Episode 81

Hate waiting a week for the next episode of Radio Rental? Subscribe to Tenderfoot Plus to get early access to episodes, ad-free listening, and 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. Oh, hi. Welcome to Radio Rental, a video rental shop with a collection of the scariest stories you've ever heard, all told by real people. Come on in. Don't be shy. Actually, this is great timing for me because I have an itch on my back and I can't really get it on the corner of the front desk. Could you get that for me? Low back. Actually, under the chin would be nice, too, while you're at it. Okay, you don't have to scratch me if you're going to be all weird about it. Uh, it seems like you don't realize what's happening here. I'm Malachi. I'm Terry's cat. We've met, like, a lot of times. I get it. I'm not naive. You're a little surprised I can talk right now. Is that it? Kind of hypocritical, I might say. You come here fiending for paranormal stories and weird, unexplained events and stuff, and then when one actually happens to you, you're put off? Classic humans. They always want to put you in a box, except when you actually want to get in a box. Then that's when they take it out for recycling. Anyway, I don't know what to tell you. A witch visited me in the middle of the night. Yeah, that's what I said. I was sleeping over there on a perfect rectangle of newspaper and I opened my eyes and there was a witch in front of me. And she waved her hands in my face and then said I would be able to talk for two weeks. And I said, well, I don't know. I don't know. I'm just telling you what happened. And yeah, I didn't think this is what my human voice would sound like either. I'm as surprised as you are. Anyway, Terry left the store all of a sudden and now I'm in charge. No quote unquote babysitter showed up this week to help me. I mean, better than the last guy who kept trying to high five me. Do I look like a golden doodle? God, I hate, hate golden doodles. The dog equivalent of an inbred popular girl. Beautiful and so dumb. Okay, well, anyway, scary tape time. I'll nudge the right tape with my nose. Uh, but you're gonna have to physically put it into the VCR, though. I may have a voice, but the witch didn't grace me with opposable thumbs. Great, thank you. You never really know what's lurking nearby. If your feet are on the floor right now, what's beneath the floor? If you reach out and touch your wall, what's behind the wall? Things can surprise you. There are all sorts of places where things can hide. Every year, I would go to summer camp. Camp every summer happened in August. Something that we would do regularly as an activity is we would go swimming. The whole camp was situated around a big man-made lake, And there was a section for boating and then another section that was sectioned off for swimming. One day, my group and the group of corresponding age boys went for a swimming session. There were probably about a dozen of us. We would run down this long wooden dock, jump into the water, swim out to a floating dock that was like maybe 10 yards ahead of us. climb up the dock, mess around, jump off, just goof around and have a good time. There was another floating dock very similar to the one that we would always swim to, but it was way further down the lake, probably about three times as far distance as the one that we would normally go to. The years that I had been to this camp, I'd never seen anybody Go over to this other dock. One day, I had the bright idea that, like, hey, instead of doing what we normally do, why don't we go check out that other dock? It's pretty much the same thing. But, you know, it's a little bit of a challenge to have a longer swim. It's just like, you know, something a little bit different. So we swim down to this other dock. I'm not the best swimmer. You know, I don't swim that often. So, you know, by the time I got there, it was like a little bit worn out. Everybody's climbing up on the dock. I'm treading water, and as everybody is climbing up in front of me, I see on the ladder to go up to the dock this strange-looking spider that I'd never seen before. It was pretty big. It was probably about two inches long end-to-end, and most of that was legs. It was very leggy, had a long, skinny body, and something that was very strange to me about it was it had these really large mandibles that kind of protruded out. and so I was just like kind of there in the water looking at it waiting for my turn to go up and so I walk up the ladder past the spider I made sure to like leave as much distance as I could between the spider and myself we climb up on the dock we were all a little bit tired from the long swim we lie down in the sun we're just kind of resting for a little bit it's like a beautiful childhood memory and our really just perfect day. We got up and started playing our normal games, jumping off the side of the dock, normal horseplay, joking, laughing. One thing that we would normally do is we would sink the dock. Everybody would get together, stand kind of near one of the corners and move further and further into the corner, putting all of the weight on the corner of the dock so that it would sink down into the water and then everyone would just like kind of jump off and the dock would pop up and everyone would laugh and, you know, get back on and, you know, whatever from there. The dock filled with water. And as it filled with water, hundreds of the type of spider that I'd seen on the ladder came pouring out from in between the boards, all between our feet, all in the water with us in the part of the dock that was already submerged. Full-grown adult spiders. They started running over the feet of the children who were standing on the dry part of the dock. The dock exploded with spiders in every direction. Their long legs going everywhere, climbing over each other. There were several different sizes of spiders amongst the horde of them. There was a large number of spiders who had just been very disturbed. We all panicked. We jumped off the dock into the water. We jumped in all helter-skelter, all different directions, every which way, to try to get away from them. The spiders were all around us. They were faring better in the water than we were. The surface tension was holding them up, and they were kind of almost walking on the surface of the water. Everybody started to scream. Everybody was splashing and panicking. As I looked around and realized how many spiders were around us in the water and how hard it was to get away from them, it occurred to me that my long hair was not tied back. Oh my gosh, are there spiders in my hair right now? I reached my hands back and I could feel, you know, strands of my hair kind of floating on the surface of the water. And sure enough, I could feel those long legs of those spiders. I could feel their little bodies mixed in with my hair and immediately I just panicked. I dove under the water as fast as I could, just shaking my head, trying to get them off of me and away from me. It was hard to move away from the spiders because all of the movement going on in the water was so unpredictable. I didn't know which way to go. Every way seemed