Episode 114

Hate waiting a week for the next episode of Radio Rental? Subscribe to Tenderfoot Plus today for binge listening. You'll also get ad-free episodes 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 night, you've gone Radio Rental. Now, keep heading down the hall. Just past the break room, you'll see something that looks like an air vent. Oh, oh, um, hey, uh, yeah, hold on one sec. Go ahead and pull that vent cover off. Off the wall. Oh, there we go. Hey, man, welcome to Radio Rental. We're a video rental store with an exclusive collection of scary stories, all told by real people. I'm Vince. Last time you were here, I'd just found a retro training vid for Radio Rental employees. I just can't stop watching it. It's bonkers. And if you remove the air conditioning grill, you'll see that it's not air conditioning at all, but a crawl space. I knew this place didn't have air conditioning. Then, valued employee, you've finally located our. infinite storage. Anything you're looking for can be found in there. And unfortunately, anything you're not looking for. can also be found in there. Good luck. Did you guys hear that? I mean, there's, like, extra rooms somewhere behind the walls or something. Sicko, that's. I mean, honestly, I always wanted a secret hang for me and my friends. I always wanted friends, too. Anyway, enough of the dilly-dally. I'm gonna pop in a tip for you while I go search for this crawl space. Hmm, I'm gonna go crawling for this space. I was pregnant with our second child. I was having a lot of concerns over the house that we were living in. So, we had been looking to move. And our realtor had taken us to. I don't know, dozens of homes. I said, you know, let's take a beat. I'm very close to having this baby at this point. I'm exhausted. We're not getting anywhere. And maybe I'll just make it work at our current house. I failed. I failed to turn off the notifications that you get online when a new house comes on the market. So, after I had told our agent, I don't want to look anymore, eight or nine days later, a new house is on the market. And when this thing popped up, I was like, wow. It was really, really interesting to see something that was, you know, from the 1890s. So, I called the realtor and I was like, look, I know I said that we should stop looking, but I really, really want. to go see this house. What stood out about it to me was that the condition that it was in was untouched. There was still gas lighting, flames running the overhead fixtures, and it looked like this incredibly preserved relic. And I just immediately fell in love with it. The rooms were so magnificent looking and everything was so ornate. I remember saying to the listing agent that it feels like I just walked into the Magic Castle in Hollywood. I made the joke to the realtor. I was like, man, this furniture is incredible. You guys should leave it behind. I didn't know that that was actually the plan at the time. The open house was a couple days later and I brought Matt back. They had an offer deadline of, I think, Monday morning. We saw the house together on Saturday and he agreed. It's really, really cool. And how amazing would it be for our children to grow up next to this park? So we put in an offer. And to be honest with you, it was kind of a joke. We've been beat out so many times already. There's no chance that we're going to be taken seriously. I grew up in a historic house in downtown Oklahoma City. And so I wrote a letter to the sellers saying that I have experience living in a historic home. I understand how important they are to preserve for the community. And if we have the opportunity to be the buyers, we would raise our family here. Our realtor called 48 hours later and told us that our offer had been accepted and that it was nowhere near the top offer. We got chills. We were like, this is fate. We are so excited about this. I had a number of panic attacks over it because it needed so much work. To make it livable. It didn't have even a bathroom or a kitchen that worked. But I was just so excited by the opportunity to preserve this piece of history and make it our family forever home. We moved forward. We did our inspections. The sellers were a historic preservation nonprofit. And they were really, really involved with us showing up to all of our inspections. And to our appraisal. And they were always there, which is a really unusual way of selling a home. Usually you never see the sellers, but they were always around us. So we thought, we know everything there is to know about this house because the sellers are here sitting in this room with us while we're having our inspections. Surely they've told us everything there is to know about this house. So we end up purchasing it. And we start, you know, taking things, you know, out of the house. Along the way, we're having a ton of fun because the sellers left everything in the house that was in it from not only them, but from the family before them who lived here from 1970 to 1993. So we're documenting this on our social media. We're talking about the things that we find in the closets and the antiques that are in every single one of the rooms. And it's very, very fun. And then we go back to the house. And we get this letter. Matt calls me and he goes, I got a letter in the mail and it says purchaser on the envelope. Says it's come from Canada. It's the very first piece of mail that we actually