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Episode 76

47m 8s

Episode 76

Radio Rental presents a collection of chilling, true-life horror stories told in an immersive, vintage VHS-style format, blending suspense with personal anecdotes to create a unique listening experience. The stories revolve around real incidents such as mysterious phone calls, unexplained intrusions, and nighttime sightings, often involving a deep familiarity with the victims’ routines. One narrative follows a college student who experiences repeated calls and a terrifying visitation, while another details a home invasion where a figure enters, observes silently, and leaves after hours. The hosts, particularly Terry Carnation, frame these events as symptoms of psychological distress, highlighting how fear and paranoia can manifest in response to ambiguous experiences. The show not only entertains but also explores the human tendency to interpret the unknown through the lens of trauma and logic. With humor and self-awareness, the stories balance fear with reflection, inviting listeners to question their own perceptions. The program promotes a sense of community through its call for audience submissions, and it is marketed through subscriptions and merchandise, reinforcing its role as a modern horror storytelling platform rooted in authenticity and atmosphere.

Transcription

6907 Words, 36328 Characters

English
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 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, welcome to Radio Rental. Please come in, look around, look around. We may appear to be just a humble video rental shop, but we're not. Just a humble video rental shop, no? No, no, no, no, no, no. I know why you're here. You're here for the special collection. Here at Radio Rental, we possess quite a delicious secret stash of the scariest true stories you've ever heard, all told by real people. And on the greatest, most modern format ever created, VHS, videoHS. The VHS tapes make these scary stories all the more exclusive, because firstly, they only exist right here at Radio Rental. In hard copies, no cloud, thank you very much. Also, the technology is so delicate, it's so intricate. And yet simple, you see, it's pretty cool. Look, you just pop this plastic part right here. And you can see the magnetic tape that winds around the rotating thing. And you just pull and you. Didn't actually mean to do that, hold on a second. You know what, I think I can wind this back up. I don't have a pencil around here, it's something, one with an eraser. Let me get a little. stick. oh, okay, that was an accident. You know what, I don't think there was a very scary story anyway, so I'm very sorry to whomever's trauma that was overused word these days. Trauma, it's kind of like authentic. Everything's trauma and authentic. What's your authentic trauma? Anyway, you must be wondering, who is this man in front of me with a flowing bobbling hair and a beautiful woolen turtleneck who knows so much about technology and video H.S. technology? And to answer your burning question, I am Terry Carnation, I run the shop here, I'm a former AM radio star of the paranormal calling show, perhaps you've heard of it, dark air, and I'm also a phlebotomist, just not by trade, but by hobby, and oh, excuse me, one moment. Hello. Hello. So weird, fourth time today, Dem Robo calls. If I wanted to speak to a robot, I would talk to my cold, emotionless cat Malachi. It's practically a robot, a robot cat. Absolutely no empathy in that meow, but it's just me, me, me all the time. It's all me and no ow. Anyway, enough about that. I know you're actually here, not to listen to me, Babel, but to listen to one of my scary stories, so let's pop one in. You've been very patient. Okay, not the broken one here. Malachi, I play with this. Make it a cat toy. Here's your new cat toy. Oh, this one's good. And by good, I mean bad. Very bad. Let's do this one. In the 90s, things were just different. Growing up, my parents weren't nervous, like we are today. They both worked full time, and we raised ourselves in the summer. We just had this inflated sense of confidence that we were fine, and the real life couldn't happen to us. How did it happen now? I think we would have been far more vigilant and a lot more afraid. This takes place in about 1998 to 1999. I was living at home attending Weber State University. I grew up in a home with 10 other siblings, so I'm the youngest of 11 kids. Four or five of my siblings were already moved out and married by the time I came along. Just me and my sisters are pretty much the only ones left at home. Everybody's moved on, gone away to graduate school or got married and moved out. There's only me and my two older sisters living at home were all attending Weber State University. All have separate schedules. My dad is actually a professor at Weber State, and my mom works in their education department. My parents always had the same schedule. They left early in the morning. Where we lived was at the end of a dead end street, with a wall of pines dividing us from the rest of the neighbors, and then our property dropped down into the mouth of the canyon. I remember one morning, everybody being gone to school, and we didn't have