Rewind: Episode 05

Hey, what's up guys, I'm Steven and this is Radio Rental Rewind where we check out the archives, the scariest stories we have, the greatest hits, the fan favorites. And today we're going to be talking about haunted places. So if you like that, you're going to love this. This one is from Episode 34 and it's called Haunted Living. So let's check it out. Yeah, battery looks full, yep, and we're at 13 seconds. So just set it right on the table and leave it alone, okay. It all started back in 2016. We had just purchased this house and moved in. We said it was our dream house. It's everything that we both had ever wanted. About two weeks after we moved in, we had an explosion on the side of our house. The air conditioning unit started a fire in between the wall of our two kids bedrooms. We had the fire department out, we had a bunch of electricians out and nobody could really tell us exactly what had happened. We just knew that a fire had started from a big surge of electricity that was inside the house. We were just told that we were lucky that it stopped. We figured it was just a fluke and we could start living normally again after that and now that everything had been replaced and fixed. After that everything, strange started happening. It's flickering throughout the house. It wasn't normal flickering like a light bulb has gone out. We'd be eating dinner and noticed that the lights were flickering. We'd be up in our bedroom. The lights would flicker. We would look up when they would start flickering and the chandeliers would be swinging back and forth on their chains. We called electricians out to try and fix the problem and they replaced everything that we could think of replacing and nothing was fixing the problem. Our smoke alarms started to have a mind of their own. It wasn't just chirping like smoke alarms go off when they're losing their batteries. The smoke alarms would go off just long enough to make us think there was an actual fire. Start moving out of the room, start gathering the kids and then the smoke alarms would just turn themselves off. I would be walking on the treadmill and I'd be going at like a three point speed and all of a sudden it would start increasing faster and faster until I was yanking the emergency chain. We would be in other rooms when our TVs would turn on or off. Everything that was happening was just unexplainable. We were trying pretty much everything we could think of to solve these issues. We spent so much money on electricians trying to get answers. We had the fire department out here inspecting everything. Experts going through the house trying to figure out why our house was having the issues that it was having and the only explanation that we were getting was that our house has electric surges from within it. Nobody can explain why. At this point it's definitely intruded our thoughts on a daily basis, especially when noises started happening in the house as well. Footsteps that we would hear upstairs, those are hard to ignore. I'd be in the kitchen and I'd hear a big bang on the other side of the wall. It would be as loud as a chair falling over and I'd come in here thinking I'd see a chair had fallen over and there was nothing out of place. Just hanging out in the family room with the kids and we'd hear a bunch of stomping upstairs and us trying to explain away to the kids that it's probably just the pipes upstairs. But it's a pretty new house. It's only about 20 years old. It was starting to feel like the house was alive, kind of had a mind of its own. We started talking about moving pretty early on, but we felt crazy. Are we really going to make this massive financial decision off of a few thumbs and a little weird electricity? I worked from home at the time by myself while the kids were in school. I started hearing noises where I thought somebody was breaking into the house every day. I would hear a huge crash against the back window every morning at about 10 a.m. And I would come running out of the office thinking that somebody had tried to break into the back door. So I started telling my husband that I was experiencing these noises while he was at work. All the walls had either banging or sounded like something was running its hands down the wall. There were so many noises happening on three out of the four walls in the home office. I kept running out thinking that I was going to find somebody in my house. The noises just kept amplifying and getting worse and more frequent. It felt like I had to get out of the house. I grabbed my laptop and my phone and my keys and it ran out to the garage and got in the car and drove away from my house to a different part of the neighborhood and just started crying and telling my husband I can't live here anymore. I don't want to do this. I'm sick to death of this. I can't focus. It's making me feel crazy. Everything crossed my mind from maybe the former owner still had a key. They were trying to get in. I couldn't figure out what was happening. Shortly after that, my husband also started working from home. He started thinking that someone was breaking in to the point where he started taking a knife in the morning before he would go downstairs to work. There was so many times he came running upstairs thinking that somebody was here. Nobody ever was. It was just his turn, I guess, to start hearing all of the same things that I was hearing. If my husband and my kids weren't hearing what I was hearing, I would be seriously questioning my sanity. They did hear a lot of stuff. We explained a lot of things away to our kids. Up until this point, my husband and I had been really careful. We still are to this day. We have an explanation for everything so that they don't grow up thinking that they live in a haunted house. They had never heard us talk about any of this stuff. We always