Radio Rental - Episode 101

Episode Date: April 10, 2026

Welcome to Radio Rental, a mysterious video rental shop with an exclusive collection of VHS tapes. On these tapes are TRUE scary stories, narrated by the people who experienced them... On today's tapes: >> Headlamp >> Sometimes there's scary people doing sketchy stuff - even in Canada. >> My Friend, The Woods >> Hey, kid. Maybe pick another place to practice whistling. Meanwhile, at the store: Ricky Lee gives the store a light makeover. Groovy, baby. Want more Radio Rental? For early access and ad-free listening, subscribe to Tenderfoot+ at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://tenderfoot.tv/plus/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Follow the show at @radiorental Visit the website at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠radiorentalusa.com To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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add free listening, and even some bonus scary stories. Visit Tenderfootplus.com for details. 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.tendorfoot.tv. TV to Indefat. 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 Rentle.

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 story. 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. It is. Long time no-say, friend. Hey, welcome to Radio Rental, you fellow traveler.

It is me. It is me. It's Riggily Bagley, accredited astrological advisor and current custodian here at Radio at Radio Rental, a video rental shop with an exclusive collection of scary stories, all told by real breathing people. You know the drill, right? And we got our junior associate clerk, Vince, in the back of the store today. He's organizing the candy.

So, hey, Vince, tell everybody, hey, that kid's locked in. I'm talking about that. That's a man of integrity right there. Thank you for your service, Vince. Yeah, them milk duds ain't going to count themselves if they ain't. Anyway, it's good to see, y'all. You may have picked up on a little bit of a different vibe around here today. Do you like it?

You know you do, don't you? I like it. I did a little redecorating while the shop was closed, and it wasn't in the budget, but hell, y'all, it was musty in here. I wanted to spice it up a little bit. So I got a couple of beanbag shares over there. the corner, of course, the Himalayan salt lamp, and added this little beaded curtain to kind of break up the open floor plan that they had in here. This didn't feel intimate enough, in my opinion.

All right, well, that's enough of the HGTV tour. Love it or listed. I love it myself. All right, let's get into some tapes. I'm going to grab a special box from the back. Oh, Lloyd looked like Malachi. I missed y'all too. All right. Oh, ooh, this is a good one. I cheated and watched this one a couple of times during the hiatus. And here's the verdict on it. It gave me chronic nightmares for weeks. Weeks!

If anybody knows Northern Ontario and Canada, it's some of the deepest backbush in the world. It's very isolated. So we have hundreds of miles of what we call logging roads in northern Ontario, and these logging roads are prime. for hunting and fishing and camping and off-roading and doing whatever you want. There's literally hundreds of miles to go anywhere. I had found a logging road that in my time going there for about a year,

nobody's used it. It was one Friday night at the end of COVID, and nobody is out there, and that's why I love going out there. I'm a solitude kind of guy. I went out there, and it was after work, and it takes me a bit to get out there. You can go 40, 5.000. 50, 60, 100 miles down some of these logging roads.

I got in there around 9 at night. It's already dark in Northern Ontario at this point. I'm driving down the logging road, and the weather turned on me. And the reason I'm there is I know a great grouse hole. I go grouse hunting up there. And I was going to set up camp for the weekend, but anyone from Northern Ontario will tell you the weather can turn, especially in September.

And it did. So as I'm driving down the logging road, it's freezing rain, it's turning to muck. The skitter trails are pretty much a wash. And as I get to my campsite, it is just totally mucked out. I can't even get my truck in. It's freezing rain. And at this point, it's pitch dark. I'm not setting up camp.

I'm not doing anything. I said, you know what? It was a fun trip coming in. I'll call it for the weekend and go back to town. knowing that I've got a couple more hours ahead of me on my way out. On my way out, I'm driving slow. Down a skitter trail, I noticed a pair of headlights, truck lights. Me being a Canadian, the first thing in my mind is maybe this guy needs help

because I've been stuck down a skitter trail in muddy weather in my truck before, and I had a family of people on ATVs drive right by me, ignore me completely, and it sucked. You know, you're out in the middle of the bush, and you see this. someone, you think maybe this guy can help. There's no cell phone service. There's no, there's basically not even radio out in some of these places in northern Canada. So I figured, hey man, it would be a pretty dick move if I just drove by this guy and didn't ask if he needed any help. So I parked my truck at the mouth of the skitter trail in the logging road. So I'm not blocking the trail if he's coming out. And I start walking down. And the truck is about, I don't know,

good 25, 50 yards, maybe more facing towards the road. So I thought he was trying to come out down the trail, and maybe he got stuck in all the muck. So I go down the trail. I notice that the truck is running, and it's a big Generation 2 black Dodge Cummings Diesel, and all the interior lights are on, but there's nobody there.

