transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:01] Thanks for subscribing to Tenderfoot Plus. From all of us here at Radio Rental, we appreciate your customer loyalty. Now, on to the episode.

Speaker 2:
[00:12] Can't get enough of me, Terry Carnation, then you're in luck, because my face is all over some brand new merch. Go to shop.tenderfoot.tv to indulge.

Speaker 3:
[00:24] The following podcast includes scary stories with content that could be triggering to some listeners. Listener discretion is advised.

Speaker 2:
[00:38] 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.

Speaker 4:
[01:27] The King of Cups upside down. Now, hey, that's interesting, because typically, that symbolizes a compromised emotional status, you know, like instability or manipulation. But when I see this card, usually it's on somebody that's very moody, which does not seem like you at all, Vince. Um, yeah. Did you shuffle the deck? Maybe you didn't shuffle them good enough. I don't know. Don't worry about it, son. We're gonna keep going. Let me just welcome our visitors here. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Radio Rental. Long time no see. I'm Ricky Lee Bagley, and I've been manning the counter here at Radio Rental, which is, as you know, a video rental shop with an exclusive collection of scary stories told by real breathing people. And this here is Vince, the junior associate clerk. We've had a bit of a slow day. I'll admit that today. It's been kind of slow, so I've been doing a tarot reading for old young Vincent here.

Speaker 1:
[02:40] Hey.

Speaker 4:
[02:42] Anyway, I know what you want. You've been very patient while the shop was closed. Vince, you want one of our exclusive scary stories. One of the tapes that we keep in the secret box in the back behind the beaded curtain. I love that curtain, dude. I swear. Anyway, let's see what we got in here. Ooh. Ooh, this one. This one right here. Vince, pop this one in while I draw your next tarot card. Okay, bud? Oh, jeez, Louise, Vince, you got the devil card. That represents destructive behaviors in her daemons. Does that resonate with you? Uh, no, definitely not.

Speaker 5:
[03:38] This story happened about 16 years ago, in the summer of 2010. I was just coming out of my freshman year of college. The neighborhood that I lived in in high school was a really nice golf course community. It bordered the rivers and estuaries that bled out into the Atlantic Ocean, so it was a really beautiful place to grow up. I remember one day, my mom brought out these blueprints of the house and the surrounding property. And I asked her, I saw all these Xs in the forest. And I was like, oh, what are those? And she's like, well, that's what I wanted to show you. I think you might find this interesting. These are unmarked graves. And apparently they go all the way back to the 1800s. We kind of took it upon ourselves, my brother and I, because we had watched those ghost adventure shows on Travel Channel. And I think everyone's familiar with these types of shows. You go out with a recording device and you start asking questions. Who are you? What are you doing here? And my brother and I were like, oh, that would be really cool. We should get some friends and go out there and just ask some questions and see if we can capture something. It's myself and seven others out there in the middle of this forest. 10.30 at night, maybe 11 o'clock. We basically went to the backyard and then just kind of went into this forested area. I had a new MacBook at the time. So we were like, oh, this would be a great way to record what's going on back here if there is anything. I opened GarageBand and I just hit record and we just started asking questions, a bunch of us. You know, the typical, who are you, what are you doing? As we're out there, we start seeing like these unmarked graves. Some of them look unmarked. They're like covered with moss and mud. And they're kind of just jutting out of the forest everywhere. And there's dozens of them just scattered about this patch of forest. It's already kind of an eerie vibe. You know, we're just asking these questions, not only myself, but friends of mine as well. I ask the question, is there anyone you'd like us to contact for you? But if you are here, and if you have any loved ones that you'd like us to contact, come up and say something now into the device I'm holding. And I can send your message to them.

Speaker 2:
[06:01] I'm just getting fucking sneaked right now.

Speaker 6:
[06:04] Do you want me to say that to the computer, too, this device?

