On your first solo flight, a mile above the earth, you discover a silver glint way off in the sky. What could it be? As it draws closer, you realize it's something you don't want to encounter, but now you have no choice.
We’re taking flight this week. Far up above the clouds where we come face-to-face with something we wish we hadn’t.
Welcome to Camp Monsters Summer Camp. Over the past few seasons of the show, we’ve gotten tons of suggestions on the monsters we should cover. We noticed that a lot of these take place at a summer camp. So we’ve collected the best of the stories you’ve sent — and researched a few of our own — to create our first series of legendary summer camp creatures. Hopefully you can take these episodes with you to summer camp or they’ll bring you back to when you were a camper, scared of what might be lurking outside of your cabin.
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You’ve seen it yourself. On a clear day… way, way up in the dome of the deep blue sky-- you’ve seen something sparkle… glint like polished silver in the sun. You never give it a second thought, never spare it another glance-- why should you? It’s a high-flying airplane of some kind, one of those unpainted ones with a gleaming metal fuselage-- isn’t it? What else could it be?
But… all alone in a tiny cockpit a mile above the earth, you gain a different perspective on a lot of things. Cities and roads and rivers and forests all shrink to insignificance. Clouds are your company-- you see eye-to-eye with them. And that silver glint way off in the sky above… your perspective on that begins to change as well. Because it doesn’t move like a plane… and as it comes closer, it doesn’t look like one either.
What else could it be? You don’t know… and you decide that you don’t want to find out. But sometimes… all alone up there at high altitude… up where the air gets thin… you find you don’t have any choice.
This is the Camp Monsters Podcast.
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 get to the campfire.
…but will you make it?
Of course there’s a place where the air is even thinner than it is at high altitude. And you may be holding it in your hand right now. Many of YETI’s stylish mugs, tumblers, bottles and jugs make use of double-walled vacuum insulation, which contains a thin sliver of… nothing. Or as close to nothing as you can get: the air is pumped out before the chamber is sealed. Without any air to carry it, the heat from your coffee or the icy coldness of your drink can’t cross the vacuum gap… keeping your beverage just the way you like it for hours on end. So next time you’re sipping something perfectly hot or cold from your YETI Rambler mug, raise a little toast to thin air… and to the good people at YETI. Check it out at YETI.com, or at your local REI.
Welcome to Camp Monsters Summer Camp. Over the past few seasons, so many of you have written in with fantastic, frightening tales that take place at summer camp. So we’ve collected the best of the stories you’ve sent-- and researched a few of our own-- to create our first series of legendary summer camp monsters. We hope you take these stories with you to whatever camp you go to, or if your summer camp days are behind you: listen and remember what it was like.
Here we are on the edge of the night. Tucked between hazy blue hills, with that orange sky still close enough to singe ourselves on the last burning flare of a West Virginia sunset. The summer night settling down around us as soft as the mists that will rise in the morning. We’ve got a campfire tonight-- but I’ll bet you’ve never been to a campfire like this one before. With these shapes looming at the edge of the firelight-- struts and wheels, propellers and polished canopies… and wings, everywhere, wings in silver and white… Resting now... resting for tomorrow when they’ll carry us up into the heavens again.
This is a night at a summer “soaring” camp, where we get to learn to fly gliders-- also called “sailplanes.” Those sleek, light, long-winged aircraft with no engine. You sit inside a small, enclosed cockpit, towed up to altitude on a long tether behind a powered aircraft, or slung high into the air by a cable on a fast winch-- and then you’re released, and you ride the winds and thermal air currents for long minutes, or even hours. These mountains on the West Virginia border have great gliding weather in the summer, and they’re dotted with remote little airfields that planes and gliders can launch from, or drop into to spend a night.
A night like this one. Tonight we’ll sleep under the wings of our aircraft, here in the grass beside the runway of one of those little rural airfields. The fire is warm and the stars are bright, and the night is quiet… quiet in more ways than one. Notice your cell phone signal-- or lack thereof. These hills are the heart of the National Radio Quiet Zone, a vast area of sparsely-populated country where all sorts of electronics are restricted. They say that something as minor as a faulty microwave oven is liable to bring a government van to your house, tracking the source of the electromagnetic disturbance.