did it when they were not home or asleep. The kids were in the basement. At this time, they were about five and six years old. They had come running upstairs. Mom, we saw something in the basement. My heart drops. I said, "Why did you see in the basement?" And they said, "We saw a shadow figure." My blood goes cold. What did it look like? The older one kind of motions with his hands. It was like a shadow, but I couldn't really see through it. I said, "What did it do?" He said, "It just kind of glided across the room, and he showed me with his feet. And then it went through me, and then it went into the wall with an outlet." And you didn't see a shadow person. That was just your shadow in the basement. They were adamant that they saw it. So I took the older one downstairs first and I left the little one upstairs and said, "Show me where you saw it." And he retraced the path of this shadow person in the basement. And I said, "Interesting, trying to keep it pretty calm, neutral." And I took him back upstairs and then I took the younger one downstairs and said, "Show me where you saw this thing." [BLANK_AUDIO] one shows me the exacting path and the exacting wall, and I just take him back up stairs and said, "Well, if you ever see it again, let me know," but I just think you saw your shadow. They didn't talk about it again until within the last three months. He said that he saw a shadow figure again only. This time he said he opened the basement door, and it was standing at the bottom of the basement stairs. He opened the door inside, slammed the door again. The older one told me what happened, and I said, "You haven't seen anything like that in years." And he said, "This time it was different," and I said, "How was it different?" "This time it had legs." What did we do with that? I told my husband if it keeps happening, we got to go. I'm not going to have our kids grow up in something like this. There was one night I came home pretty late. My kids were already upstairs to sleep. My husband was sitting on the couch. I came in, start asking him how the night was, telling him about my night, and I hear a kid's voice singing. It's late. Why are the kids awake? I thought they'd be asleep by now. In total seriousness, my husband looks over at me and says, "That's not the kids." Yes, it is. Of course, that's the kids. He's like, "It's not the kids. I've checked on them multiple times." This thing starts stopping and starting, and I don't know how to explain it. There's no speakers on. It's not really a song. It's more just like a lazy melody, like if a little kid was kind of just humming to themselves. It wasn't anything that would have been recorded on the radio. It just was this meandering tune in this child's voice. And I kept arguing with my husband like, "Stop." Of course, that's the kids. I'm telling you, it's not the kids. So I raised up the stairs. I opened my son's door first. I looked at him and he was asleep in his bed. A foot away is my daughter's door, so I opened her door and she's asleep in bed. And I'm just standing there in the hallway. Looking in their two doors, seeing that they're both asleep and still hearing this music. Since I was letting light into my daughter's room, she pops her head up and I'm looking at my daughter and she's looking at me. She sleepily looks at me and says, "What is that?" And I said, "What is what?" And she said, "What is that singing?" "I don't know, honey. You might just be dreaming. Just go back to sleep." She looks at me and says, "I think that's just my brother trying to scare me." And then she lays back down and goes to sleep again. It eventually stopped, but I still can't explain it. We were out of ideas at this point. We had done saging. We had called more electricians than I can count. We had spent thousands of dollars replacing wiring, lighting, tvs. We had already done everything that we could think of. We had a priest out to the house. He came over in full, priestly attire and brought his holy water with him. He just wanted to do a little blessing on the front door. No, you're going to go to every room in the house. So I walked around with him to every room, every corner of the house. He sprinkled holy water everywhere and did lots of blessings. He asked for more details. We explained what was happening in the house. He said sometimes when people are having something like this happen, whatever the entity is that is in your house acts playful. Tries to get you to trust it. Definitely wants you to notice it, but doesn't do anything to make you feel scared or do anything that's enough to get you to leave. Then it starts to show its true colors after you start to trust it. The night of Halloween actually my husband and I were woken up at about three o'clock in the morning to the smoke alarm going off in our bedroom. Long enough to get our attention. Always gave smoke alarms 10 seconds or so to stop because they were happening so frequently. This one went off longer to the point where I thought there was an actual fire in the house, so my husband and I jumped out of bed. We opened the door to our bedroom. Let's go get the kids. We need to get out. Ran out onto the landing outside of our bedroom. At that point, the smoke alarm just stopped. My husband and I were just standing out on the landing in the dark, in total silence. It wants us out here. It wants us to know it didn't work. How do you just go back to sleep? It truly just becomes part of your life. If something like this has never happened to you, you have all these things that you would do. And all these ways that you would handle it. Really, the only thing that you can do is just go back to sleep. You just have to go back to your everyday life. Shortly after that, there was the night that my husband and I were sleeping. All of a sudden, what sounded like an old-fashioned