Are you being watched? Are you sure? This episode will take you to a lonely stretch of the California coast where that feeling of being watched becomes too strong to ignore.
There are certain places around the country where you can never feel sure. The central coast of California is one of those places — a desolate, rugged, beautiful area where there have long been whispers about something haunting the cliffs. An outline, a figure, watching you from above. A creature you can’t identify… but know you don’t want to meet.
Are you being watched? Are you sure? You know the feeling. It can steal up on you anywhere, any time, and the more alone you think you are the stronger the feeling gets. Look around you now, just to be certain-- you won’t want anyone to surprise you while you’re listening to this... No, you’re all by yourself, like you thought. There’s no one else near, no way that anyone could be... watching you… Right?
But everyone has had that feeling... And there are places… places that seem to evoke that feeling of being watched more than others.
The lonely hills and beaches on the central coast of California are one of those places. There, the feeling of being watched when you know that you’re alone is so prevalent-- and can grow so strong-- that sometimes the feeling begins to take a physical shape. For centuries, since the days of the Spanish Missions, travelers along the central coast have encountered El Vigilante Oscuro… The Dark Watcher. On a distant ridge there appears an… outline, a shadow, where you could swear there wasn’t one before. The dark silhouette of a figure, standing… watching you. A figure… somehow you know that you don’t want to meet.
But of course… that’s exactly what we’re going to do.
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 and heard and felt, but… witnesses can be mistaken. Listen to these stories and decide for yourself: they couldn’t possibly be true… could they?
On a night like this anything seems possible. Listen! The murmur of the surf, the waves of the Pacific crashing endlessly on the beach down there. If eternity makes a sound, that’s it. The boundless ocean, the starry sky, the never-ending breeze wafting off the dark sea-- people have gotten lost in all these lonely forevers. Good thing we have our little beach fire here, our little beacon to guide us back. When the moon comes out we’ll be able to see the breakers glowing pale down on the surfline, and the night won’t seem so big. It’s quite a while before the moon comes out, though.
This has always been a lonely stretch of coast-- some places lonelier than others. There’s a little cove just north of here, where the shoreline gets so rugged that the highway has to turn inland. The cove is too small to have a name-- it’s a tough hike to get to, so the place is almost always empty except for the gulls and shorebirds. And the seals too, at the right time of year. The elephant seals love it. It was the seals that brought that little team of student biologists there last year. Did you hear about that? They were going to stay for three weeks, but… well, they didn’t last that long.
It started when they were just three days into their observations. There were four of them, and they would split up in the mornings to different places along the shore and then come back to camp to compare notes in the evening. It was in the early afternoon when Sarah, one of the biologists, suddenly got that feeling. You know: the feeling that she was... being watched. She knew it, she could feel eyes on her. Of course she was right; at that moment there were eyes on her: hundreds of deep, black, bulbous, seal eyes rested warily on Sarah. Seals aren’t stupid-- they know enough to keep watch on any of those unpredictable humans that are nearby.
But all those dark eyes weren’t the source of Sarah’s feeling. No, it was something inland, something when she turned her back, when she was watching the seals like she was supposed to. The longer she tried to count pups and log gender ratios, the stronger the feeling became, until she couldn’t concentrate on the seals, until she could hardly see them, until it was like a voice in her head screaming at her to TURN AROUND--
But when she turned around and looked… there was nothing there. Hm. That surprised her a little. You see all morning long, as the feeling of being watched kept growing, her eyes had been drawn to an outline on the ridge behind her. It could have been a person, maybe a solo hiker admiring the ocean view-- but then it couldn’t be, because every time she turned around it was in exactly the same place, completely unmoving since she’d noticed it several hours ago. She had trained her binoculars on it, but there was just enough haze between her and the ridge to keep the figure shadowy and obscure. She’d convinced herself that it was a rock or a bush that she hadn’t noticed the past two days-- but now, it was gone.
She squinted, scanned up and down the ridge, shifted her position a little in case it was a trick of perspective. Nothing. She raised her binoculars and traced the entire ridge, with every rock jumping out in perfect clarity now that the haze had burned off-- no figure. And all the while that feeling of being watched was growing ever more insistent, so strong now that her imagination took her out of her body for a moment, and she saw herself as through another pair of eyes-- hostile eyes, crawling toward her at a terrible pace through the long beach grass.
