Episode 95

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 even some 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. Hey, it's me, Jared. Radio Rental's favorite AC repairman. I'm sure you're thrilled to see me again. And that's Malachi, who I think hates me. Is it me, or is it you like this with everyone? And you're the customer. Hi. Hi. Welcome in. I guess you want me to play you a scary tape from Radio Rental's exclusive collection. Kept in a very exclusive cardboard box. Well, here goes nothing. I'm not even going to read the title of this one. I don't want to get my hopes up again. Yeah, listen to that baby purr. I fixed that. It was a fall night in Guelph, Ontario. This was in my second year of university. I was over at my friend's apartment. Three friends and myself were at their apartment at night working late into the night on a school project that was due the next morning. A video project. A video project. Two out of the three of my friends working on the project lived at this apartment. Their third roommate, his name's Jay. He wasn't in the same program as us, so he had been studying that night for his midterm the next morning. Jay tended to struggle with sleeping. He would often take, you know, certain meds to help him fall asleep and stay asleep. And he had been studying that night and had called it a night, went to bed. So we were trying to be excellent and to be extra careful when working on our project to keep quiet. We didn't want to startle him, wake him up at any point. His bedroom was in the far left corner of the kitchen so we could see his door closed and how it was dark inside. It's about 1:00 a.m. at this point, and we're starting to put sort of the finishing touches on this video project we're getting done. Jay's room has been dark for hours. We assume he's dead asleep at this point. He hasn't made a sound. So we're sitting at this table about 30 feet away from his door. All of a sudden, there's a thud at his door. And it gets all of our attention right away because it's late at night, it's 1:00 a.m., it's quiet. We're being as quiet as we can. We look up at the door, everything looks normal. It's just a dark room, door's shut, hasn't moved. Maybe he's up. We don't think too much about it. We get back to work. And then about 15 minutes later, the same thing happens. Louder this time, more aggressive, startles us again. We look back up, and it's the same thing as before. His door is shut. The room is dark. We are at full attention now. It's gotten kind of hard for us to focus on our work because, you know, why has he just run into his door twice without opening it? I mean, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Maybe he's playing a joke on us, trying to scare us. But like I said before, he struggles with sleeping, and he has a midterm the next morning. It's not really the right time for him to be playing a prank on us. It doesn't make sense. I had a running joke at the time in their apartment. They had a poster on the wall of a local politician named Steve. Every time there would be a noise in the apartment, I would say, "Oh, that's Steve." to us. Anytime there was something freaky going on, I would just blame it on Steve. It was always in a joking manner. I see the picture of Steve on the wall and I think, oh, I'll just call out to Steve the poltergeist. So I call out and I say, Steve, if you're there, give us a sign. And then bang, immediately after I said that, he's run into the door. It's a loud thump. Coming from the inside, which sort of shakes the apartment. We're all shocked and terrified at this moment. It's late at night. Everything's quiet for the most part. We're scrambling at this point. I grab a golf club, which was near me, and I'm holding it to my chest. I just had this sort of primal fear for some reason. The four of us are in this corner, kind of huddled, just watching the door, trying to make sense of what's happening. We decide to set up a chair with a phone on it to just be recording the door, just in case whatever happens. So we have the phone set up, we're recording the door, and we're still trying to finish this project that we have to finish. So we get back to work. We're wrapping things up. I decide to call out to Steve again. Steve? Steve, you still there? And then immediately again, the loudest bang at his door. Oh, dude, what the fuck? He's fucking with us. Open that door now, or I'm going home. We can't make sense of what's happening. We ran straight outside. We didn't put our shoes on. We just threw the door open and flew out into the street. We immediately just tried to explain it, trying to convince ourselves that he was still playing a prank on us. Because if he is, it's working. we were arguing with each other like why would he be doing this right now that this makes no sense at this point it's like 2:00 a.m. in the morning but then we go through it again like he he struggles with sleeping he has a midterm he's been studying for like he needs his sleep tonight that's why we've been trying to be so quiet tonight after about five minutes outside you know we work up the courage to go back inside. We look towards Jay's bedroom door. We notice a piece of paper just sitting in front of his door. That piece of paper had been slipped from his room under the door into the kitchen. Zeke picks up the note and his eyes just go wide looking at it. And we sort of look over his shoulder. On the note is just one word scribbled in. Help. This just sends shivers down my spine. And it's written very sloppily, like chicken scratch, horrible writing. Just the word help in the