Rewind: Episode 02

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Let's see, I guess, like, could you just sort of set the stage for me? Like, how old were you? What were you doing in life? Where were you? Just kind of, like, overall, kind of set the stage for me. Okay. I was 17, fresh out of high school. There was this Christian camp that I'd gone to every year from, like, the third grade. You would just go and you'd take some time to get away from work and life, and the whole idea was just to get away from, like, your phones and the TV and media and have some time to worship and get closer to God. That was the whole idea of it. They hire seasonal workers every year, so there's, like, staff housing, all the girls stay together, all the guys stay together. It's way up in the mountains, probably an hour from Fresno, big, big pine trees. It's, like, near the redwoods ponds. There's a creek running through the whole camp. We had a bobcat incident, actually. You're not supposed to say bobcat. You have to call him Bob. I think Ted was bears. If you had a walkie and you saw a bear because there were other people in the camp, you'd have to call them Bob. If you had a walkie and you saw other people with walkies, you didn't want to say, "Hey, I just saw a bear," because then everybody starts freaking out. "Oh, I just ran into Ted." Then we know we have to get the kids very far away from that spot. We all kind of had time before work actually started to get to know each other and, you know, do the team-building exercises and all the hokey stuff, and there was this guy named Kyle who also worked at the camp. He was in Adventure Rec. They were the lifeguards, and there was some climbing courses and stuff like that. So they would do archery, belay, and all of that kind of stuff, keeping everybody safe and the fun stuff, basically. He was tall, like probably 6'4", really handsome, strong jaw, blue eyes, golden brown curly hair. He was an all-around good-looking dude, kind of golden boy. I mean, I was 17. Girls would kind of open up to him in particular. He just kind of had a way. You would do things for him and then realize he never asked you to do that. He just kind of navigated it, just kind of pushed it that way. For example, the whole Adventure Rec thing, sometimes they ended up working through lunch. So us in the kitchen would always just save them a plate if they let us know they had to work through lunch. Well, he came through the kitchen one time, and he kind of grabbed a rag and wiped something down where I was cleaning. Oh, now that we're best friends. And I help you out all the time, you'll bring me a meal, right? You'll bring me some food for lunch? That's just how he was. Just certain things didn't feel right. He'd give you like the big winning pageant smile, but it was never like a real smile. You know, the crinkles by your eyes, it like never went to his eyes, only the mouth. He would try and get you alone. The minute someone else volunteered to go with, he would just kind of, "Oh, okay, well you guys got it." And back out. But he would be really insistent on being alone with people. I sort of wrote him off in terms of the weirdness. It's awkward. I'm awkward too. But I kind of wrote it off at first. He's just bad vibes. I mean, everywhere he went, fights started. People hate each other. You know, people group up into little friend groups. Everywhere he went, people would open up to him, and the next thing you know, this girl knew that, or they would open up to each other. And the next thing they know, it's all over the camp. Shit that happened in their past, or how they grew up, there's a lot of rough childhoods growing up. And he would infiltrate these groups, group by group by group. Every time he was in one, it just completely decimated friendships. He would introduce himself to the group, and they'd be like, "Oh yeah, Kyle's been hanging out." Or, "Kyle wants to go with us to do this, and Kyle wants to go with us to do that." I was chatting with a bunch of my girlfriends one time, and they're like, "Yeah, Kyle, he's just so sweet." I told him stuff that I've never told anyone. Like, I don't even know if I could tell you guys. And the next thing you know, it's all around the camp that she'd been assaulted, and all this awful stuff had happened to her. I felt like he definitely got off on hurting people, and just kind of watching the mayhem happen. He never asked for anything. He would just kind of twist. Twist until it popped. I'm really scared of the dark. I'm terrified. And we had just seen a bobcat, so I had to walk a mile to Uppercast. Uppercamp. In the dark. To go back to my housing. It had been seen up and down this trail that I had to walk. It was like a mile. I grew up not far from that camp. So you know all the things as far as big cats like bobcats. You want to make yourself look big. You want to make loud, very human noises. You don't hunch over. You know all the stuff. If I see it, I'm going to grab a stick, and I'm going to make myself look huge and scare the thing