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:
[00:15] The following podcast includes scary stories with content that could be triggering to some listeners. Listener discretion is advised.

Speaker 3:
[00:30] 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:
[00:58] You've gone Radio Rental.

Speaker 5:
[01:30] Hey, what the? Yo, what's happening? Yo, where am I?

Speaker 4:
[01:35] Oh, shit.

Speaker 5:
[01:37] I know where the hell I am. I'm at Radio Rental again, aren't I? Mm-hmm, got this little ass vest on, with my name on it. What the hell, why me? Why Jeremy? What's so special about Jeremy, huh? You know what, maybe, maybe I'm like a chosen one or something. I'm like Neo in the Matrix. You know what I'm saying? Oh, maybe this is the Matrix, but it's like a T-Mu Matrix, because this, this is a musty ass rental shop. But, but it is cool to be chosen one, though. That's, that is pretty damn cool. I just wish it could be like a high stakes mission or something like that, you know? Why gotta be chosen for an entry level position that don't even exist anymore? Anyway, it's you. Yeah. I remember you. I remember you because you didn't say anything last time. Just like that. So congratulations on being the most consistent person I've ever met in my life. Did you spontaneously teleport here too? Uh, shit, I don't know what to do. Should I see a doctor or should I just lean in, you know? Always this damn st- Oh, hey, hey, Malachi. Hey, I remember you. Who feeds you, by the way? What do you eat? Tape dust? I don't understand. What you got there, is that a little crinkly toy? You want to fetch? Go fetch. I didn't even know cats did that. They don't even come in your car with them, but they'll fetch. That's insane. Well, look, I guess since I'm here, I'll watch some of those horror tapes with you. I did kind of like that part last time. But hey, this better not happen again. You hear me, store? Huh? Okay? Or at least give me some advance notice so I can prepare. I have shit to do. Like, damn. I mean, not today, specifically. But I usually have shit to do. You just got it right on accident. This is... Anyway. All right. Let's tape on the top of the box. Let's do this one.

