Episode 103

Hate waiting a week for the next episode of Radio Rental? Subscribe to Tinder Foot Plus to get early access to episodes, add free listening, and even some bonus scary stories. Visit Tinderfootplus.com for details. The podcast includes scary stories, with content that could be triggering to some listeners. Order discretion is advised. 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 night. You've gone, Radio Rental. The King of Cups upside down, now hey that's interesting because typically that symbolizes a compromised emotional status, you know, like instability or manipulation, but when I see this card, usually it's on somebody that's very moody which does not seem like you at all vents. Did you shuffle the deck? Maybe you didn't shuffle them good enough, I don't know, don't worry about it son, we're going to keep going. Let me just welcome our visitors here, hey everybody, welcome back to Radio Rental. Long time no see, I'm Ricky Lee Bagley and I've been man in the counter here at Radio Rental which is, as you know, a video rental shop with an exclusive collection of scary stories told by real, breathing people. And this here is vents, the Junior Associate Clerk. We've had a bit of a slow day, I'll admit that today's been kind of slow so I've been doing a tarot reading for a young Vincent here. Anyway, I know what you want, you've been very patient while the shop was closed, you want one of our exclusive scary stories. One of the tapes that we keep in the secret box in the back, behind the baited curtain. I love that curtain, dude, I swear. Anyway, let's see what we got in here, ooh, ooh this one. This one right here, vents pop this one in while I draw your next tarot card, okay bud. Oh geez, Louise, Vance, you got the devil card. That represents destructive behaviors, inner diamonds. Does that resonate with you? Uh, no, definitely not. This story happened about 16 years ago in the summer of 2010. I was just coming out of my freshman year of college. The neighborhood that I lived in in high school was a really nice golf course community. It bordered the rivers and estuaries that bled out into the Atlantic Ocean, so it was a really beautiful place to grow up. Do you remember one day my mom brought out these blueprints of the house and the surrounding property? When I asked her, I saw all these exes in the forest and I was like, oh, what are those? She's like, well, that's why I wanted to show you, I think you might find this interesting. These are unmarked graves and apparently they go all the way back to the 1800s. We kind of took it upon ourselves, my brother and I, because we had watched those ghost adventure shows on travel channel and I think everyone's familiar with these types of shows. You got the recording device and you start asking questions, who are you? What are you doing here? And my brother and I were like, oh, that'd be really cool. We should get some friends and go out there and just ask some questions and see if we can capture something. It's myself and seven others out there in the middle of this forest. 10, 30 at night, maybe 11 o'clock. We basically went to the backyard and then just kind of winded this forested area. I had a new MacBook at the time, so we were like, oh, this would be a great way to record what's going on back here if there is anything. I opened GarageBand and I just hit Record and we just started asking questions a bunch of us. You know, the typical who are you, what are you doing? As we're out there, we start seeing like these unmarked graves. Some of them look unmarked. They're like covered with moss and mud and they're kind of just jutting out of the forest everywhere and there's dozens of them just scattered about this patch of forest. It's already kind of an eerie vibe. You know, we're just asking these questions not only myself but friends of mine as well. I ask the question, is there anyone you'd like us to contact for you? But if you are here and if you have any loved ones that you'd like us to contact, come up and say something now into the device I'm holding and I can send your message to them. As we're asking questions, I see this grave only a few feet away from us that says Eliza age 9, 1892 and has jutted out of the ground and there's moss covered all over it. We're out there for about 15 to 20 minutes. As we're going back inside, I notice that my laptop is really drained of battery, which I thought was really odd because I just purchased this laptop a few weeks prior. It was at the time the best MacBook you could get and I was like, oh my god, this thing's already drained of battery. There must be something wrong with it and so we go into the kitchen and all eight of us are kind of around this laptop and as we start playing back the audio, we start hearing voices that don't belong to any of us talking under us as we're asking these questions and that we're talking amongst ourselves. Kind of like layered beneath when we were talking and asking questions. It's really hard to make out. It's definitely female. It sounds distant, almost with a reverb on it and you hear my brother on the recording go, man, I'm scared of fucking snakes right now because he's worried, you