Episode 60

You're listening to a Tinderfoot TV podcast.

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Subscribe to Tenderfoot Plus to get early access to episodes, ad-free listening, and 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.

Hello, Malachi.

Oh.

Oh, sorry, I thought you were my cat.

Hello, and welcome to Radio Rental.

I'm Terry Carnation, shopkeeper and HBIC.

That stands for head bitch in charge.

I just learned that yesterday.

I kind of like it.

Kind of works for me.

No, Radio Rental is a VHS rental shop with a collection of the scariest stories you've ever heard in your entire life.

And they're all told by 100%

real people.

No actors.

No professional storytellers.

No AI.

Fuck AI.

James Cameron warned us about it in 1984.

Thank you very much.

Anyway, if you were with us last week, you may remember that we had something of a little scare here ourselves.

My cat Malachi ran off after setting his tail aflame and he still hasn't come back.

At first, I wasn't overly concerned.

I mean, after all, he's roamed around on his own before.

But now I really am starting to get worried.

I mean, he's just...

He's so used to his creature comforts, his

fresh tuna, and his pumpkin spice lattes, and his favorite little Chenil blanket, and his bath and bodyworks candles.

His sardine-flavored THC gummies,

his anus expressor, that artificial cat scrotum that he wears around sometimes.

What?

You weren't supposed to know about that.

Anyway,

so I made this sign.

Have you seen this cat?

And I drew Malachi as best I could.

I'm not really sure I did the whiskers justice.

So actually, if you have a better drawing of Malachi, I'm deeply in need.

If you would please email Radio Rental with your best Malachi artwork, it would be so appreciated.

Radio Rental at tenderfoot.tv.

This isn't a joke.

Please email us with your best Malachi artwork.

It would be so appreciated.

We'll be happy to share it online.

Radio rental at tenderfoot.tv.

Now enough of my troubles and Malachi's.

It's time for the reason that you're really here.

Let's get into this scary collection of tapes, shall we?

Oh, let's see here.

What do we have?

Ooh, this one looks good.

Let's just pop it in and see what happens.

That's what she said.

And by she, I mean...

Megan Markle.

That's literally what Megan Markle said once.

I heard her say it.

We were at a fundraiser together for the Feline Leukemia Foundation.

She said that.

Anyway, moving on.

Press play.

Prove that she didn't say it.

Prove it.

I was there.

I went to college in Williamsburg, Virginia, which is a pretty small, safe town.

That night, I was getting ready for a party with a friend.

She was coming with me to some stupid sorority formal thing as my date.

We're getting all dressed up.

We're listening to music, you know, drinking some beers, just having a great time.

It's a great night.

I was really looking forward to it.

We go to this party.

We dance the night away.

I kind of cut it off at a couple of drinks because I wanted to see some friends after the party and see if they wanted to hang out.

And I knew I had a long walk to get there, so I wanted to make sure I wasn't falling over.

The party started wrapping up, started winding down, and my friend was feeling a little sick, so I wanted to go home.

So I walked her home and decided to keep walking to my friend's house on the other side of town just to see if they wanted to keep the party going.

There was about a 20 to 25 minute walk from there to where I wanted to end up.

The streets that I walked on were honestly streets that I walk on every day.

The first, probably 75% of the walk, well lit, weaves through campus.

The last part, I had to walk on a main road that went through the town and into the residential area.

And this part's pretty dark.

So as I transitioned from the light part of the walk to the dark part,

I noticed a van

parked in a crosswalk of a side street that I needed to cross.

Okay, that van is strange.

The van was white, windowless, and there wasn't a license plate on the back.

It looks like the van that your mom tells you not to approach growing up.

I'm probably 15 paces from this van,

and then the van door flies open.

Something isn't right.

A man comes out.

Immediate beeline for me.

He's wearing all black, so black hat, black sweatshirt, pants, shoes.

I can only see his face and his hands.

He had a pretty nondescript face.

He clearly wasn't a student.

I don't know this guy.

What does he want from me?

I don't like his van.

I don't like any of this.

Why is he approaching me like this?

Like, it looks like he's in a rush.

It looks like he's frantic.

I didn't want to just run.

Maybe he's a normal guy and I don't want to be an asshole.

Like, maybe he needs help.

He starts approaching me,

immediately trying to get my attention.

He doesn't, like, break eye contact.

He's just headed to me.

And he starts saying, come into my van as he's walking towards me.

Very quickly, I realize he doesn't need help.

He definitely doesn't know who I am.

He's just trying to get me in his car.

Come with me, come into my van.

You need to be in my van.