Speaker 6:
[03:51] This story of mine started in Philadelphia in 2017. I was in art school at the time, and I moved to South Philly in a house. I was running a room for my senior year. Just getting to know the roommates, these were guys I never lived with before. I didn't know them, they just kind of had like a vacancy, and it was a cheap room for rent. I was, you know, poor college student. It was like a particularly warm February, and the house I was in had like a rooftop deck. We were on the roof of the house, sitting in lawn chairs drinking with roommates, just you know, shooting the shit. Off to the distance, I see like an orange ball of light that I almost describe as fire. Kind of like a orange orb in the sky. It was probably like two, three city blocks away. It had to be the size of almost kind of like a car, like a small car. It was quite high up, so it didn't look like it was coming from a chimney or like a burning building. The second I noticed it, that's when it looked like it flamed out. I wouldn't necessarily think anything of it. It was just really strange. I just thought maybe it was, you know, a trick of the sunlight or even a fire from a building. But again, it was too high to look like it would be something that would carry up that way. It didn't look like it was any type of balloon. It was during the day, so there was no fireworks or I think anything that someone would create this themselves. I looked at it. I thought it was weird. I didn't say anything because I didn't know these guys too, too well. I only lived there about a month and a half, and I didn't want to be like, what the hell was that? That night, I went to bed as normal. Around 2.30, I woke up in an extremely strange way. I woke up like I landed on my bed. My hands tucked under my chest, kind of like face first, like I planted onto my bed, like I was physically dropped on my bed, and I jolted awake. Almost as if you were like as a kid running and jumping onto your bed and landing on your stomach with your hands tucked in your chest. Just literally felt like I was dropped on my bed. I like sprung awake and it was extremely strange. I had a squeaky mattress at the time, poor college kid, so the mattress was squeaking as if it was like ricocheting off the weight of me landing on it. I jolted up, they're extremely groggy and shocked. I don't, to my knowledge, sleepwalk or move around in my sleep. Wasn't like that sensation where you're about to fall asleep and your body jerks a little bit. It wasn't that sensation. It was much more intense and more physical, I would say. It felt almost like I smashed into the bed and then had to like push myself back up. So it wasn't just kind of like a flinch or a quick jolt of the body. It was like a physical full body sensation of being imprinted into the bed and then bounced off. Super strange and I just went back to bed. The next morning, I'm getting ready for school. My roommates at the time, they were all working. So we were up at the same time because I'd get to school at 8.30. They would have to get to work. My roommate Sean, who I shared a wall with, was like, did anyone hear like that crazy noise last night? It sounded like a bomb went off in the city. The other two guys who lived on the bottom floor were like, no, I didn't. I also was like, oh no, I didn't mention that. I was like, oh, I might have jumped onto my bed. That was my assumption that I might have just jumped on to my bed and hit the wall or something. He was like, oh, it was weird. He's like, I just didn't know what it was. Didn't sound like thunder. There was no storms. I leave for school and I'm walking to school. The college I went to was the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. It's a really old art school. It's actually the oldest art school in America. It's a two building school. One is this old historic museum. And I had classes in that building. As I was walking around that day, like weird electrical things started happening. I'd walk under a light. It would turn off or a light would flicker and I'd walk under it and then it would stop. This is strange, but it's an old building. This type of stuff didn't normally happen to me. I didn't really register it. As I was walking home, it was dark in the city. And as I'd walk under street lights, the same things started happening. They would flicker or they would turn off or they would turn on if they were already off. And that's when I was like, okay, this is a little strange. It's happened enough now in enough spaces where this is really strange. I go home, eat dinner, just hang out for a bit. Later that night, I take showers at night. So I'm getting ready for a shower and looking in the mirror. And I noticed these dots on my back in a weird geometric pattern. It's like two on top of each other, then one, then another two, then one. And they kind of start near my spine and move to the side. And as they move, they kind of fade. It's not like I felt a sensation back there. And that's why I was looking. I just happened to stumble upon them. They weren't raised. They didn't itch. They weren't indented. They were just red dots, like flat red dots. And I was like, okay, that's really strange because they're in a pattern. I don't have like back acne or anything like that. There wasn't really like an explanation for the pattern. And in art school, we're standing all day and painting classes. So it's not like I was sitting down and something could have imprinted on my back or something like that. I was like, huh, that's really, really weird. And didn't really think anything of it. I didn't think it was too much of a concern to go to a doctor or anything because there was no pain. So I took my shower and I went back to bed. Throughout the next couple of days, the light stuff was still happening, but it started to fade. And every day that passed, the dots on my back were getting less and less. I had some friends look at it and they were like, oh, that's really strange. We tried Googling it, but we couldn't find anything. Those fade, and then eventually the light stuff stops, and I kind of forget about it a little bit. And I was like, oh, that's just a weird story.

Speaker 1:
[10:31] Story, story.

Speaker 6:
[10:35] It was like a couple weeks later, I went home for Easter. So I'm in my childhood bedroom, and I wake up the same way again. Boom, like it feels like I landed on the bed. This time I was like, okay, this is really strange. Like, this is the second time this phenomenon has happened and not in my Philly place. I'm in my parents' house. This is really weird. I was just kind of a little freaked out, went back to bed, and then the next morning checked, and there were dots again on my back, but in a different position this time. They were smaller. And then like this time, I believe they were to like the left. But again, still in that same pattern, the two, the one, the two, and then they would fade. So that, again, was super strange. I remember telling my mom about it, and I was like, this is the second time these dots came up, and she was like, oh, maybe you need to go to the doctor. She was like, they're flat on your back. But this time, like these electrical phenomena happened again. If I'd walked by the TV, the TV would turn off. I would go outside with the dog, and then the lights on the patio started flickering. Now it's happening at my parents' house, and their house isn't that old. It was built in like the 90s, I believe. So I was like, okay, this is really strange. And, you know, it's kind of started to freak my parents out. That night, we would hear like doors starting to slam. We were on the second floor, and like the first floor had the kitchen, and we were hearing doors slamming, and we were like, okay, now we're, we're all really spooked out, because this was really kind of creepy. I grew up in this house. There was never like a haunting or any type of paranormal activity. Eventually, like just like before, the dots faded and that phenomena stopped. This time it faded a lot quicker because the dots were smaller and more faint. The second time, I believe it only lasted like one or two days, and by the time like Easter was over and I went back to school on that following Tuesday, it was like kind of done. I haven't woken up this way before. Those dots have never reappeared on my back. I do check a lot. This has been almost 10 years, but I will still check sometimes. Occasionally, a street light will turn out as I drive under it, or something like that will happen. I think that's more up to chance now, but every time it happens, the friends that know this story or the people that know me that know this story are always like, oh, it's the aliens. The second time it happened, I really kind of went on Reddit and was in a community and being like, what is this? What's happening? A lot of people pointed to aliens because of the electrical phenomena and the dots and they were like, oh, people had similar dots and this and that. I remember finding a really crappy website, looked like it was made in the 90s. It was just like text, white text on a black background with images. Someone had a very similar dot pattern on their back. It wasn't quite like mine, but it was a similar geometric shape and they were claiming aliens. Do I believe it? Maybe. I do think aliens exist. I don't know if they're like actively abducting people or what. But yeah, I don't have any other explanation for it. Out of all the paranormal or fanciful things out there, I do think aliens are the most plausible. I've heard other abduction stories and people like losing time and being misplaced. I don't have those, but again, this was happening when I was asleep. You know, I might not have the same lost time or the same grogginess or waking up in a different room or waking up with different clothes on. It was kind of terrifying to think of like, oh, what did they do? Especially if there was these dots on my back, like what were they doing there? Was it an injection? Was it like surgery? Who knows? Like, what did they take? What did they put in? Mixed emotions for sure, like exciting in the sense of like, oh, that's really interesting because it happened to me, but also quite terrifying because I have no idea if it is true, what they've done or what happened or what was going on.

