Radio Rental - Episode 108

Episode Date: May 29, 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: >> House Haunters >> When the "Dream House" ends up being more of a "Nightmare House." >> Number Two >> Odd circumstances lead this storyteller to consider that someone - or something - might be breaking in to relieve itself. Meanwhile, at the store: Jared (Josh Radnor) helps keep the lights on. Literally. 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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Canadian new vehicle total registrations for calendar year 2025 for the Cadillac definition of luxury. The next radio rental tape is waiting for you right now. With Tenderfoot Plus, you'll get next week's full episode early. More stories, more strange encounters,

and more benefits, like ad-free listening and exclusive bonus tapes. If you want the VIP listening experience, subscribe to Tenderfoot Plus today at Tenderfootplus.com. Annual members pay less than $3.50. per month to unlock early, ad-free, and exclusive tapes. That's tenderfootplus.com.

Hate waiting a week for the next episode of Radio Rental? Subscribe to Tenderfoot Plus to get early access to episodes, ad-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 Rentle.

At Radio Rentle, 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 Rentals Hey, hey, great timing

Can you help me while I'm up here? Can you hand me the Phillipsette screwdriver? No, that's a tri-wing. And that's a flathead. And that's Robertson. Warmer. Warmer. There we go.

That's it. Thanks. Hey, it's me, Jared. We've met. I'm Radio Rentals Repair Man. Someone called me earlier. Again, didn't recognize the voice. Kind of deep, but also quiet.

Not to be mean, but he seemed kind of off. Can't explain it. Anyway, he said one of the fluorescent panels burned out again, so I came down here, brought along a few T5 tubes all ready to go, and turns out it's actually T-12s up there. Of course. Luckily, I keep a couple of extra T-8s and T-12s on me in the van, and, uh, sorry, you seem bored.

Yeah, thanks, Malachi. I'm getting that. I mean, sure. I know where the special tapes are. I guess I could pull out a few of them for us to, I mean, you to watch. Sure, what the hell? Let's do it. Malachi, get off my ladder. Malachi, get off. Thank you. This one says something totally illegible. Let's do it.

So this was back in 2016. We were kind of at a downpoint. I had five kids, and it was me and my boyfriend. I just had a stillborn, so we were kind of in a shallow point of our lives. We just needed a fresh start. Driving around and looking for houses to, you know, like rent or whatever, I found this one. It was a nice big yard, big house, fenced-in yard,

which was even better for all of us. And it happened to be for rent, so I called the number, and we got to go see it. And it looked beautiful, so we took it. About a week later, we moved in. The first day that we started moving everything in, we walked into the house and I was, you know, like rearranging things and the vents,

the vents in that house had the weirdest sounds ever coming from them. It's not like this, your old, creepy, you know, like house kind of, you know, creaks and whatever that you hear. something was inside the vent, like trying to, like, come out like an animal or something. I don't know. And so I told my boyfriend, I'm like, do you hear that? Like, what is that sound?

I ended up just brushing it off and just left it as is. The next day, we went back there to move more stuff in, and me and my boyfriend decided to stay that night there. My kids went with my mom for the night. It was getting later, so we just made a makeship bed through the mattress down on the floor in the living room. Of course, he fell asleep right away, so. Then I was up still, so I just went around the house and was kind of like putting, you know, little odds and things away and closing up the curtains and stuff. As I'm coming around from the kitchen into the dining room and I'm going to fix the curtain there, all of a sudden, I grabbed the curtain to pull it and there was a man. Standing right there, right in front of my window, just staring at me.

I don't know what came over me, but I didn't scream or nothing. I just locked eyes with this man or something. Walked backwards, walked all the way around until I got to where my boyfriend was. I shook him and I was like, hey, hey, you know, trying to wake him up. And he woke up. Now, mind you, the whole time I'm locked eyes with this guy, he looks bald, he's really, really pale. It's almost like he was burnt almost, like his face was just disfigured a little, you know.

I woke up my boyfriend. He jumped up and ran towards the window, but by the time he got there, this whatever was gone. That kind of freaked me out. We talked about it for a little bit the rest of the night, and we decided not to say anything to anybody because, you know, we didn't want to scare the kids. It could have been anybody.