know, what could be in the forest. And as he's saying that, you hear what sounds like a female voice, very distant. It sounded like it was saying "Mama." I'm scared of fucking snakes right now because it's the fight. At least that's what it seemed to me. Mind you, we weren't hearing any of this in real time because we're recording a roach band, we don't have headphones on and it's just a bunch of us friends out in the forest is asking random questions. "It was you who spoke earlier, would you like to speak again?" "Would like, make yourself known." They're audible but you can't hear exactly what they're saying, which just makes it a level creepier. We're startled. We're like, oh my god. What do we have like, what the heck just happened? It was a really strange experience. At that time, we really didn't think much of it. We're just like, oh god, that's spooky. But we just kind of forgot about the whole thing, saved the audio file and then just went and partied, you know, that night I think and just kind of forgot about the whole thing. A few days later, my brother and I were like, hey, let's do one more test. And we walked out with the laptop again and we started playing old music from the Civil War era. I was standing out there with the laptop on the edge of the forest. My brother was on the porch and he was kind of coaxing me and he's like, okay, man, we can come back in now. I remember, again, this flood light coming from the hotel very clearly just piercing through the trees at nighttime. I played some music, I was messing around with my laptop and I looked back up and the hotel flood lights completely blacked out. And it looks like this really large black mass kind of in front of it and it kind of took me a second to gauge what's happening because obviously it's dark. I'm looking at an LCD screen or just a computer screen and back. But something was clearly blocking it and it was very tall and it was just really weird. So I just kind of like step back, win inside the house and just kind of forgot about it. Archive the audio and just was like, oh, that's an interesting experience. Two years go by. My friend Craig, who just so happened to be out there the first time we were doing those recordings, called me and said, "Hey, man, I got an even creepier place that you should check out, and it's literally a mile and a half down the road in the same stretch of forest." He said, "I met a guy up here and he went out there with some friends. Apparently they just saw some really creepy stuff. Way more revved up." And again, we kind of had that adventurous spirit and we're like, "Okay, let's go out and check this out." I mean, we did it before. We should see what's up. The oddest part about it was, I remember Craig showing me a Google Earth image of this dome structure in the middle of the forest. And it essentially looks like a flying saucer just sitting in the middle of the forest. I was like, "Oh my god, what's that?" And he's like, "That's apparently the hub of this activity." So my brother and I, we got some flashlights. We go out to where this place supposedly is. And we're kind of standing outside this thing. We didn't really want to break in or anything. We were just kind of trying to get an idea of what's going on and what this place is. We see this old fence and it says something along the lines of biohazard area, keep out. Something about that just initially read like BS. We saw a part of the fence that was already peeled open. So my brother and I were like, "Well, let's just walk through." It's around 10.30 at night. At this point, it's really humid. It's really dark. There's almost like steam coming off the ground. My brother's on the left and I'm on the right. I had a backpack with my laptop with the hope of, "Hey, let's go to this place and do recording like I had done two years prior." As we're walking, trying to follow this map, all of a sudden, I heard what sounded like a female voice pressed up against my ear. Directly in your ear, it's almost like you'd feel someone's lips touching the little tiny hair follicles on your ears that close. I couldn't discern what it was saying. And I got so scared. I just stopped, got shivers down my spine. I'm like, "Trev, did you fucking hear that?" I looked to my left and he's already pointing at something at the forest. And he's like, "No, but do you hear that?" I'm not hearing anything at this point. And I'm starting to get kind of freaked out. My initial gut reaction was going, "Hey, who's there?" to the forest. My brother trends in me again, he's like, "You didn't hear that, either?" And at this point, I'm like, "What? What am I not hearing?" I'm like, "I don't know what you're talking about, but I just heard a woman's voice whisper in my ear." He said, "I heard bipedal footsteps run up to us, pause, and then when you yelled, I heard it step back a few paces and then run back in the forest." Like, just someone barefoot running through the forest. So you didn't hear that woman's voice just now? No. We're both having these subjective auditory experiences. We're already creeped out at this point. I think most people be like, "After this, I'm going back." Maybe it's just the