This sudden image in her mind was so intense and unexpected that a flare of panic rose within her and she lowered the binoculars to look around-- just as she heard a rustle and crash in the tall grass to her right. A shout escaped through her clenched, bared teeth as she scrambled up and wheeled around to face the threat, crouching and raising the binoculars in her hand--
-- then she straightened up and brushed the sand off her jacket, coughed and looked sideways, smirking in light embarrassment. “What?” asked Josh, one of her fellow biologists, passing by on his way to camp for a notebook he’d forgotten. The wind ruffled his hair and he squinted through the sunshine at her. “What were you doing?” he asked in amused curiosity.
“You snuck up on me!” Sarah said, “I was trying to count the seals.” But she didn’t look at him when she said it.
“What were you watching up there?” Josh asked, his eyes searching the ridge. Sarah hesitated, feeling a little foolish, but then stepped past him to the top of a ripple of sand that gave her a view over the waving grass that stretched away up to the high ground. “Did you notice anyone up there this morning, on the ridge?” she asked him. He shook his head no. “There was someone standing up there all morning,” she said. “Standing so still I thought they must be a rock or a little shrub until I looked again and they’d moved away somewhere.” Josh raised his binoculars and she pointed him to the place, a thousand yards or so from them up the steep hill. They both scanned the spot again, then swept down the hillside and through the rhythmically swaying grass. There was no sign of anyone-- but then, there were too many little folds in the landscape to be completely sure.
Josh didn’t go back to camp for his notebook. And he didn’t return to his chosen observation perch. Sarah regretted telling him about the figure-- she didn’t need to be babied just because she’d noticed some hippie hiker meditating on the ridgeline. She tried a couple times to drive Josh away before the truth came out: “Hey, you got me a little spooked, okay?” he finally said, sheepishly, “Can I just stay here with you? I grew up around here, and-- well-- I’ll tell you more about it tonight.”
That night they built a fire-- just about like the fire we’re sitting around here-- and the stars came out. Maggie and Lewis, the other two biologists on the team, chatted away about their days’ observations. Josh kept shooting looks at Sarah, but instead of pulling her discreetly aside he waited until the other two quieted down at the very end of the night... and then with the last of the coals faintly lighting up his face he told this story:
In the old days, on the other side of these coastal mountains there had been a Spanish mission, Mission San Antonio de Padua. At first it had been little more than a trading post, attracting some converts with the lure of imported European goods. But as the Spanish empire declined, the ships that supplied the Mission came less and less frequently, and the priests and soldiers had to become more self-reliant. They achieved this by raiding the native villages in the hills, rounding the people up and driving them down into the valley to act as forced labor, expanding the fields of crops that surrounded the Mission.
This couldn’t go on for long, however, before any journey by the Spanish into the hills found all the villages they came to deserted, the people fled before them. The only sign of human life that they encountered-- if it was human life, which some of them doubted-- were what they called Los Vigilantes Oscuros… The Dark Watchers. These were figures, alone or in small groups, that would appear on the hills and ridges above the Spaniards, watching them. The figures would make no response if hailed or called out to, and if a group of men were sent to parley with them, they would return reporting no sign of anyone having been on the ridge. Or, far more horrible, the men sent would fail to return at all, but without a shout or a shot to indicate foul play. They would simply vanish.
These sightings culminated on the night of December 21st, 1821. It was the last Friday before Christmas, and the little candle-lit church at the Mission was crowded for a performance of the Mystery Plays: short parables or scenes from the lives of saints performed as theatre by the priests and local believers. The final scene of the night presented a feast, with characters drinking wine and calling out jokes to one another. So when a figure suddenly appeared behind the table draped all in black, wearing a featureless black mask, the audience fell silent in anticipation-- the moral of the play was obviously about to be delivered: this terrible representation of death and oblivion was going to remind the feasting revellers of their own mortality.
It was only as the silence in the church stretched out that the audience noticed the priests and elders who were acting in the play had fallen silent too, and had turned to gaze on the dark figure with confusion on their faces. Something had gone wrong. Someone had missed their lines or… the figure stepped... seemed to float over or through the table and out toward the audience, who all pressed back a step or two. Then there was a faint >snap< like a dry bone breaking, and a pair of blank, shining white eyes without pupils suddenly appeared on the head of the apparition, reflecting the candlelight and staring directly into the eyes of each witness, regardless of where that person was in the church.
This odd and terrifying trick shook the very ground the audience stood on-- there were shouts and cries and a rumble like many running feet, and the candles started to go out. As statues of saints and bits of plaster began to fall, the crowd realized that this was in fact an earthquake-- the last candles toppled over, extinguished, and the darkness of the mysterious figure spread to engulf the whole room.
