Reflecting on the miraculous desert rescue

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The next radio rental tape is waiting for you right now . With Tenderfoot Plus, you'll get next week's full episode early. More stories, more strange encounters, and more benefits like ad-free listening and exclusive bonus tapes. If you want the VIP listening experience, subscribe to Tenderfoot Plus Today at tenderfootplus.com. Annual members pay less than three dollars and fifty cents per month to unlock early, ad-free, and exclusive tapes. That's tenderfootplus.com . Hate waiting a week for the next episode of Radio Rental? Subscribe to Tenderfoot Plus to get early access to episodes, ad-free listening, and even some bonus scary stories. Visit TenderfootPlus.com for details. The following podcast includes scary stories with content that could be triggering to some listeners. Listener discretion is advised. Take a break from the same old boring blockbusters and experience a new kind of movie night with Radio Rental . At Radio Rental, our videos come to life in your living room. Defy all logic and reasoning and make you question your own reality . This is not your ordinary video rental store. At Radio Rental, we carry one-of-a-kind videos. So frightening, so mind-bending, you won't be able to sleep at n ight. You've gone. Radio Rental . Whoa, whoa, whoa! Hey, hey, hey! Leave the door open. Hold on. I think I can. Ah, damn it. There it goes again. It's hiding between body horror and teen slashers. Oh, uh hey, I think I've seen you here before. I'm Jared, the repairman. Someone called me today. Didn't recognize the voice. Really thick southern accent. They said there was a maintenance issue at the store, so I show up here. No one's here except this bird . Yeah, this really isn't my purview. I'm a repairman. I'm not animal control. Mmm, yeah. Hey, Malachi . There's a bird in here, buddy. Why don't you tap into those natural instincts, huh? No, you're gonna play with your crinkle ball instead. Right. There's actually live prey in here, but yeah, let's go for the crinkleball . I'd say I'd go get someone to help you out, but there's no one in the back . I guess I mean I've done it before. I I guess I could play one of those tapes for you. Yeah ? Okay . I mean I'm waiting on this bird to decide to leave anyway. Alright, uh let's see here. How about this one? It says something camp. Summer camp. Summer summer camp. Okay. That sounds nice. Maybe it's like meatballs or wet hot American summer. Maybe this one will be a comedy . So it was the summer before I turned 18 . I just graduated high school, getting ready to go off to college. Was going to a camp I had always gone to all my life , but this was my first summer working as a counselor at this camp. So I was going to be there all summer . I was going up with my best friend, and we all knew a couple people who were going to be counselors with us and we were really excited to start the summer . Throughout the summer we would always a little group of us would kind of break away at night and sneak out of our cabins. Make sure, you know, someone was watching the kids. But we would always, you know, try to go sneak off camp a little bit . We were sneaking away one night and a couple of us were down there, maybe four or five of us, just hanging out, talking. After a while, a few went back and It was getting pretty late that night, so uh Annie was ready to go back . And so I decided I'd walk back with Annie . We're walking through the woods and it opens up into this big field . Which is where you can see all the different cabins and things like that. And on the other end of the field is the bathroom. And the bathroom has this big floodlight on it. So you can see the bathroom from anywhere on the camp so the kids know how to get there and all and we heard this like loud screeching sound sounded so close . The shriek, the best way I could describe it was human, but it was like this very animalistic, like if you had never learned how to talk, this is how The way the field was shaped . We would walk around from like the horse stables and you'd be in the middle of the field. And the way the moon was that night, you could see the across the entire field. You could see all the cabins, you could see the bathrooms, everything . And we saw this big thing in the middle of the field . But you couldn't really tell based off the shape. You could just see that it was some kind of animal crouched or sitting in the middle of this grass . When I first saw it, my brain immediately goes to something rational. It's gotta be my friend. It's gotta be somebody that I know . And I thought it was a moose because it had these big antlers and it was huge . As we got closer to it we could see it kind of moving . But as soon as we stepped into the field it stood up on two legs . They look about like eight feet tall and almost unnaturally skinny. They're completely silhouette d, but we can still see their shape pretty well . And sprinted like a person would sprint into the woods that were fifty feet away . It's running across the field, across to our left . As it's running, right before it hits the tree line, instead of running on two legs, it drops to all fours , but maintains its full sprint . All rationality went out the door . I've never seen any animal that's been able to like transition that well from a two-legged sprint to a four-legged sprint. At that point I was pretty significantly scared here. I just saw a monster. I just witnessed something that is not supposed to be real . The closest it