Speaker 5:
[14:57] Damn, I kind of know how that guy feels. Feeling like you're falling through space, waking up in a strange way, possible abduction, pretty familiar, huh? So I remember we got to do the ads, and I want to start talking, and then the ads start happening. So I know that it's supposed to happen, it's just, are y'all faking me out? Are there no ads this time? Okay, fine. Let's roll another tape. Okay, oh, this one looks good. This one looks good because.........

Speaker 3:
[15:37] Haute Couture, high fashion Paris Milan, catwalk baby. Yes, you heard the rumors right. The Terry Carnation collection is in the Radio Rental merch store right now. Just go to shop.tenderfoot.tv to get your hands on this season's hottest styles.

Speaker 4:
[15:56] Fit check, sleigh, glow up fire, drip.

Speaker 3:
[16:05] I don't know what any of that means, but it's written here.

Speaker 4:
[16:20] They're very funny.

Speaker 5:
[16:22] First, you kidnapped me, then you cut me off, me and Sittins to advertise some dietary supplements. Some meal prep boxes?

Speaker 4:
[16:30] Why don't you cook?

Speaker 5:
[16:31] You got a kitchen, don't you? I don't know, maybe everybody doesn't have a kitchen. All right, anyway, let's watch the next tape.

Speaker 7:
[16:51] My job at the funeral home was a removal technician, which meant that I went to the scenes of death and I retrieved the dead bodies from nursing homes, houses, hospitals, crime scenes, car crashes, anywhere that somebody may have passed away. If they needed to be retrieved and taken to a funeral home or a morgue, it was my job to go get them. This day, it was getting close to closing time. We were planning to actually shut down kind of early because it had been a slow day. And we got a call. My partner that I usually did removals with had already left for the day. So the person that I had to take with me was an embalmer. It was somebody that didn't actually go do removals. She just managed the funeral part. That was all we had, so she ended up going with me. The call was in town, so it wasn't too far. We thought it would just be a quick pick up, take back, finish up for the day. So we got to the scene. There's a lot of police presence. Usually that's normal for a homicide, but what we'd been told through the paperwork was it was just an elderly man that had passed away at home. So that confused me from the get-go, but the weirdest part starting off was the state of the house. It was a house that was just on a normal block. It wasn't out in the middle of nowhere. It wasn't anything like that. The first thing I thought when I saw the house is how have I never seen this house before? So the funeral home that I worked in was maybe a five, ten minute drive from my house. He lived just a couple streets over from me. And the path that I drove to work went by his house. And I never realized that. I just never noticed it, but it was like as soon as I noticed it, it's like how could I possibly miss this? It sticks out like a sore thumb. It's a two story home. It's very old. It has a creepy look to it, just being so weathered. The roof tiles were falling off. It wasn't kept up very well. There's junk all in the yard. The porch is full of stuff. The windows had all these weird carvings in them, almost like zodiac kind of codes. It looked like he had tried to carve skulls into it, like skulls and crossbones. Like somebody that just isn't in the right state of mind just took a razor to the windows and just started carving things into it. It looked like one of those houses that, when I was a kid, we would have made up a story about it. You know, don't go over there because the boogeyman lives in there. That kind of house is what it looked like. Usually when we go to a removal, we find a family member and they give us, you know, their information, we give them paperwork. As we walk up to the porch, there's a woman standing next to a man in a suit. This woman just seems completely jittery, scared, nervous. She's just blabbering and speaking incoherently. I say, hello ma'am, I'm from this and this funeral home. I'm here to pick up your family member. Who is he to you? She says, he's my brother. And I said, okay, well, I'm so sorry for your loss. And she said, I'm not. And I was like, oh, okay. That's not very common to hear. She said, he and I do not get along. I've had a restraining order against him. This is my attorney, speak to my attorney, don't speak to me. And that's the first time I've ever had anybody bring an attorney with them to a situation like this. The attorney very quickly took all our paperwork, signed it, told us that the funeral home wasn't to contact the sister anymore about her brother, anything like that. Okay, this is weird. I don't know what we're about to get into. And usually from the state of the outside of someone's house, you can tell what the inside is going to look like. What they show to the world, they're okay with that. What they have inside their house is private, and it's going to be even worse than whatever you can see out in the yard. The outside was cluttered and junky and had all these weird things on it, so I thought, let's brace ourselves for whatever's inside. As soon as we step inside the living room, we're met at the door with two or three police officers. And they say, hey guys, just be careful. We've been in here the past couple hours. We've been disarming the house. And I'm like, what? Disarming? What do you mean? And they said the guy set a lot of booby traps. He has trip wires. We've been trying to take them all apart. We don't know if we found all of them. We don't know what's left where. Be very careful where you step. Where you move. Don't touch certain things. Don't try to grab things. Just please be careful. Watch your step. We're standing there with this cot that we have to take through the house. It's a big, heavy cot. There's wheels on it. I'm terrified. What if I trip over something? What if I trigger something? What if, you know, there's something that the officers haven't disarmed yet? I'm trying to get around, and all around us are just walls and walls of pizza boxes, newspapers, a crazy amount of things that are hoarded up, and the windows have been blocked out. There's hardly any light. As we're walking through the house, obviously, I'm watching my step. I'm trying not to step on anything, trying not to catch my ankle on anything. The house