It’s not clear what the purpose of the National Radio Quiet Zone is. Official sources just make vague references to “important radio frequency research,” without giving further details. Like Area 51 and other highly secret government projects, there is more we don’t know about the National Radio Quiet Zone than what we do. And like Area 51, there are a lot of whispers about what really goes on around here. Of course some people don’t whisper about it-- some people shout that the Quiet Zone isn’t really quiet at all… that these blue mountains vibrate with frequencies not meant for us to hear.
Laura is one of those. She says sometimes it gets so loud that she can hear it, even if she isn’t supposed to. Of course her ears weren’t always switched on that way. It happened way up above one of these quiet mountain valleys, in a blaze of bright light, when she saw that horrible thing reaching out for her…
But I guess we can’t start the story right there. We’ve got to climb up to that altitude from somewhere much lower, somewhere around two thousand feet AGL-- Above Ground Level. That’s where Laura dropped the tow-plane’s tether, dipped one wing to put her glider into a gentle turn-- called a “bank”-- and let herself soar into the glory of a sky bright as liquid crystal. The whine of the tow-plane’s engine faded away and left nothing but the whisper of the wind rushing around Laura’s canopy and the beating of her ecstatic heart. For a moment-- just a moment-- she let herself forget everything: all the facts she’d had to memorize and skills she’d had to learn to earn this, her first solo flight in a glider. For a moment Laura let herself simply soar on those slender wings that the wind buoyed up and up.
If you’ve ever flown in a small plane on a clear day you have some idea of the world that Laura found herself in. The clouds stacked in soft, bulbous towers here and there at eye-level, so bright Laura had to squint at them even through her sunglasses. The earth spread out below like the rumples of an old familiar quilt, patched in blues and greens, deep and bright. The electric-blue sky, arcing down and falling gently to the earth at the distant smudge of the horizon. But in a powered plane you bounce around all this glory as the roaring engine hauls you stubbornly against the air-- in a glider you soar, silently, with the winds lifting and leading you.
Laura felt the thrill of flight tingling in her fingers and toes. Her hand grazed the control stick ever-so-slightly, and her glider responded by increasing the angle of its graceful, soaring turn, lifting slightly as she chanced into a thermal: that’s a column of warm, rising air. She steepened the turn to stay within the thermal, to let it carry her upward-- and that’s when she first saw it. It’s a shame that she noticed it. If she hadn’t… well, we might not have a story to tell, and her nights might be much quieter.
It was just a flash, at first. Just a moment’s reflected sunlight, far away and high above. She gave it no more thought than you or I would, seeing it from the ground-- just a high-flying jet of some kind, much too distant to worry about. Laura kept the glider in its banking turn, enjoying the gentle upward nudges of the thermal lift. She stole a glance down the lower of her long white wings, at the green of the valley floor sliding past-- houses and fields and roads and tree-lined creeks, so small and insignificant from up here. Cars and trucks sliding noiselessly along thin gray roads, like multi-colored drops of water dripping down the seams of a green raincoat. Then she put her mind back on business at hand, and her eyes back on the horizon…
And she saw it again. A speck, now-- a silver speck, still far, far away but… in front of her once more. Huh. She didn’t feel like she was pointing in the same direction that she’d first seen it, but… but she must be. So she kept the glider in its bank, this time with her eyes on the other plane… and she watched it keep pace with her, high up in the sky above, but managing to stay in the same spot relative to Laura throughout her turn.
Well, that explained it. There wasn’t a jet on earth that could move like that. It was so far away-- seemingly just a speck on the horizon, not quite large enough for her to make out its shape. To travel fast enough to keep up with her as she turned that steeply… the speed it would have to be going, the distance it would have to cover was impractical. No-- what she’d mistaken for a distant plane must be a defect of some kind on her canopy, a reflection… or maybe moisture in the atmosphere, catching the sun as she turned to create the illusion of something sparkling in the distance. That must be it--
Just as she was reaching that conclusion and dismissing the shiny mirage from her mind, her radio squawked loudly. Catching her in the quiet of the glide, it made her jump. For safety’s sake, even in the Radio Quiet Zone airplane radio traffic is allowed. But there were no words in the transmission, nothing intended for her-- just a sudden burst of garbled sound, a random signal bouncing around the atmosphere from some distant station until it burst suddenly over her little cockpit speaker.
