Episode 64

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Visit TenderfootPlus.com for details.

The following podcast includes scary stories with content that could be triggering to some listeners.

Listener discretion is advised.

Take a break from the same old boring blockbusters and experience a new kind of movie night with Radio Rental.

At Radio Rental, our videos come to life in your living room, defy all logic and reasoning, and make you question your own reality.

This is not your ordinary video rental store.

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

You've gone.

Radio Rental.

Oh, so so, so sir.

Hello, ho!

Welcome, welcome to Radio Rental, a VHS rental shop that houses a collection of the scariest true horror stories you've ever heard.

I'm Terry Carnation, former AM radio star and current proprietor of the Radio Rental Store.

I've actually just been enjoying some fan mail.

Before we start on some scary stories, would you like me to read you a few letters?

Of course, you would.

You'll find this abundantly interesting.

Let's see what we've got here.

Oh, okay.

This one is from Ashley and Andrew.

Mr.

Carnation, we are writing to you today with great joy and excitement as we embark on a new chapter in our lives, our wedding.

We, Andrew and Ashley, are delighted to be joining our lives together and becoming the Kaufmans.

As we plan our special day, we have been reflecting on the journey that has brought us to this point.

Our relationship has been shaped not only by the love and support of our family and friends, but also by the numerous shows that have played significant roles in our lives.

Radio Rental is one of those important entities.

We understand that it is not possible for you to physically attend our wedding due to various commitments, distance, the void, etc.

However, in recognition of the meaningful impact you have had on us, we would like to honor you by including your name on our scrapbook wall at the reception.

Your presence even in spirit would mean the world to us.

We eagerly await your response and hope you enjoy sharing this joyous occasion with us.

Well,

this

is extremely flattering.

Honestly, I would offer to officiate.

I love to officiate weddings.

But as I can see the date listed here, I regret to tell you that I will unfortunately not be able to make it.

However, you may include me in your scrapbook wall, as you say, however you would like.

Marriage is a beautiful thing.

I mean, it didn't quite work out for me, as you know.

My beautiful queen of a wife, Zelon, has been mysteriously missing for many, many years now.

And I really sincerely hope that that doesn't happen to either of you.

Anyway, take care, Andrew and Ashley, and best wishes.

Oh, what a thrill.

I love fan mail.

Anywho, let's shift gears and move to our first scary tape.

Away we go.

In 2008, I was getting my bachelor's.

My husband was getting his master's.

We already had two kids.

We struggled a lot to make ends meet.

We turned to Craigslist a lot.

I would do nanning and babysitting jobs.

My husband would buy and sell sell furniture from there and it was really neat for college students.

One particularly rough time, we were thinking about asking our parents for help

when I saw this Craigslist ad for a chiropractor front desk position.

It was $18 an hour.

I had not seen that kind of money for a part-time job before.

So I was reading over this ad.

It was a little strange.

It was imperative that the front desk position be filled with someone who's attractive.

They said it was this healthy environment that they needed to portray.

They needed help with marketing.

I was a media studies major and I really just didn't see jobs for that kind of money.

This is kind of perfect.

Emailed immediately and got a response back.

He wanted me to reply with some marketing strategies, and I thought it was kind of weird because I didn't know anything about the company or what they were utilizing.

It was strange, but he wanted to meet.

He was like, yes, let's meet the next day.

I was excited.

This was going to be like a really great opportunity for us.

I went to sleep nervous, going over my interview anxiety techniques.

I remember waking up,

sitting up,

and saying out loud,

he's a serial killer.

I don't talk in my sleep.

This has never happened.

But I sat straight up

and I said out loud, he's a serial killer.

My husband woke up and he's half asleep and he says, what?

I said, the guy, the chiropractor, he's a serial killer.

My husband said, okay, babe, don't go.

I remember remember laying back down thinking, I'm going.

That's crazy.

It's impossible.

I'm going.

In the morning, my husband decided to drive by the place just to make sure it's on the up and up.

He couldn't find it.

When he said he couldn't find it, I decided, okay,

I'm going to go find it.

This was back when we had to print off directions.

We didn't have it in our phones.

I was driving by

and I still couldn't find it.

This is so many strikes against this,

but we really needed it.

I was going.

When it was time for the interview, I'm driving around.

I'm kind of guessing at this point.

I'm going down alleys.

I've given up on the printed directions.

I find myself in front of this storefront.

It was old, run down,

and I could see above the door in big letters that it used to say chiropractor.

The letters have been taken down.

It was kind of the outline.

So I knew I was in the right place, but it didn't look like it should be the right place.

I'm walking up to the door.

It said chiropractor and had the doctor's name, but it wasn't the man from the email.

It was a different doctor.

So I walk in the door

and I had this sigh of relief because it looked like a regular doctor-looking office.