Speaker 5:
[06:10] As we're asking questions, I see this grave only a few feet away from us that says, Eliza, age 9, 1892, and it's jutted out of the ground, and there's moss covered all over it. We're out there for about 15 to 20 minutes. As we're going back inside, I notice that my laptop is really drained of battery, which I thought was really odd because I had just purchased this laptop a few weeks prior. It was, you know, at the time, the best MacBook you could get. And I was like, oh my god, this thing's already drained of battery. There must be something wrong with it. And so we go into the kitchen, and all eight of us are kind of around this laptop. And as we start playing back the audio, we start hearing voices that don't belong to any of us talking under us as we're asking these questions and that we're talking amongst ourselves. Kind of like layered beneath when we were talking and asking questions. It's really hard to make out. It's definitely female. It sounds distant almost with a reverb on it. And you hear my brother on the recording go, man, I'm scared of fucking snakes right now because, you know, he's worried, you know, what could be in the forest? And as he's saying that, you hear what sounds like a female voice, very distant. It sounded like it was saying, mama. I'm scared of snakes right now.

Speaker 1:
[07:31] This device.

Speaker 5:
[07:35] At least that's what it seemed to me. Mind you, we weren't hearing any of this in real time because we're recording GarageBand, we don't have headphones on. And it's just a bunch of us friends out in the forest just asking random questions.

Speaker 1:
[07:50] If it was you who spoke earlier, would you like to speak again?

Speaker 5:
[07:59] Would like to make yourself known. They're audible, but you can't hear exactly what they're saying, which just makes it a level creepier. We're startled, we're like, oh my God, like, what do we have? Like, what the heck just happened? It was a really strange experience. At that time, we really didn't think much of it. We're just like, oh God, that's spooky. But we just kind of forgot about the whole thing, saved the audio file and then just went and partied, you know, that night, I think, and just kind of forgot about the whole thing. A few days later, my brother and I were like, hey, let's do one more test. And we walked out with the laptop again, and we started playing old music from the Civil War era. I was standing out there with the laptop on the edge of the forest. My brother was on the porch and he was kind of coaxing me. He's like, okay, man, let's, we can come back in now. I remember again, this floodlight coming from the hotel, very clearly just piercing through the trees at nighttime. I played some music, I was messing around with my laptop, and I looked back up, and the hotel floodlights completely blacked out. And it looks like this really large black mass kind of in front of it. And it kind of took me a second to gauge what's happening, because obviously it's dark. I'm looking at an LCD screen or just a computer screen in back. But something was clearly blocking it, and it was very tall, and it was just really weird. So I just kind of like stepped back, went inside the house, and just kind of forgot about it. Archived the audio and just was like, oh, that's an interesting experience. Two years go by, my friend Craig, who just so happened to be out there the first time we were doing those recordings, called me and said, hey man, I got an even creepier place that you should check out, and it's literally a mile and a half down the road in the same stretch of forest. He said, I met a guy up here, and he went out there with some friends. Apparently, they just saw some really creepy stuff. Way more rubbed up. And again, we kind of had that adventurous spirit, and we're like, okay, let's go out and check this out. I mean, we did it before. We should see what's up. The oddest part about it was, I remember Craig showing me a Google Earth image of this dome structure in the middle of the forest. And it essentially looks like a flying saucer just sitting in the middle of the forest. I was like, oh my God, what's that? And he's like, that's apparently the hub of this activity. So my brother and I, we got some flashlights. We go out to where this place supposedly is, and we're kind of standing outside this thing. We didn't really want to break in or anything. We were just kind of trying to get an idea of what's going on and what this place is. We see this old fence and it says something along the lines of biohazard area, keep out. Something about that just initially read like BS. We saw a part of the fence that was already peeled open. So my brother and I were like, well, let's just walk through. It's around 1030 at night at this point. It's really humid. It's really dark. There's almost like steam coming off the ground. My brother's on the left and I'm on the right. I had a backpack with my laptop with the hope of, hey, let's go to this place and do recording like I had done two years prior. As we're walking, trying to follow this map, all of a sudden, I heard what sounded like a female voice press up against my ear. Directly in your ear, it's almost like you'd feel someone's lips touching the little tiny hair follicles on your ear. It was that close. I couldn't discern what it was saying. And I got so scared, I just stopped, got shivers down my spine like, Trev, did you fucking hear that? Did you hear that? I looked to my left and he's already pointing at something in the forest. And he's like, no, but do you hear that? I'm not hearing anything at this point. And I'm starting to get kind of freaked out. My initial gut reaction was going, hey, who's there? Into the forest. My brother turns to me again, he's like, you didn't hear that either? And at this point, I'm like, what am I not hearing? I'm like, I don't know what you're talking about, but I just heard a woman's voice whisper in my ear. He said, I heard bipedal footsteps run up to us, pause, and then when you yelled, I heard it step back a few paces and then run back in the forest. Like just someone barefoot running through the forest. So you didn't hear that woman's voice just now?