You kind of think, you know, it's a peeping tom or something like that. So we didn't say anything, just kind of brushed it off. And then for a few, like a month or so, I would say, everything was fine. The house was great. The kids were great. The laundry was downstairs in the basement. So I used to go down there all the time

and do the laundry all by myself. After like a month or two of being there, I'd walked downstairs and I would get this eerie feeling like something was like staring at me or like looking at me from over in the other room there. I kind of brushed it off. But then every time I would go downstairs,

I'd get that feeling, plus I'd start hearing sounds over there, like somebody who's throwing something or trying to get my attention. Every time I would go down to the basement, I would just use my cell phone and put on music. I'd get halfway down to the basement, and my music would distort out. And I couldn't get it to work anymore. When I walked back upstairs, my music would come right back on.

There was something down there, and I couldn't figure it out. but I just kind of kept it to myself and then one day it was just me, my boyfriend, and my youngest friend who was two at the time I was going to go downstairs and do laundry so I'm like, okay, I'll bring you with, because usually my two-year-old never really went downstairs with me

so I decided he could come with me that day to help do laundry. As we were walking down the stairs, he's ahead of me. He walks down, he gets to the bottom step, he turns to that room, that I swore that, you know, something was over there trying to give my attention. And he just puts his hand up and starts waving. And he's like, hi, hi, hi.

And then he's like, Mommy, come down here and say hi. And I just like froze solid at first. I ran down the rest of the stairs. I grabbed him. I ran back upstairs. And I ran into my room and I was like, I told you, I told you there's something down there. That was my. full out, like, complete knowing that something was there.

Like, there was something there. I mean, my two-year-old isn't going to say hi to nobody like that. I was kind of weary of the house and all, but I didn't want to make any big movements or even say anything to my kids because they were pretty comfortable there. They really didn't say much. I was home alone with my kids.

They were sleeping out in the livery room. They had had, like, a little sleep together in the living room. And I was in my room. and I was just sitting in my bed and I was coloring. In my room there was a closet and then there was a vent that was, you know, it was an older style vent with the big brass, like, great over the front of it. I had a floor mirror, like one that you would probably put up on the wall, you know, just a long, wobbly one. During the day I must have been cleaning or something and I had moved that mirror, usually it would sit in front of the vent.

And that night, it was kind of off to the side. So I'm sitting there, I'm coloring, and I don't know why, but I just kept staring at this vent. I'd look away, look back again. I've seen something, long, skinny fingers, and a face, just long hair over it, very dark. The eyes were like piercing. The failing I got from this was like, why the hell are you looking at me? don't look at me whatever it was

grabbed the mirror took it and slammed it up against that vent by my wall and I just froze solid I had goosebumps running up and down my whole body and I didn't know what to do

I just stared over there the mirror is just wobbling that was kind of clarification that it was something had grabbed it and moved it not only that I seen it with my own eyes So then I grabbed my phone, my cell phone, and I called my boyfriend because he was at a friend's house,

and I let it ring a few times, and I hung up. A few seconds later, he calls back, and he's like, what's wrong? I told him, I'm like, you just need to come home. I'm like, something happened, I need you to come home. He said, I'll be on my way, and I just sat there and stared at that mirror, not knowing what to do. I mean, I was terrified, of course. But he gets home, and I told him what happened, and he's like, you want to know what? what's even, you're going to shock you even more.

And I'm like, what? He's like, just before you called, him and his friend were talking, and his friend was like, man, I don't know what it is about that house that you guys are in, but there's something in that basement of that house. He's like, the feeling is just eerie. Like, there's something going on in that house. It's scary, you know, like when you don't know

what you're dealing with or anything like that. Then my kids started telling me, like, all my kids were telling me. Yeah, Mom, oh, you didn't know? They're like, yeah, there's a little girl that we see. sometimes. She's got long black hair. She's burnt really bad, though, Mom. I was like, has anybody else seen anything? And then that's when my son was like, Mom, yeah, why do you think I don't like sleep down in the living room? I can't sleep next. I don't want to sleep next to the kitchen. He's like, I don't like seeing the lady that's in the kitchen. These are things that they probably had said to me

early on, and I just didn't put two and two together. My oldest daughter one night when she was upstairs, she's like, Mom, why do you think I always want my door shut in room? I don't like seeing the lady that's always standing outside the door. What is going on in here, you know? There wasn't much we could do. We were tight on money, so we had to stay there and, you know, live there. And it's not like we were being hurt or anything like that. Well, at least I didn't think so.