Laura reached to turn the volume down, and got another surprise as she did. Her altitude. She’d released at 2,000 feet, and had chanced upon this thermal shortly after… it had felt like quite a gentle one, but… now her altimeter read 6,000 feet and climbing. That was unexpected but… fine-- nothing to be alarmed about, though she hadn’t intended to go this high on her first solo. The solution was simple enough: level off, fly out of the thermal and start an easy descent.
So that’s what she did. She brought the glider out of its soaring upward turn, then with an eye on her airspeed she gently pressed the nose downward… and out there beyond the nose she spotted that metallic flash again, still in the distance but closer now, close enough to be transformed from just a speck that sparkled in the sun into… something different. Something with a shape, geometrical…
A delta-winged jet? Something fast and large, something that, at this distance, looked like an enormous triangle. Laura stared, and as she stared the less she saw… or, the less she trusted what she saw… the less she believed it. The… the other plane-- the delta-winged airplane, because that’s the only thing it could be-- it seemed to have lights embedded all along the edges of its wings. Not just landing lights, but… lights of every color that… that were slowly changing color as she watched.
All at once Laura felt very, very small and alone. The playground of sun and cloud that had smiled on her as she soared through it suddenly disappeared, and Laura was conscious of being strapped into a delicate construction suspended in the middle of the thin, unpredictable air. The cockpit seemed to tighten around her, and she realized that just inches beyond her body in every direction was… nothing. Nothing but a tumbling fall, thousands and thousands of feet down to earth, down to the green which now seemed darker and duller through the haze, hungry and hostile. Thousands and thousands of feet down… thousands… how many? How was her altitude doing?
She glanced down just as the radio squawked again, even louder than the first time. A louder, longer belch of sound, just as startling and even more meaningless-- a rasping scream of interference with the tone of a shouted command. An electronic noise, but distorted until Laura could almost imagine several voices within it, gabbling in some wailing, unearthly language. So loud she winced. She turned the radio volume down to its lowest setting, then glanced at the altimeter.
Nine thousand feet. And climbing. Her mind raced back… a minute, maybe two minutes had passed since she’d been surprised to find her altitude at six thousand. Finding and riding strong thermals; gaining altitude on nothing but the wind beneath you-- this was what gliding was all about, these were the gifts of a great glider pilot… but three thousand feet in two minutes, when she was trying to descend? She’d never heard of anything like that. And she’d been flying straight for some distance… thermals are narrow columns of rising air, with glider pilots wheeling in steep circles to stay within them-- flying straight as she had been, she should be well out of the thermal by now, and gravity should be back in control: gently pulling her heavier-than-air craft down to earth as the lift from her long wings did what it could to slow the inevitable.
Laura toyed with the idea that her altimeter was faulty-- had she set it correctly before she took off? Could it be somehow reversed, spooling up as she was swooping down? But another glance toward earth put that idea to rest-- the haze had thickened, the features of the land were much smaller, more indistinct. She was ascending. And out in front of her-- way out in front and above-- that strange… airplane… still glinted, still slowly pulsed its changing colors. It must be keeping perfect pace with Laura’s glider-- because from where she sat it didn’t appear to be moving at all.
Something very strange was happening here. Something uncanny. Laura didn’t know what it was, but… she knew she didn’t want to be part of it anymore. She wanted out of here. She wanted this to stop.
Laura put the glider into a “slip”: an inefficient glide, perfect for burning off altitude without picking up airspeed. She felt the glider fall away beneath her, had the sensation of altitude being swiftly lost… but she watched the altimeter rise through ten thousand feet. She deployed her air brakes a little bit, then a little more… and climbed from eleven through twelve thousand feet in the time it took her to draw ten breaths… and now she was breathing fast. Above twelve thousand she should use oxygen, which she didn’t have. She hadn’t planned on going anywhere near this altitude.
The radio. Maybe someone on the ground could tell her… could help. In desperation, Laura stabbed at the transmit button, and on her third stab managed to press it down. Adrenaline was coursing through her body, but she tried to keep her cadence slow and understandable:
“Uh… Base this is glider… niner three… echo-- ah-- check-- bravo… uh… I have a problem. Please. Copy?” Laura heard only silence in reply. She broadcast again, fiddled with the volume knob, then winced as another blast of garbled sound interference burst from the radio speaker, so loud she felt it like a blow to the head. But she left the volume up, in case someone from the ground got back to her. Fifteen thousand, the altimeter read.