could get to the tree line that's where it ran. Didn't run towards us or away from us, it just ran off to the side And through that tree line right there is the trail that leads to the horse stable so the camp . So it leads right towards the horse stables and then we hear a huge bang . And then like an almost like human shriek. And it's like the scream and then all the horses go crazy . We both just kind of stood there and we were frozen . Annie and I are just standing here in the middle of this field , middle of the night, middle of nowhere, Wisconsin . We were just both so freaked out . Once we heard the scream out by the horses, there was just this moment of both of us completely shocked faces, completely silent, not even knowing what to say, just looking at each other . Then there was this like explosion of emotion of just like what was that? Oh my god, did you see that? Was that real he grabbed my arm and we sprinted back to my cabin, which was maybe fifty yards away. He dropped me off at the porch and stood there with me for a second. I walked back to my cabin and we decided to just go to sleep . But we could still hear this like wailing screams from that side of the woods where this thing just ran into . And we heard in for the rest of the night. The next day at breakfast we immediately ran over each other. I was like, what was that? What do you think that was? And he was just as confused as I was. He's like, I have no clue. I thought it was a bear or maybe like a deer or something, and I didn't know what it was. And then when it ran, I have even Did you guys hear anything? Did you guys see anything ? As the story kept getting bigger and bigger, traveling throughout the whole dining hall, eventually, like I said, the boss catches wind of what we're talking about, and everyone's cracking jokes and saying these funny things, and then he tells us at like that staff meeting that morning, he says , earlier this summer before everyone else showed up to camp . Uh one of the cabins kind of far off had the lights switching on and off. And he went out to go turn the lights off, check around there, see if anything was going wrong. And he said on his way back down the trail, he saw a pair of yellow eyes about ten feet up in the trees, staring down at him. And he said he'd followed him through the woods. And this guy is like the most no-onsnense person I've ever met in my life. So for him to tell that story in front of all of us, it was like he believed that it was real . So at that point, people started listening to us, started trusting us. Yeah, it kind of went on from there . We would hear it a lot at night. Every night was different. For most of the summer it just sounded like an animal was being killed, like a deer. Like kinda just like loud shrieking . Like very piercing and woke campers up. It was it was that loud. Nobody really had any input until we went into town the weekend. Every all the kids went back . Couple of like the locals . This one lady owned like a jewelry, like a turquoise business, and she she's like, oh, you know , you kids should not be messing around on near Native American lands. They're not meant for kids or children or for people to be playing in . And she told us about this Native American spirit called a windigo . And once we Googled that , that looked a lot like what we saw. That freaked me out more than seeing it that night. Night, night, night, night, night. She just basically told me that like a windigo is a part of like um native american folkl ore basically and it's just a an evil trapped spirit into like a morphed body of like a deer, a bear, and a wolf almost . And they kind of shape shift to different people depending on who what you see or what you think they're supposed to look like . They're supposed to have a craving for human flesh . Kinda scary. As we were reading more into like the stories, it's there's some stories that say the more you say it, the more power it gives to the creature, you know? So it's like it's almost like something wants you to know it's a windigo The next year somebody went back and they found a deer in the middle of like our bike path that was like cut directly in half . And they always thought like whatever we heard probably did that, but we never knew exactly what was. Yeah, you see , this is why I like being a repairman. I'm all about the great indoors. I make the indoors function. That's kind of my whole thing. And let me tell you, none of that would be happening if those kids were indoors where they belong . Speaking of indoors, hand me my broom . This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy. 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So my buddy and I were out on a a bit of a cross-country road trip . We were kind of just going wherever the road took us. At that point, we were in western New Mexico. Him and I were just kind of hanging out around the campfire we had camped at the night before. We had really no plans. It happened to be Christmas Day and we were kinda thousands of miles away from our families and to be honest we were feeling kinda bummed out about that. We didn't really feel like, you know, we had anything to do for the day. There wasn't much out there to do, so we opened up our road atlas and we wanted to kind of find a hot springs or something, just somewhere to hang out and just kinda shoot the breeze and just like relax the day away. It was beautiful weather that day, and we just wanted to do something. We located this place called the San Francisco Hot Spring. Seemed like it was relatively