got to the house that wasn't our mortgage statement. So I come over and open the letter. It's this very detailed, multi-page typed letter from the house. And it says, I got a letter from the house. I got a letter from the house. From somebody who claims that they used to live in this house. We got a letter addressed purchaser. It says, let me introduce myself. I am the last surviving member of the Madison family who once owned the house and I grew up in it. I didn't know someone I would like to pass on a brief history of the family, tell you about the secret rooms and a few things you may not have been told when you bought the house. Yeah, secret rooms. There's no way that this is possible because we sat here with the sellers and then we started thinking maybe they didn't know about them either. We were initially both freaking out. What do we really know about this person? But on the other hand, secret rooms are very exciting to everybody. And so immediately we're like, we need to find out if these are still here. Let's start with secret room number one. Now to the secret room. There are three, including a compartment in the fireplace downstairs. We'll start there. And immediately I was like, we have three fireplaces downstairs. Which one is it? And it mentioned a mirrored panel. Well, there are two fireplaces with mirrored panels above them. So Matt automatically runs into the foyer and starts grubbing up the mirror with his hand, trying to push on it to see if it would give way. And I realized it must not be that. It's a fireplace. So we go over to the other fireplace. So I don't think it's this one. I think it's this one. Yeah, well, I. Okay, it says the panel slides up to reveal a secret compartment. Oh, oh, oh! Oh, it's heavy, man. When he pushes on it, lo and behold, the mirror slides upward, revealing this panel. What? You have got to be kidding me. What we saw inside was so. exciting because it was just full of all of these bottles of alcohol, beer, wine, spirits, everything. And they were just caked in dust. 1989, Napa Valley. What is cream sherry? That sounds disgusting. Yeah, there's no deal. Oh my God. This is, first of all, very dirty and crazy. Vineyards and distilleries and breweries that are now closed and these things are covered in dust. It's all completely undisturbed. My understanding now is that it was a prohibition, sort of hidey hole that probably has been in the house since the day that it was built. Wow. Okay, wait, there's two more rooms though, Matt. Hold on. We go back to the letter and then read where the second one is. She said there's a panel across from the bathroom door upstairs. In that panel is a room behind it. She actually, I think, said that there's a little knob hidden inside the panel, but that knob was gone. So it took us a while to figure out exactly where she was talking about. And actually, Matt had to go buy a full hazmat suit and start prying apart the paneling in the wall to get behind it. It ended up being a room where the original refrigerator was. And Matt had to go buy a full hazmat suit and start prying apart the paneling in the wall to get behind it. For the house was kept, but that's not the way we cool homes anymore. So that's not what was back there. We initially thought, well, that was kind of okay. There was nothing back there as far as we could tell. It was as she said, but there was nothing back there. We posted a video about this online and somebody in our social media comments said, I think I saw a box in the back corner. We went back up there and there was not just one box. There were about, 12 boxes full of things. And it was passports with people in 1920s clothes in these passports. It was letters from famous magicians who toured all over Asia. It was all kinds of like antique perfume bottles and soaps and things like that. It actually took a while for us to find room three. That didn't have anything in it, but I think it's because everything from that room had gotten kind of dispersed all around the basement already. We found trunks that were on a sister ship of the Titanic that have the original room label in them. We have found an entire Victorian wedding dress and suit from somebody. There are paintings and portraits of people in our basement that I don't think we will ever know who they are. There are dozens, hundreds of scrolls because the house came with a lot of music kind of equipment, like a Victrola record player and a piano from 1880. And then a player piano that you roll up in front of the piano, you put a scroll in it and it plays the music for you on the piano with these hammers that come out. Hundreds of songs for that. And then Matt has recently started going through letters between this person named Ralph and this woman named Angel, and she was communicating with him while he was in World War II. And so she was sending him letters every single day the entire time that he was in service. Who are Ralph and Angel to us? We still have no idea. We cannot figure out why their entire five-year-long pen pal ship is in our basement. Posters and travel diaries from someone who was affiliated with Frank James and Jesse James. One of the things that we found was a book by an author named Chan Thomas. Chan Thomas has written a number of very popular conspiracy theory books from what we could find. The book that we found was an unpublished manuscript in the walls of our house. It was a