Radio Rental - Episode 105

Episode Date: May 8, 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: >> CCTV >> What's on TV tonight? Hopefully it's not you. >> Scrapbooking >> This storyteller finds out she's part of someone's rather creepy art project. Meanwhile, at the store: Vince is back and being very totally normal. 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

You're listening to a tenderfoot TV podcast. Reesas knows a thing or two about great combinations. Chocolate and peanut butter, obviously. But there's more than one way to Rees's. From indulgent Reese's big cups with caramel to crunchy Reese's pieces and Reese's miniatures, there's a delicious Rees for every mood. It's the same combo you love,

just with more ways to enjoy it. So, whether you're snacking, sharing, or just treating yourself, nothing else is Rees's. Is the government hiding proof of intelligent life beyond our planet? A new season of High Strange is here. The explanation keeps changing, but the stories don't go away. Videos appearing to show UFOs flying through the air are real. My name is Payne Lindsay, and my new season of High Strange goes deeper into real encounters,

firsthand accounts, and the explanations that never seem to stick. Images of that rotating thing captured by U.S. Navy aircraft. I talked to scientists, military witnesses, pilots, and people who saw something they can't unsee. There was no other explanation for what we saw that day. I remembered those faces and they weren't human. High Strange, seasons one and two, are available now. Listen for free on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Season 3 of High Strange is coming June 26.

For ad-free listening, subscribe to Tinderfoot Plus at tenderfootplus.com. Hate waiting a week for the next episode of Radio Rental? Subscribe to Tenderfoot Plus to get early access to episodes, add free listening, and even some 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. Hey, man. Welcome to Radio Rental. I'm Vince. Again, as you can see on the nameplate on my vest, Radio Rentals, a video rental store, but we specialize in horror. And in the back, we have a collection of secret tapes. All true horror stories told all by real people.

Hard, hard stuff. Doesn't get any harder than that. I'll assume that you want to watch one of these tapes. Good, that's good, real good, because Vince wants to watch one of the tapes, too. Not that I'm pumped about it. I'll grab one. How about this one?

Malika, off the counter. You're making me awfully upset that you're not moving. Okay, thank you. All right, first tape. Let her rip. I was in sixth grade at the time, so it was probably around like 11 or 12. My family was originally in a rent-to-buy situation,

which didn't go out the way they wanted it to. And we had to move really quick into another house. It was like a really big house we ended up getting. Four bedrooms, three bathrooms, and it had like this really large living room with an overlook. It was gorgeous. I do remember meeting the landlord. They came to the house like once, I believe, when I was a kid.

And they didn't seem like bad people. They were just like older folks. My parents' bedroom was like the biggest bedroom in the house. Their master bedroom had a very big living room that attached to it and then it would leave to a hallway where their closets were. And since we had that big living room, me and my siblings always used to have sleepovers over there. I'm one of six girls, so like that's just how we kind of bonded. So we'd always have movie nights there and we'd like hang out.

It was great. At the time, my family was like super, super. not into technology. I've been programming until I was nine. So like anytime they needed help with something, like it was me who had to help. This was a time where like streaming was becoming really popular, like the Roku and Netflix, all that kind of stuff. So my parents had switched from cable to Rokos that connect directly to the TV. So it was a sister's sleep overnight. Everybody had went to bed. I was the only one up. I cannot fall asleep without the TV on. It has to be on at all. time for me to fall asleep. We had lost the original remote to the TV. We had to physically

get up and on the side of the TV there's H.D.MI input settings and you have to press it until it reached the H.G.M. input setting where the video is being broadcast. So that night, I got up. I went to go change H. G.M. Settings. When I hit the second H. G.M.I. setting, input comes on TV, which never happens because there's nothing plugged in to the HGMI setting because we don't have cable. Something pops up on the TV that I've never seen pop up before. That's where I see all these image panels of different CCTV footage. So confused of what it is I'm even looking at

and I take a couple minutes to comprehend it and I'm staring at each image. I remember it being. very greeny and it was very low quality. Each image is a different part of a house. One is a kitchen. One is the living room. There's a couple other ones throughout the house, like a basement. I had no clue like what I was looking at.

First thing I'm assuming is that it's a cable image. Maybe my parents got cable again, you know, or there's another input setting. The last panel was a little bit of a smaller living room, and it looks like there was someone in the panel. Somebody was looking at a TV. I noticed the pajamas specifically that they were wearing very distinct. That's what I noticed that it was me. I'm looking at imagery of my own house.

