Episode 86

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, sorry to scare you. It's just little old me, Sandy Van Duser. Welcome to Radio Rental. A video rental shop with a collection of exclusive scary stories all told by real people. You seem like you don't remember me. Don't worry, I'm used to that. Librarians are often used to being overlooked. I mean, you know, we're professionally trained to be quiet and orderly and normal. All things that I am. Anyway, I'm Sandy, the librarian at the branch down the street from Radio Rental. I've been filling in for Terry Kardashian, while he's on his "mysterious" trip. I'm so honored that Terry thought of me, that he trusted me with his big box of tapes. Maybe he feels the erotic connection between us. Oh, I can't wait until he comes back. Where is Terry, anyway? You know what? I'm going to call him. I'm going to do it. No, I think it's a really good idea, Malachi. I'm calling him. Hi, you've reached Terry Kardashian. I can't come to the phone right now as I'm out searching for my long-lost wife, Zilon, or I've been kidnapped for ransom, or a little bit of both. It's not exactly clear to me at this point which one is really happening, but leave a message. Did he -- did he just say his -- his wife? I thought his wife wasn't in the picture anymore. Okay, I wasn't expecting that. How about we blow off some steam by watching some of these messed-up horror stories, hmm? Great. Let's do this one. Who gives a shit? I remember a high school teacher telling us, "At your age, you never think about death." But I've thought about death every single day of my entire life. My family came to the United States in 1897. There's a lot of, like, mythology and lore. My great-great-grandpa came here by himself when he was about 17 years old. His family was German, and they had lived in Russia for a while. And from the outside, it kind of looks like he achieved the American dream. This is where it starts to feel kind of weird. There's a pattern that's kind of undeniable in the men in my paternal line. Starting with that first guy that came over from Germany, on paper, it looks like he found his own version of the American dream. He took a job with a farmer, married the farmer's daughter, started a farm of his own, and had a bunch of kids to help him with the work. But those of us in the family know that there's a lot more to that story. I don't know what happened in Germany or if the curse started here in the United States. All I know is the pattern. No man in my paternal line dies of sickness or natural causes. We die because something kills us. And it's always our kids who find us first. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ My great-great-grandfather was the first domino to fall. He didn't come home for supper one night, and his kids went out to look for him. If I remember right, it was his daughter who found him. She went back to the barn, the back of the property, opened up the door, and saw him hanging in there with a rope tied to the rafters. This kind of thing wasn't too uncommon back then. A lot of older folks, especially, immigrant families, had a lot more fear of dementia than of dying. And so maybe that's what happened to him. But then it comes to my great-grandfather. He had polio as a kid, and even though he had polio, he was put to work just as hard as his siblings. He took up a family farm, had a bunch of kids of his own, kept it moving. Whether it was the struggle from polio or his dad's suicide or something else, my family always describes Byron as a cruel man. And you can still see it with the older guys in my family. They all look like they've been through things they shouldn't have. When I hear stories about my great-grandpa, I don't hear fond memory stories. I hear how scared his kids were of him. The curse found Byron when he was out working with some farm equipment. He was driving a skid loader, one of those things with the interchangeable buckets that they use to move pallets and dirt and farm equipment around. He had the bucket raised up high and he decided he needed to get out, but he left the machine running. As he was standing up to get out, one of the straps of his overalls caught the steering hands and he fell forward head first. The big metal bucket came down and it crushed him there. His daughter came out to the field looking for him and found him like that. In 1986, the curse found my grandpa. By then, the family enterprise had expanded and he and his brothers were running operations from farming to beekeeping and trading equipment. They had all grown up in the Seventh Day Adventist tradition, but my grandpa had veered pretty far into one particular vein of that religion. If you've ever seen Andrew Garfield's Under the Banner of Heaven, you probably get the idea. He was the kind of guy that believed that taxes were theft. My grandpa was also a mechanical genius. He was the first in our family to go through college. He got a degree in agriculture and he pioneered all kinds of really cool biological systems for grafting plants and that kind of stuff. He owned a lot of land and even learned how to pilot a little family-sized plane. He kept one of those planes on his property. My grandpa was also a very dominant and secretive man. Every contract and deed and piece of business that he dealt with was private to him, and he didn't share those things with his wife or his family or anybody else. When the feds finally showed up to arrest him for tax evasion, he was already packed up with his second family and flying them down to Brazil where he had paid somebody for a new plot of land in cash. The trouble was, there were people living on that land already. Over the years, a lot of poor people in the area had built shacks on that land, and they weren't too happy about the idea of moving. So my grandpa, being who he was, fired up his equipment and started bulldozing down everything they owned in the world. I don't know how many enemies he made doing that, but I know it was enough. The people pulled together