away. It was night. It was pitch black. If I am walking through some place dark and I hear any kind of sound, I literally, like I lose all function. Like I fall on the ground. And I was freaking out. I did not want to. I was very tired. And I'm walking through the camp and there's Kyle and two friends of his. They're hanging out outside. And those three hung out quite a bit. As we're walking up the hill, Kyle says something, "How was work?" I said, "Over." I didn't even stop. He's like, "Oh, let me walk you up. Oh, you know, it's pitch black. The mountain lion's been around." He wasn't even supposed to be in upper camp. You had to be like one of a few people to be allowed up there because they were young kids. And I was like, "No, no, I can do it. No, really, it's okay." Just really trying to get him to stay. I'm like, "No, I don't want you to get in trouble. No, you should probably stay down here. No, I don't want to get in trouble either because our boss is up there and, you know, it's just really not a good idea. Why don't you stay down here?" And I couldn't make him not come. I couldn't make him not walk with me. There was nothing I could do. He's to my right and he kept slowing down. I wasn't walking super fast or like I would be hard to keep up with, but he stayed to my right and a little bit behind. Not where I could see him comfortably and look where I was going. It was just like a very gripping fear in the middle of my stomach. You need to get out of this situation. What do you have in your pockets right now? What can you see on the ground right now? Can you book it? What can you do? So we'd been walking a little bit and then they caught up with us. The other friend of his ended up getting his truck. Thank God. He was a really good guy. And I had a suspicion he kind of felt the same way I did about him. It ended up being his two friends taking me up and he was like, "I'm going to stay here." And the minute someone else volunteered to go with us, he was like, "Oh, well, you guys got it." I kind of felt like he knew he was scaring me and he enjoyed it. By the end of camp, there's one meal you can't eat and mine was the fajitas. Just looking at it makes you want to gag. I'm a little sick and tired of camp food. I said Fresno is about an hour away, 45 minutes an hour. That's like the big city. So we were all going to load up in our cars. We had like a half day because the group that was there left early. There wasn't really a set plan other than we're going to go to this place for dinner after. I think it was around 10, 11 o'clock we were supposed to go. So there is a sign out sheet because a lot of people go hiking in Yosemite or there's people going home if they can for the weekend. To go see their family. The sign out sheet was just a stack of papers and a clipboard, pencil tied to that ring at the top. You would sign your name, where you're going, what time you'll be back, what time you're leaving. So I put my name down, just said I was going to Fresno with the group and the time I'd be back. The whole idea was just, "Okay, well we checked the sign out sheet and it's 11 and they're not back so that's a problem, we need to start looking at the location they put down where they'd be." If you go hiking in the woods and you fall and you get hurt and you can't make it back, how would we know? So I was the last one off and I come down and everyone's pretty much broken up into their groups. A couple of us didn't have cars so everybody kind of found somebody to ride with and I look around and pretty much everybody's full except for Kyle and he's like, "No, it's okay Taylor, I saved you a spot with me" and it was just going to be me and him and his little pickup. And I was like. "No, mm-mm." So I start asking. asking a couple of my other friends, like, hey, does anybody have a spot? Like, I'm literally just walking around. He's kind of getting insistent. And I'm like, no, actually, I'm just kind of tired. I'm just going to stay here. I'm not feeling super well. I'm not getting in the car with that guy. I'm not going to be alone with that guy. I'm not going to go. I just said, I don't feel very good. I'm kind of tired. I'm just going to stay here and I'll go back to girl staff housing and I'll just knock out for the night. I'm just, I don't want to go. And I never said, I don't want to go with you. I wasn't rude about it. I had never said a crossword to him. And all of a sudden he had like a completely different face. He was good looking. He was until he switched and there, I couldn't believe I'd ever found him attractive. He was so pissed. It went from golden boy smile to just gone dead. Just malice. And he was saying just about anything and anything I think that he thought would hurt my feelings or make me back down, make me feel bad about refusing to go. I was near tears. Honestly, he got me. It worked. I was pretty upset. Eventually some of the guys are coming over like, dude, it's fine. It's fine. She doesn't have to go. Trying to calm him down. And they sort of go around by the pickup. And my friend Robin comes over and are you okay? And I'm like, yeah, yeah. I just knocked him out. