Episode 94

It's Halloween, and we have a treat for you. We just released an exclusive Radio Rental Halloween bonus tape on Tenderfoot Plus to celebrate the season. Get this, plus a ton of other exclusive content for just $4.99 a month, or get four months free when you sign up for an annual membership. As a Tenderfoot Plus subscriber, you'll also get access to other great shows and their ad-free exclusives. And, if that's not enough incentive to join, as a Plus member, you also get 20% off all the merch in our shop. Don't miss your chance to save and get ready to be spooked. 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. At Radio Rental, we carry one-of-a-kind videos, so frightening, you won't be able to sleep at night. Malachi, Malachi, come here, trick-or-treaters here. Malachi. Oh, oh, oh, wait, no, never mind, never mind, it's a full-grown adult customer, unless that's some kind of costume. Okay, I'm sorry. I recognize you, I recognize you. Hello, friend, and welcome to Radio Rental. It is me, it's me, it's Ricky Lee, astrological advisor and proprietor to this here rental shop. Video Rentals is what we do here, and I apologize for mistaking you for a child. It's probably the Kool-Aid mustache that made me think that. Y'all, I'm excited about trick-or-treaters. I love Halloween. It's like my favorite holiday, the bobbing for apples, the funny tombstones on the lawn. Saying stuff like, hey, I told you I was sick. That shit cracks me up. Anyway, did you like my costume? Man, I'm getting a kick out of this costume. Can you see what I am? See that? I'm a sumo wrestler. One of those blow-up sumo wrestlers. Y'all, this costume cracks me up. Uh-oh, trick-or-treater, trick-or-treater, let me get my tootsie. Damn, nobody's here Again, somebody's ding-dong ditching us or something But I'm a big man Literally, I'm a big man I can take it It's all part of Halloween Hey, hey, hey, Malik, Malik, Bud, stop, stop. We talked about this. You can't get your claws anywhere near me. I'm inflatable. All right, here we go. It is All Hallows' Eves, and you know what that means. We're going to do some spooky, spooky, spooky, spooky stories. So let's dim the light. Yep, that's good. Pop this in the tape machine, and, buddy, we are off to the races. I worked at a local tool store and we closed at 9:00 PM, but we always had to stay like an hour later to clean and to close out the registers, that sort of thing. I normally didn't get home until around 10:30. That particular night I get home, I enter into the house and the first thing I notice is all of the lights are off, except for the light over the stove, which my mom always turned on before she went to bed. Her door was closed, so I knew she had went to bed already. My brother's door was open, meaning that he was out with his friends and he was around 16 at the time, so he did that a lot. I went through the kitchen to put my purse on the table. As soon as I put my purse on the table, there was a knock at the door. It was pretty late. I looked at the clock and the clock said 10:38. I immediately thought to myself, "Who could it be?" We didn't pass out candy because we never got trick-or-treaters, we tried the first couple of years. We didn't know how many trick-or-treaters that we lived there, but being a 55-plus community, there wasn't a lot of trick-or-treaters. We just decided to stop. We didn't even turn on our porch light or try to pass out candy, so I thought, "Well, maybe it's one of my brother's friends coming to see if he was home." It didn't happen a whole lot, but every now and then somebody would come looking for him. I don't have a trick-or-treater, I don't have any candy, I don't know what to do. I just go to the door. Before I open it, I say, "Who is it?" This voice says, "Trick-or-treat." I thought to myself, "It is too late to be trick-or-treating." And then I thought, "Okay, maybe it's just one of my brother's friends, and they're trying to be funny since it's Halloween." I turn on the porch light before I open the door, and I was comfortable with opening the door because the voice sounded farther away. So I felt like once I opened the door, there would be distance between me and the person on the other side of the door. When I open the door, I am just frozen. There is a person just directly in front of me. To give you an idea of how close he was, out of my peripheral vision, I couldn't see what he was wearing. I couldn't see anything. If I would have moved forward a little bit, we would have touched. I couldn't see his face. That's how close he was to me. All I could see was the devil's mask he was wearing. It wasn't one of those child-friendly masks. It was one of those ones that would scare the crap out of little children. He's not saying anything. I'm not saying anything. Because I'm just standing. I'm just standing in shock. I didn't