There was the long counter, very typical computer setup.

And along the wall was a bunch of boxes of files.

I couldn't tell if he was moving in or moving out.

I was thinking, I should ask him if he's moving out.

Is this not going to be the location that I would be working in?

I felt really silly.

This is a doctor.

I'm glad that I came.

And then I saw this fish tank, which was this kind of like quintessential doctor's office thing.

I'm looking at the fish.

He said my name.

Joanna.

And when I turned around,

he was just so big.

The counter seemed child-sized with him standing behind it.

He's in this white lab coat,

this ruddy complexion.

He was just as big as a linebacker.

This was not an inviting person.

My stomach dropped.

I didn't want to be alone with him.

He invites me back into his office.

It was so dark, I can't tell you what was on the walls.

I can't even really make out his face anymore.

I felt like he could see me, and I couldn't see him as well.

And it was really disorienting.

He knew immediately that I thought this is a really dark room.

Why are you leading me back here?

And he said, oh,

this used to be a massage parlor.

So the offices are really dark.

We're working on that.

And for a second, I thought, yeah, I've been to a spa.

The lights are kind of low.

But the outside of the building said chiropractor, it's not adding up for me.

So I don't trust him at this point.

I felt like I was in survival mode.

That's when he asked me if I was familiar with chiropractor offices.

His office wasn't a typical office.

He liked to do things outside of the box.

I told him I'd been to a chiropractor before, but I didn't know all the services they offered.

And that I'm sure if I saw anything, I would think it's perfectly normal.

He was really happy about that.

It was like he wanted to talk.

He was talking about himself.

He worked at a university nearby.

And that's where he taught classes on human dissection.

He's talking about enjoying dissecting cadavers.

I was a stranger to him.

And the things he was talking about were scary.

The alarms in my head were getting louder and louder.

I feel sick.

I feel dizzy.

I'm thinking,

convince this guy that you think everything is normal.

I'm trying to ask him questions about the position.

I'm asking him hours.

I'm asking him about the marketing.

He didn't really want to talk about the job.

He didn't want to talk about me or how qualified or not qualified I was.

He wants to talk about the girl who had the job before me.

He called her Fruitcake.

and kept referring to her as fruitcake and never giving her a name.

It was very mocking.

He hadn't had anybody else for six weeks.

She just didn't work out for the position.

Just didn't live up to his expectations of the job.

She didn't agree with the things he did inside the office or outside the office.

I'm trying to seem interested.

I don't want to seem like anything he's saying is weird.

I'm being very sympathetic to him about fruitcake not working out, how that's good for me.

That's when I started kind of shifting around and looking at my phone.

When I checked for the time,

My phone felt so bright, like when you turn it on in a movie,

he was watching me closely.

And that's when,

out of nowhere,

he asked me if I believed in God.

My stomach dropped.

I panicked because I didn't know what his right answer would be.

I was afraid to answer wrong.

I said, yes, do you?

And he said, I do.

And I believe in karma

because

I do bad things.

And recently, he did something

really bad.

And afterwards, he fell down his basement stairs and broke his clavicle.

And he said that was six weeks ago.

Red flag.

Fruitcake.

I felt like he wanted me to ask him what happened to fruitcake.

But I just wanted to get out of there.

I felt like if he tells me something,

I'm not getting out of here.

So I was just going to smile and nod.

I knew he was about to tell me something.

He was just about to tell me what that was

when the bell rang.

It was so tense in there.

I was startled and I jumped to my feet.

Someone walked in the front door

and he yelled at me to sit down.

That's when I decided it was flight or fight.

I flew.

I ran out of the office.

Around the counter and it was so bright out there.

The light just hit me after being in such a dark room.

And I stopped when I saw this woman had walked in and was standing at the front desk.

He chased me out of the office and stopped when he saw her.

And we all stared at each other.

She said,

Hi, I'm new in town.

And I am looking for a new chiropractor.

He said,

Joanna, please go back to my office while I help this customer out.

And I just stood there.

Now I feel protective of this new woman.

I don't know.

Maybe I could walk out with her.

She just keeps talking and says, I saw your sign from the road.

And I just want to check and see if you take my insurance.

He tried to talk her into coming back for a free consultation.

She was refusing.

She had her card out for him to check and he said, it's no problem.

Just come on back.

Her face got hard.

She looked frustrated.

She looked annoyed like she had.

just been trying to be nice.

She said, my son's asleep in the car.

Will you please just check my insurance?

And I'm going to go.

That's when I started inching towards the door.

He's occupied.

I just want to get out of there.

He saw me and said, Joanna, we're not finished.

And this woman seemed bigger than him in this moment.

Her presence was so big.

And she said, don't worry about her.

She knew something was wrong.

We all seemed like strangers standing there staring at each other.

And that's when a voice told me to run.