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Yeah. I just not in the mood tonight. She says, okay, well we'll see you when we get back. I'll bring you some food or something. And she goes to give me a hug. And I'm like, do not fucking get in the car with that guy. Do not. She's like, okay, I won't. I turn around and I go back up to the friendship house to the sign out sheet to cross my name off. Cause I didn't go. And I just wanted to be with him. And I just wanted to go back to girl staff housing and just be alone. I had to scratch off and basically say, I didn't go. There's pages and pages and pages. And I think the very top page was from the year before. So they have everybody's all of them for like a year. So I flipped through the page all the way down to the bottom. Cause mine would have been the last one or the second to last. See this friend, this friend, this friend, this friend. And I do it again. I'm like, okay, maybe I put it on a different page by accident. So I flipped through all the pages. And I just wanted to go back to girl staff housing. So I flipped through all the pages I could find. What did I do? Like, where did I put my name down? And like the year before somewhere or in a different week, I looked at the next page. It was totally blank. Cause no one used it yet. It's not there where I was looking at every single name and making sure that was not me and checking every day. And it's not there. He was the last person to be around that sign out sheet until I went back up there after everyone had left. He erased my name and he erased my name before the argument because he didn't go back up after. I don't think I was coming back to that camp. You have like a true crime podcast and my mom watched a lot of 48 hours. I mean, you don't have to get very far off the road before no one can really hear you. I think he would have killed me. And I never said it out loud before. As far as I think I could have been dead. I think he probably would have killed me. I think he's a bad person. Every emotion he had was about as shallow as a puddle. There was no depth. There was no gravity. I just think if I had just given in like one more time, like how many times have you, you didn't really want to go out and your friend's like, nah, come on. You gave in. What if that time was your life? I think about that sometimes, you know, it's years later and I've been married for years now. And, all that life that happened in between might have just not happened. It's just so weird to think about. Like, I might have died. Be mean. Be mean. Be rude. You don't have to be nice to them. You don't owe them anything. You can say, no, I don't want to go. No, I don't want you to do this. No, I don't want you to go with me. You can stomp your feet. You can throw a fit. You can be loud. When it comes to your safety, like, why do you care if someone thought you were kind of a bitch this one time? Throw a fit. If you have a bad feeling, just do whatever you need to do to get out of that situation. Yeah. Maybe that was just a moment. Maybe he, you know. I feel like a lot of people are probably capable, but don't ever do it. It seems like he's definitely the type. Yeah. Yeah. Shit, good thing you were mean. Yeah. Yeah. That's crazy. Well, thank you for sharing that. That was, yeah, it's going to sound really good. Awesome. Thank you. So we don't know a whole lot about Kyle the counselor. I guess that's what we're calling him. Except for years later, our storyteller Googled him and he was living in the LA area and no longer works as a camp counselor at that camp or any other camp. Or at least we hope he doesn't because that would just be really weird and really creepy. But I guess that's his kind of thing after all, right? Oh, damn. Yeah. So I never went to camp as a kid and I used to be jealous of all my friends who got, you know, do the summer camp thing. But now I'm like, dude, I'm glad I didn't go because if this type of stuff happens, I'm I'm out. But let's take a breath, you know, let's take a break. But we'll be right back. Cool, we're back. And this is the second time we're going to do this. We got some weird stuff last time. We're going to listen to some voicemails from you guys. I mean, let's see if you can out weird yourself. And that is not a challenge. Last time was weird, or is it? We got some pretty weird ones. I know. And like weird that I couldn't have thought up here where I think it was accidentally weird. But there's a pattern of accidental weirdness and odd sounds and breathing and weird human behavior. I don't know. It's like just weird enough to be annoying. Yeah. And somewhat scary. So let's check them out. I'm excited. Yeah, let's let's see what we got this time. Cool. All right. I am so sorry. I have not gotten your celery back to you. You gave me fresh celery and said, please only take one. And I ate the whole bag. I'm so sorry. I do have a question for you. Where do you get your