Laura’s head was feeling light, but her thoughts were getting sluggish. Her heart was pounding and her breaths were fast and shallow. The altimeter kept climbing, but she was having a hard time reading it. It was cold-- her hands and feet had gone numb, and an itching prickle was beginning to climb up her arms and legs: the first crab-like fingers of unconsciousness stealing up her body, though she couldn’t recognize it. Gasping for lift in the thinning air, her mind began to stall-- then slipped over into a spin.
In what little thought she’d given it, Laura had assumed that high-altitude oxygen deprivation must be fairly merciful, as the brain slowly shuts down. Sort of gentle and befuddling, like the first parts of a dream. But now, as Laura climbed closer and closer to that unwilling sleep, it felt like a horrible nightmare. Beneath her growing confusion and dimming perceptions, Laura’s mind knew that something was going very, very wrong. Unable to think its way through the problem, it simply set off all the alarm bells in her body, and she found herself thrashing around the tiny cockpit in blind, thoughtless, animal panic. She was trapped in this box. She was trapped. Trapped. Trapped. No! No! If she could have remembered how to open the canopy she would have thrown herself out into the endless wind, without knowing what she was doing.
But finally… finally she slowed... finally she stopped, chest heaving, as her oxygen-starved body exhausted itself. She fell back into her little seat and looked up, into the sky-- and there it was. The silver triangle. Above her now: close, and enormous. And it was not… like… any aircraft she’d ever seen or read about. A huge, smooth, shining metal triangle-- windowless-- but with lights all around its edges. Lights that changed colors and pulsed in different rhythms. And those colors and rhythms seemed to bleed into her eyes, because even when she closed her eyelids she could still she them-- those patterns of pulsing, shifting colors swirling and snaking past her like a tunnel of flowing script in a three-dimensional language.
And the radio… was it the radio? From somewhere came screams and growls and clicks, peals of laughter and sobs like a thousand electric voices twisted through a synthesizer and beamed into her, amplifying in her mind, then broadcast out again even louder than they’d come in. So loud she couldn’t stand it… she didn’t know what they were, she didn’t know anything. But it was alright… it was all alright. These things, these… these signals weren’t for her, anyway. They were just passing… just passing through her.
Then Laura slowly opened her eyes again, for what felt like the last time: and when she did she saw herself, sitting in the cockpit of a glider that seemed to be hovering, inverted, just above her. She had her head thrown back, staring at herself with her open eyes vacant, and the green earth indistinct far, far below. And somehow she realized that what she was seeing was a reflection-- a reflection she was seeing in the flawless-mirror fuselage of the enormous triangular craft that now hovered mere feet… just inches above her.
Laura managed to move-- just her hands, just a little bit. Laura managed to push the glider’s control stick all the way forward and hold it there, until she was pointing straight down, straight down at the ground, at the haze of green so far away. If this was real life-- if the laws of physics and flight still applied, then her glider was not designed for a dive like this. She would gain speed, descend out of control, the wings would buckle, the airframe would rip itself apart. But Laura wasn’t afraid. Laura knew. She knew, and she chuckled, and the tears sprang out of her eyes. Laura knew she wasn’t descending. She was still going up. Up into the thin air.
The only other thing Laura remembers is the feeling of a bright light all around her– incredibly bright, like a flash of lightning that never ended. So bright that it startled her eyes open for just an instant. And in that instant she saw a hand hovering in front of her face, pale and pasty-looking like… like it was wearing surgical gloves. And in the hand was something… a surgical instrument? Some kind of borer or auger, with a dark red sparkle of blood on the end. Was she–? Had she crashed? Was she waking up in surgery?
She hoped not. Then there was a sound, in the hush of wherever she was– a sound not quite like someone speaking a single word. And as she closed her eyes against the unbearable brightness of the light she found herself counting. One… two… … … three. Only three. Why had… how could there have been only three? Only three fingers on that surgeon’s gloved hand? Darkness threw itself back over her before she could come up with an answer.