center of the page. I said to Zeke, I said, we got to go in there. Something's not right. We have to go in there and see for ourselves what's going on in this room. Maybe he is in trouble somehow. This has to be done. So we do open his door to his room, turn on his light. And the first thing I noticed was him laying on the bed with his covers off of his body. He's sort of just laying like he had fallen back into the bed. He's not like snuggled up under the covers. Dwayne's first thought he checks the closet to make sure that there's not an intruder or just some other being in the room make sure Jay's the only one in this room we walk right over to him and Zeke keeps calling out his name like Jay, Jay, Jay wake up Jay and he's almost yelling at him at this point just yelling his name over and over and Jay's just completely unresponsive Zeke even goes right up to him is yelling at him and we can see his eyes his eyes would sort of flutter from closed to half open over and over again like very rapidly open enough to where you would see a pupil but I couldn't see his pupil because they were straight up, like rolled back into his head. Like he's not in control of them or he's not conscious. Zeke at this point is shaking him, calling out his name. Jay, wake up, Jay, you're scaring us, Jay. Still nothing, not a single response from the guy. He just was in a frozen state with his eyes fluttering and completely unresponsive. And Zeke puts both hands on his shoulders and is pushing up and down pretty hard, like shaking him so his head's bobbing. The bed is essentially bouncing because he's pushing down on both shoulders over and over again. He probably shakes him for a good 20 seconds until we just gave up because there was no response from Jay. And then it seems kind of ridiculous what we're doing. We're shaking this man in his bed and he's unresponsive. This is freaking me out. This is not a prank at all. He would have broken character. He would have smiled. He would have laughed. This guy is possessed and we can't seem to do anything to snap him out of it. We turn off his lights again, shut his bedroom door, leave him to rest. I remember Dwayne saying that he didn't want to stay in his bed for too long. He didn't want to stay in his bed for too long. He didn't want to stay there for the night because he didn't have a lock on his door and he was worried about staying in his room that night because he thought Jay might break into his room and hurt him. Dwayne stays at my house to sleep and Zeke stays at another friend of ours to sleep. We hardly get any sleep that night. Maybe a couple hours because our minds are reeling. So the next morning we do go to class. We present our project. But in the back of our minds we're just thinking about Jay still because none of us have seen him since we entered his room. Then we head back to the apartment to talk to Jay. And he's just sitting in the kitchen like normal. Seems to be himself. Dwayne asked Jay, how was your sleep last night? I hope we didn't bother you. I hope we weren't too loud. I hope we didn't wake you up at all last night. Jay said, yeah, no, my sleep was all right. But I had this dream where, I kept trying to leave my room and there was this dark, massive figure at the door blocking my way. And every time I tried to leave my room, this dark figure would stop me. This large, dark figure blocking the doorway. Once we heard this, we couldn't believe it. It was, it was shocking. We checked the footage. On the phone, it had me calling out to Steve. It had the door being slammed into. And throughout the entire time, the room was pitch dark. So he, in his state, was still able to grab a pen, grab a piece of paper from his table and wrote help and put it under the door for us to read. We just thought it was incredible what he had told us about his, what he had told us about his night. Because it sort of explained how he was essentially running into his door over and over again. 'Cause that's sort of how it felt when it was happening. Like the door is just being smashed into, like in an attempt to escape, but he wasn't able to open the door and just leave in his state. So he was calling out for us to help him. For a while, we tried to just say that he was pranking us, but that doesn't line up at all. And I feel like we sort of failed him, honestly. Look, you wanna know about condenser coil, expansion valves? Come to me, I'm your guy. I could tell you stories about refrigerant that would make you shiver. That's actually a pretty good pun, shiver. But demons, potential ghosts, that's above my pay grade. Anyway, let's take a break for the ads. Ooh, I wonder if I can actually take this opportunity to plug my own business. Hi, hi, I'm Jared Miller, AC repairman. You know what they say, if you need it repaired, just call Jared. The number is five. Guess the other advertisers were more important. Fine, I get it. No, no, no, I get it. BetterHelp's a sexier product. Dietary supplements are in. But you know who's there for you when the dietary supplements and green powders don't agree with your stomach? Yeah, your local handyman. Anyway, I already know you just want me to play you another tape. I get it, I get it. You got one thing on the brain, and that's other people's trauma, apparently. All right, here we go. So it's the summer of 1999. My neighbors and I are outside playing. It's something we did all the time, from sunup to sundown, just be playing basketball and just be outside. On this day, whereas we're shooting hoops, we can look down the street, It's something we did all the time, from sunup to sundown, and