say anything for so long that it made him repeat himself, trick or treat. And then it occurred to me that the reason why he sounded so far away was because the mask had muffled his voice. At that point, I said, "I'm sorry. We don't have any candy." He's not moving. He's still standing there. You would think that he would step back, but he hasn't. He says, "But I said trick or treat, and you opened the door." And I said, "Well, yes, to be honest. I thought you were going to either be one of my brother's friends, or to tell you I don't have any candy." He said, "But I said trick or treat, and you opened the door." And I said, "Well, yes, to be honest. I thought you were going to either be one of my brother's friends, or to tell you I don't have any candy." He's not moving. I thought you were going to either be one of my brother's friends, or to tell you I'm sorry, we don't have any candy." He says, "But I said trick or treat, and you opened the door." I have something for you. That's when he took a step back, and I was able to see that he had on like a dark colored jacket. He put his hand into his pocket. The motion of him putting his hand into his pocket was slow motion for me. I thought he was reaching for a gun. I slammed the door, lock it, and then I run behind the couch. I'm on my hands and my knees, just crouched there for like five minutes before I got up the courage. Just move, basically. It's silent, and then I hear him say, God bless you. I wasn't going to hurt you. And then it sounds like he sticks something into the wedge of the door. It took me a while to get up the nerve to, like, get up from behind the couch. I went to the door. I really wanted to see what he had slid through the crack of the door. I opened the door, and this business card fell onto the porch. I pick it up. It had the name, it had the address of a church. What kind of church allows kids to go out so late at night and knock on people's doors? It is very weird to go around knocking on people's doors really late at night in a devil's mask and not saying, hey, come to my church, but trick or treat, do you got candy first? Okay, no, then I have something for you. I mean, that's not something you would normally say to somebody without them getting nervous. I think it was that he was somewhere where I couldn't see him, and he was walking around, and I couldn't see him. And he was watching me. He knew I was walking to my door. He saw me go into my house. That is just really creepy to think about. If they wanted more people to come to their church, that's one heck of a way to get somebody to come. I mean, that's just weird. Okay. Okay, that right there, that made me think twice about being excited about trick-or-treaters. They come to my house, they're getting the X-Lax chocolates. I did not like that. Now, you know what? I am not going to answer that one right now. I'm busy. Right now, we're the customer. Hey, y'all, let's take a break for ads. I got to have a Sour Patch Kid to calm myself down. I've always felt like Sour Patch Kids are a lot like Geminis. First, they're sweet, and then they're sour, and you know what I mean. Wrigley, that's pretty good right there. You come up with some analogies now. You know what I'm talking about? All right, my friends, we are back, and let's do another take. All right, let's do this one right here. Oh, Malachi. I'm sorry, buddy. I'm sorry. I got your tail. I'm so sorry. I couldn't see you because of my big sumo belly. Oh, dadgummit. Dadgummit. You got my costume with your claws. There she blows. Woo-wee. Sounds like my uncle after eating all the onion dip. All right, I'm going to pop this tape in for you while I do a quick outfit change. That's right. I am always prepared with an extra Halloween costume. You never know what's happening. Like most of the world, we're a little weirded out. I was worried about what was going on during COVID, right, during the pandemic. There was a lot of uncertainty going on. I actually met this girl before everything went into lockdown. We hit it off. We got along great. Like, we made each other laugh and everything. But she had a lot of baggage that she carried with her. She carried something with her previous relationship. Basically, she was going to attend an event, and her previous lover purchased the dress, dressed for her. Some things happened, and she could no longer attend the event. But because of those things that occurred, her previous lover unfortunately inflicted some self-harm, and he's no longer with us. So she carried that with her, and it really affected her. And I could tell with certain aspects of being in a relationship, right? Like, she's apprehensive of certain things. Sometimes she would cry, and I'd be like, what's going on? Stuff like that. Like, I knew it really affected her. Fast forward to when we're dating. She's living in