adrenaline, we're just like, "Let's keep going forward." We're getting closer to where this apparent building is. Then I see this small, almost like a military bunker made of concrete, no windows, no doors, several yards in front of us. I knew it was a part of it because it just had the creepy vibe. It kind of looked like the same texture of the building from the satellite view. I knew it was like a smaller outpost. I couldn't tell if this was military associated, how old this building was. I really wasn't quite sure. I've never really quite seen anything like it. We just see this little blown out bomb shelter-looking thing and there's nothing in it. We were about to walk forward again and all of a sudden it felt like disorientation. It felt like the atmosphere shifted. Both of us at the same time felt it. All of a sudden it just felt like the forest lit up. As if all the fauna in the forest just woke up at the same time as if it's feeling the same energy my brother and I were feeling. All these animals just like screeching and making noises, birds, frogs, bugs, whatever else was in the forest at the same time. It just felt like the symphony of animals reacting almost to the same atmosphere shift my brother and I were feeling because it was almost instantaneous. Something just felt unsettling and just not right about the situation. As if we stepped one step closer and then we'd see something that maybe we would never want to see or remember. Something that might kind of scar us for life. That's at least what it felt like. I turn to my brother and I'm like, are you feeling that? He's like, yep, we got to get the fuck out of here and we just booked it out of there as fast as we could. We didn't have time to like whip out with the laptop and start doing another recording. It was already getting too weird at this point. I ain't lying, I ain't going to be able to unhear that. Anyway, let's take a break for us and let's take a little break for ourselves. All right, and we're back and let's just dive right into another tape. Hey Vent, shuffle that deck again, boy, I'm going to start a new read. I didn't feel good about the last one. I was working as a research biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. That job that I was taking entails flying out to the Cusco quim Yukon River Delta sometime in early June and then living in a remote tent camp, all of June, all of July, all of August, September and to early October. What I'm doing there is I'm there to look at the focundity or native success of different species of salmon that are coming up into a particular river system. There's biologists all the way up and down the Cusco quim river system. All of our research projects were up way up in the headwaters of these mountains. First of all, you're very far from a native village. You're probably three to five hours from a native village. In addition to that, you're an additional three to five hours by boat from any sort of town. When you're in these areas, especially the first time and that's what this was, this is my first time up in that area. You get all your gear ready. You're starting to prep your mind and even when you're applying for these jobs, it's quite interesting because when you're interviewing for these positions, at least this is what I thought. I thought there's going to be a lot of questions around science and around genetics and around fish and how I answered those questions was how I was going to get the job. But really, what the biologists want to know is how comfortable are you by yourself? How comfortable are you for many, many months dealing with wildlife and weather and isolation and living in a space that is so quiet that you're just listening to the wind or your own footsteps? If you spent any time outdoors by yourself in any great length, it's a natural essence to look over your shoulder. Especially when it's quiet. Going up here, I was thrilled. I wanted to be outside. I wanted to fish. I wanted to see the mountains in the wildlife and of course do my job. I wanted to study salmon and contribute to science and help this region manage their fish population. But when I got there and you see the expanse of this area, picture an alder-choked river and by alder-choked, I mean this is a species of tree that grows kind of, you picture the head of Medusa, the trunk grow in all sorts of kind of tangled configurations. They get big green leaves on them in the summer. They turn dark brown at the end of September October and then they fall to the ground. But during the summer, the essence is it feels like they're impenetrable. The edges of the river are lined in this species of tree and it's very, very thick, very dense and then outside of that. There are a lot of spruce trees and a very dense forest, a difficult forest to navigate. And then on the side where I had my camp was Tundra. You can see for miles and miles and miles where, where I was camping, all the way up to these big, huge, gorgeous, kill-buck mountains. You start to understand who you are in a hurry, the quiet at night, the quiet during the day. Like I said, you're not really speaking to another person that frequently. It was early in the summer that year and