out of the corner of our eye, just be playing basketball and just be outside. On this day, whereas we're shooting hoops, we can look down the street and out of the corner of our eye we can see two people peeking into houses. First we see them try to jump onto a windowsill and then we can see them go around and try to peek into windows that might have been open. Definitely wasn't people that we knew from the neighborhood. So we go inside, and we were only 15 and 13 at the time, so we went in to get our moms to tell them, you know, something's going up down the street. As our parents come out, the people are gone. There's no sign of them. All of a sudden, around the other corner, you see the people come back out, and we're like, see, we weren't lying to you. There's actually people peeking into these windows. And the same thing, they start peeking into the windows. They started trying to jump onto the windowsill. But at this house, the old man that had lived there was still home. He came out, and we could see him arguing with them. We couldn't hear what they were saying, but we could see, like, their arms flailing. So there was definitely some type of argument being had. Our moms, now believing us, you know, also started watching to see what might go on. And my mom at this time had her phone with her just in case, you know, something had happened. So we're sitting there and the old man seems to go and the two people that were peeking into the houses, looks like they leave and we continue playing basketball. All of a sudden we look up and we realize that those two people didn't leave. They were actually coming down the street towards us. So the two of them start walking towards us and where I was, I was at the top of the driveway. and he makes his way down and he puts out his hand for a handshake. Instinctively, I reach out and grab his hand and just regret it as soon as I grasp it. His warm, sweaty palms just like squeeze tightly onto my hands and I hear him say, Hi, I'm Bobby Corey. He says it with a tone that I should know exactly who he is. I shake his hand, and he says, I used to live down the street, and my daddy won't let me in. We were just looking in the windows to see if our friends were still there, so don't be afraid. You guys don't have to be afraid of me. And he says that a few times to us, like, don't be afraid. We're not scary. Don't be afraid. He starts asking us, where's your daddy? Does your daddy live here? Is your daddy still around? And at this point, our moms come up and they are trying to pull us away, but Bobby is still shaking my hand at this point. As we're talking, he notices that my mom has a phone in her hand and he sees a cruiser come down the street. And he gives her a look, like, did you call the cops? And it turns out that the old man who had just started walking down yells, nope, nope, that was me. So the police come down and they start talking to the adults. All of us kids go down to the back. I noticed that they pat down Bobby and his girlfriend. And he's getting into the back of the cruiser. No Miranda rights, no cuffs. And the cops go over to the adults and they start talking to them as well, telling them what's going to happen. And the cruiser takes off. All of us kids are a little shaken up. I mean, this man was extremely creepy. His girlfriend was just whispering at him and giggling. So we had no clue what was going on. The adults come to us and tell us that he's gone now. He's going to get dropped off at the next town over. He has a brother, whose brother's going to come and pick him up. The old man proceeds to tell us that Bobby did live in the neighborhood. Bobby Corey lived down the street for years, and his whole house with his brothers and sisters were trouble. Bobby, years ago, had possibly started a fire in the house that had claimed the life of one of the kids. Bobby Corey had either been locked up or put away for some unknown reason, and that's why he was home now, and his dad wasn't going to let him in. So with all this excitement, you know, we stay outside for a little bit longer, and my mom decides, we'll all stay together, we'll have a little cookout now, let's go get some hot dogs and hamburgers and stuff. I ride with my mom, and we're just going to go down the street to go pick up some hamburgers and hot dogs, and, you know, try to just enjoy the rest of the nice day and try to forget about what just happened. And as we're driving down the street, it's about three-quarters of a mile long, and it's straight woods, and it's a straight shot. We get almost to the end, and we see two people walking with a brown paper bag. I sink into my chair, try not to look at them, and my mom obviously can't sink because she's driving, drives past them, and they give a little stare down, and my mom realizes, oh my God, we have to get back home. So we go up another, like, probably ten seconds, pull a U-turn, and start driving. And as we start driving back, there was nobody on the street. This street had no driveways, no other roads. It was a straight three-quarter mile of just woods. So we get back to our house. We gather up our neighbors who are outside still. We bring everybody into our house, and we just sit in our living room. I had a ranch-style house with a big bay window up front. So we all sit there and just, you know, wait to see if anybody comes walking down the street or if we can hear anything. After about 10, 15 minutes, we can start hearing faint singing. And then it gets louder and louder. And then we can see them coming out down the street, Bobby Corey waving an American flag, singing