So I keep walking around. Behind the truck, there's a clearing. Somewhere even farther behind the clearing, I see another light on, a flashlight, or a headlamp. And I see it moving around the bush. At this point, I thought maybe he saw me, and maybe he's creeped out.

So I'll announce myself, and I'll say, hey, man, I'm just here checking you out if you need any help. And that's what I yelled in the bush. I hollered into the bush. Hey, buddy, I'm just here to help you out. If you need any help, I'm just parked down the road. That's when the movement stopped completely. The headlamp went out, and nobody responded.

in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere. That's when I got a little concerned for my well-being, and my heart sank. I kind of just got that bad feeling right off the bat. I didn't hear anybody respond to me, because usually a normal person would just be like, oh, no problem, man. Or hold on, stay there, let me come talk to you.

And then I started to observe the truck a little bit more, and that's when I realized the truck had no license plate. The truck had pickaxes and shovels, and it looked like it was running for a quick getaway towards the road. I thought, oh, this is getting weirder. And as I observed that, I heard someone come running towards the truck and me through the bush without the light on.

My first reaction was to run. I panicked and got completely disorienting, right off the bat. It's pitch dark. It's raining. It's mucky trail. It's the middle of the woods. You kind of lose your breath. You don't know which way is up. You don't know you're left from your right. And everything is going so fast. Your skin's buzzing. You're just panicking. Luckily, I saw my headlights at the end of the road and just started running in that direction. Of course, I tripped in the mud face first, and then I got up and kept running. As soon as I made it to my truck, I jumped in, I slammed it in reverse because I had looked back,

and the truck was ripping down the trail towards me. He came ripping out of the trail and almost took my entire front end of the truck off. And then he parked right in front of me. As he does that, he completely blocks the road in front of me on a 45 degree angle, making it impossible for me to go anywhere. And that's when I reached in the back, stumbling for my shotgun. And as I got my shotgun, I raised it and displayed it to him. I don't know if he saw it or not, but that's when his truck just took off.

He burned rubber, kicking gravel and rocks all across my front grill, cracking my windshield. And I just sat there in complete disbelief. I sat there for about an hour, running through every possibility through my head what just happened. Why did he react this way? What was he doing out there? Should I call the police or should I go to a wildlife conservation trooper immediately on the way home before I do anything? What's out there? Should I get out of my truck and go explore this area right now?

Is there somebody out there that needs my help or something? I just sat there for about an hour contemplating everything. Basically had the best cigarette of my entire life. And I don't think I left until about an hour. I might have even had a couple more cigarettes after that, but I didn't leave for an entire hour after that at least. I just sat there. At the time, I'm thinking someone's getting rid of a body.

100%. This is Northern Ontario. There's one million places to deposit a body that will never be discovered. There will never be a town built there. There will never be any excavation. Some of this land is like untouched frontier still. Us northern boys, we know all about the shadiness that happens in the bush once in a while. We hear the stories.

We have bikers up in northern Ontario. So my mind, you know, big black Dodge, middle of the night, no plates. I'm thinking there's bikers out here getting rid of someone or maybe drug addicts. That's what I thought. Drug addicts just got a body or the bikers were getting rid of one. On my way home, that night I contacted what we call the Ministry of Natural Resources. That's our wildlife conservation troopers. They're the exact same as the United States.

There's the police of the woods for hunting, fishing, camping, everything really. related to outdoors. And I told them exactly what happened. They instructed me also to call the Ontario Provincial Police, which are state troopers or provincial troopers. I called them as well. They coordinated. And I said, will I ever hear back from you?

And they said, well, if we need you as a witness or if we make some sort of arrest, we'll obviously hear back from you. But if all you have to work on is a black truck in the middle of the night, I don't know what we're going to be able to tell you, especially there's no cameras out there, there's nothing, we can't ping a cell phone. Does it look like we're going to have any answers for you? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?