She was a long time in that darkness, before the voices started. Faint-- so faint-- but urgent, anguished. Not the strange, electronic voices that had come over the glider’s radio… not the one quiet sound in the surgery’s hush… these were distant human voices. As they drew slowly closer, they began to sound familiar to Laura. She tried to place them. Through her memory flashed vivid snippets of the voices that she’d want to hear again, the voices of the people she’d hope to meet in eternity. Her grandmother’s soft hum, gently explaining something… Uncle Paul, laughing loudly at his own joke… But those weren’t the voices that were coming now, louder all the time. These voices were familiar, but… who were they? How did she know them?
That’s right… they were her friends… yes… her friends from glider camp. In the instant that she recognized the voices, light broke open above her-- not the incredible brightness of before, but bright enough that she had to close her eyes. And then she could hear the words of concern and re-assurance that her friends were saying, and she squinted through the canopy at them, heard the sound of the latch being opened and smelled the hot, fresh mountain air…
Her friends on the ground had watched her going up– up and up– spiraling up in that thermal until they lost sight of her. They had tried to raise her on the radio, with no luck. No one on the ground or in the other gliders had seen any sort of triangular aircraft. They were about the call a mayday on her when someone spotted her glider looping slowly down, in big circles around the airport. It had seemed to be in control until the final approach, when it veered off and buried its nose and canopy into the tall, thick scrub of the field beside the runway. That’s where they found her.
Of course there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for Laura’s experience. In the excitement and exuberance of her first solo flight she caught a lucky thermal and rode it way too high, where oxygen deprivation caused disturbances to her perceptions and eventually led to unconsciousness. Maybe she regained some control as she descended through the lower altitudes, or maybe her glider just drifted down on its own and managed the lucky landing that left her unhurt. At least, the only harm the hospital noted when it discharged her that night was a single, superficial puncture wound just above her left eye. A wound… in the shape of a perfect triangle.
Ever since then, Laura will tell you that something has changed. She’s never looked at a high-flying aircraft the same way again. And her dreams… she says her dreams are the strangest part… She sleeps just fine, she wakes rested-- but whenever she wakes up with the sleep still in her eyes and the last little sliver of her dreams alive in her memory… all she can remember are swirls of color and pulsing lights, and a strange clicking growl of harsh electric voices so vivid and loud that they seem to be echoing out of her… filling the air with meanings and messages that aren’t meant for her– that aren’t meant for us– to understand.
Well… the message for us right now is that it’s time to put this fire out and crawl into our sleeping bags under the shelter of these wings. We ought to get up early-- there’s nothing like flying through a West Virginia sunrise in the quiet of a glider cockpit. The glides are short in the morning, since the thermals haven’t had a chance to form yet, but… sometimes that’s alright, too. At least there’s no danger of going too high and… and not being able to come down.
But if you do plan on flying somewhere that isn’t your home glider base, be sure to check out YETI’s full line of backpacks, duffels, and luggage. Sheathed in Tuffskin nylon with reinforced stitching and structured walls-- and manufactured to the same exacting standards you’ve come to expect from their rugged coolers-- YETI’s backpacks, duffels and luggage are ready to go wherever your adventures take you: high-altitude, underground, and everywhere in between. Check them out at YETI dot com, or try before you buy at your local REI. Thanks, YETI!
Boy, one of those YETI Panga waterproof backpacks will sure come in handy next week. We’re going on a fifty-mile canoe trip up a remote mountain lake, and with a bunch of campers in canoes you know things are going to get wet. But, as it turns out, it’s not the water we’ll have to worry about. It’s those figures we begin to glimpse moving through the woods across the lake at night… those markings that start showing up on trees around camp… those haunting cries from out in the trees… coming closer…
Camp Monsters is part of the REI Podcast Network. Pulling us all up to altitude with her relentless, reliable motor is our Senior Producer, Chelsea Davis. Sharing that two-seater over there are our Executive Producers, who never fly solo: Paolo “Maverick” Mottola and Joe “Goose” Crosby. Sorry, Goose. That shimmering triangle hovering above us, controlling our minds with bursts of disturbing sound is actually just our Engineer Nick Patri’s latest attempt to break into the electro-synth-pop music scene. And passed out at the controls-- as always-- is yours truly, Weston Davis, who wrote and performed this episode.
And remember: the stories we tell here on Camp Monsters are just stories. Some of them are based on things that people claim to have seen and experienced, but it’s up to you to decide what you believe… and how to explain away what you don’t. Please like, share, rate, and review this podcast, and spread the word any way you can. We sure appreciate it. Thank you, and see you next week around the campfire.