Episode 70

Hate waiting a week for the next episode of Radio Rental? Subscribe to Tenderfoot Plus to get early access to episodes, add free listening and bonus scary stories. Visit TenderfootPlus.com for details. Take a break from the same old boring blockbusters and experience a new kind of movie night with the 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 our kind videos so frightening, so mind-bending, you won't be able to sleep at night. You've gone, Radio Rental. Hello, hello, welcome to Radio Rental. Happy Day of the Dead! Radio Rental, I'm your host, and Tendero, Terry Carnation, and I'm Terry Carnation. Anywho, today is one of my very favorite holidays, and for those of you who are not familiar with it, in English or Anglais, it is Day of the Dead, a Mexican holiday that reunites the living with the deceased. Yes, it sounds a little bit macabre, but it really is a beautiful whimsical holiday where the spirits of loved ones are believed to return home over the span of these two days. And every year I participate, as you can see, I've got my little altar set up with flowers and a friend us to honor all the people in my life that have passed too soon. You can see at the top I have. Well, I have a picture of Zellon, my late wife. Well, she may not actually be dead, and I'm not certain of the situation there. Maybe she's just missing, I don't know, it's complicated. Long story. Also on the shrine, Patrick Swayze, Suzanne Summers. Heroes, gone too soon. The offenders are my offerings to these beautiful people. For my wife, I have offered this multi-directional microphone. For Patrick Swayze, I offer, of course, a comb. For Suzanne Summers, a thymaster. Oh gee. Maybe I undergifted for Patrick, oh well. All right, well, enough of this. I'm sure you're here to listen to some real actual true horror stories told by real actual people, and let's see what I have in store for you today. Get it, in store? Want me to store? Okay, here we go. Let's do this one. Aquí, aquí vamos. Agamos este. Arriba con los historios del horror. 20 years ago, my wife and I were living in Moscow, Idaho. She was finishing up her red shirt year of track, and I was just graduated, and we were looking to do one more camping trip before the season turned. We had heard a lot about this town called Oak River. At the end of a highway, about east of Moscow, they had a really good diner, apparently, and a lot of good recreational hiking and fun spots to see. So that sounded good to us. So we threw all the camping gear in the truck and hit the road. We pull into Oak River. It's probably around 6.30 or 7, and the town is alive. Like it's bustling, it's packed. There seem to be tourists there. There's a big group of hunters. People are walking all over the streets. Parents hustling their kids back into the car, so they can hit the road. There's no question that there was a lot going on. That's why we were concerned as we're driving in that we're not entirely sure that we're going to get a campsite, because it seems as though everybody had a similar idea. We're following the signs to the campsite. The road takes us around the outside of town, and this isn't a very big town. Oak River is pretty small, so you can kind of get a look at the entire town as you're driving around it. There's this gravel dirt road that winds up this mountain, and that's where all the campsites are. It was just packed with cars. So we head up the mountain, and as we're going up the mountain, we're passing campsites in their occupied. And we're starting to get nervous. We're starting to wonder if we're going to be able to camp at all. But after about five or ten minutes of driving up this mountain, winding around, we pass this middle-aged couple setting up a camp off on the right. We veer around this corner, and there's a spot off on the left. It was a little tiny spot. It's right off the side of the road, so there wasn't really any privacy. Built a fire. It's got our tent set up, sleeping bags, made a little dinner, and we're sitting around talking. I think I just opened the first beer. And we hear a car. And the car starts coming down the mountain, and turns up a few minutes later, passes by, kicking up some dust. A few minutes later, we hear another car coming down the mountain, and it passes us. And then all of a sudden, there's like a steady stream of cars. And they're bumper to bumper. Trucks with campers on the back, little cars with sleeping bags packed in the back up against the windows. All different kinds of cars, all different makes and models, all different groups of people, just streaming down the mountain. My wife and I are just kind of sitting there, and we're wondering, is there something we don't know about? Is there like a curfew on this hill, or maybe the campsites closed? We didn't have smartphones back then, but it's not like we could check to see if there was some alert posted. So we just kind of had to trust that whatever was going on didn't include us. It was