Many were injured in the rush out of the church, and the Mission was so damaged that it was never repaired-- those that could, made the arduous trek to the missions at Soledad or Carmel, and strained the resources of those tiny outposts until the spring came and some of the people could be got out of the region entirely. They had become convinced, they said, that the eyes of God had turned away from them-- and been replaced by other eyes, that they could feel watching them… day and night.
Josh finished his story by telling Maggie and Lewis about the figure that Sarah had seen on the ridge that day. Put on the spot by such a dramatic tale, Sarah felt obliged to downplay what she’d seen, almost to deny it, and Maggie and Lewis laughed at her and more particularly at Josh, accusing them of spending the day together cooking up a scary story instead of doing their work. Josh looked wounded but smiled and headed for his tent, and the others went their separate ways shortly thereafter.
Sarah slept a deep but anxious sleep, her otherwise pleasant dreams interrupted repeatedly by a bizarre awareness that would creep up on her in the midst of each dream: she would be dreaming… and suddenly she would become aware that this was a dream that she was in, and that someone else was watching it. This disturbing sequence repeated with increasing urgency until her eyes snapped open and she lay there on her side staring into pitch darkness as the details of her last dream faded. The night sounds of the surf and the calls of the seals to one another brought some comfort to her pounding heart, and she rolled over on her back and stared at the pale dawn sky for several moments before she realized that something was wrong.
The sky was too bright. That is, the sky was so far along into dawn that the darkness she’d been staring into inside her tent was too complete, too dark. She turned her head quickly-- and there was a pair of blank, white, shining eyes right next to her, staring at her, staring as if from a face of perfect darkness lying just beside her own.
She screamed and sat up, and as she did the inside of the tent all became perfectly visible in the thin dawn light, and the wind rustled the flaps of the tent that she had closed last night but that now hung unzipped, wide open. There were shouts and the scramble of bodies from the other tents nearby, and as Sarah tumbled from her tent Maggie and Lewis came on the run, asking if she was okay. She collected herself and said she was fine... just a bad dream. But her hands were still shaking fifteen minutes later when she took the tin of coffee that Lewis had heated up over the little camp stove. She asked casually where Josh was-- Lewis said that he had gotten up before dawn and whispered something about getting an early start at his observation spot on the beach.
Sarah was so shaken by her final, terrifying dream that the possible significance of Josh’s absence that morning didn’t begin to dawn on her until quite a while later, after she had finally convinced Maggie and Lewis to leave her alone at her observation point and get out to theirs. It was a foggy morning and she lay there in the damp sand with the dew falling on her, doggedly making her morning counts and recording the figures in a notebook. And once again, the feeling started to creep up on her. That sensation that said, still quietly now: TURN AROUND, THERE’S SOMEONE HERE.
And as she pointedly ignored the feeling, the pieces started falling into place-- Josh stumbling up to her yesterday, just after the figure on the ridge had disappeared. Josh leaving his tent before dawn this morning... The blank white eyes that she’d seen beside her, shining out of the blackness-- it didn’t seem possible that they could be anything but a dream, or that anyone could have physically gotten out of her tent as she sat up, without her seeing them… but Josh’s leaving early that morning at least hinted that he could be involved somehow. Maybe this was some elaborate joke, or an unhealthy obsession he was acting on. In either case, she wasn’t going to sit still for it. She was going to fight; confront the thing directly; do the unexpected.
As that feeling of hostile surveillance raised the hairs on the back of her neck, she turned her eyes calmly inland. The sea fog hid the base of the ridge: made it float and appear to tremble and roil at the bottom like a massive dark millipede. And on a point of the ridge just above the fog-- swirling in the midst of the fog, in fact-- stood a dark figure, perfectly still, like a thin stump or an odd outcropping of rock. Maybe it was a distortion of the mist, but the figure seemed closer today than yesterday, lower down on the crest of the steep ridge. It would be dangerous climbing up that ridge in the fog-- dangerous and frightening, the last thing anyone would be expected to do. In a credit to her courage, Sarah set off.
Far enough inland for the sound of the sea to have faded a little but the calls of the seals to still be quite loud, she came to the face of the ridge and found it impassable, impossibly steep, practically a cliff. She followed its rugged base toward the ocean until she found a place where a finger of the ridge curved down, still steep but passable. There was even a faint trail up it. This she followed, along the rising crest of the ridge or, when the crest became too steep, just to one side of it. Any moment she expected to climb above the fog, or for it to burn off, but in fact it seemed to grow thicker. In spite of this, the feeling of being watched grew and grew within her until several times she stopped for long moments to look all around-- and though the fog swirled countless half-formed shapes about her, it never revealed any solid source for her feeling.
