Damn you're good.

It was indeed a litcoin-qt wallet that I used.

And the reason why opening the file in the wallet didn't work the first time was because I hadn't downloaded the blockchain, after seeing someone say I didn't need to. They were probably referring to an electrum wallet. It also helped that I had not encrypted the file.

So the issue was that i originally didn't use an electrum wallet at all and ended up confusing myself by renaming the original file litecoins.dat

Steps taken:

1. downloaded the litecoin-qt wallet

2. downloaded the blockchain which took about 8 hours

3. went to /Users//Library/Application Support/Litecoin/

4. replaced the wallet.dat file they had with my own wallet.dat

5. closed out litecoin-qt

6. reopened it with all of them there still

Thanks so much for all your help. Hopefully sheds some light for somebody in the future.