nothing we needed to worry about. I was the last car left. There was kind of a lull in our conversation, and then I was zoning out. I was just staring at the fire. I hear a scream. I was kind of so lost in thought that I was questioning whether or not I'd actually heard that. And I looked at my wife, and she had stopped what she was doing. So I knew that there was something, and we started talking. I was like, did you hear that? And she's like, yeah, and I'm like, what was that? And she said, I think it was someone screaming. I think that woman maybe got hurt down, and as she was kind of talking, we heard another scream coming from the woods right behind our campsite. And that one, we both stopped. It felt like there was another person screaming. Someone was screaming down the mountain, and then someone was screaming in the woods behind us. Two people either in trouble or hurt, or something. We didn't know. We just watched a bunch of people leave, and then now we start to hear this. Maybe we need to get out of here too. Like maybe those people knew something that we didn't know, and it's time to go. The scream down the mountain happened again. And it's immediately answered with the one behind us. And then it just started to happen every so often back and forth. It was no longer like somebody's hurt. It sounded like somebody's screaming at you to leave. The more they happened, the less human they sounded. All we knew is that we needed to get into a safer spot than where we were. We pulled the stakes out of the ground. We had our sleeping bags and everything in the tent. Rolled the tent up, and then threw all our stuff just in the back of the truck, without packing it back up or anything, just dumped everything back there. And then just stayed long enough to put out the fire. One of us would run out, pour water on it, stir it up. They'd run back in the truck and we'd sit and wait. And then another person would go out when that seemed to calm down, and we kept doing that until we knew the fire was out. That whole time, like every so often, you would hear this kind of call and response on these shrieks in the woods. And they were kind of moving around. The one behind us was kind of moving in the trees and it seemed to getting louder and louder. And the other one down the mountain was doing the same. It seemed to be getting louder and louder. And it kind of felt right on top of us by the end. And when we were sure the fire was out, we fired the truck up and started driving back down the hill. As we were driving away, you could hear like one last shriek in the night as we started driving down the mountain. We wanted to stop and check that other campsite where we were hearing that other screen. If somebody did need help, we didn't want to just leave. We kind of slowly drive by and their camp stuff was all still set up. They didn't have a fire going but their tent was there and sleeping bags but their car was gone. We didn't know if it left when all those other cars that we don't remember them leaving so we didn't know when that happened but we just assumed that they were gone. That just kind of reinforced the idea that whatever was motivating all those people to leave, it was validating that we needed to leave as well. Clearly there's something going on here where nobody wants to be camping on this mountain right now. And so we started heading back down the hill. It's a narrow dirt and gravel road. No turn-offs like we're just following the road down. It's not as though we have a bunch of choices on different ways we can get down the mountain. There seems to be only one way down the mountain and we're taking it. My wife has got her phone out and she's trying to get service because we're both kind of throwing with energy and as we're getting closer to town I can start to see lights through the trees but the last little stretch of road does not feel familiar. It feels like we should be going off to the left and we were going off to the right making all these turns that I didn't remember making. We come around this band the road drops there's kind of a big hill and it spits us out into town and when I looked at where we were my first thought was this isn't Elk River. This isn't the same town. Nothing about it looks familiar. We were looking down a main street that was lined on either side with businesses. There was one flashing red light in the middle of that main street. There's not a car in sight. There is an a person in sight. All that activity that we had seen a couple hours before. No sign of that at all. Not even parked cars like there was nothing there. There were a couple leaves blowing across the street. It just felt abandoned like an abandoned town. We start driving down the street and we're trying to find our way to the highway and we're driving down in my wife's still looking at her phone trying to get service. As I close in on that flashing red light there's a business kitty corner on that intersection. It has these big