I woke up one morning and I just noticed there's this bruising on my leg. and I put my hand on my leg to kind of match it up and it matched all my fingertips. I was like, oh, that's weird. Maybe I just ran into something or whatever, you know? But then more and more of them would show up on my legs and my arms. And I didn't know where they were coming from.

I had the most emotional torture, I guess, from that house. It played a lot of mind tricks with me, I would say, because there's a lot of things that, like, it just didn't add up, Downstairs there was four rooms. And the second room we called the red room, because it was the color red. I can remember when we went there the very first time before we rented this place, and that room downstairs, I can guarantee was not damaged.

It was just a red room. As soon as we moved in and a few months later, that room was charred to, I mean, it was charred. It was nothing but black. The wood was all charred. And it was just a burnt room. I called the landlord and I had asked the landlord. I'm like, I have a question. Was the room downstairs burnt or was this house ever in a fire?

And she's like, no, she's like, I have no record of any fire ever happening at this house. So that right there was kind of weird. And it just blew my mind because I know what I've seen. I know that room was burnt. And I wasn't the only one who's seen it. It was everybody in my household that's seen it. and anybody that had gone down to the basement would have seen it. She did tell me that they haven't been able to keep a renter in there.

In that house, they've had a lot of people come and go, come and go, and they just leave unexpectedly, like, just leave. At all times, though, in the house, you could always feel presence. I don't know, the kids said it was a lady, there was a lady, it must have been the lady, because this lady would, I could feel her every morning. She must have just made a routine, like she was still just living there, you know? she would answer the door to people who would come to my house,

knock on the door, she would tell them to come in. Our friends would be like, uh, didn't you just tell, I'm like, what are you doing here? Didn't you just tell me to come in? No, I never said anything. But this lady would let people in our house. One night, me and my boyfriend were in my room.

I went to the restroom. We had a window right next to our bathroom. All of a sudden I hear this, the loudest, most deepest, bark ever and it was like it was right next to me. I ran out of the bathroom, ran into my room and I'm like, did you hear that? My boyfriend's like, yeah, I heard that too. He's like, let's go outside smoke a cigarette real quick in the back, you know, and we'll see if there's anything out there. He went first. I stayed back. I was putting on a sweatshirt or something. All of a sudden,

this man just right in my ear, get the fuck out of my house, he says to me. Whoa. I froze. I have goosebumps running all down my body. I don't know how to explain it. His voice was just like deep and just mean. And he meant he wanted me out of his house. I just ran. I ran to the back door and I got there and I shut the door and standing out there and I was smoking a cigarette.

My boyfriend had almost finished it all. So there's just a few drags left on it. So I just took the few drags and threw it and we were going to go back. and as we turned to come back in the house, there it was again. That bark. The loud, deep bark. But this time it was like right on our tails.

We ran in the house so fast, slam the door. It literally felt like that dog was chasing, you know, like right there by us. Ran in the house and my boyfriend just took off. And he went to our room. He opened up the window real quick and he started yelling, like yelling out the window. And I'm like, what are you doing? He's like, if there's a dog out there, it would be drawn to noise and silence. And we never heard it again.

Not once. By now we're like, what the hell is going on in this house? Like, we're seeing things that we shouldn't, you know, that I know, or we know we are seeing. It's just really eerie. One night, we had a friend come over, and it was him and his girlfriend. and they were, you know, just chilling. Me and his girlfriend ran up to the gas station real quick, so it was just my boyfriend and him at the house.

We came back, and I walked in the house, and it came to my room there, and my boyfriend's friend was, like, white as the walls. And I'm like, what happened? My boyfriend's like, he's seen her. And I'm like, he's seen what? And he's like, he's seen her. Then his friend was like, yeah, I've seen him.

lady walk across the hallway, tall lady, old-fashioned-like dressed, long white dress, black boots on. He was terrified. I mean, this is coming from somebody who didn't believe in ghost. He didn't, you know, believe any of that stuff. And this man was so scared. It was crazy. He was like, nope, I need to go home. So him and his girlfriend, they went home. To this day, that friend is get terrified of that house. He will not go within a block of that house. He does not ever want to see the house. He will not go near it.