the little money that they had, and they paid a man to go after him. The way I heard it, he and his new wife and their three little kids had parked at a gas station to go to the bathroom someplace, and grandpa stayed in the car. They heard a gunshot from inside and ran out to see what happened and saw him there bleeding out on the road. The story gets a little fuzzy here. What people-- go through when they die and what they do with bodies in different countries is pretty different from the US. So local authorities came, and they took his body, and the family never saw him again. My dad was only 19 years old, and he had just finished up high school here in the States when he got the call that his dad had been killed. He still has nightmares about it. I'm still fairly religious, so I don't know how closely I believe in this. I can't deny that the pattern has some unbroken threads. My family curse always happens in the same way. It always happens to a man in my direct bloodline. We're always killed, and we're always found by one of our kids. Part of me really believes that when my dad dies, it won't be from sickness or age, and part of me has always believed the same about myself, that my life will be cut short by something unexpected. Neither of us have ever believed that we would live long enough to see old age, but the other part of me feels a little bit invincible when my dad is still around. Like, if the curse is real somehow, he'd have to go first. I think the scariest thing about it are all the questions I have about my dad. It's horrible to think about losing a parent, but there's another layer to it. If the curse is real, does that mean I'd find him? My relationship to my family has been a rocky one. I still reject a lot of things that are so deeply tied with their identities. I would describe my family as, you know, blood comes before anything else. So even if you have problematic members of the family, I think I'm probably the first generation. I'm not willing to distance myself from those kinds of things, but it's very tight-knit. It's very mafia. If you trace the paternal line of my dad, it was his dad and his dad's dad and his dad's dad's dad. There's always some tie between their death and the decisions that they made. And so in a weird way, it's like these people who were kind of awful to their parents, but they were also awful to their parents. And so in a weird way, it's like these people who were kind of awful to their parents. And so in a weird way, it's like these people around them were met with like untimely deaths. Yeah, I try to not be that type of person and hopefully it changes for me. When you look at the ties between each death, the first man that we can trace in this curse killed himself by choice. The second man used a bulldozer to kill himself by accident. And the third man earned his death by accident. And the third man earned his death by bulldozing, by destroying people's lives with a bulldozer. And then they destroyed his. Even within a more Christian framework, curses, even if you look back in the Bible, they're very present. A lot of times, what goes with the curse is it'll happen to generations after the person who did it. One day, I'd love to be a dad myself. But when I think about all the history of our family, I just really hope that we have a daughter. Oh, wow. That's awful. Truly awful. And a lot to think about. The idea of karma comes to mind. Sounds like this young storyteller might actually break the curse. You know, that's very, very interesting. A family where only bad stuff happens to the men. I could think of a few men that could benefit from a challenging karmic cycle like that. Or maybe just one man in particular. I don't want to hear his name anymore. All right, here's your little ad break. He lurks in shadow. He slips into dreams. He casts no reflection. Audible presents Bram Stoker's Dracula, a new folk tale. Bram Stoker's Dracula, a new folk tale. Feel the terror of being hunted and the thrill of the hunt. Don't miss the year's best new audio thriller, Bram Stoker's Dracula. 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. We're back. Whoop-dee-doo. Time for the next tape from Terry's Stupid Box. I lived in Omaha, which is the biggest city in Nebraska. Around this time, I was hanging out with some friends who live on the kind of outskirts of the biggest part of the city. Kind of bordering on big city and cornfields, basically. One of my best friends lived on that sort of almost cornfield part of town. We were always hanging out at his place because his parents were really cool. They'd let us hang out there. They'd let us drink. We'd watch games there. We'd all get to sleep there. If we had drank anything, ride 4x4s, all that good stuff you get to do in the country. It was a lot of fun out there and we spent a lot of time out there. The drive that you have to take out there is just this really long, winding, two-way road. It takes forever to get there. There's super, super thick trees on both sides. Really hard to see anything. And on the way out there, you pass by one of the largest cemeteries in the city. The road cuts basically right through the middle of this huge, huge, huge cemetery. Not very well lit. There's barely any lighting. Street lamps every once in a while. Very little traffic. A bit creepy, just inherently. Tend to speed through there to kind of get through it. That specific night. I was windows down, listening to music. It was about 10 o'clock. I was coming around one of the curves in the road. They're pretty sharp, so I couldn't see what was in front of me. And I slammed the brakes on. In the middle of the road, walking the direction I was driving, so with their backs to me, was what looked like a family just standing in the middle of the road. There was what looked like a mom and a dad. Average height, weight, normal clothes, nothing tattered, nothing fancy. And then the child was seven or eight years old. Medium length hair. It looked like a little boy to me. And then the mom was pushing