windows kind of like a small town diner looking place and there's this eerie red light glowing from inside. It's kind of spilling out on the sidewalk. As I stop at the four-way intersection I'm looking in that building. It's the only sign of life that I've seen is this light coming out. Inside I can see that there's somebody in there. There's a lot of weird jerky movements and I turn to my wife and say do you see that? And I go to gesture to what I've just seen and by the time I look back at that building there's somebody standing in the window looking outside. They have a wedge cap on in this apron. There's kind of stains on both black smudges smeared all over. It was creepy to see this person that had been flailing around or whatever they were doing to suddenly be standing in the window that quickly was odd. It did not feel natural but the creepiest part was the person wasn't looking at us. They were staring straight out the window into nothing that buildings on the other side of the street were dark. There was nobody in the street and they're holding this big kitchen knife in their hand. I remember my wife was just like we have to get out of here. This is not even like excited, scary, fun story, territory anymore. This is like we need to get out of here. There's something going on and we don't need to be here anymore. As I start to go the person starts yelling, yelling at the window out into the vacant air. They don't seem to register us as we drive by. It's like they're ranting at somebody, like they're letting somebody have it. This person was very angry. Make a way through the next stretch of the six seven blocks of this main street. You get to the end of the main street and there was this T intersection and there was a sign pointing off to the right where the highway was. It says highway eight this way and as we turn onto that road we see a person walking down the middle of the road and they were tall. They were walking very, very slowly, almost robotically down the middle of the road on the double yellow line. They had this black hood on that was covering their face and their head. This long black trench coat was kind of billowing around their legs as they were walking. I'm slowly coming up behind this person. I keep waiting for them to register that we're coming. But there was nothing like this person did not seem to know or care that we were behind them. So I'm pulling over to the shoulder of the road, whatever shoulder was there. I'm slowly going by. As we pass by this person as my rear view mirror and my driver's side window get right next to them. They slowly turn their head and I can just see the bottom half of the face and it's this pale angular jaw and this super wide narrow grin and they're still walking super slowly. At that point I was like we just need to go. My punched it. I'm kind of paying attention to this person in the rear view mirror. I'm half expecting them to start sprinting after us and up ahead where we turn onto the highway there's this little gravel turnout lot and there's a old round headlights rusty seams farm trucks sitting there. It's completely dark. It's not on just sitting there. We get to the turn to get onto the highway and as soon as I make that turn the headlights on this truck fire up the engine worse to life and it pulls in right behind us and just starts tailing us. Now we're winding on this mountain highway and one side of the highway is a sheer drop all the way down to this elk creek and on the other side is this steep mountain so there's no shoulder to pull off on. There's nowhere for us to go except forward and this truck is right honest. They're so close that I can't see their headlights. I look in the rear view mirror and I just see the windshield and I just see like two non-moving silhouettes in the driver and passenger seat and if I go faster they go faster and if I slow way down they slow way down. We finally get to this spot where there's a little bit of a straightaway and you see the sign one of those small town signs it says thank you for visiting elk river come again soon and immediately after the sign there's a sharp turn to the left we go past the sign make that turn the truck's right honest we're probably going 45 or 50 miles an hour as soon as we make that turn I look at my rear view mirror and the truck's gone. There's no sign of it like slowing down and coming to a stop there's no glow of its headlights as it stopped behind that turn there's no evidence that truck was ever there it's just disappeared. We just continued on down the road not looking back not wanting to stop it took us a while driving home before we could like decompress and actually talk about what had happened. We were so off-balance by all those things that happened back to back that it did just take a minute for us to ground ourselves back into some form of reality that we could like tell ourselves to. It really wasn't until we started to see cars coming the other way other signs of life that