an apartment close by. She has a big walk-in closet. She would go into her closet looking at her stuff, and she would come across this dress. She would see the dress, and she'd try it on, and now, of course, those emotions would come back to her. But she noticed that every single time that happened, something strange would happen. It started off with closet doors being left open, and she'd wake up, it'd be closed. Same thing with the closet light. She'd turn it off, it'd be on, and vice versa. She'd turn them off and close it, and when she'd wake up, it'd be on, and the closet door would be open. Another occasion, she noticed that the light in her bathroom was flickering. She could tell, like, the light switch was being flicked on and off. That really freaked her out. So these little things would happen. Within a few weeks of me knowing her, finally, the one that just pushed her over the edge was that, again, she tried on the dress, going through all those emotions, reliving everything, like, bringing up that energy. She went to bed, and she woke up in the middle of the night, and there was a black figure at her doorway, and she lived alone. She called me. I went over to make sure nobody was there. Nobody had broken into her apartment. There was no forced entry or anything like that. So, at this point, I decide that it's got to be the dress, not necessarily anything paranormal. This dress, she keeps trying it on, and it keeps doing something to her emotionally. Obviously, that was a common denominator, right? It was the dress. So I spoke to her. I'm like, "Look, I think this dress is doing something to you. It might be carrying something. It might be carrying some sort of energy that's not really good for you. So what I have to do is I'm going to take this dress away from your home, and I'm going to put it elsewhere so you don't try it on, and you don't think about it, and it can affect you." So, I brought it to my home. After I brought it to my home, there were some little weird things going on. I had some friends living with me because they worked out in the oil fields, and there was no work for them. They had nowhere to go, so I allowed them to come here and live with me. So, there was always something going on. They're helping me fix up the house. They're out doing odd jobs, just trying to make ends meet. It was a bunch of activity in the house. One of my friends that was living here, he's kind of a big macho, like a big guy's guy, and he started having nightmares, which was really weird to me, because I've known him 20 years, and he's never even mentioned that before. I thought that was a little strange. I mean, I didn't put too much importance on it, but I thought it was a little out of the ordinary. When everything changed for me is when we started seeing each other in the house that wasn't us. We started seeing doppelgangers. The first one was my girlfriend was staying over, and she was asleep. And she said that I woke her up and was like nudging her and telling her to come with me. And she was just dead tired, and she was just annoyed. She was just like, "Dude, just leave me alone. I'm not going to go with you." And I was very insistent on her going, and she said, "Just leave me alone." She rolls over, and when she rolls over, she sees that I'm asleep next to her. So, of course, naturally, she turns around to see where I was. And all of a sudden, all of a sudden, all of a sudden, one of me was gone. She woke me up. She was freaked out about that. I tried to tell her it was just a nightmare. It's just another nightmare. You're fine. Everything's okay. You're in a safe space. A few weeks later, I remember it was a Saturday, and I was cleaning my yard. It was monsoon season, so we had a bunch of weeds, so I was cleaning my yard. I was wearing a red shirt. Took me about an hour, hour and a half. My friend lived in a room in the back of the house. You can't access it. It's through the side of the house. You can't access it through inside. You have to go outside. So, I come inside after cleaning the yard. I take a shower. I rest a little bit, drink some water, do whatever I need to do, and I change into a blue shirt. A few hours later, I see another friend going to the back of the house where my roommate lives, and I'm going to go say hi to him and go chit-chat with him. My friend walks back there, and I walk back there right after him, and my roommate tells me, he's like, "Hey, weren't you wearing a red shirt?" I was wearing a red shirt earlier, man, but, like, this was hours ago. He's like, "No, no, no, just now." I was like, "No, no, I'm telling you. This was hours ago." He said, "No, just now." He's like, "I literally just saw you walk by my door wearing a red shirt." And I said, "Dude, you saw John. John just saw me walk up right now. I've been wearing a blue shirt." Again, he's like