What I can only assume to be was camera footage. It's all of our things and all of our belongings. I was, like, so scared. My stomach dropped. I was small enough to kind of jump and hide behind the TV stand. And so that's what I did. So I didn't have to look at these images anymore. And I switched that last HGMI setting and put it back on

to the Roku. And then I run back to bed and go to sleep. I do this thing, which I still do. When I'm really scared, I just go underneath the covers, and I fall asleep as quickly as possible because you can't be scared when you're sleeping. So the quicker I fall asleep, the less I will have to be scared or worry about it

until the morning. The next day, I would try to figure out where these supposed-tated cameras can be. So I look around the house. I'm looking everywhere that I saw the footage originally showing. It looked like the cameras were placed in the foyer where you walk in, the basement where you would be watching TV or watching a movie, the main living room where everybody would sit,

the kitchen where it would point to everyone where they were eating, and then my parents' master bedroom living room. I took my hand and I rubbed it against the wall to see if I could find anything, and I could not find anything. Nothing. I'm looking through all my parents' phones to see if they could find any recording apps of, like, camera footage apps

or on their browsers, if they have anything that's, like, a streaming for a camera, and I literally could not find anything. I looked all day, that day, nothing. I didn't tell my parents, because I guess at the time, I was just way, way too scared. What I did tell my parents,

they were pretty mad that I didn't tell them at first about what had happened. Like I said, I just cannot believe my parents can install anything. They can't even do Wi-Fi. It was a rented house, so there was no way that they were allowed to put anything up like that, especially install something in the house. We had very strict rules. When it comes to that, we would always have people who had to contract and come over,

especially because it was like a rented place. We can't hire our own staff to do all that kind of stuff. We have to have the landlords do it. My theory is that for some reason, the landlord really wanted to watch all of us make sure the property isn't being broken somehow. But at the same time as like a kid of six little girls growing up in a house, I think that is a very creepy way to ensure that your property stays safe. We're all kids and these people who we do not know, we're pretty much watching us. I feel like after I had found the videos, I kind of did, like, shift the way that I acted in that house.

As I'm in college and a computer science student now, it really, like, kind of disturbs me a lot more. I just think of being, like, watched in that house. I think of all the moments where I was, like, doing something personal or just even, like, eating dinner or being around my home, watching TV and thinking about the fact that, like, somebody could have access to what I'm doing right now and watching me and watching what I'm doing right now and that definitely scares me a lot that's really terrible you should definitely never

watch people without their permission um just uh totally completely unrelated don't look in the top right hand corner of the store there's uh not a there's actually a big spider's nest up there Large spiders. You don't want to look at it. It'll freak. Okay, let's take a break for ads. Hi, my name is Lloyd Lockridge, and I'm the host of a new podcast from Odyssey called Family Lour. In this podcast, I'm going to have people on to tell unusual and sometimes far-fetched stories about their families. I've heard my whole life that she invented the margarita. And then, we're going to investigate those stories and find out how much of it is true.

He gets a patent one month before the Wright brothers. Oh, my God. Please follow and listen to Family Lour, an Odyssey podcast, available, now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your shows. Okay, we're back. Hopefully no spiders jumped on your face. Let me just take a little sip of my energy drink. It calms me. Oh, there's a, there's a friggin, friggin' Lego in my energy drink.

Malachi, are you trying to assassinate me? Best of luck, Vince is smarter than the average bear. Anyway, let's get that tape in. So this happened when I moved to a new city. I didn't know a lot of people. I only knew my boyfriend, and then we knew like a couple of his distant family members there. Where I moved was, it looked like any other, like, very, like, safe suburban neighborhood.

I mean, I didn't know a lot of, my neighbors because it was a mostly older neighborhood. That year, I asked my friend to come visit me for my birthday because I didn't have a lot of friends down here. And so she did. She was here for a couple days. We went out and then the next morning I was going to drive her to the airport. And the night before, when we went out, I had parked right outside my cul-de-sac. And I had never parked there before, but, like, there was no problems that I thought were going to happen. I woke up the next morning. We were going to drive her to the airport.

We were going to get some breakfast before. We walked out to my car. We opened the door. And it, like, took a second for my brain to process, like, what was going on to, like, understand that something was wrong. I'm a pretty messy person, so I thought maybe my car was just, like, super messy. Everything was just piled into, like, the passenger seat floor. my glove compartment, my two sides of my door, my, like everything.

Everything was piled onto the floor. I knew that it wasn't just me, like, being messy. Someone had been in my car and moved to things. And that gave me like an eerie feeling. We were like, hmm, that's really weird. Like, my car must have been broken into. But the windows weren't broken, and, like, there was no signs of, like, forced entry or anything. I thought, okay, we were.