cell phones at the time. We did, but we didn't. We had landlines, and so when the phone would ring, all the phones would ring in the house. One particular morning, it started ringing and ringing, and I tried to ignore it. It kept calm back, calm back, so I picked it up, and there was nobody there, so I hung up the phone. What happened again? So I picked up the phone. Once again, nobody's there, but I listened for a second. You could hear somebody there, but there was no heavy breathing. It was just obviously in my mind, a prank call. I hung up the phone. It called back a few more times, and I just unplugged the phone. And I didn't really take note of it. This started happening almost every morning. I would just pick it up and hang it back up. Sometimes I would pick it up because I was irritated that I got woken up, and I might actually say, like, quit bugging me. I didn't appreciate getting woken up every morning. Then my sister Shannon reported having the same thing happen, when she would be home, getting phone calls. She would sometimes be a little bit more upset, like, yeah, you could hear this creepy breathing. I don't know if whoever was calling was amping things up, or if he just enjoyed talking to my sister more. But we talked to my parents into getting caller ID, which was relatively new at the time. I don't know why this would have stopped the phone calls because I don't know how a caller would know we had caller ID, but it did. We didn't get calls anymore. And we all just kind of forgot about it. One morning, I went out to go to school. After everyone had left, I went out to my car, and I noticed that there was glass on the ground. As I walked around my car to see what was from, I saw that the back window had been broken out. The first thing I looked at was my car stereo to see if it had been stolen, and it was still in place. So I went around to the driver's door, opened up the car, looked through it. As I sat there, I noticed that I wasn't missing anything. Things in my car, the move, my wallet that was in the armrest had been taken out. My license was actually on the dash. There was a few dollars in my wallet. There was not anything worth stealing, but that was still there. My glove box was dirty, not fingerprints, but dirt smudges, and so did my wallet, so did my driver's license. So I don't know if this person actually had dirt on their hands. And I think at that time, I felt rather invaded because it felt very personal. My first thing was it's the same person that we've been dealing with on the phone. That just came to mind. That was my instincts. Somebody knowing the family's schedule to know when everybody leaves the house, that that would be a good time to start harassing someone that was home alone. A college girl that was home alone. It all felt like it was related. Now I complained to my parents about it and we just continued to do what we did. We weren't used to having locked doors and monitoring things. I didn't really have any recourse because I just didn't really feel like that was something I could call the police about. But it did start to escalate shortly after that. It was fall, getting a little colder, but it was still pretty warm outside. We didn't have a see in our house at the time, so most of us slept with our windows open. This one particular night, I remember being pulled from my sleep, just woke up for no reason. And I remember sitting there thinking, "Why am I awake?" So I rolled over and went back to sleep. Happened again a moment later, and it was kind of irritated. I rolled back over, then the third time, I remember sitting up in my bed and actually saying out loud to myself, "Fine, I'm awake." So I got up, I went and used the bathroom, got a drink of water, came back into my room, flipped out the lights, climbed into bed. And right as I got comfortable, I heard a loud pounce. My bedroom window sits about seven feet off the ground. There's a basement window below it, and then there's kind of some, like, wanes coating that you could stand on. So someone had been right there at my window, and as I got into bed and turned the light out, he jumped down and I heard him walk. I rolled out of my bed onto the floor and actually crawled down the hall to my parents' room. And my dad, next thing I know, he was a mugsie girl, "What's going on?" I told him what had happened, I was upset. He went outside, looked around. Whoever had been at my window was long gone. I was starting to get rattled, for sure. I was starting to feel like this place of security was now being encroached upon. We're now upset enough about it that my dad says, "Okay, well, we're going to start making the house more safe and his ideas will get some sensor lights put up around the house." And that seemed to help. That seemed to give us all a little bit more of a sense of security. We also started talking about, "We really need to start locking the doors," which we had never done. And we started just making measures so that we felt a little bit more secure that if somebody is going to continue to snoop around the property, we felt like it would be less convenient for them. One evening, about nine o'clock, it was dark, and I decided I needed to run to the grocery store down the street. This night, I