I'm shaking my head.

He puts his hand on my back

and he starts to push me.

Get in my van, get in my van, come with me.

You want to get in my van with me?

I'm still shaking my head, saying no.

He grabs my arm and he starts to pull me with his hands.

He grabbed me kind of by the bicep and he started yanking on it and trying to pull me down the sidewalk and push me into the van.

Come into my van.

You're getting into my van with me.

Just that kind of language over and over again.

It felt like he was talking to a toddler or maybe he thought I was so drunk that he could just kind of fool me into getting into his van with him without using any force.

Come with me,

get in my van.

We're going in my van

just over and over again.

I scream no.

I just break his frantic get in my van, get in my van.

He's pulling me, and I'm struggling a little bit to get him away from me.

I start screaming, no.

I kind of throw my elbow into him, break free,

and I start to run.

It was just adrenaline immediately.

This man is trying to abduct me.

I just need to run and get away.

I just was running as fast as I could.

I am high tailing it down the road toward the woods.

And then I hear the door slam,

the tires screech.

They're coming for me.

They're driving on the left side of the road.

And he starts coming at me.

Following me.

Oh my God.

He's going to hit me.

So I'm running, running, running down the street.

I obviously don't have a lot of time.

I see some bushes on my left.

I'm waiting until the van gets just about to hit me, maybe like five feet away.

And I just dive to my left into the bushes.

Holy crap.

I can't believe I just dodged that bullet.

They were so close to hitting me.

And if I didn't dive into those bushes, I think they would have.

They slam on the brakes.

See them start to turn.

They're turning for me.

So I have to get up and I just just have to keep running.

Dart into some yards and the woods.

I don't remember the route I took, but I just stayed off the roads and listened to them circle.

I could barely breathe.

I've never run faster in my life.

Complete animalistic panic and instinct running through these yards, like busting through fences.

Two or three blocks through woods and yards, trying to be quiet so I didn't reveal where I was.

I hear them circling the block looking for me,

and I'm just thinking, I have no shot.

They're gonna get me.

They're gonna get out of their car.

They're gonna chase me on foot, and they're gonna get me.

But they didn't get out of their car, they chose to keep circling the block.

I'm on foot

in the woods, in the dark, and they can't see me.

Do I give up?

Or do I give it everything I got?

So I gave it everything I got and

I got away.

I finally make my way to my friend's house after navigating through a maze of yards and woods, just not allowing myself to be seen on the street.

And I get there, let myself in.

Nobody's home, so I just sit on the couch and kind of hope I can sleep there and no one sees me.

I was completely numb.

I sat on the couch and just let myself breathe.

Sat there for a really long time.

Just kind of trying to calm myself down.

What the hell was that?

I definitely could have just died.

I definitely could have just been human trafficked or kidnapped.

They did not have good intentions.

God, that's just terrifying.

It's like the end of Ferris Bueller's day off when Ferris is running through all the backyards to get home, except with life and death stakes

and no principal Rooney.

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And we're back.

But you know who's not back yet?

That's right, Malachi.

I'm sorry to bring the mood down.

As much as I hate to admit it, I really am starting to miss the little guy.

Don't tell him I said that.

Okay, next scary story.

Bominos.

It was October of 2021.

A neighbor called me and asked if I had seen another set of neighbors two doors down.

All of our neighbors are really friendly.

We all get along really well.

We talk a lot, except for one house on our street.

So my neighbor called me and asked if I had seen Maureen or her son, Brian.

Maureen was probably in her 80s and Brian was in his 60s, so a mother and son living together.

I told her that the last time I had seen Brian or Maureen was in August, at the beginning of August.

I had seen Brian walking out to his mailbox and he had blue latex gloves on.

That's the only reason I noticed it.

And they were rarely out of their house.

Only outside to take care of their rose bushes or mow the lawn or get the mail.

That's the only time you ever saw them.

They never had visitors, no family visiting, no friends.

It was strange when she pointed that out that I had not seen them for at that point almost two months.

I looked at their yard and realized that their grass was three feet tall.

It had not been mowed, which was not normal for them.

Their mailbox was overflowing with mail to the point there were letters flying around their yard.

The neighbor that originally called me called the police to do a well check.

It was not much longer that she called us again to tell us to sit down.

She had some crazy news.

They were both dead

and had been dead for a while.

The police thought that there may have been some foul play.

They weren't sure if the son had killed the mother or if she had just died from natural causes, but he had killed himself and she was dead.

I watched the police all day.

The crime van pulled up.

The police were in and out of the house.

The smell was awful.

Watched them take the body bags out

and then just waited.