Speaker 3:
[13:32] No.

Speaker 5:
[13:34] We're both having these subjective auditory experiences. We're already creeped out at this point. I think most people would be like, F this, I'm going back. Maybe it's just the adrenaline. We're just like, let's keep going forward. We're getting closer to where this apparent building is. And I see this small, almost like a military bunker made of concrete, no windows, no doors, several yards in front of us. I knew it was a part of it because it just had the creepy vibe. It kind of looked like the same texture of the building from the satellite view, but I knew it was like a smaller outpost. I couldn't tell if this was military associated, how old this building was. I really wasn't quite sure. I'd never really quite seen anything like it. We just see this little blown out, bomb shelter looking thing, and there's nothing in it. We were about to walk forward again, and all of a sudden it felt like disorientation. It felt like the atmosphere shifted. Both of us at the same time felt it. All of a sudden, it just felt like the forest lit up. As if all the fauna in the forest just woke up at the same time, as if it's feeling the same energy my brother and I were feeling. All these animals just like screeching and making noises. Birds, frogs, bugs, whatever else was in the forest at the time. It just felt like this symphony of animals reacting almost to the same atmospheric shift my brother and I were feeling, because it was almost instantaneous. Something just felt unsettling and just not right about the situation. Like, as if we stepped one step closer and then we'd see something that maybe we would never want to see or remember. Something that might like kind of scar us for life. That's at least what it felt like. I turned to my brother and I'm like, are you feeling that? And he's like, yup, we gotta get the fuck out of here. And we just booked it out of there as fast as we could. We didn't have time to whip out the laptop and start doing another recording. It was already getting too weird at this point.

Speaker 4:
[16:06] I ain't lying, I ain't gonna be able to unhear that. Anyway, let's take a break for ads, and let's take a little break for ourselves. Alrighty, we're back, and let's just dive right into another tape. Hey, Vince, shuffle that deck again, boy. I'm gonna start a new reading. I didn't feel good about the last one.