walked out of the breezeway, waved my arms, set the sensor light off, and I did my usual dart to the car. I darted down the driveway, prayed and unlocked my car, jumped in, locked the doors, and went to the grocery store, came back home, got out of my car, locked it. As I walked up the driveway, waving my arms, the sensor lights weren't going off, and I kept waving and waving, and I started to feel the sense of dread. And as I got directly under the lights, I looked up to see that the light bulbs had been removed. Seeing those empty sockets, my heart sunk. It felt like somebody was there watching me. It felt like I was not alone standing there under that empty flood light. The next day, we actually took inventory around the house, and we noticed that any lights that were on the deck or corners of the home, the sensor itself had actually been angled up towards the sky. And we saw an old broom on the back patio that was just dropped on the ground. It had appeared to us that this person had taken that broom and pushed the sensor lights with the handle of the broom up to the sky so that they wouldn't go off. And that was unnerving. So it made us feel like this person knew our property, knew our home, every bit as well as we did, if not better, from watching it. After that had taken place, we had our first snowfall. We lived in Ogden, Utah, we got quite a bit of snow, and we joked because activity had stopped. The phone calls, none of us noticed anyone walking near our windows. We didn't have footprints in the snow. We named him the Fair Weathered Stalker, and we all started to get sort of this sense of security that maybe it had been over. And he was done. And when we started going back to our usual activities, it was as soon as that weather and the snow had melted that it started to pick right back up where it had left off. I remember the first time that we realized it was happening again, my sister came home from a date. She looked rather flustered and pale in the face, and we were like, "What is going on?" She just said, "Somebody bashed out the sensor lights on the driveway." We were like, "Bash them out!" So we went out there and someone had actually smashed them, like glass on the ground. This felt more aggressive, more frightening than before, because it almost had teeth behind it. It almost felt like whoever this was was angry. We were all thinking the guy that harassed us all last summer is back. We came to a head this particular evening. It was a weekend, a Friday night. We had had friends over, hanging out, playing games. They had gone home. My parents had gone to bed. I imagine it was about 1 a.m. We were all packing for a river rafting trip that we were going on the next morning. We were getting our things together. I'm in my room packing and my sister is looking for a sleeping bag that happened to be in the trunk of my car. She goes out the back door. I'm folding things in my duffel bag and I hear this blood-curdling scream. I freeze. I start yelling her name. I'm like, "Shannon, are you okay? Are you okay?" But I'm still too terrified to move. I hear my sister Nancy screaming, "Shannon, Shannon!" We're just yelling her name. And then it went quiet. Then we heard her say, "Who are you?" Followed with, "Don't move." And then she screamed into the house. Call 911 as she started booking in the back door. She got back inside safe, locked the door. She's wide as a ghost and I'm calling, shaking, calling 911. And as I'm on the phone, she tells me there is a guy outside. He's on the side of the driveway when I came out. He froze. She froze. They were all of about 10 feet away from each other. And he just stayed staring at her, kind of frozen in the light. The man she saw was actually a younger guy. Said he was probably in his later twenties. Kind of a taller, gangly, athletic build, clean-cut hair. He looked like a normal guy. You'd see off the street. Following the phone call, they were there really promptly. I was looking out the window. I could see several cops with big, mag flashlights going through the bushes, going through the trees. Then this batch said, "They're done looking. They haven't found anyone, but they would like to talk to you if you guys want to come to the door." And I remember all three of us and my parents were awake at this time. They actually said to us, "You're not the first people who have called about somebody snooping around in this neighborhood." They told us of a woman just a couple blocks up from us and she lived alone. But when she came to her home, the dishes had been used. Someone was actually in her kitchen cooking. Another woman complained that she had woken up in the middle of the night to a man standing above her bed and she started coughing. Kind of panicking and at that point, he left the room and fled the house. You know, I don't feel like they were trying to tell us anything to make us nervous, but I think they really did want us to take this seriously. They said, given the amount of activity that we had had, they felt like we were kind of a hotspot. They were concerned. Maybe a week or two after that, I woke up one morning. And my parents were always out of the house. My sister Nancy was always out of the house by 7, 7, 30. And then either Shannon