It was her voice in my head.

I was looking at her.

I heard her tell me to run.

But she's standing in front of me talking to him.

When that voice said run,

I ran.

Ran out of the office to my car.

I locked my door and I'm facing the office.

And I thought, I'm just going to wait here for her to get out.

I was worried about her.

And now I'm looking because I'm thinking maybe I should pull out and park next to her.

Maybe if she's behind me,

I didn't see her car.

I didn't see anything.

Then the voice again said, go.

I drove as fast as I could out of there.

I went out the same way I came, and there was still no signs.

I don't know how she got there, right when I needed her.

I even checked the newspaper for weeks for a missing woman

and there was nothing.

I never saw anything.

I checked Craig's list a lot to see if he was posting new ads.

because the other one was taken down and I didn't see anything.

I did check the local university and he worked there.

His picture

was up.

I think she rescued me.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again.

Do not trust Craigslist, people.

I should know I've fallen prey to quite a few scams in my day.

That's actually how I ended up with Malachi.

I thought I was buying a baby panther from Nepal.

Huh.

Was not the case.

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And we're back.

Let's pop another story into my VCR.

Oh yeah, baby.

During COVID, my girlfriend got a heavy dose of puppy fever.

We ended up adopting a really sweet Rottweiler from Florida.

Chop, we adopted him when he was eight weeks old.

We got him right after his mom gave birth.

Just a very fiercely loyal, loyal and loving dog to both my wife and I.

Absolutely fearless when it came to taking care of us, making sure that we were okay, protected within the house, protected outside.

You'd have to come up to him to make sure that he approved of you, essentially.

Broader definition, he was kind of an asshole.

Judgmental, but just fiercely, fiercely loved us.

We always made the joke that if someone tried to rob us in the middle of the night, that they probably wouldn't make it past our living room with all their limbs.

It was an August day in beautiful South Carolina.

Ended up bringing him to my parents' house for a little bit.

My mom and dad both like to go on a lunchtime walk when they're both on their lunch breaks.

Ended up taking him over there and just taking him for a quick little stroll, 20-minute stroll around the neighborhood.

No different than any other day we walked him around midday.

During that 20 minutes, he started panting a good amount.

I could tell that something was wrong.

He couldn't keep up.

Ended up leaving him with my dad for about five minutes, sprinting back to the house, grabbing my car and taking him back to my house, wrapping his feet with a cold cloth, cooling him down with ice.

The second I could get him to move, he could barely stand up.

I took him right to the vet.

The lady at the vet said, he's very critical right now.

We can let him go,

or you can take him to the overnight clinic and see if there's any plasma transfusion that he can do to give him some sort of chance

sadly it didn't work through the plasma transfusion through everything they could do

he lost his battle that night

spent a good amount of time just in the room him and i my wife was absolutely devastated that was her best friend and she couldn't make it in the room so i stayed in the room and just apologizing and feeling a lot of guilt.

The next day, my wife and I were just beyond devastated.

We ended up just driving around in our local area just because

couldn't stay at home because the house was too quiet.

We got rip eight weeks after Shot passed away.

My wife was looking online at a couple different options and she told me, hey, I just put a deposit down on another puppy.

Okay, i guess let's do this again i'm ready to get hurt all over again

same exact german rottweiler same exact breed only difference between the two as far as looks were where chop had a doctail rip has his tail

just the nicest nicest dog most gentle patient loving but not quite as protective as uh as chop was back in his day

I've had sleep paralysis on and off since I was about 18 years old.

First thing I notice in an episode, the room that I'm in or the room that I'm looking at, I can immediately see that it's almost black and white and there's just something sinister that I feel within the room.

You know what this room is, you know where this place is, but

something's terribly wrong.

Your brain's firing on all synapses telling you that something's not right.

You need to leave this state as soon as possible.

Typically, I always see one demon in the corner.

It's the standard one that a lot of people see throughout the years.

Just a really, really tall man wearing a hat.

He's very famous throughout humanity.

A lot of people know him as the Hat Man.

He's about nine foot tall.

He stands in the corner of the room.

Very dark, shadowy.

Has a very evil, unnatural looking smile, just grinning at you, staring into your soul.

Can't make out any distinct things on his face other than his beady eyes and that just evil, evil, toothy grin.

And he's always wearing a dark, dark hat.

It's just very shocking and jolting to see it whenever he comes into your room.

It's one of those archetypes that a lot of humanity ends up seeing.

It's always scary in the moment.

It's kind of hard to realize when you're in it, that it's going on, but once your brain makes that connection, it's easier to get yourself out of it.

The strategies that I try, wiggling my toes, wiggling my feet, trying to focus on one thing inside the room, those are the strategies I typically would use to pull myself out of an episode.

This particular episode that happened,

very, very intense for me,

very different in many sort of ways.