God Bless America, marching with his girlfriend in tow, giggling, right behind him, also holding an American flag, parading in front of my neighbor's house and then our house. And you can hear God Bless America back and forth, horrible-toned, right in front of where we were sitting. We never saw him peek into our window, but there he was marching right in front of us, probably no more than 20 feet, holding his paper bag, holding his American flag, going right past our driveway and then down the road. We cracked the window a little bit so we could hear, and we could hear him getting fainter and fainter. And when we thought it was okay and safe, we all got out of the house and very slowly walked to the top of the driveway and looked down, and we couldn't see anything, and we could barely hear anything at this point. So we thought, okay, we're in the clear. Just as we thought we were in the clear, a llama comes flying down the street. There are some people in our neighborhood that had animals. I didn't know anybody that had a llama, but apparently there was one, and it got loose and started sprinting down towards us. The cruiser came up to us and told us that the original call that he received was somebody had gone into their backyard and unlatched, their llamas from the backyard, and now they were running loose. So somebody else now had called to say that there was a man in their backyard unlatching their animals, and he described Bobby Corey. So Bobby Corey now had gone past us and was letting out animals for whatever reason. That was the last time I thought I would ever hear the name of Bobby Corey. Bobby Corey. About a week later, I was going over to my friend's house, who lived pretty close to me. If anybody needed to cut through the woods to pretty much anywhere in this neighborhood, instead of driving down the street or walking wide open, you could just go through the woods and be able to get to all these centralized locations. So I went over to his house, and we were going to try to see if, any of our friends were around, and maybe I'll try to get together and play a big game of wiffle ball. So when we got to his house, he unlocked the door, which typically meant that nobody was home. They always locked their house. So we went inside, grabbed some snacks, and we went to go on the computer. This is 1999, so you had to use dial-up to get onto America Online. So we sat down, and we were going to see if any of our friends were online to get in touch with them. As we're sitting there chatting, we can hear something above us. So my friend yells to his brother, and he goes, Hey, Jay, are you home? And we don't hear anything after that. We look at each other, we think it's kind of odd, but it's an older house, so maybe it was just a creek. So we start talking to some friends, seeing, you know, what's going on when we get knocked offline. We're like, oh, that's weird. Now back then, if you had picked up the phone, you'd get knocked offline. So we go back on to dial-up, and we think we hear some footsteps again upstairs. Well, as we're talking to our friends, I tell my buddy, I say, Hey, tell them we think someone might be here. And as I say that, we get knocked offline again. So now we're very suspicious that there might be somebody in the house with us. So we grab the landline that was next to us, and we decide to call our friends and ask them where they are. Maybe they want to come over because they could come here and help us out. We call them, and as we're on the phone with them, I hear the receiver pick up upstairs. And I look at my friend, and I go, someone just picked up the phone. He upped the phone, and me and him look at each other, and we decide that we're going to go now upstairs to try to see who's here. It could still be his brother messing with us. It's something he would do. So we go to the kitchen. We go up his staircase, which is a very old-school, steep staircase. And we go to his bedroom, which is on the left, and we look, and there's nobody there. To go to where the noise was, we have to go through a hallway, which connects to another hallway. And as we're walking down this hallway, I can see in the room a shadow dart across and go behind the door. And I freeze, and I look at my friend, and I go, "Did you see that?" And he nods, and we both go to take one more step, and at that moment, he darts. So I dart, and we run down the stairs, out the front door, and just go to the driveway. We look up to the window of where we heard the noise, and then we look at each other, and we go, "No, we got to be braver than this. We have to go back in." So together, we go into the kitchen, and I grab a serrated bread knife, 'cause the first thing I grabbed. He grabs a giant butcher knife, and we start walking up the staircase. The hallway that I mentioned before had two doors on either end. As we go up to the staircase, both doors are now shut. So with our knives in hand, we look at each other, and we go, "All right, on the count of three, we're going to go in. We're just going to see who's there. One, two, three. We slam open our door. Across the hall, the other door slams open. He darts. I dart. We run out to the driveway. Now we know that there's someone definitely upstairs. In the driveway, we look down, and we can see that there's four guys working on their car. So we go down and we get them, and we say, "Hey, if you guys could come up with us, help us. We think someone broke in. It's just us two in the house." We didn't need to give them any more reason. And they ransacked the house. They ran through the first floor, looking for anybody