book called We Are the Killers, and it was about treating cancer. Very like side tangent here, we didn't know what to do with this book. We actually put it up on eBay and immediately got an offer for like $200. And we thought, well, that sold very fast. Maybe we don't accept it. And we thought, well, maybe we don't accept it. And we thought, well, maybe we don't accept that offer. And so we took it off. We posted about it on social media and people were like, we've been dying to read this book. Everybody's been looking for it. You have to upload it somewhere, which we have done. But we ended up selling the original one and it sold immediately for $800. I had some kids from a like local high school reach out to me and say, hey, we're doing a project on Chan Thomas. We really would be interested in knowing more about this book because we can't find any copies of it anywhere at all. Could you share it with us? And I said, sure, no problem. So I scanned it in, I uploaded it for them. I got an email from them about six to eight months after they sent me that email. And they said, you're not going to believe what we have uncovered. Three weeks later, I emailed them back because I'm not great at checking my email. And I said, hey, please, I'd love to know what you uncovered. And the emails bounced. I have no idea what they found, but there's all these theories that the CIA actually bought the book from us. And if you think that's like a stretch, the CIA actually redacted a number of Chan Thomas books. And so you cannot, they now have declassified them. But for a very long time, a book that he had written was partially redacted and you couldn't get the full manuscript. So it is not completely out of the realm of possibility that the CIA actually purchased that book from us. And a lot of people on our social media seem to think that that's the case. To this day, three and a half years later, we still have not been able to go through everything in that basement because it is just packed to the absolute gills with stuff. The story continues. Because we have continued to get these letters from this woman for three years. And we get sometimes two a day. The person who wrote us the letter identified herself as essentially a foster sibling who lived here with alongside Roger, the former owner, but they were not blood related. She took nothing from this house. So when it was donated to the nonprofit that we ultimately bought it from, we still had all of her pictures from high school in the basement. We have this drawer in our house where we store all of these letters and we have dozens of them. I know she watches our social media and sometimes she'll send us gifts based on things that we're talking about on social media. For example, this very large music box was locked and for years we haven't been able to open it. Well, the next thing to show up is a bag full of skeleton keys to try. And I've gotten some very odd cookbooks and she has sent us a mugshot of hers and some sort of indication that she's works for the government. We've gotten riddles. That one's always interesting. Really bizarre riddles about a man. In space and essentially how long can he survive without oxygen? The one letter I think that really kind of scared Matt, you know, he was here at night alone. We were, we had a bunch of water damage. The ceilings were quite literally pouring inside the house and he goes to check the mail and there's a purchaser letter. She continues to write purchaser rather than our names. So he opens it alone here in the dark when we have no electricity. And it is a picture of a Peters meter, which is a device used to identify like shorts, I believe in your alarm system, like where people might break in or be able to break in. It's a picture of a Peters meter. It's a letter about her being a fugitive from Arkansas and unable to return to the United States. And it's a wanted poster. To this day, I don't know if it's real. I've tried looking these things up. I come from a background of being able to find people. I have cast reality television. I can find anybody. If they are to be found, if there is a scrap of evidence that they are a real person and exist online, I will find them. I cannot find this lady. I can't find anything about her. at all. And I know that she must have survived social media because, again, she watches our TikToks. And she's, as far as we know, in her 70s and lives in Canada. But what do we really know about her? Because all we know about her is what she writes about herself in these letters. The letter that we got two weeks ago, all it said was turkey, turkey, turkey, gobble, gobble, gobble, turkey, turkey, turkey, gobble, turkey, gobble, turkey, gobble, turkey for the whole page. Why? Over time, we've posted some of these videos on our social media, and it's created a bit of a frenzy. And I think she watches that. She does not sign her letters with her name anymore. And now she calls herself Secret Stalker. They all come from her. Different mailing addresses. For example, the ones I'm looking at here say this one is coming from Captain Jack Sparrow, Dudley Do-Right, Al Capone, Elizabeth Windsor, B. Smith. Some of them are sent from Alcatraz or from Rikers. A lot of people have told us we need to go to the cops because this is scary. She's actually sent us a letter from her. She's sent us a letter from her. She's sent us a photo of the outside of our old house