we felt like okay now we're back into something we can recognize. We get home about one or two in the morning, we kind of just sit around and talk about it. We didn't sleep the whole night. We just kept reliving those moments, reliving different parts of it, trying to find some sort of through line. You know, I think at this point we've just accepted that it was just an experience that has no explanation. All those pieces together, it was so creepy and bizarre that we really have no explanation and so we don't really try to explain anymore. We just kind of accept it as this bizarre experience. The possibility that that was a supernatural experience is absolutely valid. There is absolutely a possibility of that. That makes more sense to me than to try to assemble any sort of logical through line through the entirety of it. There is something exhilarating about that. It's not something I want to relive ever again, because there was an uncertainty that we were going to make it out of there. Holy, holy elk, what in the real life horror movie was going on there? Good Lord! Remind me to cross Elk River off of my list of places to retire and rather find a nice condo and amityville. Honestly, that sounds kind of nice. Long Island. It's beautiful this time of year. Okay, time for ads. And we're back from Los Ads, excellent day. Hey, Malachi, be careful around all those candles, dear. Okay? Remember last time what happened when you were around an open flame? Hmm? Caught your tail on fire and then went missing for a week. We don't want to repeat of that. We have literally done that episode. Hey, hey, hey, hey, Malachi, don't get too familiar with that picture of my wife, Malachi. Don't be weird. I should have neutered you. Yeah, you better run. I'm going to put the next tape in before Malachi comes back. Consider this story and a friendah to you, my dear horror, fiend. It was late September 2020 during COVID. We're living in a rural Michigan. I was there with my husband and my two children. It was a pretty idyllic farmhouse. We had three acres. We had about a flock of ten chickens and a rooster. Michigan had been drastically locked down throughout the year. We couldn't go to parks. Restaurants were closed. So we really were just sort of secluded. My mom decided to visit from Arkansas. She had flown up and was there for about two days. We had planned a road trip to Colorado with the kids. And we were going to see what it was like. We hoped to someday move to Colorado. We all went to bed one night in Michigan. The nights get pretty cold. We don't need air conditioning. We all have our windows open. As you're laying there, you hear a lot of noise, but it's all generally pretty quiet. You're just going to hear crickets and the river running in the back. The coop was about 500 feet from the house. Throughout the night, we had our rooster, a big, huge, black rooster, crow all night long. A full alert crow. It's quite disturbing to hear the rooster waking you up. A rooster will alarm everybody that danger is nearby. They will make sure their whole flock knows that something alarming is happening and that they all need to know. It's very loud. It's very disturbing. This rooster was crowing nonstop every five minutes. All the way until the morning and then it stopped. The next morning, I said to my mom, "Oh my gosh, that rooster just like kept me up and she is like, I know me too, what in the world?" Having own chickens for over 10 years, you know that's unusual. You don't ever hear a rooster at night, ever. Maybe a fox or a predator was trying to get in the coop and we thought, well, maybe that's why it was crowing all night. So I sent my son out in the morning to let the chickens out. He didn't see anything unusual. The coop was secure. They all run out and they run to their swamp land and they sort of disappear for the day. But the rooster usually won't. He will stick around, hang out, keep an alert for any hawks or anything that might be around. So I went out about the morning. I went upstairs and I started to get ready and brush my teeth. We had a dark brown granite vanity in our bathroom. I was brushing my teeth and I looked down and there was this perfect imprint of a skull staring back at me at this dark countertop. There was a perfect skull made out of toothpaste. It was obvious that it was white toothpaste. It was obviously a skull too. The skull to me looked like one of my children had dropped maybe a bit of toothpaste on the counter and then stuck their palm in it. As they lifted their palm up, it left the skull. I don't know why but I just instantly knew that something bad was going to happen without a doubt in my mind and I immediately text my husband who is a large animal veterinarian. Exactly what I text was something bad is going to happen. And it wasn't like I was being dramatic or overthinking anything. It was just clear like completely clear in my head that something bad was going to happen. Come around noon. I went downstairs. We