was so hoarded, there was only maybe a foot-wide path through the house. The further you get inside, it gets darker and darker. Getting through it was almost like a weird little maze. The carvings that were on the windows started to show up on the walls. Big carvings, little carvings, random letters that were in English, random letters that looked like other languages. Once we got halfway down the hallway, I started seeing what looked like fishing line. It was tied to nails in the walls. They had fishing weights on them, and they were still just hanging from the wall. As we walked through, the traps moved on from fishing weights and fishing line to a piece of plywood hanging down from one of the doorways that had a large nail driven through it. So if you had tripped that wire, the board would have swung down with the nail through it at like head level. It was swinging back and forth, and you could tell that it was hanging to a piece of fishing line up towards the ceiling. He had things attached to bookshelves where if you step too close to it, it would fall forward. He had really gone through and set things up to make it that nobody would get through his home. I don't even know how the police managed to not get hurt doing that. As we're trying to get through, an officer notified us we did find a trap that had a gun attached to it. They did say one of the police officers had tripped over it and the gun was supposed to go off, but for some reason it didn't. I'd seen a couple of the officers on other removals and they had been calm and cool. The police officer that was guiding us through kind of seemed shaky himself. It kind of seemed like he was a little scared, like he didn't know what might be happening or what might happen. So that kind of put me on edge. What else could he have in here? He could have a bomb set up, he could have, you know, a siren set up, something that could, you know, harm myself or anybody else in there. It was like walking through a field of landmines. One wrong step and something is going to go off, something is going to swing down and hurt you. Something is going to fall over. It's just, it was panic inducing, honestly. There's police all around us and they lead us over to the stairwell and they said, he's up here, so go up the stairwell. It should be fine upstairs. We have officers up there working right now. We go up the stairwell and as we're going up the stairwell, I can see into the rooms next to us. One room was just wall to wall with mattresses, still in the plastic, brand new, big king size mattresses. Thousands of dollars worth just in this room, padding the walls, lying around the floor. It looked like he was setting up a soundproof room. As we go on to the next room, I can see inside, there's three or four officers just taking apart all these guns. It's rifles, pistols, all kinds of different types of guns. They're taking them apart, they're unloading them. They have this huge pile on the floor in front of them, and it looks like they've already disarmed probably 20, and they're still pulling out more guns to disarm and disarm and disarm. What was he doing? What was he planning on doing? This man's just been living in the neighborhood under the guise of, you know, just a lonely old man. But in reality, he's set up all these traps, he's made all these plans, he's got all this survivalist gear. What was he, one, readying himself for, and two, what was he trying to defend himself from in his own home? This guy was just living amongst us, and he had a surplus of weapons and a soundproof room and all these bulk items in his house that he had purchased. At that point, I just wanted to go. I was afraid of walking into a trap that they hadn't disarmed. The police don't seem very comfortable at all. It was just a strange overall deal. So, we finally got to him. I was definitely nervous because he had set up all these defenses to protect himself. So what's to say? He doesn't have something on him to protect his own body, you know, protect himself to the end. I made pretty good effort to check him over and make sure he didn't have anything, you know, strapped on to him, anything that he could have hidden, anything that would possibly go off and harm me or anybody else around us. Picked him up. Still have to go back downstairs, down the spiral staircase, maneuver through the house. This time, I'm walking out backwards because I'm helping my partner, so she's at the top end of the cot, I'm at the other end. As I'm walking backwards, I just immediately back into this giant stack of boxes, and they all just tip over and things come spilling out. I was so terrified that I had just triggered something that was going to send the entire house crumbling down. I froze, and my partner, she just looked at me. I don't care anymore, I'm getting out of here. I don't care if I trip a wire, I don't care. The faster I get out of here, the calmer I'll be. At that point, I just started rushing. It got to the point where a police officer had to come up behind me and basically just put his hand on my back and was like, I'm just going to guide you out. It felt genuinely like being in some kind of mental warfare kind of thing because you don't know where you go, what you do, if you move the wrong way, if you hit the wrong thing, something could come down out of nowhere. It was like some big labyrinth of just garbage and traps and all this other stuff. When I got out of the house, it was like being underwater and coming up and finally getting air. Then I knew, okay, I'm safe. I had calmed down quite a bit. I finally felt like I could breathe. There was a lot of people crowded outside that had not been there when we got there. And a lot of people were just coming up and asking me like, oh, what's the inside of the house like? So that gave me the impression that nobody had gone in there. To me, it was just strange that like, wow, all of these people have probably been looking at this house for years and years that this guy has lived here. And they've had all these questions and they wanted to know what's going on in there or what was he like? What's the inside like? What does he have? As soon as that started and people wanted to ask me what's it like, and you know, what happened? What's going on? And it just, let's get this wrapped up. Let's get back in the car. Let's get back to where we need to go and then let me clock out for the day.