Speaker 7:
[16:48] I was working as a research biologist for the US. Fish and Wildlife Service. That job that I was taking entails flying out to the Cuscoquim Yukon River Delta sometime in early June and then living in a remote tent camp all of June, all of July, all of August, September, and to early October. What I'm doing there is I'm there to look at the fecundity or native success of different species of salmon that are coming up into a particular river system. There's biologists all the way up and down the Cuscoquim River system. So all of our research projects were way up in the headwaters of these mountains. And first of all, you're very far from a native village. You're probably three to five hours from a native village. In addition to that, you're an additional three to five hours by boat from any sort of town. When you're in these areas, especially the first time, and that's what this was, this is my first time up in that area, you get all your gear ready, you're starting to prep your mind. And even when you're applying for these jobs, it's quite interesting because when you're interviewing for these positions, at least this is what I thought, I thought there's gonna be a lot of questions around science and around genetics and around fish. And how I answered those questions was how I was gonna get the job. But really what the biologists wanted to know is how comfortable are you by yourself? How comfortable are you for many, many months dealing with wildlife and weather and isolation and living in a space that is so quiet that you're just listening to the wind or your own footsteps? Have you spent any time outdoors by yourself in any great length? It's a natural essence to look over your shoulder, especially when it's quiet. Going up here, I was thrilled. I wanted to be outside. I wanted to fish. I wanted to see the mountains and the wildlife. And then, of course, do my job. I wanted to study salmon and contribute to science and help this region manage their fish population. But when I got there, and you see the expanse of this area, picture an alder-choked river. And by alder-choked, I mean this is a species of tree that grows kind of, if you picture the head of Medusa, the trunks grow in all sorts of kind of tangled configurations. They get big green leaves on them in the summer. They turn dark brown at the end of September, October, and then they fall to the ground. But during the summer, the essence is it feels like they're impenetrable. The edges of the rivers are lined in this species of tree, and it's very, very thick, very dense. And then outside of that, there are a lot of spruce trees and a very dense forest, a difficult forest to navigate. And then on the side where I had my camp was tundra. You can see for miles and miles and miles where I was camping, all the way up to these big, huge, gorgeous Kilbuck Mountains. You start to understand who you are in a hurry, the quiet at night, the quiet during the day. Like I said, you're not really speaking to another person that frequently. It was early in the summer that year, and I would work all day. And then at night, because I enjoy angling, I would go down on the river and I would fly fish. And the river that I was on was pretty small and pretty choked with these alders. And so I would go down and I would wait across the river, and I'd go on this sandbar that was on the other side of the river from my camp. As the river's rushing by, that's what consumes your hearing. It's not deafening, but it's so overpowering to your ears that you can't hear anything else. You're not even hearing birds, you're not hearing the rustling of the leaves, you're hearing the water. And so I'm fishing, and I don't know if it's that I had a sixth sense that I was being watched. I didn't hear anything, but I sensed that I was being watched. And I can see the grass has matted down. I can see where salmon ripped apart last night. The backs of the heads are bitten off the salmon and their skin, and you can just see their carcasses all around. And I was looking at all the leaves, and I was kind of trying to pick up movement behind there, or just look to see if why I was feeling a bit more spooky this night than otherwise. My mind is telling me that you're going to confirm that it's your imagination. You're going to go back to fishing. She was very close to me, just a few feet away. It was as though I was watching a horror movie, where you see the face of a ghost, or the face of a man looking through a window as the camera pans by. She was just looking at me, I was looking at her. Of course, it got my hackles up. So I watched her. I spoke to her in a calm voice, and I called her mama. I was like, hey, mama, what's going on? I'm just down here fishing. So I was casting my fly rod, and that wasn't out of being a tough guy. That wasn't out of my fishing is super important. I didn't want to change what was happening because I didn't want to elicit a different response. And I just kept looking over my shoulder, and one of the times when I looked over my shoulder, she was gone. And then I looked to the right, and she was right there, right next to me, very, very close. The wind was blowing up river that night, and I can specifically remember that because of how I was casting. She had circled downwind of me and was walking downstream into the wind and trying to smell me and understand, I think, what I was as well. She was half the distance or even maybe even a third of the distance of what she was before, clearly getting my scent, and she was smelling it more. I just went back to fishing and just kept my eyes off of hers, but I was keeping an eye on her a little bit, and she came all the way up behind me. I could see her in my peripheral, and when I wasn't looking, she would be leaning way into me. She was nervous. She had trepidation as well, so she had her feet kind of backed off and she was leaning as far in as she could without taking a physical step to get closer to me. When I turned around, when I would make eye contact with her, she would snarl. She would start to lift her lips up and show her teeth. I'm sure my pupils were dilating, and you know, obviously my heart's beating even more. She's so close now, and when she shows her teeth, you know, you're just like, oh man, this is maybe going from good to bad or bad to worse. When I turn away and I'm looking at her in my peripheral vision, I can see that she is no longer posturing. You know, then I'm starting to understand. I'm scaring her as much as she is, in an essence, scaring me. It was the next night. I was preparing some gear. Again, it was in the evening time. I wasn't going to fish this night. And I heard a distant howl. Close but a distant howl. A few moments later, I heard a very large, haunting howl, a howl, an empty kind of howl up river. Hollow and significant. So I walked to the edge of the river.

Speaker 1:
[25:17] I howled back.