a macho guy, and he's like, "I don't want to talk about this anymore. Let's change the subject." And he just walked away. Those are the little things. We'd be asleep in the room. would hear, like, papers being thrown underneath my door. We'd hear taps on the window. A couple of my friends live with me. I mean, we like to drink. We like to have a good time. I figured it's just one of my drunk friends being an idiot on the outside of the house doing something dumb. So I'd open up the curtain, get ready to yell at somebody, and there was nobody there. There was nothing there. So little things like that. The moment I realized that something was definitely not right, I was going to pick up this friend, my roommate, from my house, and we were going to go to his parents' house for a family party. So on the side of the house, there's a motion sensor light that turns on, obviously, when you pass by. It was already getting a little dark, and I was going to come pick him up. When I turn into my driveway, there's kind of like a little blind spot. But as I'm approaching, I see him sitting on his truck on the tailgate, legs dangling, just waiting for me. As I pull in, and the light shines onto where he would have been sitting. The lights shine on that spot, and I can no longer see him. I see the motion sensor light turn on, and I think, oh, he just went to go grab something. He's going to go lock up. He's going to go do whatever he needs to do. So I sit there, and I wait for him. I didn't text him or anything. I just waited, waited, waited, waited. I waited a good solid 10 minutes. He never comes out. I text him. I'm like, hey, dude, like, where are you? Let's go. He responds, hey, man, I'm sorry. I forgot to tell you. I'm already at my parents' house. I'm already at the family place. I'm already at the party. My stomach dropped. I was like, oh, my gosh. I saw him, but that wasn't him. Well, I don't know what I saw, but I saw something, definitely taking his form. Something's going on, man. It's beyond little things. It's something bigger than that. This wasn't a human being that I saw. It definitely wasn't him. There's something here in this house. There's something messing with us. There's something trying to get at us, something not of this world. After that, the vibes and the energy definitely got worse. We really started fighting a lot, my girlfriend and I. We started having a lot of problems. I started feeling like it wasn't even her anymore. Like, we're fighting over nothing. This energy wanted us to fight because it was thriving on the negativity, right? It was manifesting itself in those little ways, but now that it was there, it wanted us to keep fighting. I talked to her and I said, look, we need to do something about this dress. The dress was in my shed. I felt like it brought some negative energy to my house and we needed to do something about it. I didn't know what we needed to do, but we needed to do something about it. When I talked about getting rid of the dress and trying to move forward with this is when we started fighting even more. So I was talking to my friend in Seattle about everything going on, telling him I didn't know what to do with this dress. He's like, look, man, what you got to do is you got to tie up this dress, and either bury it or burn the dress, do something with it. You got to at least bind it. So you bind that negative energy. I'm like, okay, well, I'll try it. My friend that was now living with me, he went to the back to go grab the dress with me. I hadn't touched the dress. It hadn't been touched in a few weeks. It was just there. I go into the backyard and I go into the shed and I pull it out. And he's like, dude, keep that thing away from me. I don't want it to be anywhere near that dress. And as he's saying that, a hawk comes swooping down and it comes back up and starts circling around where the fire pit is. I know this sounds crazy and far-fetched. Eventually my friend's like, you know what, man, you're on your own. I got to get out of here. I do not want to be here when this all goes down. I'm sorry, but I don't want to be around. We bring the dogs in, the dogs are inside. The dogs are safe. I don't know what to do at this point. I'm just like, I don't even know what I'm going to do. I'm going to tie up this dress and burn it. And then we're going to feel better. I'm in the backyard. I'm on the fire pit around where the hawk was circling. And I start tying up the dress. And I tell her, hey, just start praying. So she starts praying. I tie up the dress. I don't tie it too tightly, obviously, because we're going to burn it. I don't want to make a tight ball. So I start tying it a little loosely. I put it into the fire pit. I put it in the fire pit with some other pieces of wood. And I just douse it in lighter fluid to make sure that it catches fire. The weather