like the wrong way. There were spiders everywhere. We were trying to get away from them, but we really couldn't. It was difficult to get away from them. We swam back to shore, swam back to another dock that was connected to the shore, got out of the water. We were all done with swimming for the day. Everybody was quiet. We didn't say much to each other. We were just all very shaken up and we just wanted to go back to our tents. I don't know that much about spider habits. I don't know if there's any evidence or if these spiders like live in a community or whatever. The whole dock was full of full grown spiders living there in some sort of a colony. I wasn't very afraid of spiders before this incident occurred, but I was arachnophobic for many years after this. That whole time, they were inches from us, right below the boards that we were laying on. You never really know what's lurking where. Oh man, I love that story. Is that scary to humans? I would be having a field day, batting around all those little spider bodies. Oh man, I love when I find a bug in the corner. Best. Best day ever. All right, let's take a break for ads. I think I saw a moth over there, so obviously I'm going to go investigate that. Okay, hope you enjoyed your ads. I really enjoyed eating that moth. All right, let's listen to another story, shall we? Here's your next tape. Are you going to put it in? Yeah, because, you know, still no thumb growth in the last five minutes. This was about 24 years ago. My child was about a year old, barely walking. During that summer. We liked to visit a local lake. It was a small lake. It was actually more of a pond. The bottom was clay and seaweed, the bottom of that lake. Other people brought their little kids there, and we'd picnic and swim. On this particular day, it was about six o'clock in the evening, there was quite a few families there. About 20, 25 people at the lake, in the swimming area. I was holding my daughter. My wife was swimming, and I was talking to my daughter while we were watching the water, and I heard my wife shout my name. I looked over at her, and she was standing there uncomfortably, kind of grossed out look on her face. Kind of a little bit scared. And she's saying, "I think I just stepped on somebody's face." I thought she was joking. I just thought she felt something weird under the water. Then she repeated it, "I really think I just stepped on somebody's face." It wasn't deep water, where she was standing was up to her waist. But I remember her shouting, "I think I just stepped on somebody's face." She was shifting her weight back and forth, trying to kind of get out of there. She got out of the water pretty quick, and she said, "I felt a nose and an eye socket." It's what she felt, it's the feel of it, the softness. When she said she felt that eye socket. She felt that nose. That's what made her sure. There was a lot of people at that lake, and they could hear what she said. She was talking to me, but obviously everybody in the area could hear what she had to say. Nobody really cared because it's a lake. You find strange things in the lake. They heard and saw what I saw. And nobody really reacted. Nobody came and talked to us and said, "Where was it?" There wasn't a circle around us saying, "Should we call the police?" People continued doing what they were doing, and they just assumed that it was nothing. That's when I considered going in the water and investigating myself. It was kind of more of a morbid curiosity. You know, what would happen? What if it really is a body? If it wasn't a body, great, if it was a body, I didn't like that scenario. I didn't think that would play out very nicely at the lake. I would have reached down, grabbed what I thought might have been a body, pulled it up. How terrible would that have been? It would have ended up with me throwing up in the water, dry heaving. Maybe other people would have seen what I pulled up, traumatizing everybody there, traumatizing ourselves. So we decided, let's just go. I left it, and we left. By the time we got home, we had convinced ourselves that this wasn't a face. This wasn't a body. This wasn't. This wasn't a tree. This was rocks. This was mud. This was clay. If there was a body right there, don't you think we'd know about it? And we convinced ourselves that this was nothing. This was just, this was just nothing. Weird things under the water. That's what it amounted to. Two days later, I came home from work, and we had to do some shopping. We loaded up our child into the car. My wife got into the car, and as we left, she said, "In the newspaper today, it says that there was a body found in that lake, the body of a little boy." That's when it comes back, like, my goodness, this was real. This was real. There's a very good chance that that was a real body that my wife stepped on. Fear of the water is a very real thing. And when I'm telling this story to some people, they're just, it terrifies them, because the story seems to confirm their fears, their fears of the water. How many places have we gone swimming where there's things under the water that we didn't know about? The fear of the unknown terrifies people, and maybe it should. Jesus, I don't know why humans feel the need to go in water. I just, that really doesn't resonate with me. I mean, I hate water. It's a zero out of 10 experience. Honestly, I barely like even drinking out of my own bowl. I'd go weeks if I could. All right, now I need to run around the room as fast as I can for no apparent reason. So let's take another break for ads, shall we? Hey, thanks for stopping by Radio Rental again today. Even though you didn't recognize me and you didn't scritch-scratch my chin, I still had an overall non-offensive time. Your company was adequate, and that's a pretty high rating in my book, so I guess we'll see you next week at Radio Rental. Hey, real quick last thing. If you could toss that fabric mouse over there as hard as you can, I'm going to run around the room again while I look at it and pretend it's stalking me. All right, bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. is created by Payne Lindsay and brought to you by Tenderfoot TV. Showrunner is Meredith Stedman. Lead producer is Eric Quintana. Executive producers are Payne Lindsay and Donald Albright. Our main host is Rainn Wilson. Guest host is Tig Notaro. Written by Meredith Stedman. Additional writing by Mark Laughlin. Original score by Makeup and Vanity Set with additional score by Jay Ragsdale. Editing by Eric Quintana, Stephen Perez, Meredith Stedman, Tristan Bankston, and Sean Nerney. Sound design, mix, and master by Stephen Perez and Cooper Skinner. Additional editing by April Ruha and Dayton Cole. Our production manager is Jordan Foxworthy. Our social media manager is Caroline Orogema. 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.tenderfoot.tv. Special thanks to Oren 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 yourscarystory at gmail.com or contact us via the form on our website, radiorentalusa.com. Follow us on Instagram at Radio Rental. On behalf of the Radio Rental Store, we'd love it if you'd subscribe, rate, and review. As always, thanks for listening.