or I were left home alone. I remember waking up just enough out of my sleep to hear my sister walk into my bedroom. And she was standing there in my room. I just felt like I shouldn't open my eyes. I just was tired enough. And my mind just told me that she was looking through my closet, wanting to get something, wanting to borrow something. That wasn't unusual for us to try to borrow each other's things. I remember specifically saying, "Don't wear my white shirts." She didn't say anything. She just shifted. You know, I had old carpet in my room and the matting under it made kind of a crunching noise. I could tell very specifically where someone was walking in your room. She shifted a little bit. I didn't know what she was looking at. I didn't really care. I didn't want to open my eyes. And then she walked to the doorway and stood there. And I remember thinking like, "What is she doing?" But again, I didn't open my eyes. And the phone started ringing and she leaves my bedroom. And the phone keeps ringing and the phone keeps ringing. And I say, "Shannon, will you get the phone?" No response. So I sit up in bed and the hallways dark. Then I walked out into the hall and her room was dark. And the phone's just ringing off the hook. So I walk into the kitchen to get the phone and I just felt this chill come over me. I felt like I wasn't alone. But there was definitely no sister in my house. I remember picking up the phone. It was a telemarketer. I set the phone back down. I really felt like there were eyes on me. And I just remember my heart kind of racing. I looked out in the driveway and there was no car. There was no one. I looked back in the empty house and that was when I knew I wasn't alone in the house. I knew that whoever had been in my room wasn't my sister Shannon. I knew it was someone who was standing there staring at me and watching me sleep. The house was dead silent. All my senses were heightened. I'd been lined up right to my room. I locked the bedroom door and called 911. I sat there listening as I said, "I'm a home alone. I think there's somebody in my house." Dispatch said, "Stay on the phone with me. Are you in a room with the door locked?" I said, "Yes." The lock was something you could open with your finger now. Paper thin wood door. They were faux wooden doors. They were hollow. And she said, "Stay put. The cops are on their way." At that point, I was standing in my window with the window open and my foot against the screen because I knew that if somebody opened that door, the best thing for me to do would be to jump out of my window and then run for it. Dispatch kept saying, "Are you okay?" And I just said, "I don't want to talk. I didn't want to make any more noise." And as I sat there, I heard someone walking down the hall. And my door knob twisted. And there was a little push on the door. And I sat there frozen, like not breathing, listening to every sound. And I heard the person walk down the hall towards the front door, went out the front door. And at that time, Dispatch said, "Hey, they're almost there, they're coming." I stayed right there in the window, I was trying to look out my window to see if I could see anyone coming from the front door. And then I just remember that I saw the cops come up the street. She said, "Stay in your room, they're going to surround the house." When she walked me through exactly what was happening. Finally she said, "K, it's safe for you to come out." They went through your home, they're there for you to talk to. I remember opening my bedroom door and they said, "Do you remember the front door being open?" It had been left wide open. Interestingly enough, after that incident, my brother Chris came home from law school and my nephew Adam moved to our house within probably that week. And when they moved back, everything stopped. Hey, I don't think it was ever solved, I don't think anyone ever knew who it was. I remember the cops saying to us, "Often times when you have a situation where somebody's stalking you to this degree, they know your schedule, they're calling your phone when people leave the house, they know when to come, when not to come." They said, "Often times they're people that you've met somewhere." They just had a fault since the security. God, that's terrible. This is exactly why I installed security lights around my store too and I'm not even a young woman. Hello. I think I would make an excellent young woman. Anyway, I can't imagine how they felt being preyed upon like that. You see outside? See, I've got security lights and they're on right now. Now, imagine if you saw a person skulking by that, "Oh, wait, did you see that? Did you see that? A literal person was just skulking by that window." As I said, imagine if you saw some, "Are you going crazy?" You know what? Seeing things is a well-studied byproduct of listening to radio rental stories. Probably just a trick of the mind. Let's pick a quick break for ads and we'll reset. Do you have a dark curiosity? Heart Starts pounding, Horror's hauntings and mysteries is a weekly podcast hosted by me, Caitlin Moore. Each week I'll take you on a dark journey through terrifying, true urban legends, bizarre true crime cases, chilling tales of backwards horror and more. So if you're