Speaker 5:
[31:44] No way, that one was crazy. I think that's one of my favorites so far. That one right there. I mean, booby traps? Booby traps are always fun, but they're never the booby trap you think it is. Anyway, all right, time for the ads to start again, I'm sure, to cut me off right as I get into like talking about. If I'm being honest, this is a pretty good day. These tapes are insane, and even though you won't talk to me, you're not bad company either. All in all, this was fun. But hey, I'm not saying you can do this whenever you want, okay? I have boundaries. Jeremy has boundaries.

Speaker 7:
[32:31] I'm alive.

Speaker 5:
[32:33] I am busy as hell, and I will not be.

Speaker 2:
[32:49] Radio Rental is created by Payne Lindsey and brought to you by Tenderfoot TV. Show runner is Meredith Stedman. Lead producers are Eric Quintana and Stephen Perez. Executive producers are Payne Lindsey and Donald Albright. This episode is hosted by Chris Redd. Writing by Meredith Stedman. 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 Nerney, Stephen Perez, Meredith Stedman and Cooper Skinner. Our production manager is Jordan Foxworthy. Cover artwork by Trevor Eyler and Rob Sheridan. Radio Rental merchandise by Byron McCoy. To shop Radio Rental merch, visit shop.tenderfoot.tv. Special thanks to Oren 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 yourscarystory at gmail.com. Or contact us via the form on our website, radiorentalusa.com. Follow us on Instagram at radiorental. On behalf of the Radio Rental store, we'd love it if you'd subscribe, rate and review. As always, thanks for listening.