I must have just left my car and locked, like, so stupid of me, whatever. But I'm, like, very, very OCD about locking my car. That never, I mean, I would never do that. But I thought, you know, everyone makes mistakes. As we're, like, kind of looking around, like, seeing what might have been stolen, I started noticing really, really weird things. Like, I was dumb and left a couple, like, some cash in the car. And that wasn't taken.

I left my AirPods in the car, and that wasn't taken. So then I'm thinking, what kind of? kind of thief is coming into my car and not taking, like, things that are just sitting on the seat. Maybe they got scared off before they could take anything. They just rifled through my car, whatever. So I get a big trash bag and I'm, like, throwing things away, just, like, trying to figure out, you know, if anything was taken. I have a picture that I keep in my car all the time of me and my family. It helps with, like, homesickness. I just look at it when I'm driving. I was probably two years old in the picture.

And it's like me, my parents, my grandparents, my aunt, like whole family. I always wanted to just keep little memories, anything I could have my family around me. So when I missed them, I could look at a picture of them. It was like they were kind of there with me. That was one of the only family pictures I had physically, which was why I kept it with me so much, because we just didn't print out a lot of them. Everything was in one pile, so it's not.

weird for like one thing to be out of place, but something in my brain was like, where's that picture? I just can't find the picture. And then I find parts of the picture, heads of my family members, just like sitting on the ground. Um, okay, there's just perfectly cut out pictures of my family's heads. This is so creepy. Perfectly cut out, not ripped. It was like someone had sat in my car and cut them with scissors. I'm a little dramatic and I start crying because I'm like, this is so scary. Like, this is so weird.

We never were able to find the rest of the picture. And as we were kind of like dealing with that, someone walked up to my car and they asked me if I had a break in. I said, yeah. He introduced himself as my neighbor. I didn't know a lot of my neighbors at the time. He said, was a picture stolen from your car?

Yeah, that was the only thing that was taken. And he said the same thing happened to me. And he was able to describe to me how it happened to him, basically, which is kind of how I pieced together, why my windows weren't broken and what happened to me. Where his car was, he was able to get, like some ring camera or video footage

when it happened to him. But unfortunately, like where I was, there was no camera facing my car. But when he did check his cameras, when his car was broken into, all it caught was a man walking by the car. He stood there for a couple seconds. All the lights in the car went on.

And then the guy went in. And he had no idea how the guy got in. there was no like breaking of any windows, didn't look like he was unlocking anything. And I'm pretty sure that that's the exact same thing that happened to my car. I'm sure there's like some tool that people use for criminals to like break into cars, but it still really freaked me out. I have no idea still how this happened, how this happened to this other guy.

And I've been really terrified to like park my car there ever since because I don't know. It's just outside of my circle and I felt like maybe this guy just kind of hangs out outside my cul-de-sac. It wouldn't have scared me so much if it didn't feel so malicious and, like, targeted. Why would you want pictures of my family? We did find the scissors from the first aid kit in my car, which is how he cut the faces.

Some guy just came by, sat in my car for however long, and took the time to do that, and then left, and it scarred me forever. I think about it a lot. I don't understand the motive. He obviously didn't want to steal anything because he didn't. He just wanted to freak me out, I guess.

I have a feeling that it's definitely not the first or second time that he's done it, but I just wish I knew what he wanted or what he was really doing with it because it's not something you hear every day. like criminals steals pictures from people's cars. Like he didn't want anything but that picture. So I wonder what he does with them.

I imagine that he does have some kind of wall or like sick room or something that he has these pictures in. And I'm in there somewhere, which is just so unsettling to me. I can't figure out the why. I want to so bad and I can't figure it out. Would it be totally bonkers if that guy had like a whole wall of other people's family's photos?

Maybe he cuts out some of their faces and he puts himself in those photos. Maybe he just peruses the aisles at the Goodwill store, picking up family photos and inserts himself in to be a part of their family. I don't know. Is that kind of sweet? I think it might be... Let's take a break for ads. Thanks again for stopping by. I appreciate it when you stop.

by, because it means then I get to watch another one of the tapes. I don't think it's probably good for me to watch them alone, because I might get addicted. And addiction's a hell of a drug. Anyway, I'll see you around. Oh, that better not be another fucking Lego I just stepped on. Oh, it's not. It's a used syringe.

Radio Rental is created by Payne Lindsay and brought to you by Tenor Foot 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 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 Nerney, 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 RadioRental 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 Odyssey. 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, radio rental USA.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.