looking to join a passionate community of the Darkly Curious, check out Heart Starts pounding on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. And remember, stay curious. Did you know that if your spouse goes missing, but you don't tell anyone, that's not necessarily a crime? That surprising fact is that the heart of the brand new season of Bearbrook, the award-winning true crime podcast from New Hampshire Public Radio, I'm your host, Jason Moon. In season three, a private matter, we investigate another New Hampshire mystery, a beloved Christmas tree farmer with dementia vanishes from his small town. His wife never reports him missing. Can he still be found? If you knew Jay as well as I do, he's private, he doesn't want everybody to know his business. I don't believe you. I kind of revered back to that Bearbrook saying, "What if we were to just come across something?" In a rude challenge, he said, "I found him." Follow Bearbrook on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back from ads. I hope you purchased something nice and useful from our sponsors, perhaps something with a difficult cancellation policy. Now, how about we. are you serious? I don't want to update my vehicle insurance policy again. What do you want? Hello? Who is this? Who are you? I demand your identification. Hmm. It was odd, probably just, I don't know, Malachi's vet calling to remind us about an annual check-up, a draining of the anal sacs, perhaps. You do have a vet, Malachi, at least I'm pretty sure, we must have visited one once. Oh, really? Okay, well, we should probably get you a vet then. Good thing you've been so healthy, Malachi, huh? Whoa. Okay, now I'm sure of it, there's someone out there. The harassing phone calls, the shadowy figures, this must be all connected. Um, but, excuse me, where's my head? Don't make the customer uncomfortable, Terry. I actually have that poster on a little sticky note right here, to remember. It's good to have a mantra. My other mantras, mechalakahai, mechahaili, ho. Anyway, I'm sure it's all absolutely fine, and let's just plug in another VHS tape for our listening pleasure. Oh, oh, oh, yes, this one, oh, this one will do. When I was 18, I lived in a suburb of Melbourne. I was working in my first proper like adult job. My office was about a 20-minute walk from my house at the time. I had a dog who was a great, great guard dog. I was finishing work rather late. I was working till about 8pm at this time and I'd walk home from work. I came around the corner as I approached my house from across the road and maybe 50 metres away and I could see my carport roof which was connected to the side of the house and above the carport roof was a bedroom window. The sun was setting behind the house and I could see the silhouette of what I assumed was a person standing on the carport roof looking in through the window. It looked to me like a skinny tall person. I stopped for a moment and sort of looked at them for a second. I yelled at them from across the street. They stood up and then they just got smaller. The silhouette shrunk and disappeared which for my perspective was they were running away from me. They were running across the carport into the backyard to get out because I saw that I had seen them. But my dog's kennel was under the carport. He didn't bark, he didn't make a noise. The carport roof was made of corrugated iron. It's very loud when you walk across a corrugated iron roof and I couldn't hear footsteps. My dog couldn't hear footsteps. To get off my carport roof he would have jumped into my driveway and then run through the backyard. We had a huge rotation ridge back. He would not have let anyone come through that yard. After seeing it disappear my next thought was, or maybe it was a shadow of some tree nearby that was just cast across the window and made it look that way. I don't know how that could be, but my mind looks for a logical material explanation first. It's not a person because my dog would have barked, they would have heard it run off the carport roof and seen it jump into the backyard. It must have been a shadow. The day after I saw that I was in the house by myself, my parents were away at the time. I was coming back home from work again, it was around 8.30 when I was walking home, paid extra attention to that roof this time and there was nothing there, so my relief. I went inside and fed the dog and made myself dinner and had a pretty standard evening by myself at home watching a movie. I went to bed around 11.30 pm that night and I went through my usual routine before going to bed of checking all the windows and doors and that included actually closing most of the internal doors in the house. The suburb we lived in, not the craziest high crime rate, but it wasn't that surprising to hear if someone got broken into down the road or around the corner. Locked all the doors, made sure the house was in good order, had the dog inside with me most of the night, but I did put the dog to bed here as a big outdoor kennel where he sleeps, went upstairs to my bedroom and fell asleep. A few hours later, I was awoken by something, I'm not sure what, I don't remember hearing anything or being woken up by anything specific but open my eyes and I sat up in my bed, I