starts changing. The wind starts picking up. I can see some black clouds on the horizon. And I start seeing a bunch of lightning. I light the fire pit. Of course, all the lighter fluid's burning. The dress just hasn't caught fire yet, which is really strange. I don't understand why it's not catching fire. It's perfectly protected. None of the fabric is catching fire. It's not even seeing fire. It's not catching fire. It's not being singed or anything like that. It's just completely, completely almost like a force field around it. And it's not catching fire, which is really, really strange to me because there was pieces of scrap wood in the fire pit that were scorched and they were burned. And the dress is fabric. Wouldn't you think it would start catching fire? Again, I tied it loosely so it would burn it more easily, but it didn't. I'm watching it just kind of escape all this fire, kind of very confused about it. It starts to get a little windy. The motion sensor light I mentioned previously turns on. So I tell my girlfriend, I'm like, hey, I think somebody's here. But I didn't hear the gate open because you need to open the gate to get to the part where the motion sensor light turns on. And at that moment, she got really scared. She was visibly shaken. And she told me, I'm really scared right now. Something was either there or something was leaving. So I told her, start praying harder. So she shuts her eyes, and she clenches her fist, and she starts praying. Meanwhile, I'm still looking at this dress not burned. It's, again, untouched completely. The other pieces of water already caught fire, and this dress is untouched. So then instinctively, I yell out, get out of here. You're not welcome here. Leave this home. As soon as I start yelling that, like a whirlwind or something, like there's a giant fireball where the dress finally catches fire, it starts burning really, really hot. Burns maybe about 10 feet up in the air, kind of winning, kind of like a little whirlwind. I can hear her praying. I'm looking at this giant fireball just burning. I feel like the embers are being peppered in my direction. I can't explain what's going on. I just look at it and continue to yell out the phrase, largate, largate. I was in awe, and I was confused, and I was thinking, what is going on here? What am I witnessing? The wind kind of starts to die down, and just at the moment where she says, amen, is when the motion sensor light turns off. The fire dissipates, and just a calm comes over, like the storm clouds are no longer coming. She looks at me, and I look at her, and she tells me, she's like, I feel so much better. That's what I feel, like a weight's been lifted off my shoulder. One of the first things that she told me, she's like, nobody's going to believe us, and nobody's going to believe us, and I told her, you're right. I 100% understand from an outsider's perspective that this story sounds insane. I know how I sound telling this story, but I also do know is that there's a lot of things in this world that we can't explain, man, and I think that what I experienced is one of those things that there's no explanation for it just yet. I know what I went through, and I know what I saw, what I witnessed, and that's, to me, enough. From that day forward, nothing else weird has ever happened in this home. Nothing. Freeze! It's the cops! I'm just kidding. I'm kidding. It's me, Ricky Lee, and a 70s cop out fit from a vintage store. Ain't this thing cool? Now, the shorts, the shorts are a little short, and they're kind of riding up in the back and riding up in the front. The boys look like they're playing hide and seek. Y'all got to see Malachi's costume, too. Come on out, Malachi. Come here. All right, let's do some ads, and I'll let you see it when we get back in just a second. Woo! Woo! Woo! Look at Malachi. He's a little police cruiser. Ha ha! Woo! Woo! Just strapped a little light on his back. Look at him go. Hey, criminals, y'all better beware, because he's got the zoomies. Look, I am not getting that. Not after that first story. So bye, everybody. Happy Halloween. We will see you next time. Malachi, come here, bud. You and I are about to split this candy up between the two of us. One for you, and three for Ricky Lee. Showrunner is Meredith Stedman. Lead producer is Eric Quintana. Executive producer is Our producers are Payne Lindsay and Donald Albright. Our host is Jeff Foxworthy as his character, Ricky Lee Bagley. Writing by Meredith Stedman. Original score by Makeup and Vanity Set, with additional score by Jay Ragsdale. Editing by Eric Quintana, Payne Lindsay, Stephen Perez, Cooper Skinner, Meredith Stedman, and Dylan Harrington. Sound design, mix, and master by Stephen Perez and Cooper Skinner. 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.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.