music box, clinking away at an old-fashioned song. I started blasting in our bedroom. Full blast. I shot up in my bed. My husband shot up, jumped out of bed, and started racing around the room, trying to figure out where it was. He was racing around to his phone. It wasn't his phone. My phone wasn't my phone. There was a TV in our room, and he turned the power button on. It wasn't the TV. He turned the TV back off. There's nothing else in our room that it could have been. I sat in bed, the covers pulled up, yelling, turn it off, turn it off, turn it off, turn it off, all of a sudden it just stopped. There's no reasonable explanation as to what it could have been. I can handle noises. I can handle electric issues, but if anything starts making me question our safety, or if I start seeing anything, that's my line in the sand. My husband was sick, and when he gets sick with a cough in particular, he will sleep downstairs, gone a couch so he can cough freely and not wake me up all night. I was sleeping in our room. Almost every night I wake up at about three o'clock in the morning or so, and fall back asleep pretty soon. I don't know where. I feel the comforter behind me inflate. It's here. As soon as I thought that, something yanks back my hair. I was trying to reach my phone, but I couldn't. The comforter flies over my face. I was trying to scream as loud as I could. But nothing was coming out. It probably lasted maybe five to 10 seconds. As quickly as it started, it stopped. I have thought about it every day since it happened. Maybe I was just asleep, maybe I was dreaming, but I don't think I was asleep and I don't think I was dreaming. And I've never had a dream like that. I don't get night tears. I don't get sleep paralysis. I don't get anything like that. My husband had to leave to go to a conference for four days and I remember telling him how crazy it is that I'm more afraid of what's inside our house than what's outside of our house when he's gone. How can you live in a house like that? You can't. As soon as the holidays are over, we gotta go. It seems to be very much attached to the house and in the bones of the house. I have to believe it's just attached to this house and hopefully when we leave, it's gonna stay put. I'm looking forward to that. I was like giving myself a pep talk earlier today. I think like. Oh, you're gonna just do this and I don't know. We'll see what happens. But yeah, definitely nerves, for sure. That's why we don't talk about it with people. Yes. Yeah, I mean, things will. But yeah, if anything major happens, I will reach back out and let you know. So the family still lives in the house. I know, I know. But last we heard they were safe and sound and happily ever after. But it has been a minute since we talked to 'em. Probably should do a welfare check or something on 'em. Anyway, we'll keep you posted. Yeah, I've never lived in a place that I thought was haunted, but I've had some friends who've lived in some haunted places. They said, "I wouldn't have lasted as long as that family." Honestly, I would've gotten the hell out of there. But, you know, good for them. They're okay, they made it. But let's take a breath, let's take a break and we'll be right back. All right, guys, so we know you all can't get enough or radio rental, right? Well, now you can. Visit the Tenderfoot store at shop.tenderfoot.tv to grab our latest radio rental merch, like the Summer Hat and Open Lake Women's T. Plus the exclusive drops like the Terry Carnation collection. You can even take the radio rental store home. Yeah, the whole thing. With our exclusive brick building LEGO set. So treat yourself or grab a gift for a friend at shop.tenderfoot.tv. And as we celebrate 10 years of Tenderfoot, yeah, that's right. We've got a special offer for our loyal listeners. Sign up for a new annual Tenderfoot Plus subscription or upgrade from your existing monthly plan and you'll get a free t-shirt from the shop. You can pick from dozens of radio rental, up and vanished, in Tenderfoot designs. And yeah, exclusions apply. So head over to promo.tenderfootplus.com to claim your free shirt before they run out. And they will. And as always, thanks for being a loyal radio rental customer. Later. Do you have a dark curiosity? Heart Starts pounding horrors 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 Bear Brook, 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 Bear Brook saying, like, what if we were to just come across something? You know, in a real challenge, he said, you know, I found him. Follow Bear Brook on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, we're back. My favorite part, you've listened to us. It's time for us to listen to you and hear your weird voice mails, which never cease to amaze me. Let's see what we got. It's always something. All right, I'm ready. Check it out. Now, Akai, I love you. I love this show. Thank you for everything you do. I'm just starting off with John. He was like, set it off in a second. John out. Malachi's killing it, though. I have two pieces of real. A lot of them cover that else. Love the show. What is going on in the background? Where are these people? Love the show. He sounds trashed. Yeah, something on the background. It's real. But there's a kid in the background. Mother playground. Perfect time to call right away. Oh, like whoa. Let me know if you want me to be in one of your episodes. You might end up in one. You might only like that on the wrong end. I love our listeners. Yeah, yeah, we love you guys. Hey, thanks, Payne. Fun hanging out. But now we're going to check out another story, even creepier than this first one. This one's called Village Ghost. And it's back from episode 31. All right. All right, so typical of the way we would like to start is I'll have you basically kind of set the scene for me. Kind of where