looked at my door and under my door I could see the light coming in from the hallway and I thought that was strange, I was fairly certain I had turned off all the lights before I fell asleep that night, I assumed at the time I've left the hallway alone, whatever I'm tired, I'm gonna go back to sleep. So I lay back down on my side, I'm facing the wall, the opposite wall of my bedroom and I start to hear the door handle of my door rattle. It starts to sound like someone's trying to open it, someone's in the house, I think someone's trying to open my door. Maybe that thing I saw on the roof the night before was actually a person who wasn't a shadow and maybe here they are, now trying to rob the place. I'm in the house by myself, if we're being robbed, it's probably more than one person, I think I'm gonna pretend I'm asleep and just hope they take whatever they need to take and leave. I'm lying there, listening to the door handle open, hearing my heart stop pounding in my ear. I see this narrow vertical slit of light appear on the wall and that slit of light starts to widen. The door is opening and the light is pouring in from the hallway into my bedroom and is forming this line of light on the wall that's expanding as the door is getting more and more open. I'm looking at this light on the wall, this is coming in from the hallway and then I see the slit of light start to get narrow again and eventually close. Okay, they've opened the door, they've seen me, they've closed the door quietly. I assume at this point they're either gonna leave because they realize someone's home or they're gonna finish what they're doing and someone's just gonna keep an eye on the bedroom and make sure I don't cause any trouble. My heart's pounding but I'm desperately trying to listen to anything I can hear, any footsteps outside, any talking, the sound of anything being taken out of window or at a door or the sound of my dog barking and I couldn't hear anything, it was complete silence. I start to feel this pressure around my feet. The blankets pull really tight. I feel the mattress at the end of my bed sink down and my heart rate starts going up again I can hear it pounding in my ears. This is terrifying. I'm just trying to slow my heart rate, pretend I'm asleep. I could see the clock on my stereo and the other wall, a little off to two at this point in the morning. I'm not paralyzed, I can wiggle my toes, I can feel my fingers, I can hear my heart beating. I'm fairly certain at this point that I'm wide awake and that this is actually happening. I can feel the pressure on the end of my bed but I can't hear anything, I can't hear anyone breathe, I can't hear anything downstairs, well I can hear as my heart. I did have a TV in my room, at one point in the night I was staring right at the screen trying to pick up any movement in the reflection and I was trying to focus on it to see if I could see a silhouette or anything at the end of my bed and I couldn't. I was too scared to like look up with my head and make it obvious that I was awake. I think to myself after some time I'm going to do a gentle like little turn in my bed because I'm sleeping on my side at the moment, I'm going to roll my body over. I roll over a little bit onto my stomach and my legs roll and as my right leg comes over my left leg it hits something solid at the end of my bed. Someone's opened my door, come into the room, close the door and it's just sat at the end of my bed. I start running through all these scenarios in my head, should I sit up, should I say something, should I just sit here and do nothing and I'm listening at the same time to hear breathing, feel movement, can't hear or feel a thing. I'm not sure what to do and I sit there feeling this solid object up against my feet on the end of my bed. Now I'm not sure what happened next. I don't have any memory of what happened next. The next time I look at the clock, it's a couple hours later and I think to myself, oh my God, I must have fallen asleep and perhaps all of this was a dream. The light coming in from outside starts to get a little brighter. It's that time of morning now where the sun hasn't risen but the sky is a bit brighter and some of those early birds start chirping. I can start to see everything in my room a little clearer now. At this point it's a little before 6am and so I shuffle in my bed a little bit once again and as soon as I shuffle I feel that the blanket is still very tight around my feet and there is a weight on the end of my bed and I can't move my feet past this thing. I'm trying to like roll over and bed a little bit and my feet just keep heating up against this thing. The room's starting to get brighter now. It's nearly 6am. I feel the weight at the end of my bed lift. Suddenly I'm terrified again my heart starts racing. It's standing up. Just as it happened earlier that night, the vertical slit of light on the wall appears again and gets wider and then it gets narrow again and completely disappears as my door is being closed. I hear again the door handle make its rattling noise as if someone's pulling the door shut. I wait about 5, maybe 10 minutes and I must have the courage to sit up in my bed. I look down at my door and the light is still on in the hallway. I