Episode 74

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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.

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At Radio Rental, we carry one-of-a-kind videos so frightening, so mind-bending, you won't be able to sleep at night.

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Radio Rental.

Hi everyone.

Hi everyone.

Welcome to Radio Rental.

A video store

with this scariest collection of true stories you've ever heard.

I'm

usually

your host, Terry Carnation, but

today,

as you can probably tell, I

lost my voice.

Must be a change in the weather, or I don't know, something going around.

So,

anyhow, backed by popular demand, Malachi will be hosting this episode.

He's very excited.

Okay, Malachi, be good.

Don't be too good.

Or as the kids say, if you can't be good, be careful.

If you can't be careful, name it after me.

I just got that.

I really don't want to lose my job.

Not to a cat.

That would be a new low.

Alright.

First tape.

Pop it in.

Sorry.

Didn't mean to step on your lines.

It was my freshman year of college.

I was taking a theater appreciation class.

For part of it, we had to watch plays that our school would put on.

I usually went with my friends that were in the class.

I couldn't go with them this time,

so I just decided to go by myself.

I walk up to the door and there's this man in his late 20s, early 30s standing by the door.

Just kind of smiled at him because that's just what you do with strangers.

I got in line to get my ticket scanned and he got in line behind me.

While I'm standing there, I'm not really paying attention.

I'm playing a game on my phone, but I can hear him behind me mumbling about where his car was parked.

It was really strange.

It kind of sounded like he was talking to someone, but it was so quiet that it was just kind of to himself, which I kind of thought was weird, but I kind of just brushed it off.

So I got my ticket scanned and I walk through the doors and I hear him behind me ask,

where are you sitting?

I didn't think he was talking to me because I don't know him.

So I just kept walking and I sat in my seat.

20 seconds later, he walks in behind me, came into the row that I was on.

He was trying to get on the seat that was to the left of me,

stuck his leg all the way over my legs and like was leaned over me,

climbing over my body.

to get into the chair.

And while he's climbing over, he's like,

I can't believe I'm sitting right next to her.

It seemed like he was trying to get my attention without really saying anything to me.

He wanted me to notice him.

I just thought maybe he's just trying to be funny or like make me feel comfortable.

Maybe he's just socially awkward.

I was trying to just ride it off.

He sits down, turns to me, and asks me for a piece of gum.

I didn't have my purse or anything with me, so I didn't have any gum.

He starts asking me all these questions.

Do you come to these plays often?

No,

I don't.

Oh, well, I come all the time and my girlfriend's actually in this play.

He starts asking me questions about my major, if I came to college alone.

I told him I was majoring in chemistry.

Oh, what do you want to do with that?

And I said, I want to be a chemistry teacher.

No way.

My mom is a chemistry teacher.

And I was like, oh, what are the odds that this guy's mom is a chemistry teacher?

He started asking if I came to college alone.

I lied to him.

No, me and my brother came to college together.

Do you read any books?

And I said yes.

And I told him my favorite book was The Book Thief.

And he was like, my favorite book is The Book Thief.

He was asking me what kind of music I listened to.

Who is my favorite artist?

I told him this artist that's lesser known, Regina Specter, because not very many people listen to her.

Oh, I love her.

I listen to her all the time.

Everything in the small talk, he had the same answer, had the same interests.

Everything was connected to him somehow.

Something's weird.

Maybe he's flirting with me.

As I'm talking to him, This woman enters the aisle and she comes and sits on my right side

and she reaches out and grabs my arm and I like whipped my head around and looked at her.

Hey, how are you?

And I was like, I'm good.

I was thinking to myself, this is so weird.

Why are these two people being so talkative to me?

And then she starts asking me, do you come to these plays often?

She was asking me my major.

She asked me what books I liked.

She liked the same kind of books too.

They were asking me basically the same questions.

I was really weirded out.

I felt like I was having deja vu with how similar both of our conversations had been.

What's going on?

The lights flickered, play was starting.

We're watching the play and I could see in my peripheral vision that both of them would turn their heads and look at me while the play was going on.

The man especially would look at me so much and it made me really nervous.

Intermission came.

The man looked at me.

I'm gonna go get some candy from the concessions if you want anything.

No, I'm good.

Thank you, though.

Are you sure?

It's on me.

Like, I promise I'll surprise you.

No, I really don't want anything.

Thank you, though.

Okay, whatever.

And he seemed kind of frustrated and got up and made that big theatrical show of climbing over me again.

The woman turned to me.

She started telling me that I have a very beautiful speaking voice.

Asked me if I'd ever sang before,

which I thought was really weird when she asked me that because people don't just say, oh, you have a good speaking voice.