within our area, so we took a couple hour drive out there and decided to kinda hike out there if we were able to find where it was at. We came across a bit of like a faded, rusty old sign on the side of the road that said San Francisco Hot Springs, so we figured, you know, let's try our luck and hike down this trail and see if we can actually locate it . We begin the hike and we realized from the map it was gonna be about five miles in and five miles out. Within our reason, we could hike that we were 19 years old. We were a little headstrong, and I think we could do whatever at that moment. We were we were confident . We uh cruised across a bit of like a flat desert terrain for a while where it was kind of rugged shrubs and cacti, and a bit more of an arid part of the desert, I would say . We get over to where the the edge of a valley would be, and we kind of notice a rocky switchback that leads down into it. At that point, we were pretty confident with our climbing ability, and it looked interesting down there. It had like lush grass and like tall white trees and just seemed like the ideal place to kind of set up camp for a little bit and just hang out . We ended up getting down there and it's really nice, very shady, kind of cool breeze flowing through the valley. It was a very relaxing place to kind of just hang out and set up and have some lunch and chill by the rivers ide . So I didn't know it at the time, but the grass we had set in a tall desert grass that grows wild out there was something I was severely allergic to. It hit me . As soon as we sat down on the grass, I began feeling an intense, itchy feeling up my back and a tightness around my throat . For me, after having a lifetime of just allergies and having experienced this exact symptom before, I immediately knew what was happening. I was going into anaphylactic shock. It is not a a light situation, it is a very serious medical thing to happen to you, especially when you're out in the middle of the desert. We had to immediately double back, follow the trail we took in, and climb back out of the valley on the switchback, and it would be, like I said in the beginning, another five miles. Just the fact that it was such a long walk, I wasn't even sure whether I'd make that. The only thing I could really do is bank on the fact that I I have to survive. I knew that I had to get my friend's attention and let him know we gotta move. I turn to him, I tell him exactly what's going on. He thankfully was aware enough of what was, you know, what allergic reactions really were that he completely understood and immediately hopped up, helped me pack up everything. So as soon as we started that trek up the switchback, it began to make me a bit delusional, I kinda began to fade in and out of consciousness, and my breathing became severely labored. I was struggling to breathe. We managed to get up out of the switchback, we got back onto the flat desert terrain, and we just began trudging as hard as we could in the direction that I thought the car was . In my uh delirious state, I wasn't able to track back exactly the path we had taken . It was me who tracked us into the canyon and I couldn't find the way back. I was I was too out of it. I could barely even see where I was going, I could barely even think at that time . In that moment I began to realize we had taken a wrong turn and we were nowhere near the car . We were kind of off in the middle of nowhere, and as that feeling dawned on me, it became kind of apparent that if I made another mistake like that, it it might be the end, like I might not be able to actually get out of there . In that moment , the strangest thing I'd ever seen, a falcon with a jingling bell around its neck, flew right up to us on a cacti and just started jingling around and trying to get our attention it seemed . We were both kind of like what the hell is this? We've never seen anything like that before. It was a very large falcon Because of like just how strange the situation was, we ignored it. We just started walking off in the direction we were walking in . We were on a mission, we were trying to get back to the car. We couldn't pay attention to this falcon. Although it was interesting, we couldn't pay attention to it . We take off back in the direction we were going, paying no mind to this falcon. It immediately flies directly in front of us, starts fluttering its wings aggressively, and just starts trying to get our attention. Seeing this falcon deliberately fly right back in front of us, more aggressively than before, trying to get our attention, it seemed, like flapping its wings, jingling its bell around its neck, like it was impossible to ignore for us . This was something strange happening, like it was trying to get our attention. I can't even say whether that even makes sense, but in that moment, I knew just the feeling kind of hit me that we're not going in the right direction. This falcon is trying to get our atten tion. We could both kind of feel that in the moment because we looked at each other, we were like, should we follow the falcon? Like verbatim, that's what we said, and that's what we did. I put two and two together in my head for what that's worth, and just started following this falcon . We were pushing our way back towards the car is at least what we thought was, and just knowing at this point that this Falcon was our one possible chance of even getting out of here, getting back to the car. We were almost dead silent, like we would look at each other every now and again, almost exchanging looks