were you in life? How long were you? What was going on at the time of this kind of all began? Right, right. So this was in November of 1999. At the time, I was a sophomore in college. And for my first two years in college, I attended a sort of medium-sized university in the North Carolina mountains. I had already attended there at my freshman year and I had lived on campus at kind of a regular dorm. Roommates, the whole deal. But what I liked about this college, at the time, once you became a sophomore, you became eligible to live in a place called Governor's Village, which was a series kind of a complex of dorms that were all single rooms. So you do not have a roommate. The way that the individual dorm room was set up, it was a small room, but it was more narrow than it was wide. It was sort of like a rectangle shape. I had my bed up against the window, so the head of the bed was against the window and the window kind of looked off into the parking lot and some woods. And so if you're laying in bed, your feet were pointed towards your door. And it wasn't too far from the end of the bed to the door, probably eight feet, something like that. The way that this building was set up was that it was an older building. I would say it's probably 80 years old at the time. The construction had kind of gotten older. Not everything was flush. And there was no bathroom in your actual dorm room. The dorm would lead out into a small hallway where you had the shared bathroom that you share with everyone else on that floor. And they had these fluorescent lights that were out in the hallway. And they never shut them off. They were on 25 hours a day. If you were in your dorm room or at least mine with the lights off, the light from those fluorescent lights would shine in through the doorway. And it would form this almost perfect rectangle of light. You could see the outline of the door, just from the lights. And you just would kind of get used to that. 'Cause you could always see this rectangle of light. This was a Saturday night. I remember staying up. I was a night owl. I stayed up and watched Saturday Night Live. And I was chatting on AOL instant messenger with a friend at another university. So that kind of wrapped up. It was about two o'clock in the morning and I just decided to go to bed. I'm laying there in bed and I've shut all my lights off and I've got the blanket on me. And I've kind of got my head propped up and I'm just sort of laying there thinking about what I had to do the next day. And I'm laying there and I realized something strange. I realized that I could not see the light coming in on what would have been the left hand side of the door. It was like something was in the way. I could see the light from the right and the top and a little bit sort of the top of the door on the left side, but it just sort of stopped like something was physically blocking it. And I laid there for 20, 30 seconds, just sort of looking towards my feet, idly wondering, what's blocking the door? Did I leave something there? Did I stack something up there? Did I hang my backpack on the hook on the door? I don't think I did. And I remember thinking, is it my fan? Because these dorms had no air conditioning. It was November, and I think it was late November, and I put the fan in my closet. My fan's not there. And I'm just kind of idly wondering, and my eyes sort of drift upwards. I see this face. And what I realize is blocking the light is an old woman standing at the foot of my bed. She was maybe five feet tall. She looked grandmotherly to me. You could see the wrinkles on her face. I remember her nose being fairly prominent. Her hands were at her sides, and I could remember seeing sort of the whites of her hands on the sides of her body, and she was pale. She wasn't translucent. She wasn't shimmering anything like that. It just looked like an old woman standing in my dorm room. She was wearing like a shawl, a dark shawl. It looked black in color. I remember she had on her rain bonnet, kind of like my grandma used to wear it. Then it felt like she was leaning forward a little bit. She had these big, expressive eyes, and she is just looking down at me. And as my eyes are adjusting to the dark, I can make her out more and more or the more she stands there. It looks like a real person in my room. It was this immediate rush of adrenaline. There's no way someone's snuck in. I would have seen someone sneaking in. She can't have been hiding in my closet. I have a fan in there. There's no way she could have fit in the closet. And even in my brain thinking, why would this 70 year old woman want to come into my dorm room? That doesn't make any sense. That always kind of going through my head. The thought that someone might have snuck in in my room would not have been crazy because all of us living in the village had gotten a flyer under our doors a couple of weeks earlier. One of the students who was staying at one of the other dorms in the complex had come back from the shower into our dorm room and there had been a man hiding in her closet. I shouted out something, who are you? What do you want? And there was no answer. She just kept staring at me. I remember doing the thing you see in cartoons where someone sees a mirage in the desert or something and they rub their eyes and kind of shake their head to make sure it's real. And I did that. I rubbed my eyes and shaking my head and kind of gathering myself and opening my eyes again. Halfway expecting her not to be there and she was still there. She's still just standing there, just looking at me. And I've got this surge of adrenaline because you're in bed, you're already kind of vulnerable and there's someone at the foot of your bed. I start up at a bed. To get out of bed, I would have to get out of bed to the right side. And I remember swinging my right leg out