I kept checking the news to see if anything was going to come out.

I kept waiting for someone to come to the house, maybe family or kin to start cleaning up.

No one ever showed up.

In the following 10 months, I became pretty obsessed with that house and with Maureen and Brian, just wondering what their story was.

Why didn't they have any family that realized that they had been dead for a while?

Why were the neighbors the only ones to notice that they were gone and make that call to the police?

There were multiple nights that I would stay up really late, just trying to find any information that I could about Maureen.

Had she lived in other places?

Who was her son?

What was he like?

Where were their relatives?

All I could find was that

she had been buried in a cemetery north of town that was dedicated to the unclaimed.

People who had no one to pay for their funeral or attend their funeral.

And I thought that was really sad.

It just confirmed that she had no one and Brian had no one.

So I kept watching the house, waiting to figure out what happens to a house when there's no kin to take over and clean it up and get it ready to sell.

It took a long time for it to eventually go to the state to be sold at auction.

While we were waiting for anything to happen with that house, My son and I were outside catching fireflies.

It's something we do every single year.

The house had always felt really dark.

The shutters were always drawn.

No lights were ever on.

It felt so haunted.

I thought so many times about how many times me and my family had walked by that house while the two bodies sat there.

But we were out catching fireflies in our front yard.

We will often move from our yard to a neighbor's yard because like I said, we're all very friendly with each other.

So we were moving from yard to yard to catch fireflies.

And I looked at Maureen's house to see if there were any over there that we could go catch.

Not a single firefly blinked in that yard.

They were all up and down the street, but that yard was dark.

I kept looking at the house, thinking, surely this is in my head.

One of them are going to light up over there.

And the longer longer I stared, the more scared I got because not a single lightning bug was over there.

The whole yard was just completely dark.

And that felt really fitting.

Everything about it felt haunted.

It was August of the following year

when I finally started seeing people come in and out of that house.

And it was people I had never seen before.

And they were bringing just huge bags of what looked like trash, bag after bag after bag, out into the front yard.

The front yard was full of them.

I was so invested in who Maureen and Brian were.

Clearly, they had no one.

So for some reason, I took it upon myself to be that person for them.

I was very curious.

I almost wanted to take care of them, like help take care of their home, lay them to rest since no one else was there to do it, help take care care of their things.

So I took my dog for a walk past the house

to have an excuse to talk to the people.

As I walked by, there was a woman in the front yard.

Her name was Quinn.

I asked her, did you buy this house?

She said, I did not buy this house.

But another couple did, and I have come to help them clean it out.

In exchange for her helping clean it out, she got to keep any items of value that she found and she could resell them.

I was so invested, I had spent so many hours wondering what had happened in that house, that I had to ask,

what does it look like inside?

She looked at me kind of funny

and said, Would you like to come in and see?

I couldn't say no.

She led me inside.

Through the front door, there was a walkway,

but there was hardly anywhere to put your feet.

It was just trash from the floor to the ceiling, books,

china,

coffee cups, boxes of belts.

It was a true hoarder home, as bad as any that you've ever seen on any show.

She led me through this very narrow walkway back to a bedroom.

Opened the door.

Inside was a mattress that was so discolored from decomposition stains.

And the smell was so strong still, even 10 months later, because nothing had been cleaned out.

It turns out that if you do not have kin

to pay for that cleanup from an unattended death, the police just leave it there.

The state does not pay for that.

I asked her whose bedroom she thought that was, and she said, I think maybe they were both in here dead.

Because this is the room that has the strongest smell and the biggest mess.

She invited me to come back the next day if I wanted to help clean up and if I wanted to also take any items that I thought I would want to take.

So I was kind of getting in on the deal that I could help clean up the space

and also I could take what I wanted.

But mostly I wanted answers to my questions.

I wanted to know who these people were.

what their lives were like.

Why were they so strange?

Why were they so to themselves?

I spent that night not sleeping.

I finally had their full names.

So I did some more digging and I found out that the son, Brian,

actually had an FBI case against him for soliciting a minor online.

He was never found guilty because he never actually met up with the minor.

But he was no longer allowed to have internet access in his home.

He was clearly a predator.

This was incredibly upsetting to me as I have a young child and did not realize that this was who my neighbor was.

The next day, I could not get over there quick enough.

I got my son to school and first thing headed over to the house.

Quinn was already there.

I asked her if she had found anything good.

She said, it's hard to tell with these things, but you can go ahead and go inside and just start wherever you want.

So I went directly to the one bedroom I had not been to yet, and that was Brian's bedroom.