they could see. They went upstairs. They couldn't find anything. We're walking through the house, and we get up to the second floor, and we can see that the second floor window onto the roof is open. And we walk out onto the roof and look down, and in his mother's flower bed is a perfect body imprint of somebody who had just jumped and ruined all of her flowers, and more than likely took off into the woods. We gather ourselves. We call the police just to tell them what had happened. The police come, and they take our statement. They say there's not much they can do 'cause there's no one there. And this is now the third or fourth cop that I've seen in town, so now they all know me. know my name and he tells us just to relax so that next day I go back home my neighbor comes over and he says oh I heard you had an exciting day yesterday and I was like yeah he says oh he goes there must be a full moon going on because I've caught someone the past two nights coming out the middle of the night from the woods with a bucket and stealing my water really and he goes yeah he goes brown greasy hair dirty he grabs it and he sprints back into the woods and at that moment I looked out into the woods of where the snowmobile paths were and realized it was Bobby Corey Bobby Corey had been out in the woods this entire time watching us and I know for a fact Bobby Corey was in the house that day when I was with my friend and then he escaped back into the woods you you , it was Bobby Corey all right that's about enough for me if I listen to another one I'm going to lose complete faith in humanity so here's another ad break as if marketing will help me trust again all right I'm out of here I feel I've done my duty I've fixed about everything in this store I've fixed about everything in this store I've fixed about everything in this store except for Malachi's attitude except for Malachi's attitude except for Malachi's attitude I'd say it was nice meeting you but I I'd say it was nice meeting you but I I'd say it was nice meeting you but I don't really know you you literally don't really know you you literally don't really know you you literally never said one word never said one word never said one word anyway I guess you should come back next anyway I guess you should come back next anyway I guess you should come back next week I mean I won't be here but I guess week I mean I won't be here but I guess week I mean I guess someone will be and hey don't break someone will be and hey don't break someone will be and hey don't break anything because I don't want to come anything because I don't want to come anything because I don't want to come back here anytime soon hey hey Malachi back here anytime soon hey hey Malachi back here anytime soon hey hey Malachi don't you dare push that cup off the don't you dare push that cup off the don't you dare push that cup off the count don't you dare put radio rental is count don't you dare put radio rental is count don't you dare put radio rental is created by pain Lindsay and brought to created by pain Lindsay and brought to created by pain Lindsay and brought to you by tenderfoot TV showrunner is you by tenderfoot TV showrunner is you by tenderfoot TV showrunner is Meredith Steadman lead producer is Eric Meredith Steadman lead producer is Eric Meredith Steadman lead producer is Eric Quintana executive producers are pain Quintana executive producers are pain Quintana executive producers are pain Lindsay and Donald Albright guest host Lindsay and Donald Albright guest host Lindsay and Donald Albright guest host is Josh Radner writing by Meredith is Josh Radner writing by Meredith is Josh Radner writing by Meredith Steadman original score by makeup and Steadman original score by makeup and Steadman original score by makeup and vanity set with additional score by Jay vanity set with additional score by Jay vanity set with additional score by Jay Ragsdale editing by Eric Quintana pain Ragsdale editing by Eric Quintana pain Ragsdale editing by Eric Quintana pain Lindsay Steven Perez Cooper Skinner Lindsay Steven Perez Cooper Skinner Lindsay Steven Perez Cooper Skinner Meredith Steadman and Dylan Harrington Meredith Steadman and Dylan Harrington sound design mix and master by Steven sound design mix and master by Steven sound design mix and master by Steven Perez and Cooper Skinner our production Perez and Cooper Skinner our production Perez and Cooper Skinner our production manager is Jordan Foxworthy our social manager is Jordan Foxworthy our social manager is Jordan Foxworthy our social media manager is Caroline or a Gemma media manager is Caroline or a Gemma media manager is Caroline or a Gemma video editing by Dylan Harrington cover video editing by Dylan Harrington cover video editing by Dylan Harrington cover artwork by Trevor Eiler and Rob Sheridan artwork by Trevor Eiler and Rob Sheridan artwork by Trevor Eiler and Rob Sheridan radio rental merchandise by Byron McCoy radio rental merchandise by Byron McCoy radio rental merchandise by Byron McCoy to shop radio rental merch visit shop.tenderfoot.tv special thanks to Oren Rosenbaum and special thanks to Oren Rosenbaum and special thanks to Oren Rosenbaum and the team at UTA as well as the Nord group the team at UTA as well as the Nord group the team at UTA as well as the Nord group and the team at Odyssey if you have a and the team at Odyssey if you have a and the team at Odyssey if you have a radio rental story that you'd like to radio rental story that you'd like to radio rental story that you'd like to share please email us 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