# The Clearing

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/mrballen-podcast-strange-dark-mysterious-stories-4894842/the-clearing
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/mrballen-podcast-strange-dark-mysterious-stories-4894842/the-clearing.md
Podcast: [MrBallen Podcast: Strange, Dark & Mysterious Stories](https://stenobird.com/podcast/mrballen-podcast-strange-dark-mysterious-stories-4894842)
Published: 2026-09-03T07:00:00+00:00
Episode link: https://ballenstudios.com/
Audio file: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/stitcher.simplecastaudio.com/814143cd-09c6-426f-920a-7be9b3dc1506/episodes/3a0c0d48-d0c8-48ee-adb2-9184d64b902d/audio/128/default.mp3?aid=rss_feed&awCollectionId=814143cd-09c6-426f-920a-7be9b3dc1506&awEpisodeId=3a0c0d48-d0c8-48ee-adb2-9184d64b902d&feed=dloY8UYJ
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/mrballen-podcast-strange-dark-mysterious-stories-4894842/episodes/the-clearing
Duration seconds: 1468

## Resource

One summer day, a man named John Randolph was hiking through a remote forest in Colorado when he began to smell something terrible. Intrigued, he followed the smell until it brought him to this clearing, and in the clearing John saw what looked like an old campsite. Now, John is out in the middle of nowhere, so the idea that somebody was camping out out here, in what looked like a long term settlement, was pretty bizarre to John. John walked into the clearing to see what was going on, and when he turned the corner, he saw something in the middle of the campsite he just couldn’t even process... it was so horrible, it just looked fake. But eventually, he realized what he was looking at was real, at which point John turned around and began sprinting out of there screaming for help.

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## Transcript

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