The Log

A mysterious log appears at the ski lodge where Terry works.

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SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hi, I'm Rob Tale Number twenty-six. The Log. A couple of months ago, I put out a call for listeners to send in their tales. Terry from Vermont was one of the first people to contact me, and I'm happy to present his tale to you today. I will still be the narrator, and I'll still be doing it from first person point of view, but this is Terry's story. We've been working on it for the last couple of months, going back and forth until we got it just right. It's something a little different, and I hope you enjoy it. I was working at a ski lodge in central Vermont. It was small, with about ten rooms, and functioned pretty much like a motel. In the winter, our guests were there to ski, and we would shuttle them to and from the ski slopes in the area. We had a small restaurant with a chef and a full staff, a bar and a bartender, shuttle drivers, people that worked at the front desk to check people in and out and do basic customer service stuff. There was a maintenance crew, a housekeeping crew that cleaned the rooms, one security guard that worked seven days a week, and then there was me, and I kind of bounced around. Some days I would drive the shuttle, some days I would fill in as a cook, some days I would do some light maintenance around the lodge. During ski season, this place was very busy. Every room was booked a year in advance. It was a big operation. We were also open during the summer, in the off season, and it was totally different then. They kept a skeleton crew. There were actually only four full-time staff members during the summer. I was one of them. There was a maintenance person, there was a manager, and there was someone at the front desk. But we all kind of jumped around and did everything. Like all of us were responsible for doing housekeeping stuff during off season. They did not keep a full-time housekeeping staff. All of us would step in and cook. Again, though, it was not busy. It was very rare to have more than one person at the lodge during the summer, so like one room would be booked. It was an isolated, desolate place. It was beautiful because it was Vermont in the summer, but it was empty. Everyone on the skeleton summer crew also lived at the lodge. They provided housing in the summer because most of the rooms were empty, so they could give us those to live in, and then that allowed them to pay us less. So we had four people working and living at the lodge. Every Monday we would have a staff meeting, and our staff meeting took place in a small conference room. Imagine a rectangular table with eight chairs, but there's only four people at the meeting, so we're kind of scattered around the table. And it's me, and then there's Karen, she's the maintenance person. There's Jack, he's the front desk person. And then there's Stephen, the manager. So that's it in this room. It's a table, chairs, the four of us. There's no paintings on the wall or anything. It's a blank, barren conference room. And then there's a sofa, like up against the wall, behind the table. No one's sitting on that. We're all sitting at the table. And we basically just go around and talk about things that need attention that week. Stephen the manager tells us how many people are going to be there that week, and actually, on this particular week, there were no guests at the lodge. So we all say what's going on that week for us. No big deal, nothing abnormal. The meeting goes exactly as it always does. And then we get up to leave, and Stephen points to the sofa up against the wall, and we all turn and look and sitting on this old yellow sofa is a log like a piece of wood, a part of a tree trunk. About three feet long, a circumference maybe a little bit larger than a basketball. I had never seen it there. And Stephen points to it and and he asks where it came from. And nobody knows. And he's like, Well, it had to come from somewhere. And yeah, it did. It was pretty strange. But none of us knew where it came from. I go grab it, and it's a big heavy log, and it's wet, so when I pick it up there's a big stain on the sofa. And where it touched my shirt, there's a big wet mark too. I go throw it outside and I come back in and Steven's mad. He wants to know who stained the sofa. It's an old sofa. It's been there for as long as any of us. But I don't think it was particularly expensive or anything like that. It just seemed to make Steve mad that someone would put a giant wet log on this piece of furniture. So that seems like it'll be the end of it, but but Steve won't drop it. He wants to know who brought the log in. And he doesn't seem to believe any of us. Remember, there's no guests there, it's only the four of us, so in Stephen's mind it has to be one of us. And I'm a curious person, and I did find this very strange. Either it was one of us and somebody was lying, or somebody snuck in with a big wet log and put it on the sofa and left, which is also very strange. So I'm like, Stephen, listen, if you want, I will investigate this. In the busy season, that would be the job of our head security person, but there is no security person in the off-season, so I volunteer to do the investigation. He says, Okay, you can look into it. I really like reading detective stories, and if this were one of those detective stories, the first thing the detective would do is interview all of the possible suspects. Since there's only four people, one of them is me, and one of them is Stephen, who has essentially hired me to be the detective, there were really only two people that I could interview Jack from the front desk and Karen from maintenance. And I tried to arrange interview times with each of them, but they both said no. They did, however, assure me that they had nothing to do with this stupid log, and they thought it was ridiculous that Stephen thought one of us did it. So I asked both of them who they thought did it, and they had no idea, and they just didn't care really. My investigation was almost over before it started, but we did have security cameras. And if some stranger walked off the street with this soaking wet log, went into our conference room and put it on the sofa, as long as they entered one of the main entrances, they should have been caught by the security camera. I went and told Steven that, you know, I would like to get into the security office and take a look at the security cameras. He told me that was pointless because, you know, they weren't recording because there were no tapes in them. We didn't put tapes in them during the off season because cost too much to keep putting tapes in during the off-season. And he wasn't talking about tapes in the cameras themselves, but tapes in the VCRs that the cameras fed into. And I knew that we were not recording, but I had also helped with security before, and I knew that a tape had to be in the VCR. You could walk back into the security office and there were like four TV screens, four monitors, showing the live feed of the security cameras. And for that live feed to work, there had to be a tape in the VCR. And that tape was recording. You were supposed to replace it every 24 hours, but if you didn't replace it, it would just record over itself. So even if you weren't replacing the tapes, you could rewind the current tape and see what had happened earlier that day. So I didn't want to make a big deal out of it. I just said, okay, Steven, that sounds great. You're right, the tapes are not recording. But I went down to secure it myself and and I was right, there was a tape in the VCR, it was still recording. And I sat down and I rewound it. I started fast-forwarding through the footage, looking for someone with a log, and sure enough, at about six that morning, I see someone walk through the front entrance holding a log. And it was Stephen. I was shocked. I didn't know what to do. This was my boss. He had asked me to investigate it. Why would he do that? What was the point? And I really wanted to confront him. But also I really needed this job. And like I said, he was my boss, and he had been the manager there for a long time, and it didn't seem like something that you know he would get fired for if I took it to like the owner of the lodge. So I just never said anything. And actually I I destroyed the tape. And as far as I remember, nobody ever talked about the log again. I want to thank Terry again for submitting his tale. If you would like to submit a tale, you can send me an email at robtellstales at gmail.com. I hope to hear from you. The cover art is by Marcella Johnson. She also came up with the title of the podcast. Our theme music is by Mitchell Harditch. You can find us on Instagram, Facebook, and at Robtellstales.com. This podcast would have not been possible without Ben, Marcella, and Melanie. Thank you, and thanks for listening.