I would work all day and that at night because I enjoy angling, I would go down on the river and I would fly fish. And the river that I was on was pretty small and pretty choked with these alders. And so I would go down and I would wait across the river and I'd go on the sand bar that was on the other side of the river from my camp. There's the rivers rushing by. That's what consumes your hearing. It's not deafening but it's so overpowering to your ears that you can't hear anything else and you're not even hearing birds, you're not hearing the rustling of the leaves, you're hearing the water. And so I'm fishing and I don't know if it's that I had a sixth sense that I was being washed. I didn't hear anything but I sensed that I was being watched and I turned around and I was staring at the alders looking at this wall of vegetation and I can see the grass is matted down. I can see where salmon ripped apart last night. The backs of the heads are bitten off the salmon and they're skinned and you can just see their carcasses all around. And I was looking at all the leaves and I was kind of trying to pick up movement behind there or just look to see if why I was feeling a bit more spooky this night than otherwise. My mind is telling me that you're going to confirm that it's your imagination, you're going to go back to fishing. And as I was looking, my eyes just truncated down on this space in the trees and there's a wolf face in this hole. She was very close to me just a few feet away. It says though I was watching a horror movie where you see the face of a ghost or the face of a man looking through a window as the camera pans by. She was just looking at me. I was looking at her. Of course it got my hackles up so I watched her. I spoke to her in a calm voice and I called her mama. I was like, "Hey mama, what's going on? I'm just down here fishing." So I was casking my fly rod and that wasn't out of being a tough guy. That was an out of my fishing is super important. I didn't want to change what was happening because I didn't want to elicit a different response and I just kept looking over my shoulder and one of the times when I looked over my shoulder, she was gone. And then I looked to the right and she was right there. Right next to me, very, very close. The wind was blowing up river that night and I can specifically remember that because of how I was casting. She had circled downwind of me and was walking down stream into the wind and trying to smell me and understand I think what I was as well. She was half the distance or even maybe even a third of the distance of what she was before. Clearly getting my scent and she was smelling it more. I just went back to fishing and just kept my eyes off her hers but I was keeping an eye on her a little bit and she came all the way up behind me. I could see her in my peripheral and when I wasn't looking, she would be leaning way into me. She was nervous. She had trepidation as well so she had her feet kind of backed off and she was leaning as far and as she could without taking a physical step to get closer to me. When I turned around when I would make eye contact with her, she would snarl. She would start to lift her lips up and show her teeth. I'm sure my pupils were dilating and, you know, obviously my heart's beating even more. She's so close now and when she shows her teeth, you're just like, "Oh man, this is maybe going from good to bad or bad to worse." When I turn away and I'm looking at her in my peripheral vision, I can see that she is no longer posturing. Then I'm starting to understand I'm scaring her as much as she is in an essence scaring me. It was the next night. I was preparing some gear. Again, it was in the evening time. I wasn't going to fish this night and I heard a distant howl close, but a distant howl. A few moments later, I heard a very large haunting howl. A howl on an empty kind of howl up river, hollow and significant. So I walked to the edge of the river and I howled back. Loan behold, she came walking out on the sandbar right where I had been standing the night before. And she sat down like a dog. She sat down as though it was a domesticated dog. She didn't howl back at me, but she sat up. She was sitting already, but then she sat up and paid attention like, "Oh, he just howled to me and we can now see each other." I started communicating with her in other different vocalizations like you might hear a coyote do. I started making those noises to her and she laid down and she's facing me laying down now with her head flat on her paws. And then I made a little half howl. She picked her head up and looked at me. And then I howled again. She sat up all the way up but sitting on her butt. This was for a few minutes. And she went back in the brush one time and she came back out and went back in again. That was the last time that I saw her that night. That night I was sound asleep in my tent and a big howl was right outside my tent. 3, 4, 5 feet outside my tent. Woke me from a dead sleep. That sounded significantly different. I sat up at a 12 gauge, Remington stainless steel 12 gauge pump shotgun, grabbed my gun and I shocked one in the chamber and I just sat there kind of