can't hear anything in the house. My dog is sleeping, hasn't talked all night. I look around the room. There's nothing missing. There's nothing at a place. A few minutes after that I decide to get up and open the door. my door and go explore the house. Walk down the hallway upstairs, peep into the other two bedrooms, the windows are closed. They're old-school metal-latching windows that close from the inside, they lock from the inside with a pull-down lever. And then I go downstairs and the first thing I do is I let my dog in. I go to the back door, I call him, bring him inside, let him explore the house, see if he acts weird. He starts sniffing around, I start looking into all the rooms. All the internal doors of the house are still closed as they were when I left them last night. And there's just no sign of a break-in enter at all. There's no sign anyone even came into the house. I spoke to my neighbor, looked for reports of break-ins in the area that night and couldn't find anything. As far as I can tell someone came into my bedroom at around 2am, opened my door, closed my door, sat on my bed and watched me sleep for four hours, before leaving just before 6am. I don't know how to explain the last time. I didn't feel like I fell asleep. I don't think I could have fallen asleep. My adrenaline was up, my heart was beating, I could hear it in my ears. From my perspective it felt like I blinked and suddenly the room was getting brighter because the sun was starting to rise and it was between 5 and 6. I've thought a lot about whether the shadowy silhouette that I saw on my roof the day before was the same thing that came into my room and sat on my bed for hours. I gave that a lot of thought. I find that terrifying and so it's not really a thought I want to entertain. I'd prefer to believe it was something else. I would much prefer to believe that my house was being cased out the night before. Someone found a way in without using the doors and a way out again, came in looking for something specific, didn't find it and then left. But I can't really make sense of that explanation if I'm being honest. Oof! Oh, that's some freaky imagery. I'll admit I kind of relate to this one. Except usually it's just Malachi's giant arse on the end of my bed. They can be pretty alarming how solid he is. Imagine a bowling ball nesting next to your ankles in bed each night and with a wig on top of it, that's Malachi. If he were to sit on my face at night, I would suffocate. Yeah, go ahead and try it Malachi. If you kill me in my sleep, who will feed you then, huh? Malachi, that's terrible. Don't you dare feed on my flesh. That's disgusting. I want an open casket funeral and I want to look good, baby. Really good, on fleek at my open casket, a dime piece in the coffer. Anyway, time for some ads. Oh, I must forgot about the incisod phone calls. You know, let's listen to ads instead of worrying about my potential murderous stalker problem. That's right. Consumer consumption cures all. Let's escape our incisod anxiety by buying something. And we're back. And I have a barricaded the door. But don't you worry, you can still get out via the little kitty door I had installed for Malachi. I'm pretty sure you can fit through that, because I handcrafted it a little extra wide for your feline Tushy. F-word rhymes with cat. Anyway, it's been lovely seeing you today. It's been far too long. Really, don't be a stranger. Come back next week and I'll play you a couple more of my prized. Oh, that's it. That's it. It's better be the last time you're in sufferable bastard. You. Oh, hello, mother. Mom, this is really not a good time. I'm dealing with it. Yes, I know. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have used that tone of voice on the telephone. Great point, mother. I'm sure customers would appreciate a cheerier disposition. No, I don't know your brickbox login. I don't. Nor your acorn. Okay, okay. I love you. Okay, okay. Love you. Love you too. Bile in the throat. Horrible woman. Oh, where was I? Oh, yes. Come back next week. I expect to see you then. Ta-ta for now. Out the kitty door you go. [Music] Radio Rental is created by Pain Lindsay and brought to you by Tenorfoot TV. Showrunner is Meredith Stedman. Lead producer is Eric Kintana. Executive producers are Pain Lindsay and Donald Albright. Our main host is Rain Wilson as his character Terry Carnation. Written by Meredith Stedman, additional writing by Mark Locklin. Original score by Makeup and Vanity Set. With additional score by J. Rocksdale. Editing by Eric Kintana, Steven Perez, Meredith Stedman, Tristan Bankston, and Sean Nerney. Sound design makes and master by Steven Perez and Cooper Skinner. Additional editing by April Ruha and Dayton Cole. Our production manager is Jordan Foxworthy. Our social media manager is Caroline Orajema. Video editing by Dylan Harrington. Cover artwork by Trevor Eiler and Rob Sheridan. Radio Rental Merchandise by Byron McCoy. To shop Radio Rental Merch, visit shop.tenorfoot.tv. Special thanks to Orren Rosenbaum and the team at UTA as well as the Nord Group and the team at Odyssey. If you have a Radio Rental story that you'd like to share, please email us at [email protected] 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.