when we used to live there. I, for the most part, think it's harmless. And it's fun for me. Matt is unnerving to him. Again, I'm coming from this from the place of, you know, I grew up in an old house and people did this kind of kooky stuff. But she is, I think, takes kooky to a whole new level. I do think sometimes I have to be careful when I share what she's written to us on social media because people genuinely, you know, like I said, we have young children and people do get kind of concerned for us that we are feeding into her desire for tricks and the intrigue of the whole story by reading them. And maybe that's right. But I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. If she hears this, I don't think any of this will surprise her one bit, to be honest with you. I mean, we've read all of her letters. And like I said, she watches everything. So I don't think anything here would surprise her. Yeah, I know how they feel right now. Now, secret rooms in your own home. That's some nefarious behave. Like, who knows what could be back there? Like somebody could be living back there. Like my stepdad, Chad. Yeah, maybe I finally reunite with Chad. He lurks in shadow. He slips into dreams. He casts no reflection. Audible presents Bram Stoker's Dreadnought. A new full cast audio thriller starring Ella Purnell of Fallout as Mina Harker, Jonathan Bailey of Wicked as Dracula, and an A-list cast including Maggie Gyllenhaal of The Dark Knight as Van Helsing, Amy Lou Wood of The White Lotus as Lucy, David Johnson of Industry as Dr. C-Word, and many more. The new full cast thriller locks Mina Harker in a battle of minds with the Count. When Mina's fiancé, Jonathan Harker, Louis Partridge of Enola Holmes, vanishes in Transylvania, Mina pieces together letters, diary entries, and chilling testimony to hunt the predator stalking those she loves, only to discover Dracula's already hunting her. Joined by the enigmatic Van Helsing, Mina and a small fearless band race against time to stop this ancient terror. Using her intellect, her resolve, and a gift for drawing the unseen lines between clues, Mina just may hold the key to bring down the Count, if he hasn't already found his way inside of her mind. Featuring a haunting original score by Ilan Ishkari of Audible's 1984 and spatial Dobie Atmos sound design, Audible's Dracula invites you to welcome Mina Harker to the show. Audible's new full cast original adaptation, written by Robin Ahern and directed by Mary Lambert. Now on Audible. Listen to the darkness. Go to audible.com slash listen to Dracula. Hey. Hey, I think I found that crawl space. Had to move some old boxes, but had too many copies of Troll 2. They were just all stacked up in front. Troll 2 and the lawnmower, man. Whoa. This is gnarly. It's so deep. How far does this thing go? Well, only one way to find out. Hey, pop in another tape for yourself. Belay on. Vince is going spelunking. When I was a kid, I was like, I was a big martial arts kid. My father was a boxer, his father was a boxer, so I learned a bunch of martial arts. And then I got interested in weapons, but since I'm from Canada, it's like if you want to get a gun, it's pretty hard. So I guess my focus went straight to knives. I had the stuff, I had the butterfly knives, I had all that stuff. I ended up buying a machete at Army Surplus. And it's just something like me and my friends would use to like fuck around basically. Like I had a wooden statue and it was almost like a tradition, you know. Like you'd come into my home, you'd take the machete out of the wooden statue and you'd just slash it. It was very satisfying. It sounds a bit wild and I'm a very peaceful guy. that machete saved my life i think when i was a was a teenager i was living with my mom just me and my mom she was dealing with some some medical issues so she had to take sleeping pills she would sleep like a rock like i would i would use that time to like produce music go crazy you know i guess the sleeping issues kind of ran in the family too because i had some issues sleeping so i started taking some natural sleeping meds like with valerian and a bunch of stuff but it wasn't as hard as what she was taking you know one night i after i took my meds uh i went to bed for some context my my bedroom was set up in a way that's like uh it's like a u-shape you know the entrance is uh is at one end of the u And my bed would be at the other end of the U. And in the middle of the U, there would be like a bookcase that's see-through. I could see through it, like through the DVDs and the books and all that stuff. I fade to sleep, that drugged out kind of sleep, you know. I basically wake up to a muffled voice in my room. muffled because I was drugged out, you know? As I opened my eyes, I could see through the bookcase. There was a silhouette of a man facing me through the bookcase. My brain was all messed up, so it was starting to take time to warm back up to being awake. And then I realized, I live alone with my mom. I don't live with a guy or a tall man, any kind of. My mom doesn't look anything like this. Right next to my bed, I had a machete. I would jam that machete into, like, a wooden statue that was, like, it's sheet. So I just yanked it out of that wooden statue. And that guy kind of saw that happening and bolted out of the house. And I ran after him with my machete in hand and boxers, like, just wilding out. By the time I reached outside