And it was very obvious that it was Brian's bedroom because it was full of men's shoes, men's clothing.

There was a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf just covered in books.

The bed was covered in piles of clothes.

It was so messy you could not see the floor.

I spent probably an hour going through books, looking at which ones were worth something, which ones weren't, putting them into tote bags and getting rid of trash as I went.

Me and Quinn were both really, really careful about being very respectful as we were going through these things.

While I was in there cleaning, I started to notice that there was some staining on the floor.

So I called Quinn in and I said, I don't think Brian died in the same room as Maureen.

I think he was was in here.

So she came in and we started moving things back from the floor.

And it was very

obvious that some decomposition had happened in there.

I sat on the bed and I just looked around the room.

And I noticed that there was a calendar hanging on the wall.

We knew that Maureen had died in early August, according to the police.

But Brian's calendar was turned to September, indicating that while Maureen had passed in August, Brian likely hung around for a while with her dead body in the house.

I don't know why.

It was incredibly disturbing.

I continued cleaning up his room.

Honestly, I was just looking for more clues about who he was.

There were some really nice pairs of binoculars underneath his bed.

My stomach dropped.

Very uncomfortable to find knowing that he had been tried for soliciting a minor.

The neighbor next to him has two small girls aged about eight and ten,

and his window looked out over their yard.

I felt very protective in that moment of my my neighbor's children.

I felt protective over my son.

It made me suspicious of everyone on my street.

Who else is living on my street that is a predator potentially?

I realized I don't know what's going on in the houses 200 feet from me.

There could be something incredibly dark and awful happening anywhere around us, and we could have no idea.

As I continued digging in the space, I also found financial records.

They were in so much debt.

All the stuff in their house was their attempt at making money without leaving their house, basically.

They would buy things in bulk and then try to resell them.

Obviously, selling them was not happening because the house was such a mess you could barely walk through it.

Eventually, the house was just opened up to the public and anyone could come in and take what they wanted for $5.

At this point, two industrial dumpsters had been filled with trash and there was still enough that they had to open up the house to the public to come get more of the stuff.

I asked Quinn, were they able to clean up the floors where the body fluids had piled up?

And she said no, but they had a buyer interested.

The first couple's plan was not to buy the house and flip it themselves.

They just wanted to come in, get anything worth value, clean it up, and then sell it for a profit.

The person who bought it to flip it,

I don't know if he knew what had happened in the house.

I reached out to the police department after the house was cleaned up and resold.

I needed to know what records they had.

I wanted to know what they found when they walked into the house.

I emailed them asking them for the records and they sent them over to me no problem.

The police report said simply: We arrived at the home.

The front door was unlocked.

So the front door was also unlocked the entire time Brian and Maureen sat there.

They walked in, they found a note taped to Brian's door.

And the note said, My mother, Maureen, passed away peacefully in her sleep, August 11th.

I could not bear life without her.

And when they opened the door, he was hanging inside.

The house now looks beautiful to anyone who has no idea what happened in it.

It doesn't look like the same house anymore.

And a family has moved in with children.

And I remember when I looked at the listing online, it said in the description,

all original hardwood flooring.

And I looked at the pictures

and I could see where they had sanded away

the decomposition stains.

So that family that is living in that house now probably has no idea

what they are living in.

Seeing it presented as this cozy place to raise a family,

it sent shivers down my spine.

I hated it.

Oh, God, what an extremely morbid and sad story.

But, but, but, is it just me or has she been listening a little too much to true crime?

There's such a thing as too much true crime, people.

Trust me.

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TNC's apply.

And we're back.

Hello?

Hello?

Who's there?

Really should keep something around here to defend myself with.

I don't think this Dune 2 popcorn bucket is gonna cut it.

Malachi, it's you, it's really- Oh, it's you, it's really- Oh, gosh, well, goodness, you look a little different.

Oh, God, Malachi, what happened to you?

Is that a new haircut?

Is that a mullet?

But I thought you hated getting a sheer.

Malachi, is that- is that a tattoo?

Did you get a tattoo?

Let me see it.

What did you get?

You got a lotus flower?

At least you could have gotten something imaginative, something meaningful.

Ah, brach.

Seriously?

Don't yowl at me, young man.

Well, you better love it.

I'm not paying for a removal.

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 Steadman.

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 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, Station16, 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.

On behalf of the Radio Rental store, we'd love it if you'd subscribe, rate, and review.

Thanks for listening.

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In 2016, we decided to combine true crime and comedy, and we thought, this will be great.

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New episodes every Thursday on Exactly Right.

Listen to My Favorite Murder on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Goodbye.