Podcast Summary

Key Points:

  1. Radio Rental offers early access to episodes and bonus scary stories through its Tenderfoot Plus subscription, with all content delivered on vintage VHS tapes for a unique, tangible experience.
  2. The stories feature real-life paranormal and unsettling incidents, such as repeated phone calls, broken windows, and mysterious intrusions, told in a narrative style that blurs reality and fear.
  3. One story describes a college student who experiences persistent phone calls and a terrifying intruder, culminating in a night when a figure is seen sitting in her bedroom and watching her sleep.
  4. Another account involves a person seeing a shadowy figure on a roof, later followed by a similar event where someone enters the home, opens the door, and sits silently on the bed for hours before leaving.
  5. The stories suggest a pattern of stalking behavior that knows the family’s schedule, uses deception, and leaves no physical evidence—indicating a highly targeted and personal threat.
  6. The hosts, including Terry Carnation, emphasize the psychological effects of such experiences, noting how fear, paranoia, and sensory hallucinations are common in these true tales.
  7. At the end, the narrators present the stories as part of a broader exploration of human vulnerability, with the belief that some fears may stem from the mind’s attempt to make sense of the unknown.
  8. The show blends humor, personal anecdotes, and horror to create an engaging, immersive experience that invites listeners to confront their own dark curiosities.

Summary:

Radio Rental presents a collection of chilling, true-life horror stories told in an immersive, vintage VHS-style format, blending suspense with personal anecdotes to create a unique listening experience. The stories revolve around real incidents such as mysterious phone calls, unexplained intrusions, and nighttime sightings, often involving a deep familiarity with the victims’ routines. One narrative follows a college student who experiences repeated calls and a terrifying visitation, while another details a home invasion where a figure enters, observes silently, and leaves after hours.

The hosts, particularly Terry Carnation, frame these events as symptoms of psychological distress, highlighting how fear and paranoia can manifest in response to ambiguous experiences. The show not only entertains but also explores the human tendency to interpret the unknown through the lens of trauma and logic. With humor and self-awareness, the stories balance fear with reflection, inviting listeners to question their own perceptions.

The program promotes a sense of community through its call for audience submissions, and it is marketed through subscriptions and merchandise, reinforcing its role as a modern horror storytelling platform rooted in authenticity and atmosphere.

FAQs

Radio Rental is a unique experience that brings mind-bending, scary stories to life through vintage VHS tapes. Unlike traditional video stores, it offers a surreal, immersive experience with stories told by real people, designed to challenge your perception of reality.

Subscribers to Tenderfoot Plus get early access to episodes and bonus scary stories. This subscription also includes free listening and special content not available to general audiences.

Radio Rental features real, terrifying true stories about paranormal events, stalking, and unexplained phenomena, all told in a vintage VHS-style format to enhance the eerie atmosphere.

Yes, the physical VHS tapes are central to the experience. They are rare, analog, and only available at Radio Rental, adding authenticity and exclusivity. The tactile, mechanical nature of the tapes enhances the sense of realism and fear.

Terry Carnation is the owner and host of Radio Rental. A former paranormal radio host and phlebotomist by hobby, he shares personal and terrifying stories, guiding listeners through the chilling experiences at the store.

Yes, the show features real, documented cases such as a woman who was stalked by someone who knew her schedule, and a person who saw a shadowy figure on a roof and later experienced a door being opened in her bedroom.

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