of my room, he was already out of the apartment. And I realized the door was ripped off the wall. It was kicked off the wall. Like, the sides of the walls were ripped off. The frame was completely destroyed. The door was on the ground inside the apartment. I was about to chase the guy, but then I realized my mom is in the apartment. Her door is right next to the entrance. My whole focus kind of switched at that moment. I ran into her door. The door was closed. I opened the door. She was sleeping. Thank God. He didn't do anything to her. I woke her up, and I called the police. And as the adrenaline was starting to wear off, I realized that it was even weirder than what just happen the guy came in the apartment he didn't open any doors except mine there's a bunch of doors that he could have opened but it just opened mine it went directly to me and then i realized also that he spoke to me right he was talking to me you're in a haze when you're like kind of on sleep meds so it just like sounded like a like like muffle you know like a what is he trying to tell me you know maybe he's a drug addict going through some kind of hallucination or i don't know what or maybe someone who was looking for someone that used to live there but i've been living there for like eight years with my mom i don't know it's just it was just straight up strange the police showed up and they couldn't do anything basically because like if they don't catch you getting murdered they don't they don't do anything you know that's that's how it works so i just stayed up all night uh machete in hand guarding the door teenage me trying to protect my mom i told her to go to sleep it feels like it might be either someone i knew or someone my mom knew it just felt like he knew the the apartment just for the fact that he he skipped like three doors to get to mine directly didn't open any other door yeah it feels strange that thing stuck with me for a while because uh i i was i think 16 more or less when that happened and then i lived another year with my mom there i lived two more years alone there because it became an apartment it never kind of left me today i'm tired of it i'm tired of it i'm tired of it today i'm 34 and i'm still a bit like messed up by it i wake up very easily i'm i'm like always sleeping with one eye open whenever i move somewhere new i always make sure i have some kind of weapon next to my bed it's still an issue to this day like i think i might have like a mild form of like btsd or something because of it if i hear a tiny noise in the night i'm i'm on my two feet you know i'm not a big guy like i'm like five seven uh on a good day the best deterrent other than the gun to me is a machete like like if i see a guy with a machete i'm gonna run because that's that that is a devastating type of knife that machete saved my life i think you hey hey i'm over here now i'm behind the wall are you guys still there look i found my way into the crawl space but now i can't find my way out and um probably a bad time to say this but vince is a tad bit claustrophobic i do not do well in tight spaces i get a little uh um i mean not machete man level but i mean pretty darn close um i'm gonna do some breathing exercises one two three okay let's take a break can't get enough of me terry carnation then you're in luck because my face is all over some brand new merch go to shop.tenderfoot.tv doge okay i can't take it anymore man the walls are closing in the walls are closing in huh freedom freedom it's just my mouth catching some air from inside the store through the hole i just punched in the drywall damn that feels good even though this air inside the store is not the cleanest uh hey you know my po always used to say you can't punch yourself out of a problem hey po you were wrong just punching myself out of this one okay yeah i i yeah malachi i know i know i will need to patch this hole later um but at least my mouth gets to breathe right now oh it is nutso back here swear to god it's like way bigger here than you'd think kind of feel like it goes on forever i swear i see a little bit of neon light shining from somewhere feels like i can hear something too look if you can pass me my flashlight i'm just gonna scoot on out of here uh nope now man now please okay there is something back here bro oh oh radio rentals created by payne lindsay and brought to you by tenderfoot tv showrunner is stephen perez lead producer is eric quintana executive producers are payne lindsay and donald albright hosted by tony cavallaro as vince writing by meredith stedman and stephen perez visuals and music by makeup and vanity set sound design mix and master by cooper skinner with additional sound design mix and master by chris childs editing by eric quintana mike rooney sean nerney 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 oren rosenbaum and the team at uta as well as the nord group if you have a radio rental story that you'd like to share email us at yourscarystory at gmail.com or contact us via the form on our website radiorentalusa.com follow us on instagram at radiorental on behalf of the radio rental store we'd love it if you'd subscribe rate and review as always thanks for listening and for being a loyal radio rental customer this is jill schlesinger from jill on money managing your small business finances shouldn't feel overwhelming zero out of five 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