started to get lunch knowing the routine of my family and the chickens and the rooster. I realized the rooster was not growing and usually a rooster will grow a lot in the morning and it will die down but you're going to hear a rooster all day long. My husband came home. He always came home at lunch and I said maybe you should go out and look for that rooster because now it's not growing. Maybe it did not get into the coop and it was locked out of the coop and had been out all night and it was fending off predators. He went out and he found the rooster in the back in the dark corner of the chicken coop and it was just laying hidden in the shadows in the back. The rooster was completely dead. I had already gotten into Rigamordia so I had been dead for a while. He pulled it out of the coop, checked it over, looked for injury, nothing was wrong with it, no injuries, no feathers were lost. Usually if a predator gets in a coop you're going to see feathers all over the place. The rooster just appeared to have crowed itself to death. Maybe crowed itself to the point it had a heart attack, it's the only explanation. My husband's a veterinarian, he's not an avian veterinarian but he knows chickens really well. There was nothing wrong with this rooster. He was a year old, he was young, he was healthy, huge. We had no viruses, no signs of any disease, no sign of predator attack. There was no sign that anything had tried to even get into the coop that could frighten it. He just crowed all night to exhaustion and had died. My husband went back to work. We were left with this giant rooster body. And so we decided to bury it under our apple tree that we had in the back of our property. We went about packing for our road trip, kind of ignored the events. I didn't think anything of it. A rooster's going to die, these things happen. And so we just ignored it and went about packing for our road trip. The next day, we were supposed to leave for Colorado. We got on the road. When you leave Michigan and you drive to Colorado, you have to circle around Chicago. My brother at the time lived in Chicago. And my mom, I know, would have been really excited to see my brother. But the timing of it wasn't great. For one, we had a timeline with our road trip. We had reservations. Two, my brother was uptight about COVID, COVID restrictions. We decided that we would not stop. But we had decided that we would text my brother and say, we're passing Chicago and we're waving. Hello, as we go by and we love you. During that week, my brother's restaurant had just opened back up. He was training new staff. They had been closed all through COVID restrictions. He was busy. And we kind of understood that. And my brother, he's 10 years older than me. He wasn't like a great text responder anyways. So it wasn't that unusual to not hear a reply from him. So we just decided to just keep going. And then we made our way. We finally ended up in Pugosa Springs, Colorado. The minute we arrived, we get out of the car. We go to a park to let the kids run around. And I get a phone call. And it's a nurse from an emergency room. That's asking me about my brother's medical history. They were asking me if he was a drug addict or an alcoholic. They were questioning whether he had diabetes. I was completely thrown off guard by why a nurse was calling me asking me those questions. They found him collapsed in his apartment. He had aspirated pneumonia, which meant that he had been down for days. I was completely shocked. I hung up and I talked to my mom. And my mom just immediately lost it and started crying and was really upset. And then we just immediately tried to figure out how we could get her to an airport to get to the hospital to see what was going on. We didn't know if he had had a stroke. The hospital had no idea what was going on with him. I was able to get in touch with his best friend who actually had been talking and texting with my brother. He had told me that since September 24, my brother had become very ill in his apartment. Due to the fear around COVID, they decided to kind of stay quarantined from each other and just communicate through text. I immediately got my mom to an airport. She flew to Chicago. She was by his bedside. And I had my children. And we were going to stay with a friend. And then we were going to make our way back to Michigan. After I had made it back to Michigan, I was trying to piece together a timeline of how my brother could be found collapsed in his apartment alone in Chicago. I was trying to kind of come to terms with what happened. So I asked his friend if he could send me screenshots of his text messages. And I was reviewing those text messages. And then I was going back through my photos trying to understand what I was doing around that time and why I wasn't hearing why my brother was sick and I wasn't getting text messages from him. My brother did not want to worry his family, particularly his mom and especially with the fear around