You should sing.

That's an odd thing to say.

I actually used to sing a lot in high school.

Almost seemed like she knew that I had sang before.

I told her I used to sing in high school, but I consider myself retired now.

And then she just started saying, Oh, you really need to do something with that.

Like, that's so awesome.

You shouldn't be retired.

We just kind of laughed about it.

She kind of made me feel a little bit more at ease with this conversation, but I still had these thoughts going on in my brain that I was like, that's weird.

I feel like she knows that I sing.

Does she know me?

Man comes back, climbs over me again to get into the seat on my left.

He's got M ⁇ Ms and milk duds.

And both of the packages looked like they had already been opened.

He was kind of chewing on something, so I thought maybe he was just eating some of the candy from the packages.

And he was like, here, do you want some?

I surprised you anyway.

You can pick.

No, thank you.

Really not.

Don't really want any.

He put the candy under his seat

and then never touched it again.

Didn't eat it the whole rest of the play.

Didn't look at it.

He looks at me and he is like, You have a very beautiful speaking voice.

Have you ever thought about singing?

Okay, something's really wrong because this is not really a coincidence anymore.

It kind of sounds like these two people are going off the same script and I feel like they know things about me and I don't know these people.

He starts saying that I'm beautiful.

I have a beautiful speaking voice.

I should sing.

And then he goes, where do you live?

I was really taken aback by that

and so I lied.

I told him that I lived in these apartment complexes that are an hour walk from campus

and I told him I lived with my brother.

Oh what a coincidence.

I live right beside there and I'm actually an amateur music producer.

I have like a whole recording setup at my house and you should come over and record some songs one day.

And I was like, Yeah, sure.

Absolutely not.

That's what I'm thinking in my head.

No way.

I'm never going over to your house to record anything.

While he's explaining this to me, in my field of vision, I can see his phone on his lap, and it's kind of dark in there.

His phone screen lights up.

I read what's on the screen and it's a text message from an unsaved number and it said she's really cute.

Do you think she'll do?

I felt all the color kind of drain from my face.

I almost started to cry because I knew that that was about me.

What do I do?

Like, how do I get out of this situation?

He looks at me.

He notices that I saw the text message and he grabs his phone real quick and kind of turns his body away from me so I can't see.

The woman grabs my arm so I turn around and she goes, do you want to go to the bathroom?

Sure,

I guess I'll go to the bathroom with you.

This woman probably knows that this man is being creepy towards me.

She's trying to save me.

Like, that's what women do.

She's trying to get me out of this situation.

Her phone lights up in her lap

and it is also from an unsaved number

and it just says yes.

They were texting each other.

Oh my gosh, I'm trapped between these two people and I don't know how to get out of the situation.

She saw that I saw her phone and I just looked at her.

I was like, no, I don't have to go to the bathroom.

And she goes, okay.

She never went to the bathroom.

The play starts back up again.

This whole second half of the play, I don't even remember what the play was because I was so focused on what was going on with the two people beside me.

I need to text my mom.

I need to get out of here.

I need someone to come pick me up.

As soon as the play ends, I'm just going to climb over that woman and get out of there.

Go to the bathroom as fast as I can.

The play ends, and as soon as it ends, I don't even look at the man.

I don't say anything to the woman.

I grab my keys and my playbill, and I climb over that woman and I run to the bathroom.

I saw the place where concessions would be,

but they had been closed.

Nobody had any candy.

There was no popcorn.

There was no nothing.

And I was thinking to myself, there are never concessions at any of these plays.

They don't do that.

Where did he get this candy?

What if he had done something to that candy?

What if I had been naive and taken some of that candy?

Would I have been able to walk out the door on my own?

Okay, I'm just gonna walk out of here.

I'll call my mom on the way home and just run the whole way home.

I walk out of the bathroom and I see the man and the woman standing at the other end of the room.

They are having like a whispered heated argument to each other.

That confirmed everything that I had thought.

These people know each other.

They're working together.

They're trying to get me out of here.

Every doubt that I had had in my brain was just gone.

The woman looks at me and the man turns around because his back was to me and he starts walking up to me.

He starts to be like, hey, do you want to ride to your apartment?

But one of my friends was actually there.

She came up and she's like, oh my goodness, hey Macy, like saying my name, waving at me.

The man just walked away, blends back into the crowd of people.

I talked to my friend for a second and I was like, hey, can you walk out with me, please?

Can we just walk out the door together?

Walk down the road for a little bit and then we can go our separate ways.

Sure, sure we can.

And I was kind of looking over my shoulder trying to see if I could see that man or that woman.