panning if you will. I was startled. I'm sure my pupils were dilating and I was just trying to make sense of it because now I couldn't hear the howl right. I just knew something woke me up. I could hear outside of my tent. There's a little plywood called a front porch if you will. I could hear this wolf's pads on the wood of my platform. And so I kind of unzipped my tent a little bit and I peaked out. I'm assuming it was the alpha male or one of the dominant males but he was very very large. Any howls right there. You know calm me down that it was a wolf. Has silly as that is to say. So I zipped my tent back up, unloaded my gun, got it field ready again, hung it back up and went back to sleep. Starting that next morning, almost every day when I walked out of my tent, within a few feet, I would have a wolf next to me. Within a few moments, they might be 50 yards away. There might be a hundred yards away. There might be 10 feet away. But they were in my area. And I would walk to the then genetics tent and I would turn on and say, and I talk to them all the time. I tell them good morning and I tell them, these are the things that you do and you're by yourself. These are the things that you do when you're in the wilderness. I would have conversations with them and with myself and I'd walk to the genetics tent and do my work. But every time I came out of the tent, I was eyeballing them because it became such a consistent engagement. In a few days after this, I went for a long hike, a really long hike, probably 10 miles. And lo and behold, while I was hiking, three wolves went with me. The female that I had originally been howling to and then these two young is my anticipation. I didn't see the big male. And I went on this big huge walk about and there were times when I was on that walk about that I just had this idea of, you know, again my imagination get a hold of me. Now I'm away from my camp. I'm away from my weapon. I didn't bring my weapon with me. I just have a backpack on. It's essentially my fake day off, which really didn't exist, but I just had an opportunity here to go for a long walk. I wouldn't say that they're necessarily walking with me, but they're always within 100 to 200 yards. This is how my summer kind of continued. If you know the salmon life cycle, the born and fresh water has a little tiny fry, what you would consider a middle. And they travel all the way down their natal river, all the way down the major system, the Cusco quim for hundreds and thousands of miles out to the ocean. They live in the ocean for three to five years. And then they return all the way up and they follow. Scientists believe by scent. They come all the way up to Cusco and they go all the way up to their natal river, go all the way up to these very clear shallow water of the headwaters and they go and spawn for the next generations. salmon, and then they die. And as their carcasses, they either start slowly swimming downstream or they just outright die and their carcasses are floating down. That's really why the wolves were there. They were there for the fish. They were there because my research gear would stop the carcasses from floating downstream and they would kind of snag up and build up there and just so happens where my research camp was, was a very good area for them to pick up these dead fish. That was my summer of living with the pack of wolves and that's essentially how it ended. It ended just as spooky as kind of it started and it was that just one day they were gone. She was gone. The wolves just up and left. That right there is now seared into my brain. All right, we're going to take a quick break for some ads but don't go away. We'll be right back. Okay, well let's see here. It looks like the card is the death card. Oh my word, Vance. I don't know what's happening, but this deck is picking up on an energy from you that I personally do not see and don't you worry about the death card. I don't mean you're going to die. I mean, look, we're all going to die and then of course we're in and carnated into butterflies but we all die before that happens. Yeah. Anyway, the death card signifies an end then if you would. Do you feel an ending up coming? No. Hmm. Okay. Well, I feel an ending coming and ending to this episode. Damn, Ricky Lee badly you short boy. Radio rental is created by pain Lindsay and brought to you by Tenorfoot TV. Showrunner is Meredith Stedman. Lead producers are Eric Kintana and Stephen Perez. Executive producers are Pain Lindsay and Donald Albright. This episode is hosted by Jeff Foxworthy and features Tony Cavalero. Writing by Meredith Stedman. Original score by Makeup and Vanity Set with additional score by J. Ragsdale. Sound design makes and master by Stephen Perez and Cooper Skinner. Editing by Eric Kintana, Sean Nerny, Stephen Perez, Meredith Stedman and Cooper Skinner. Our production manager is Jordan Foxworthy. Cover artwork by Trevor Eiler and Rob Sheridan. Radio rental merchandise by Byron McCoy. To shop Radio rental merch, visit shop.tenderfoot.tv. Special thanks to Orren Rosenbaum and the team at UTA as well as the Nord Group and the team at Odyssey. 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