a stroller. They didn't have any light source with them. No one had a flashlight or a lantern, or I didn't even see cell phone light, anything like that. I had my windows down, so I was. I was trying to hear if they were talking to each other, or playing music, or anything. It was dead silent. By the time I came to a stop, all I could hear was my car. No noise, no light, besides my headlights. Pitch black road. That means that before I pulled up behind them, they had been just walking in the middle of the street in, like, pitch black. Walking down the middle of the street like it was nothing. Immediately creeped out. Immediately all the hair on my body stands up. I came to a stop behind them, and I kind of just sat there waiting for them to move. They just never did. They continued walking for probably ten seconds. They were facing away from me, so they were walking away from my car. They seemed completely unaffected. By me being there, they didn't even turn their head slightly. They didn't make any attempt to move out of the way of my car. Ten seconds into them just walking away from my car, they finally stop. They stop all at the same time. They don't move out of my way. They just stop for a second, and then all at the same time, turn around to face my car. Just straight face. From what I could see. And it's not fast. It didn't seem like they coordinated it together. They don't say anything to each other. That scared me. The stroller that the mom was pushing was completely empty. There was nothing in it. There was no blanket. It wasn't holding something else. It was just completely empty. It was pretty obvious. the child that was walking with the parents was not going fit in that stroller. He would have been very, very uncomfortable if he had tried to get into it. My immediate thought was it could be a setup for a carjacking or a robbery. I could hear my heartbeat in my ears. I was waiting for someone to jump out or another car to come, or I was waiting for them to disappear into thin air. I don't know, but I was waiting for something to happen. Them just turning around all at the same time and not saying anything was the worst thing I could have imagined happening. I don't think I've ever been that scared. I really only give it a second to look at them. Ultimately, I'm too creeped out. I'm too scared something's going to happen. I put my car in reverse. I reverse for a couple seconds, flip to Yui. And drove immediately away. I checked my rear view a million times as I was driving away from them. Nothing. I don't really remember this drive. I don't remember if I ran lights. I don't remember if I saw people. I don't remember if I saw cars. I just drove and drove and drove until I was back in the city, got to a gas station, pulled in there and collected myself. I think that my brain just shut off because I was so scared. I can't even pinpoint really why I was scared. It's not like they started running towards my car. It's not like I saw someone come out of the trees. It's not like they had any weapons. I think it was just the fact that the stroller was empty and they were doing everything at the same time and they didn't seem to care that a car needed to get past them. My brain just shut off and it was just, I need to get away. I need to get away. I need to get away. I eventually called my boyfriend at the time. I had to take that exact same road out to my friend's house. I still went out there that evening and I stayed on the phone with him the whole drive and I never saw them. I never saw any people on the road and maybe one car. And I made it out to my friends and at this point I'm frantically trying to explain what I saw and I think his entire family and all of my friends probably still think that I'm insane. But I know what I saw. I asked all my friends. I asked my friends' family if they had ever seen anything like that. Asked if there were any like Amish people in the area or anything like that. They said no. Some friends have had some really good points about them, like I said, possibly being highwaymen, you know, wanting to rob people like a setup for a robbery or a carjacking or something like that. At 10 p.m. I can think of very few reasons why you would need to take your whole family on a little walking road trip through the cemetery. There's acres between each house. It's not like they're going to come upon a gas station or a huge neighborhood. They were walking towards nothing. I feel like I might have seen ghosts. I guess I've never really said that full sentence out loud, but I think that's kind of what my brain is telling me, like what my intuition is telling me. It might have been a car accident or something like that, where the whole family died besides the baby. Example, a baby that would have been small enough to fit in the stroller. So the baby is the only one that lived and the rest of the family just kind of roams this area as ghosts. A ghost family, perhaps? And what a cute little family. Lucky them. A husband, a wife, and kids. Must be nice. God, it's hot in here. That's it. The cardigan is coming off. Oh, yes, it is. It is. It's like a million degrees in here, Malachi. I don't want to hear it out of you. You have allegiances to you-know-who. You're probably just as selfish as he is. You know what? I don't think I can do this anymore. Cut to ads. Cut to ads. Thanks for visiting Radio Rental today. I hope you got everything you wanted and more. Give me that tape. Where are those instructions? Give me those. That's right. Keep walking. And tell Terry he's never welcome at my library ever again. He can get the Hunger Games out of a dumpster for all I care. Hope you find your wife, Terry. Radio Rental is created by Payne Lindsay and brought to you by Tenorfoot 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 Rachel Dratch. 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 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 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 odyssey.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.