I wake up in the middle of the night to grab a glass of water, use the bathroom,

walk back into bed,

rip sleeping on the floor next to my wife, My wife's sleeping to the left of me.

Lay down.

Fall asleep.

Immediately I start seeing those signs that I'm entering a sleep paralysis bout.

Room goes gray a little bit.

I start hearing a humming noise within my ears.

Start taking sense of everything that's around me.

I see this Hatman entity that I've been seeing since I was 19 in the corner.

It's a little more intense of a sleep paralysis about.

Normally he stands and just stares at me in the corner of the room, but this one was a little bit different.

He actually starts walking towards me,

stands on top of my chest,

and starts bending over and looking down at me.

He's about maybe a foot from my face, just staring into me.

Feels like he was staring right into my soul.

I hadn't seen that much detail in his face since I started having these episodes.

Evil, evil smile,

toothy,

absolutely uncanny, unsettling.

Feeling of just absolute primal fear just goes through my body.

A whole sense of dread and fear I've never known before.

Absolutely terrified me.

I feel almost stuck.

I try to wiggle my toes,

trying to look around the room, focus on something while dealing with this.

I ended up hearing a very deep, guttural growl coming from next to me.

Look over in the direction where my wife is sleeping.

I initially thought that it was our current dog, Rip.

I noticed the doctail.

Chop had a doctal, and Ripta has his full tail.

I end up seeing Chop standing over my wife.

I see his teeth bared.

He's not even paying attention to me.

He's not even looking at me.

And he's just standing over her in just a very powerful, bold stance.

emitting this low, low, deep, guttural, vicious growl towards this entity that's standing on top of me and trying to attack me, essentially.

After a couple seconds of him just letting him loose the snarl towards the Hatman,

he ends up launching himself

into this being that I'm seeing and knocks him back into the wall.

I immediately wake up right after that.

Absolute shock.

My heart was racing.

Went out to our living room, grabbed one of his old stuffed animals, the one that we didn't let the new dog have, and just held on to it and just sat there and cried for a little bit.

Thought about all the times that he was back around and protected us from any sort of random noise the neighbors made or anything like that.

He doesn't really show up in my dreams.

This is the first time where I've actually had something within my dreams protect me during a sleep paralysis episode.

It's almost regimented how a lot of my experiences happen.

You wake up, you feel that sense of dread, you feel something's not right.

Sometimes you'll see an apparition in the room or sometimes you won't.

And sometimes you'll snap out of it quickly.

Sometimes it'll take a little while to get out of it.

But that's the first time I've ever had something in there that was on my side.

This was just such an odd anomaly that I had no doubt in my mind, in my heart, that this was Chop coming back to protect me, keep an eye on me, and make sure my wife and I are safe.

Maybe if I hadn't woken up so soon, I wish I could have reached out my arm and tried to pet him one last time and just thank him.

It's eerie, it's uncanny, but I think it's absolutely beautiful the way the way it happened and just very thankful that whatever realm it's in, whether it's again, my brain or something maybe paranormal, that he's still around.

He's still around to doing his job and doing what he does best.

Nothing's ever actually been in there with me protecting me, keeping an eye on me, and pushing this certain thing I see back.

It's normally me just having to wake up.

In this case, I had shop.

Well, that's freaky.

But kind of beautiful, too.

I'd like to think that Malachi and I have that kind of bond.

You'd come to me if I were in a pinch, right, Malachi?

Yeah, I guess I should have known better.

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Well, these tapes have been quite harrowing today, but let's do a little more fan mail before you head out.

Okay,

this is an odd one.

Hey, Terry, of course everyone has seen the scene with the ghost by the window in the 1987 hit Ted Danson movie, Three Men and a Baby.

But I have to ask, was that you, by the window, in the less financially successful, but equally emotionally satisfying 1990s sequel, Three Men and a Little Lady?

Or was it just a cardboard cutout?

I need to know because I can't decide if I should file my copy of the film in the Terry Carnation section or the Ted Danson section of my VHS collection.

Yours truly, Mike.

Mike,

you have a Ted Danson section of your VHS collection?

What is in there, Mike?

A box set of cheers?

And a slightly shorter box set of Becker?

A mangled copy of Made in America?

Anyway, I regret to inform you that I am not the ghost in the window of the financial flop, three men and a little lady.

Had they offered me the role, I wouldn't have taken it.

I don't do sequels.

But thank you for your thought-provoking question, Mike.

Take care and get a life.

Well, folks, that's all for today.

Thank you so much for joining me at Radio Rental once again.

I'll see you next time for more scary stories.

Don't go Radio Rental on me now.

And please send more fan mail, radio rental at tenderfoot.tv.

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 Stedman.

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

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 Norr Group, Station 16, Beck Media and Marketing, 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 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.