As we're walking out the door,

I hear that man,

Macy,

hope to see you again.

That just

made me want to throw up.

He had this huge grin on his face and I actually started crying.

Me and my friend kind of walk as far as we can together.

I call my mom and I am looking behind me the whole entire time, lightly jogging the whole way home.

And it's dark at night and nobody else is walking.

I'm like shaking because I'm so scared.

But I finally made it back to my dorm and I could finally breathe.

Hung up the phone with my mom and just tried to get myself together as best that I could.

Told my roommate about it.

Something wasn't right there.

To know that he knew my name and was saying something like,

I hope to see you again.

No,

I hope I never see you again.

Ever.

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It is May of 2004.

My friend Kaylee and I are talking about moving in together.

I have a bunch of newspapers at the time because I am looking for a new job.

In one of them, I just so happened to see an ad for a house for rent.

It's very generic.

It says something like two bedroom, one bath house in the town that we live in.

I call the phone number and I leave a voicemail.

And a day or so later, I get a phone call back.

It's a guy that just sounds incredibly generic.

And he basically says that him and his brother are fixing up a house.

We set up a time for us to go see it.

He tells me where it is, and the specific thing that he says is that it is next to the laundromat.

It was a Saturday.

I pick Kaylee up, and we go to see the house.

Pull into the house that is next to what is actually technically a liquor store, not a laundromat.

Kaylee and I and all of our friends live in townhouses with street parking, so I'm already happy that there's a driveway because it means we'll be able to have people over.

In addition to that, the parking lot for the liquor store is directly next to the house.

You can just park on the side of it and walk right over.

So, again, additional parking, we'll be able to have our friends over.

I'm thinking this is great.

On the other side of the house is one that has three windows, and the middle window is broken.

It's just like a crack in the bottom corner of the window, like a baseball or something would have hit it.

I don't know why this stood out to me.

My best guess is just the safety aspect of two young girls living alone.

Is it something as simple as like a baseball, or like, you know, were there break-ins in the area?

We don't know.

We are sitting there for a couple minutes, and the guy opens a back door and comes out onto the deck and waves us over.

We walk onto the deck.

Guy introduces himself.

Incredibly generic.

He He was a guy in his mid-30s to like late 40s.

He was just a guy.

Like, there was no distinguishing features on him whatsoever.

We walk in and it's very dingy, very dark,

straight out of the 1950s with the linoleum floors and the paneling on the cabinets, and everything just looks old.

Either he didn't have the electricity on in the house or

there were no lights.

It was very, very dim.

Like it was just enough that you could see, but it was more or less the sunlight filtering in through the curtains type of like dusty, dingy, hazy type of light coming in.

As we are walking into the primary bedroom, he says to us, oh, you girls are going to fight over this bedroom.

This one has this amazing closet.

You're going to love it.

I know how girls are with clothes.

And we're we're laughing because, yeah, we have a ton of clothes.

We walk in

and the closet is not really a closet.

It's a drywall framed space

where there should be closet doors,

but there are not.

And it is pitch black inside.

It does not physically fit within the space of the house to be the walk-in closet that he was telling us that it was.

It is just a drywall framed room.

I'm standing dead on facing the closet and cannot see anything in it other than black.

Kaylee was standing behind us at a slight angle.

She was able to see that at the back where there was drywall,

it was an opening.

Kind of like a mouse hole, but bigger than that.

It was a hole in the drywall that potentially led to something else.

He says again, oh, yeah, you should really go into the closet and see how much work we've done in it.

And we're like, no, that's okay.

We talk about something else.

He brings up the closet again.

Are you sure you don't want to go in the closet?

I can feel the tension radiating off of Caitlyn.

Like, we both know this is a bad situation.

This is not safe.

He was just very, very hyper-fixated on getting us to go into the closet.

What is so special about the closet?

It's red flags at this point.

We are both incredibly creeped out.

And for every time that he tries to tell us that we should go look in the closet,

we come up with some type of excuse.

Oh, we share clothes, and at one point, I think Kaylee was like, okay, well, I need to go.

My mom's waiting for us.

Whatever excuse we could to get out of this house, we were trying to use without coming off as scared.

We know going into the closet is not a good situation for us.

We need to play it cool to get out of the house.

Are we able to just make a good enough excuse to walk out the door?

Do we need to make a run for it?

Is there anything in the house that we can use to overpower him?

Does he have someone else hiding in the house that it's not going to be two against one?

If it is two against one, can we take him?

We're 19 and 17 and we are both barely five foot tall.

How are we going to get out of this?

And it drives me insane that I have no idea

how we got out.

The next thing I know, we are in my car

and we are five miles away.