of bed from underneath the blanket, swinging it and putting my foot on the floor to start standing up. And as soon as I did that motion, she started moving and she moved backwards. She kind of slid towards the door. And when she got to the door, she was just gone. So I turn on my lamp and I start at a bed and I'm wearing a t-shirt and boxer shorts. I run to the dorm room door and open it. Of course, all this fluorescent light comes pouring in from the hallway lights. I look up and down the hallway, nobody's there. I run down the stairs barefoot. I've got to get down two flights of stairs to get to the entrance to the actual dorm building. I'm looking around the whole time trying to see if anybody's there, nobody's there. I open the front door to the dorm. So I'm now outside, but I don't see anybody. It's just completely quiet. Close the door, go upstairs, hearts racing. I just can't stop thinking about this experience, which I would say lasted for a good minute. And I turn on every light I had in my dorm, went back in bed and actually did eventually fall asleep. So the next morning, I wake up and I cannot stop thinking about this experience. I am self-critiquing in my brain all day as to what could possibly happen. I wasn't drinking. I don't do drugs. I wasn't even particularly tired when I lay down. I can remember that. I wasn't drowsy or anything like that. It was just kind of time to go to bed. So I couldn't dismiss it out of hand by just thinking about what could have happened last night. I know I wasn't dreaming. The next day was a Monday, and my first class was news riding. And I sat in the back of the room and a few minutes before class started, my friend Mason came in and sat down next to me on my left. Before he could really say anything, I said, "You'll never believe what happened to me on Saturday." And what happened? I swear, I think I saw a ghost in my room. I think I saw a ghost in my room. And that's all I said. The literally only words that came out of my mouth. There was a girl who sat in front of us. Her name was Katie. And I didn't know Katie very well. But she had overheard me talking. Katie spends around and says, "You saw a ghost in your room?" That initial question just chilled me. And I said, "Yeah." And she said, "Do you live in the village?" "Yeah." And she said, "Did you see an old woman in your room?" I remember her putting her hand on top of my hand. I must have been shaking. And she said, "You saw the ghost of the village." Other people have seen her. And then class started. She wouldn't have known about this. She wouldn't have had any idea this had happened. And I didn't know her very well. To have this other puzzle piece sort of fallen in place was it was so chilling. It's hard for me to describe just the hairs going up in the back of my neck. The sensation of cold water going down my back. I remember just sort of staring out the window. And it was like class was happening. It was like a Charlie Brown teacher kind of a thing. I have no idea what we talked about. I should be staring off in his face. This was real. This was real. And replaying it and replaying it and replaying it. I remember asking her after class, "Did you ever see it?" She said, "No, no, I've just heard stories." I never found anyone else who had seen this before. Who was she and what did she want? Looking back as terrifying as it was, I never felt like she was there to threaten me or even really scare me. I think she just seemed lonely. Maybe this was her way of keeping some connection with one world, monitoring through this place and seeing us. Maybe every now and again we get to see them. Perfect. I think that's it. I don't see anything of that. I think that's it. I've told it so many times. It's hard to instinct to tell it. No, that was a blast, thank you. Yeah, no problem. Glad I worked out. Yeah, no, thank you. Yeah, now my wife has just been telling me for years. Looks like our friend here came in contact with the. the famous governor's village ghost. And according to legend, an old woman, or elderly woman, is said to haunt the campus dorms. And if you're wondering what school he went to, it was the University of North Carolina Asheville. So if you wanna pay her a visit or have her pay you a visit, you know where to go. (phone ringing) - Yeah, I don't know, I'd last in that bed as long as that guy did. I think I would've just tried to jump out the window or run out of there, but, you know, good for him. Sounds like he's okay. Sounds like he has a cool story to tell, good for him. But, it's all take a break, let's chill out for a second. And we'll be back. - A reporter receives a shocking tip about something that happened inside a woman's prison. He starts asking questions. And what she recovers is far bigger than one disturbing event, a deeply entrenched system that people it protects and the women who risk everything to challenge it from the inside. Snap studios and KQED present, we are Jane Doe, a three-part investigative series listen on Snap Judgment wherever you get your podcast. - Looking for a horror podcast that isn't murdered to get through, then check out another FN horror podcast. Our show where paranormal and true crime stories collide with unfiltered commentary. I'm Monique Stanchos, and I'm Amy Trayden. Each week, Monique and I share one paranormal story and one true crime case. From unexplained phenomena to true tales of murder and mayhem. We find the stories you haven't heard before and research them obsessively to bring them to life. Follow or watch another FN horror podcast, wherever you get your podcast. - All right guys, appreciate you hanging out with me. It's been a pleasure hearing some haunted places, creepy stories, join me next week. And we'll check out some more scary, weird stuff. And this has been Radio Rental Rewind later. (upbeat music)