemper” as the doctor called it-- in some lumber camps in Humboldt county, northern California.
The timber fallers began to balk at going to their work in the woods, making one excuse or other, and it eventually came out that there were stories going around… rumours that there was some kind of “wildman” in the woods, stalking them. Anyone who was slow at their work was fired of course, but after a few days the same symptoms would show up in their replacements, and once word spread it proved impossible for certain camps to find anyone willing to work in them. The bosses were convinced it was a creative form of radical labor agitation, but the doctor was certain it was something more: because he was treating several men who continued to be persecuted by visions of “the Wildman” even after they’d returned to towns or cities. These subsequent experiences were usually not direct sightings of the creature itself, but feelings of surveillance, complaints of a strong odor, or faint footprints or scratches on surfaces that the patients felt were signs of the creature’s presence...
So far the tale seemed harmless enough. Roger was obviously using it to tell me that he still suffered from some kind of Sasquatch delusion, even here in the city. He had found this obscure old volume and saw his own situation reflected in it. Okay. But as Roger kept talking, the tale took a bizarre turn. First the doctor, having exhausted all the conventional medical treatments of the day, attempted to help some of his patients rationalize their fears away by taking them on a supervised trip back into the woods where they had suffered their initial encounters with the wildman. Far from being an outdoorsman himself, the doctor managed to get separated from the group and briefly lost in the woods. And though he didn’t go into any detail, he wrote that in the brief time that he was lost he’d experienced something that gave him a first-hand appreciation of the terror that his patients lived through.
After that, according to Roger, there crept into the doctor’s account a different kind of empathy for these patients. The doctor began to suggest that perhaps there was some truth behind the phenomena that they continued to see and experience. At first this empathy was presented as merely another attempt at treatment, just an experiment in humoring the patients’ delusions in order to diffuse them. But as the account continued the doctor admitted that he could no longer bring himself to exclude the possibility that some of the things his patients described might have a basis in reality. He began to hesitantly put forward the idea that perhaps there was something more than mere delusion behind their experiences-- that there may be some kind of real creature responsible, but one that only certain people could see. The doctor theorized that if there were such a creature, perhaps the ability to see it might be somehow contagious-- that this special kind of vision was something that the men had “caught” from the woods or from one another... and that they were capable of spreading it. Finally he admitted that he feared he himself had fallen victim to this contagion... and in prose that became increasingly unpolished and erratic he began to describe the things that he saw and sensed-- strange scratches and faint footprints around the doors of his home and office… a figure following him that would slip around a corner and disappear when he doubled-back… a horrible face that he’d caught glimpse of, peering into his window one night...
I was about to gently poke a few holes in Roger’s re-telling of the old doctor’s story, when Roger did it for me: “It’s all ridiculous, of course. Some doctor beginning to share an illness with his patients and then writing about it doesn’t prove anything except the fragility of the human mind. And that’s--” he said, stopping and looking right at me for the first time since we’d left the shop-- “that’s just what we’re going to prove tonight.”
He looked at me with eyes wide with desperate hope, and continued quietly, with slow emphasis. “I’m going to show you something that isn’t there. And you won’t see anything. And then I’ll know for certain what must be true: that none of it is real. Not the doctor’s story or mine… that none of it has ever been real.”
What could I say to that? I looked back into his eyes and nodded my head and said “Okay” or “Uh-huh” or something. We were stopped beside a wooden door in a tall brick wall that masked the space between two stately old apartment buildings, or two wings of the same building. They were probably only five or six stories tall, but their bulk disappeared into the foggy infinity above us, pierced here and there with the yellow light of distant windows that seemed to float unsupported. Roger produced a small flashlight from his pocket, rattled a key in the door and opened it…
Opened it onto one of the many little miracles that hide among the never-halting, ever-changing hustle of San Francisco. It was a garden. An impossible garden that filled the long narrow space with thick foliage. The color of flowers exploded in the little light that Roger held as he flashed it ahead of him to help find his way down the narrow path that snaked through the garden’s middle. As soon as I stepped through the gate the buildings on either side disappeared-- I mean that the thick bushes and drooping trees on either side hid them from view, but in truth if I hadn’t just seen them I would have sworn it was impossible that they were there. The garden was a world apart. Even the air felt different-- the greasy bay fog transformed into a soft forest mist.