fabulous hair products? Were they making that up as they went along? That is eat a whole bag. Of celery. A whole bag? That's all we got. Yeah. I was just wondering if we would get any more back rooms or glitch in the matrix stories anytime soon. My favorite stories glitch in the matrix, the doppelganger story. Yeah, these are some of my favorite because there's a moment where you think, am I going crazy? And I mean, that's like the whole radar rental world is a big glitch in the matrix. I mean, I'm not going crazy. I'm just going to go with the flow. Once I get there, it's kind of just explore mode. Where's a safe place? Where's kind of a nice, where you can set up a campsite? It's kind of just feeling it out. I find the most perfect campsite, it's this horseshoe off of this old Forest Service road. Immediately set up camp. I usually always bring a backup tent, just for whatever reason, if I want to go do something and for whatever reason gives me peace of mind. And that particular trip, my daughter wanted to know if she could spend the night by herself. I said that was no problem, I had the backup tent. We set up the two tents next to each other, and I just said, yeah, if you're going to sleep in the backup tent, you're going to have to have Guts, who was our male German Shepherd. It's about a four-hour drive by the time you're doing all that exploring and everything, so we weren't probably set up until around one o'clock. It's just getting set up, you know, maybe we played some games, some bocce balls, some catch or something like that. At night, for folks that aren't used to it, it can sound creepy or eerie, but, you know, I really enjoy it. You're going to hear an owl, you're going to hear squirrels moving through the grass. Occasionally you may hear some frogs, some crickets. Deer coming through the campground, you know, many times deer come to the campground and pick up scraps of litter or things that you may have missed that fell off. You'll hear that, I've had elk and deer rub against the tent. That particular first night we were there. I and my wife kept hearing these really heavy footsteps. Both my wife and I were just like, "Do you hear that?" and it felt like it was just encirculating us. My measure of alarm was looking at the dogs and my dogs peek their heads up every once in a while and I saw them looking outside the tent, but they didn't bark. And so I said, "Okay, well, whatever is out there, I'm going to attribute to." Maybe a bigger buck or something. It's just, it didn't sound like what I was used to for hearing deer and elk. That first night, it was uneasy, which is unusual when we're camping. I usually sleep fine. I sleep like a baby. I just had this feeling like it's just, the footsteps don't sound right. Next morning we get up, I look around, nothing's awry, nothing's amiss. So I said, "Okay, great. Let's go on a hike, get our gear together. Just, you know, day pack. And I always carry with me when I'm camping out in the woods for a variety of reasons. We start hiking probably about a half a mile down the road. All of a sudden, my dog Guts just takes off. He sprints at something and he sprints so quickly, by the time I turn, he's already 40 feet down this trail and I see that it's an old gate post. So it used to be a turnoff point, but it had been so covered in foliage, you missed it at first, you know. And it's been. basically non-maintained for probably 50, 60 years. So I thought, okay, this probably was an old road that somebody was camping on, which, you know, some people live out in the woods, you know, it's just whatever. I start running after him, yelling at him, saying, "Hey, Guts, stop." And I started apologizing, thinking, "Oh, he's clearly stumbled on a campsite. He's going to scare these poor folks to death. He's going to get himself hurt, whatever." I'm yelling after him and I had probably run about a hundred feet in. By that time, I was. I was enough around the corner that I could see something didn't look right because I could see this blue object. It was an unnatural blue, so I knew it was something man-made. I was like, okay, that's gotta be somebody, somebody's gear. But in you looking down this road, it doesn't look like it's been traveling in a while and nobody's saying anything. Another 50, 70 feet, I'm around the bend and sure enough, it's a whole abandoned campsite. All the hallmarks of a. Fully prepped campsite. It had a tent, it had a cooler, it had a propane tank, it had one of those camp burners, stove burners that you hook the propane tank up to. And the thing is that some of this stuff was really nice. And I thought to myself, who would leave all this gear here? Why would someone just throw all this stuff, this expensive camping gear away? It had all been destroyed. It's like, okay, this is so weird to me because where we are, of course, there could be a lot of snow, but there's so much tree density in here. I was looking around like, could there really be that much snow? Could there be that much snowpack coming where we are right here