Speaker 7:
[25:20] Lo and behold, she came walking out on the sandbar right where I had been standing the night before. And she sat down like a dog. She sat down as though it was a domesticated dog. She didn't howl back at me, but she sat up. She was sitting already, but then she sat up and paid attention like, oh, he just howled to me and we can now see each other. I started communicating with her in other different vocalizations, like you might hear a coyote do. I started making those noises to her. And she laid down and she's facing me laying down now with her head flat on her paws. And then I made a little half howl. She picked her head up and looked at me. And then I howled again. She sat up all the way up, but sitting on her butt. This was for a few minutes. And she went back in the brush one time and she came back out. She went back in again. That was the last time that I saw her that night. That night, I was sound asleep in my tent, and a big howl was right outside my tent. Three, four, five feet outside my tent. Woke me from a dead sleep. That sounded significantly different. I sat up. I had a 12 gauge Remington stainless steel, 12 gauge pump shotgun. Grabbed my gun and I shucked one in the chamber and I just sat there kind of panting, if you will. I was startled. I'm sure my pupils were dilating. And I was just trying to make sense of it because now I couldn't hear the howl, right? I just knew something woke me up. I could hear outside of my tent, there's a little plywood, call it a front porch, if you will. Well, I could hear this wolf's pads on the wood of my platform. And so I kind of unzipped my tent a little bit and I peeked out. I'm assuming it was the alpha male or one of the dominant males, but he was very, very large. Starting that next morning, almost every day when I walked out of my tent, within a few feet, I would have a wolf next to me. Within a few moments, they might be 50 yards away, they might be 100 yards away, they might be 10 feet away, but they were in my area. And I would walk to the genetics tent and I would turn on and say, hey, and I'd talk to them all the time. I'd tell them good morning and I'd tell them, these are the things that you do when you're by yourself. These are the things that you do when you're in the wilderness. I would have conversations with them and with myself and I'd walk to the genetics tent, do my work. But every time I came out of the tent, I was eyeballing them because it became such a consistent engagement. And a few days after this, I went for a long hike, a really long hike, probably 10 miles. And lo and behold, while I was hiking, three wolves went with me. The female that I had originally been howling to and then these two young is, is my anticipation. I didn't see the big male. And I went on this big, huge walkabout and there were times when I was on that walkabout that I just had this idea of, you know, again, my imagination would get a hold of me. You know, now I'm away from my camp. I'm away from my weapon. I didn't bring my weapon with me. I just have a backpack on. It's essentially my fake day off, which really didn't exist. But I just had an opportunity here to go for a long walk. I wouldn't say that they were necessarily walking with me, but they're always within 100 to 200 yards. This is how my summer kind of continued. If you know the salmon life cycle, they're born in freshwater, as a little tiny fry, what you would consider a minnow. And they travel all the way down their natal river, all the way down the major system, the Cusco quim for hundreds and thousands of miles out to the ocean. They live in the ocean for three to five years. And then they return all the way up, and they follow scientists believed by scent. They come all the way up to Cusco quim, and they go all the way up their natal river, go all the way up to these very clear shallow water of the headwaters, and they go and spawn for the next generation of salmon, and then they die. And just so happens where my research camp was, was a very good area for them to pick up these dead fish. That was my summer of living with the pack of wolves, and that's essentially how it ended. It ended just as spooky as kind of it started, and it was that just one day they were gone. She was gone. The wolves just up and left.

Speaker 4:
[30:50] That, right there, is now seared into my brain. All right, we're gonna take a quick break for some ads, but don't go away, we'll be right back. Okay, well, let's see here. It looks like the card is the death card. Oh my word, Vince. I don't know what's happening, but this deck is picking up on an energy from you that I personally do not see. And don't you worry about the death card, that don't mean you gonna die. I mean, look, we're all gonna die, and then of course be reincarnated into butterflies, but we all die before that happens.

Speaker 1:
[31:45] Uh, yeah.

Speaker 4:
[31:46] Anyway, the death card signifies an ending, if you would. Do you feel an ending upcoming? Uh, no. Hmm. Okay, well, I feel an ending coming, an ending to this episode.

Speaker 6:
[32:02] Damn, Ricky Lee Bagley, you sharp boy.

Speaker 3:
[32:11] Radio Rental is created by Payne Lindsey and brought to you by Tenderfoot TV. Showrunner is Meredith Steadman. Lead producers are Eric Quintana and Stephen Perez. Executive producers are Payne Lindsey and Donald Albright. This episode is hosted by Jeff Foxworthy and features Tony Cavallaro. Writing by Meredith Steadman. Original score by Makeup and Vanity Set, with additional score by Jay Ragsdale. Sound design mix and master by Stephen Perez and Cooper Skinner. Editing by Eric Quintana, Sean Nerny, Stephen Perez, Meredith Steadman and Cooper Skinner. Our production manager is Jordan Foxworthy. Cover artwork by Trevor Eiler and Rob Sheridan. Radio Rental merchandise by Byron McCoy. To shop Radio Rental merch, visit shop.tenderfoot.tv. Special thanks to Orin Rosenbaum and the team at UTA, as well as the Nord group and the team at Odyssey. If you have a Radio Rental story that you'd like to share, please email us at yourscaristory.gmail.com. Or contact us via the form on our website, radiorentalusa.com. Follow us on Instagram at Radio Rental. On behalf of the Radio Rental store, we'd love it if you'd subscribe, rate and review. As always, thanks for listening.