“My apartment is just at the end of the courtyard,” Roger said in a voice barely above a whisper. “Isn’t the garden wonderful? I always thought so. But, lately… since I’ve been… well... we’ll see.” And he moved on along the path.
We walked for what seemed too long a distance-- not far, but further than a courtyard or alley had any right to run here in the middle of one of the densest cities on the west coast. Once, we passed a little door in the side of one of the brick buildings, a red door with a single low-watt bulb hanging above it. We saw it through a screen of branches, and it seemed to be far off at the end of a different winding fork of the trail, though it was probably only twenty feet away.
A little further on, with the door gone and forgotten, Roger stopped suddenly in the middle of the path. He stopped and threw out his arms as far as the thick bushes around the trail would allow, as if to keep me from shoving past him. He was looking down at the ground, pointing his light at a particular spot, and as he felt me step up quietly beside him he brought his arms in and bent lower and lower, shining the light back and forth across a patch of dirt.
“There!” he whispered, and he pointed again at the ground with the little flashlight, then gave the light to me. “Now please: tell me that there isn’t anything there.”
And I will tell you: there wasn’t anything there. The path through the garden was mostly lined with old bricks, here and there covered with small patches of soil. Roger’s light was shining on one of those patches, fairly dry in spite of the fog, and featureless as far as I could see. Featureless except for the random scratches and disturbance of people occasionally walking through it. I shifted the light around, trying to cast shadows from different angles so as to be absolutely sure. Nothing. I began to straighten up, about to tell Roger exactly what he hoped to hear, when two things happened.
As I stood and turned to Roger my perspective changed one last time, and from the corner of my eye a shape appeared in the dust-- just the faintest outline, barely discernible. It wasn’t a big clear footprint, like you see casts of in the tourist shops and the TV bigfoot specials. It was just the faintest silhouette of the front section of a bare foot, the toes and pad, but… enormous. I turned my head back to look straight at it, and for a moment there it was, unmistakable.
I say “for a moment” because even as I turned my focus back to the print in the earth, the second thing began to happen. There was a sound in the bushes beside us, a sound that started small like someone shifting their feet in leafy undergrowth but that in an instant grew to a crashing crescendo: the sound of something large moving through the thick bushes. Moving, it seemed sure, toward us. I wheeled to shine the little light in that direction and the world began to spin as the flashlight was knocked whirling from my hand as Roger bolted past me, dashing further down the path. Greens, light and dark, flashed in the twirling light, and the color of flowers… and a mass of brown that might have been a tree trunk, but seemed in the crazy light to be moving quickly, right toward us. “Run!” Roger rasped in a choked shout-whisper. “Run!” And I ran.
But which way? To my surprise, I could hear Roger scrambling and stumbling further into the garden, trying to stay on the path, plunging deeper into the depths that showed only darkness ahead of us. Every instinct in me screamed against going that way. But the street behind seemed so far away...
What would you have done? Would you have followed the blind sounds of Roger dashing into the darkness ahead? Or stumbled back toward the street, the way we had come? Leave a review with your choice of action, if you are using a service that allows reviews. Or email your choice to Podcasts at REI dot com. And thank you for all the responses we have received so far. You really are shaping the story.
Thanks again to YETI for sponsoring Season Three of the Camp Monsters podcast, with full-season episodes starting this September. Who knows? Maybe Roger is running further down that dark path because there’s an REI down there, fully stocked with the latest YETI coolers and camp chairs and coozies… what great stuff! No wonder he’s running so fast!
Thanks for listening, and be sure to join us next month for the last installment of this story… and our final mini-episode before another full season begins in September. See you again soon around the campfire.