I don't know how we're in the car.

I don't remember leaving the house.

I don't remember walking out the door, getting into my car, backing out of the driveway, driving the couple of miles away, multiple intersections and lights.

From standing in that bedroom to then being at that intersection,

nothing.

We're just at the intersection,

a couple miles away,

at a red light.

Absolutely no way that we could have sat at this red light for more than one cycle without someone stopping, honking, hitting us.

Something would have happened if we were just sitting in the middle of the road.

Out of the corner of my eye, I can see Kaylee talking, but I can't hear her.

The clock on the dashboard shows that it's hours later than when we went to see the house, and I'm trying to figure out what happened.

And there's like this audible popping noise, like when you come up from underwater.

And then I can hear Kaylee.

And she's talking about something completely random, like one of the projects that we had in a college class together.

And I looked at her and blurted out, How the hell did we get out of the house?

She pauses for a second.

She's like, I don't know.

That doesn't make sense.

We're both kind of just looking at each other in stunned silence and the light changes to green

and I start driving because I don't know what else to do.

This house tour up until getting into the bedroom was all of 10 minutes.

At best, it was a 15 minute house tour.

We have lost almost three hours worth of time and have no idea where we were in between.

How did we get out of the house?

It was a very odd sense of calm.

There was confusion, obviously, because we couldn't explain the time difference.

We have no idea how we got out of the house.

I'm driving along the road, and I drove back to my house.

My mom was home.

I remember saying to her, I'm like, yeah, that wasn't a good idea.

I thought he was going to kill us or something.

And I said to her, I'm like, I don't remember leaving the house.

And my mom is like, okay.

The best way we were able to explain it is that we thought we were going to be shoved in that closet and killed, essentially.

In the adrenaline rush survival mode instinct that kicks in when you're doing everything to survive, maybe we don't remember because we were just so focused on getting out alive that it wasn't until we were sitting in that intersection that we both felt safe enough again

that the traumatic portion of it, the adrenaline wore off.

And once the adrenaline wore off is when we could remember things again.

That's how we justified it.

A few weeks go by, and we need to go down this road again.

The way that our town is laid out is there's very easily accessible alternate routes that we really never had to go this way.

But for the place that we decide to go, it's the most convenient route to get there.

As I am driving down the street, out of the corner of my eye, I'm kind of looking for the house just because it was such a creepy situation.

I see the liquor store.

I see the house with the three windows.

And I keep driving by, and I don't see the house that we went in.

Whatever, you just missed it.

I drive back home the same way,

and the house still isn't there.

And I don't have any way to explain this.

It's not possible for a house to have disappeared.

Kaylee and I did not drive together that day.

She had drove separately and she had called me and she's like,

the house wasn't there.

That doesn't make sense.

Why is the house not there?

I go by one more time.

It's not like the house was just demolished and there was still a foundation.

The house physically cannot fit in the space between the liquor store and the house with the three windows where the middle window was broken.

The land would have had to like squish together in order for it to fit.

There's no cutout on the curb from where the driveway was that we parked in.

The house wasn't there.

It wasn't there.

It was there, and we went to it and we saw it.

And now it isn't.

And that doesn't fit into anything that either of us can rationally explain.

The house never existed, and we don't know where we went that day.

How did we get out of of the house?

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Thank you, Malachi.

That was very helpful.

Malachi,

call

ambulance.

I'm allergic to you.

Radio Rental is created by Payne Lindsay and brought to you by Tenderfoot TV.

Lead producer is Eric Quintana.

Executive producers are Payne Lindsay and Donald Albright.

Hosted by Rain Wilson as his character, Terry Carnation.

Written and produced by Meredith Stedman.

Additional writing by Mark Lachlan.

Supervising producer is Tracy Kaplan.

Associate producer is Jaja Muhammad.

Editing by Eric Quintana, Mike Rooney, Steven Perez, and Meredith Steadman.

Sound design by Cooper Skinner, with additional sound design by Steven Perez and April Ruja.

Mix and Master by Cooper Skinner with additional mixing by Steven Perez and Devin Johnson.

Original score by Makeup and Vanity Set, with additional score by Jay Ragsdale.

Video editing by Dylan Harrington.

Cover artwork by Trevor Eiler and Rob Sheridan.

Special thanks to Oren Rosenbaum and the team at UTI, the Nord Group, Station 16, Beck Media and Marketing, and the team at Odyssey.

If you have a 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, radio rentalusa.com.

Follow us on Instagram and Twitter at Radio Rental.

You can also follow the illustrious Terry Carnation on social media.

Just search at Terry Carnation.

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Thanks for listening.