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please contact Connects Ontario at 1866-531-2,600, to speak to an advisor, free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. All right, well, we're back from the adverse. y'all think we should do another tape. I mean, it's cheap, it's easy. You hear anyway, let's do it. When I was a little girl, I was trying to learn how to whistle. I would sit on the back porch of our house,

which backed up to woods. I would just sit on the back porch and just practice different melodies trying to whistle. One day, I actually got a melody and it was twinkle-twinkle little star. I try different melodies, you know, happy birthday, the classics. I wasn't perfect at it, but I feel like I really mastered twinkle-twinkle little star. That one I would whistle over and over again.

One night I was sitting on the back porch whistling, and I whistled. the entire melody of twinkle, twinkle, little star. Except this time, the woods whistled back at me. It wasn't like an echo. It wasn't like anything I'd ever heard before. It was my entire full melody whistled back at me. I didn't understand it, but I thought it was really cool. and so I would be like hello

and I would hear my voice repeated back to me not like an echo but like in my own voice just a beat later and so I would like hum melodies I would sing songs that I made up

the woods would repeat it back to me they'd sing back to me my whole melody in my own voice. I thought it was just something fun I could do. I thought it was just a way to pass the time. I thought I had like a new friend that was the woods, I guess.

I want to say it went on for a few weeks. I would go out back pretty much every day and practice my whistling with my new friend, The Woods. The Woods would whistle with me, back at me. I wanted to show my parents this cool trick I did. And so I took them out back to the woods on our back porch, and I whistled, and the woods whistled back. And they were very scared.

Didn't really understand what was going on. So they did the same thing. They whistled. Also for them, the woods whistled back. This freaked them out naturally. I definitely thought it was just pure fun. And it wasn't until I noticed my parents' reaction that I thought maybe I was in trouble

or that something more sinister was happening. But when they explained to me that they thought there was a bad man or a creepy person back there watching me, I did start to feel more afraid. They called the police to see if maybe there was a man in the woods watching me or some creepy person back there. The police came,

and just like me and my parents, they whistled, they hummed a melody, and the woods whistled back. It hummed the same melody in their own voice, back at them. They didn't think it was a cool trick like I did. They were taking it very seriously. And they scoured the woods,

looking for any evidence of a person living back there. They didn't find anything. Not anything like a campsite. Just nothing. My parents just told me to forget about it, not whistle back there anymore. we couldn't really understand what was happening. Just in case it was a creepy person,

they told me just don't go out there by myself and whistle. My parents have always been like spiritual people who believe in like paranormal stuff. So I don't really know if that's what they were thinking was happening. But the conversation with me was, you know, just don't go back there anymore. We're not going to do that anymore. Eventually we forgot about it. Life went on. It's the summer now. I'm at this point really good at whistling. One day we were just walking around the neighborhood. I'm whistling a new melody. I've expanded beyond twinkle twinkle little star. Making up my own tunes at this point. I hear my melody.

back at me, just like it was whistled back to me from the woods. But we weren't near the woods at all. We were just in our neighborhood. We look up and on the neighbor's porch was a parrot in a cage. I whistled again and it repeated my melody back at me. I said hello. It said hello back at me in my voice. My mom did the same thing. We come to find out that the parrot had escaped for a few weeks, and that's why we heard it coming from the woods, finally solving the mystery of the whistling from the woods. I still find it very strange that the parrot could,

repeat back to us in our exact voice. I feel like that's pretty advanced for a parrot. Still confuses me. That's like a broken perfume dispenser. That don't make sense. All right, let's do some ads. There are my gloves. Come on, heat.

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Ease yourself back into things. Don't gorge yourself on horror after giving up cold turkey. You'll cramp up. You will cramp up. But don't worry, come back to Radio rental this time next week. We're going to have some more scary stories for you. Oh, look at this. Vince is offering y'all some goobers for the ride home.

Isn't that sweet? That boy, he's just sweet. Vince, I will say this, though. It's a little bit creepy you don't use your words. Oh, sorry. Goobers for the ride home. Don't mind if I do. Radio Rental is created by Payne Lindsay and brought to you by Tenderfoot TV.

Showrunner is Meredith Stedman. Lead producers are Eric Kintana and Stephen Perez. Executive producers are Payne Lindsay and Donald Albright. This episode is hosted by Jeff Foxworthy and features Tony Cavalero. 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 Kintana, Sean Nernie, Stephen Perez, Meredith Stedman, 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 Orrin Rosenbaum and the team at UTA, as well as the Nord Group and the team at Audit. If you have a radio rental story that you'd like to share, please email us at Your Scary Story at gmail.com or contact us via the form on our website, radiorantleUSA.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.