like, what are we doing? Like, what is happening right now? So I kind of knew that it was guiding us in some kind of direction because every step that we took towards it it would jump a little bit further away from us onto a different cacti and not really retreat back in our direction unless we went in the wrong direction or if we stood there for too long it would come straight back to us and it would be more frantic. Just if we were standing there, just kind of idling, it would get a little frantic and kind of try to get our attention again and let us know that like you gotta follow me right now. We got the feeling the Falcon was like, you have to put your trust in me. For what that's worth, I know it's a a wild animal or an animal, but we trusted the falcon in that moment, and every step we took towards it, it would jump to another cacti further away from us. It was going in a straight line , every step we took towards it after that, it would jump to the next cacti and the next cacti . And we kind of realized it was taking us absolutely in a straight path. It was guiding us absolutely, towards something . In that moment, I could feel that we were going back in the right direction. Like this was more familiar as it guided us, like we would get closer to us, and it would like gently flutter its wings, almost like it was intending on ringing its bell. Like it was almost using its bell to get our attention. I'd say within ten minutes it got us directly back to our car . As soon as we got to the van, immediately fluttered off in the opposite direction, and we had never seen it again . As soon as we see our car, there should be a feeling of like rejoice and celebration, but instead, my friend is like, we gotta go, get in the car now. I had to like pretty much be slightly even carried to the car. My friend threw my arm over his shoulder and pretty much hobbled me back to the van, threw me into the passenger seat, we drove down into the small town that we were near. I pretty much just reclined the seat and kind of resigned to just the fact that I got to the car and it's in my friend's hands now to get me to where I need to go to be helped. I felt in that moment that it was at a point where either I'm gonna live or die at this point, I'm on the edge. Got us to a clinic that was closed for the day. It was Christmas, like I said before. There was nobody in the clinic except for one nurse who was there doing paperwork. We knocked on the window, she let us in. At that point, the hives had completely spread up my back, around my throat, and down my chest. I was completely covered in hives. They had taken over my body, labored breathing. She pulled me back into the exam room and she hit me with a epinephrine injection, and it saved my life and revived me It's the strangest day of my life, honestly. I'd never interacted with an animal like that before. Just seeing the bell around its neck, I kind of felt like it was a trained falcon. Like it had some training, it seemed like it knew what it was doing. At least it knew it knew a lot more of what it was doing than we did at that time . I really did not consider myself spiritual. Uh I didn't really have any faith for faith or belief systems that I really followed, but I can't deny that in that moment it felt like divine intervention . It felt like everything lined up just at the nick of time seeing a live like a cr a wild animal, seeing like a an animal, you know, a falcon, something non-human, be able to actually come to the aid of another living creature was the most beautiful thing. I couldn't deny the fact that , whether I believe in anything or not, there was something somewhere in the universe that didn't want me to die that day. And it was looking out for me. There's something out there. I know it. I ended up doing some research and kind of looking into what type of falcon that was and just how trained falcons act, and I've learned that it's actually a hunting method that they're trained to do where they will fly in front of prey that they're trying to locate and they will usher them to a certain location. They'll make the prey follow them to guide them back to the hunter . From what we gathered, it was a a hunting falcon. It was spread it was trained to hunt animals. And it's kind of funny at this point, but it felt like it was actually, in hindsight, ushering us like animals . If there's one thing I know for sure about that day , I wouldn't be here today if it wasn't for that falcon. I I wouldn't have made it through that hike. I wouldn't have made it to see the day that I'm seeing today if it wasn't falcon. That falcon saved my life without any doubt in my mind . Actually kind of a nice story for once. Weird for sure, but nice. Life affirming, actually . What if what if this bird is trying to tell me something? Like the one in the tape. Maybe maybe I need to be more open to it I I could be closing myself off to a profound connection with nature. What if it sits right on my arm ? Hey, hey, Bertie! Hey, it's me! Don't worry. Come here . Ow! What the f- Alright, that's it. I need to cool off for a beat. This episode is brought to you by Prime. Obsession is in session. And this summer, Prime originals have everything you want: steamy romances, irresistible love stories, and the book to screen favorites you've already read twice. Off campus, L , Every Year After, The Love Hypothesis, Sterling Point, and more. Slow Burns, Second Chances, Chem istry you can feel through the screen. Your next obsession is waiting. 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