This is an REI co-op studios production.

No matter how dark the night, no matter how fast you run, no matter what is chasing you.

You'd be safe if only you could 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 full season will start in September thanks to REI and our sponsors at Yeni.

But to help fill the time between now and then, we thought we'd tell a story that we've been saving since before our first season, because it's too long and strange to fit into a single episode.

And because it's personal.

In fact, it's the experience that started me down the path of cryptid's research. The story that sparked what would eventually become the Camp Monsters Podcast.

But there are parts of it that, well, you'll see what I mean when we get there.

The story features a very familiar creature.

Sasquatch. The Bigfoot. The Wildman of the Northern Woods. But this story, this isn't like any Bigfoot story that I heard before.

Over the next four months, we'll release a show per month and I hope you'll listen in and help me piece together just how it all unfolded.

See if you can help me understand what actually happened.

The story begins. Well, where it begins is one of those things we'll have to figure out as we go along.

But it began for me on a dark, narrow path with branches pressing in close all around.

No, I guess we'd better go back further than that.

Back some years ago into a different kind of wilderness than the ones these tales usually started.

A wilderness of words and an urban jungle. A bookshop in the middle of San Francisco.

We'll call it a bookshop for lack of a better term. It was part cafe and part local library.

A different hours of the day and night. It was a concert hall, conference room, a tent for revival meetings of the more fantastic faiths.

And the couch in the back had made it a temporary home for more than one vagabond poet.

...