COVID. He texted his buddy on September 25 saying that for 24 hours, he's had a horrible fever. He's been shaking uncontrollably that he's just been really sick. I realized that on September 24 going through my photos was the day that I saw the skull staring back at me and was the day that I text my husband saying that something bad was going to happen. I was looking at these photos and I realized that that's also the day that the rooster crowed itself to death. That's a really weird coincidence. These two messages came to me within hours of each other on the same day that my brother became ill. So we arrived back to Michigan. The kids are so happy to be back in their yard, running around, playing, finding all their chickens. And they ran to the apple tree that has their swing. The rooster is now sitting under the apple tree, fully intact, dug back up. Having had taken it or ripped it apart or eaten it, it was just waiting for us. Pretty shocking that the rooster was back. That the rooster had found its way to the surface again. I'm always an investigator. I want to make sense of puzzles and problems. I want to find solutions in understanding. So I googled, what does it mean when a black rooster crows at night? What does it mean if a black rooster suddenly dies? According to folklore and old traditions, these are some of the worst omens that you can receive from the underworld, from the cosmos. They say that black roosters particularly symbolize death. They symbolize a change for the negative. Just really, really bad news is coming to you when this happens. It was just shocking to me that these two messages came to me within hours of each other. On the same day that my brother became ill. It was exactly the time that he started becoming sick. My brother's illness was so severe he was in the hospital for 150 days with a brain infection. He'll never make a recovery. It was life altering to the most extreme any family could experience. It's completely devastating for everybody. According to folklore, there's nothing that you can do to stop whatever bad is going to happen when you receive omens like a rooster crowing throughout the night and dying suddenly. All within hours of each other. People can have premonitions of their death or of someone that they love, something bad is going to happen and maybe there is this like subconscious ability that people have to pick up on these signs when something bad is going to happen. You really need to listen to the omens. If you feel in your heart that something is going to happen, you should listen to it. I hope that that dear family hasn't endured anything like that sense. My heart goes out to them. I'm also kind of freaking out because I swear I recently saw a toothpaste glob on my counter in the shape of the Taco Bell logo and I hope that that doesn't mean anything bad. Or I wonder if I'm going to come into a great deal of Taco Bell in my future somehow. That would be an omen. I would be very interested in, but I don't think that's how omen's work, chalupa. Time for some ads. Thank you for celebrating dear Delos Muertos with me today here at Radio Rental. Such a beautiful, beautiful holiday. I do hope that perchance I might be visited by my late wife Zalon during the night, that would be. "A rousing. I'd like that, or a union if you know what I mean." No, I'm not talking about necrophilia. It's gross malachai, I simply meant her ghost or whatever, it's different, it's not dirty, it's still monogamy, it's spiritual monogamy, it's totally normal. It's bone-chilling, pun intended. So long, everybody. Radios, amigos de Radio Rental. Radio Rental is created by Payne Lindsay and brought to you by Tenderfoot TV. Lead producer is Eric Quintana, executive producers are Payne Lindsay and Donald Albright, hosted by Rainlelson as his character Terry Carnation. Written and produced by Meredith Stedman, additional writing by Mark Locklin, supervising producer is Tracy Kaplan, associate producer is Jojo Muhammad, editing by Eric Quintana, Mike Rooney, Stephen Perez and Meredith Stedman, sound design by Cooper Skinner, with additional sound design by Stephen Perez and April Ruha, makes and master by Cooper Skinner, with additional mixing by Stephen Perez and Devon Johnson, original score by Makeup and Vanity Set, with additional score by J. Ragsdale, video editing by Dylan Harrington, cover artwork by Trevor Eiler and Rob Sheridan, special thanks to Orren Rosenbaum and the team at UTA, the Nord Group, station 16, back media and marketing and the team at Odyssey. If you have a Radio Rental story that you'd like to share, please email us at your scary story at gmail.com, or contact us via the form on our website, radiorentalusa.com. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter @radiorental. You can also follow the illustrious Terry Carnation on social media, just search at Terry Carnation. On behalf of the Radio Rental store, we'd love it if you'd subscribe, rate and reveal. Thanks for listening.