Curiously, that feeling of being watched had faded slightly when the trail rounded a blade of the ridge and she suddenly reached her destination. In the thickest fog yet the figure stood on top of a steep crest, not twenty feet away. Sarah froze. The fog was so thick she could see it drift through the air between them. The figure was turned away from her-- at least, she had that impression. She couldn’t see any face, any terrible white eyes. She forced herself to take a step toward the figure… then another one. She had planned to shout Josh’s name when she got this close, to scare him, to give him a taste of his own medicine-- but now the very idea of this figure being Josh seemed ridiculous. The thing was so, so thin… and so tall.
She wondered for a moment why she didn’t run-- and then realized that she couldn’t run, that it would make too much noise. She realized that she wasn’t even breathing, that she was praying that her feet wouldn’t make a sound, that nothing would happen to cause the thing to turn around and look at her… that would be the worst thing-- somehow that would be the worst thing that could happen. If she could just reach it, silently, before it noticed-- she was so close now, she could... she would... grab it, or something-- tackle it around the waist and hold on-- just-- she would keep it from turning and looking at her.
She actually crouched to spring at the thing, she was that close now, just feet away, perfectly silent-- she could have stretched out and touched it. But as she shifted her weight forward for the dive her foot dislodged a single pebble... which dislodged another one, which started a little landslide that sounded in the silent fog like the whole bluff giving way. Without a movement from the figure those terrible eyes suddenly appeared, big and white and blank, burning into her, and she shut her own eyes and tried to cringe away but found herself pulled forward by-- by her foot, falling-- sliding down a slope-- now slipping into thin air and her whole body beginning to fall after it. She twisted around as she slid and just managed to grab the root of a stunted bush on the very verge of the bluff as her other foot followed the first and slipped off the edge-- the edge of the ridge, beyond which the figure had been standing.
As Sarah struggled to pull herself up she felt the root begin to give way and the bush begin to pull out of the ground, and in desperation looked over her shoulder to where the figure had been... and saw nothing there but the air beyond the edge of the cliff; nothing solid for anything to ever have been standing on. With a fierce lunge she got one hand on to the top of the cliff just as the root gave way entirely-- but in real life one hand is not enough to hold a person up for long, and the last thing Sarah remembers is tumbling down the steep face of the bluff, helpless.
She has no memory of dragging herself three hundred yards down the brush-covered floor of the ravine. She has no idea how she yelled loud enough for the other three to find her, with her ribs broken like they were. She has a brief memory, completely silent, of swaying softly through the air while being blasted by the hot rotor wash of the rescue helicopter-- she was strapped into the basket, unable to move, and she screamed silently and began sobbing with the urgent need to turn her head, the overpowering need to look and see who it was that she could feel… watching her.
The elephant seals are still at that little cove. The gulls and petrels still wheel in the pale sky above, squabbling. The sea is still blue and the bluffs are still brown and the mists still come in swiftly. But Sarah’s fellow biologists decided to continue their research at a more accessible beach, so there are no longer any scientists at the little cove. No one there at all, in fact. No one for miles. Nonetheless, if you ever find yourself alone there, you may begin to feel that… well, a certain feeling may come over you that some… thing… is watching you. Watching you leave, quickly, let’s hope.
Look! Look at the ridge! There! There it is, just like I said. What do you mean, “Where?” Right there, just peeking over the top. The moon, rising just like I told you it would. Look out at the surf now-- see it glow? Makes the night seem a little smaller, doesn’t it? A bit less vast and mysterious. Good news for anyone sleeping by themselves in a tent tonight. You’ll be able to see things better… but of course, things will be able to see you better, too...
Camp Monsters is part of the REI podcast network. Stick around for a minute and we’ll hear a bit about next week’s story-- you’ll want to hear about it now... so you can prepare yourself. And if you’ve been warmed by our campfire, please subscribe if you haven’t already, and take a moment to rate, review, and share. You spreading the word about this podcast keeps us recording. Thank you.
Next week we’ll travel to an abandoned railroad bridge over the Kentucky River. It doesn’t look like much. But if you push your way through the undergrowth and up onto the rusted old bridge you may begin to hear things… to catch glimpses… you may begin to suspect that there’s something else nearby… something that’s been waiting for you.
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. See you next week.