with this much tree cover to crush this stuff? I couldn't make sense of why everything could be that damaged. We circle around, I think we saw magazines or newspaper clippings too, that were also ripped up, but that was it, just a fully abandoned campsite. It weirded us out, nobody was there, we didn't see any cars, we just kind of said, all right, this is very strange, let's walk back and sure enough, we walked back to the road and continued on our hike. I'm thinking about it, I can't get my head around it, but I don't want to spoil the day, you know, of course, I got Grace and the wife with me, I don't want to be spooking them. We go up to the top of a hill, and I hear another weird noise. This time, it sounded like grunting. I don't think there's moose in this area, highly unlikely, but there's definitely elk, definitely buck, and definitely black bear. Where the noise is coming from and where the wind is blowing, three sweaty humans. Two dogs, a lot of scent for an animal to pick up, and that wind is carrying it over to that direction, and it didn't deter it. It's probably some elk or shedding or something like that, and it's got, you know, didn't think too much of it. Go back to our campsite, have dinner, start playing bocce ball. As I'm playing bocce ball, the dogs are right by my side, as would normally be the case. All of a sudden, I see Jamie walking up, guts within a few seconds. 20 seconds later, gets up, and he just sprints. His ears are back, his head is down, his back fur is up. He is dead-eyed, set, focused in on her. I mean, he is bullseyeing her. I was like, wait, what's going on? What did I miss? Because his tail wasn't wagging. He wasn't wagging, he wasn't jogging. He was clearly trying to get to her as fast as he could. That struck me as odd. So I kind of, like, look around, and I see he's, yep, he's running right at her. So I start running towards her. As I start running towards her, all of a sudden, I see Jamie starting to run towards us. My wife is running towards me and guts. I was like, oh my god. So I immediately, just like, out of instinct, I grab my pistol. She runs at me. Guts just keeps going. He's running so fast, I can't, there was no way I'm going to catch him. He continues, I'm like, struggling. I'm like, what's going on? What's happening? She's like, I had eyes on me. Someone was watching me. I felt eyes on me. Guts continues on. I finally am screaming at him, and he finally stops. He's probably 100 feet, 150 feet ahead of me in the thicket of the woods. Leah and my daughter are behind me by about 30 feet. Leah was right next to my daughter, right at her hip. All of her hair was raised. She would not leave her side. And then I was like, okay, clearly she senses something is wrong because she's not thinking this is a game. She's not interested in what Guts is interested in. Maybe she's being alerted to what me and my wife are responding to. She was behaving very oddly, and she was just glued to her. Finally, Guts returned, and he came back, and we scoured the area. We didn't see anything, you know, and I did what I'd like to think, a pretty thorough job of surveying what possibly could have my wife saw or sensed, and what caught Guts' eye. I told my daughter, everything's going to be fine. He said, go in, go back to the tent. She's ahead of us, walking back, and my wife and I are basically whispering, and I'm like, so what happened? And she just keeps repeating the same thing. She's like, I know someone's watching me. I swear I saw someone watching me. I said, okay, well, there's clearly nothing out here, so what do you want to do? At this time, it was dusk, and there was still some sunlight left. We were so in the boons that by the time we packed up, it was going to be pitch black. And then trying to drive on one of these back road forest, service roads that aren't maintained. If you don't know what you're doing, you can't see well, you can just as easily catch something, fall into something, and cause a whole nother level of pain. So I said, okay, well, let's just bring my daughter into the tent tonight, so we'll all sleep together. Maybe what it will do is I'll just set up a little trip wire. I happen to have 100 feet of paracord with me, so I took that around, started tying as elementary as I could of a perimeter, so that I could just get a little bit of cable around our campsite. And I just hung an Altoids can and the truck keys, and I think I put some change and a lighter in the Altoids can. And so it gave a jingle when the wire was tensioned. As I go to tie the last strand where I was going to close off the sort of perimeter tie, that's when all of a sudden, like, my entire heart just fell out of my body. I'm holding these ropes in my hand, and I'm looking down, and I see that someone had done the same exact thing that I had done. There was a brown cable there that had washers on it. The rope was so old that no one saw it. I mean, it was so dilapidated and decayed and dirty from the dirt. There was no way of seeing it, and it was all fragmented. There was only a few inches hanging off the tree in various places, but the washers were still on there. They had it at about the same exact height I was about to tie it. Someone had the same exact feeling at this exact time. campsite that I having right now that they needed to do this this is an unusual and unnerving experience and my gut was telling me okay I gotta stay calm in front of them but I'm pretty terrified so what can I do probably not the best but my solution was I'm gonna fire my pistol and I unloaded a clip into the ground if somebody is out there at least they know that we are armed and now they also know we have dogs that night not one else asleep obviously 5 a.m. 6 and the second the Sun's up packing up and immediately leaving I sell some my co-workers and they're all telling me I got a call the ranger station and report the campsite and all that and part of me it's hesitant at first me admitting to myself that it really was potentially a situation where somebody was at risk previous and then us then it made it very real so it did take me a while to eventually call the ranger station and report that location for a few months you know it was all good I'm watching this documentary it was about missing people and it plots the number of missing people basically in a GIS geospatial map all of a sudden it pops up Oregon and it's like what's going on here and it's The biggest, highest concentration of missing people is smack dab, 100%, right over that area we were camping. I yelled and paused the screen and told my wife to come look at the TV. I think I took photos of it and sent it to my dad and my mom. I mean, I was flipping out. I could only have so much cognitive dissonance for so long and tell myself that it was an elk, somebody was being lazy and left all the crap there. I could only do that so far. And then eventually, no matter what, you have to face the reality like, nope, there was something that had malicious intent. You were there, your family was there, and you are the only people that have been impacted by that. Cool, that is a crazy story. I don't do a lot of camping. I have done, I've done it a lot in the past. But. But that might make me think twice about going again. Yeah, no worries. You know, the times I've gone, it's nothing like that, not even close. But great, thank you. That's a fantastic story. No, thank you, man. Thanks for having me. Yeah, get yourself a dog, man. Then you can go camping anytime. It's fun, you know. So it sounds like our storyteller could have been a victim of something really sketchy and really dangerous. Glad you and the family are okay. And after everything. He said he still goes camping, so there's no stopping him. Good for you, man. Bring plenty of weapons and dogs. Good luck. Damn, I'm I'm even more glad I haven't been camping and that just confirms my decision. So I'm not jealous, but if I ever did, I'd have to bring some weapons or something. I don't know, baseball bat, gun or I don't know, but let's let's take a break and we'll be right back. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. There are plenty of reasons we put off getting support. And for a lot of people, cost is one of them. With BetterHelp, insurance options may now be available nationwide with an average copay for eligible members of just $23 per session. And while we're reconsidering old assumptions, maybe there are a few others worth questioning, too. It is so common to feel like you have to be the glue holding every relationship project and family moment together. We absorb the rule that putting ourselves first. First is somehow selfish, even though we would urge anyone else to rest and seek support. Therapy helps you break down those double standards and build space for your own emotional needs. BetterHelp works with more than 125 health plan networks and eligible members have an average copay of just $23 per session with insurance. Don't have insurance or don't live in the United States? You can still get 10% off your first month. Visit BetterHelp.com/radiorental to explore your payment options. That's BetterHelp.com/radiorental. This is Jill Schlesinger from Jill on Money. Managing your small business finances shouldn't feel overwhelming. Xero brings your accounting, payroll, payments and analytics into one simple platform with automated features that clear away the daily busywork. You get a quick detailed look at what's coming in and what's going out. Over 5 million customers worldwide rely on Xero and 91% of customers across the U.S., U.K. and Australia. Agree, it's easy to use based on a 2024 survey. Get the clarity and confidence you need to make smart decisions for your business. Learn more at Xero.com. All right, guys, appreciate you hanging out with me on this one. Episode two, we plan on doing more of this. It's been fun being creepy, being weird, being scary, hearing the greatest of the greatest. So it's been a good hang. Join me next time on Radiorental Rewind. Later. See you next time. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.