He's terrified of it. I'm not making this up. There is something going on in this house. I even got a little bit curious, and I was searching through my phone. Like, what can you do when you have, you know, like a presence in your house? I knew we couldn't go anywhere else.

We didn't have anywhere else, you know, to go. So we had to deal with it. We just went on with life. Nope, nope, not for me. The paranormal is not for me. I'll take the normal any day. Thank you very much. I'm fine with boring. Boring is good. Boring safe. Yeah, I really didn't like that tape. Let's break for ads. All right, let's do another tape. Here we go. This one says number two. Number two. I never really believed in ghosts or the paranormal, but as I moved my stuff in on my own, I began to get an uneasy feeling. Honestly, cannot explain what happened in the house. It was impossible to fathom. I am 50 years old.

I live in the Midwest, but I grew up and spent my whole life in the UK. Before I left the UK, I was a law enforcement officer. I worked in various roles including counterterrorism. So my life for a big part was dealing in facts, truth, what I witnessed and problem solving. It was around the early 2000s in Birmingham. I'd just broken up with a girlfriend and I was in my late 20s. When I was looking for somewhere to live, I couldn't afford to buy so rental was my only option. I also had a German Shepherd dog.

who was my best pal. Never left my side. I found a big four-bedroomed house and a really nice part of Birmingham. The rent was beyond what I could afford, but I reached out to a couple of friends I thought as pretty much brothers and I knew we'd get on as housemates.

I wasn't expecting them to be in a position to do it, but as fate would have it, they were both looking to change their current circumstances. I sent them pictures, I signed the rental agreement, as soon as I could, and we moved in. The house itself was built between 1930 and 1970-ish, big, heavy wooden front door, long hallway,

which led to a big kitchen at the back. There was also a downstairs toilet just off the kitchen and the hallway. I never really believed in ghosts or the paranormal, but as I moved my stuffing on my own, I began to get an uneasy feeling. It wasn't anything that I could put my fingers, on and I kind of brushed it. I was being on my own in a new place, you know, no longer with a

girlfriend. I'd never been basically on my own. And besides my German Shepherd, he didn't do any of that staring at something that wasn't there and all of that kind of stuff that, you know, pets sometimes pick up on. Anyway, my buddies moved in. We all settled in and we had a great time living together. It was a hoot, but also a great place to live. We took turns cooking, picking films, TV, We all gone like family. They loved my dog and they looked out for him and treated him as if he was their own.

At some point, and I don't remember when, we would often wake up in the morning and find the front door wide open despite us being very careful, especially having the dog. The door was big, wooden and heavy. It had good old style locks, plenty of chains and bolts.

It was certainly not the kind of door that was light enough to open on its own. As far as I'm aware, none of us slept walked, you know, there was no real logical explanation for it to be open. Luckily, my dog always slept on the bed with me, so we never discovered the door was open until someone else did. Around the same time, all three of us began to hear the downstairs toilet flushing on its own in the middle of the night. Or even at random times during the day, you know, we might have been watching TV and we'd all hear it flush, and we'd just stop. Dead silent kind of look at each other sideways, you know, without even breathing sometimes. Until one of us had break the tension with a joke, oh, the ghost is using the toilet again.

And we kind of put it down to old plumbing and an old house. And besides the fact the flush was an old chain-style one that you pulled from the tank which was raised above your head. It took a lot of effort to pull it down with some strength and neither of us used that toilet any way. Anyway, we always tended to use the upstairs one. I tried to take my dog everywhere I went when I could. When I couldn't, I had to leave him in the kitchen. We had a big kitchen and it had a dog flap into the garden. He had water and food.

He had plenty of room. He was very well trained and behaved, never messed in the house. He also never tried to get out of the kitchen. He was just a perfectly well-mannered, beautiful dog. The door also had an old style turning knob, put much higher than you'd find in modern houses, so it was, you know, probably chest height. So the dog couldn't manipulate the door handle to escape on the kitchen. One day I needed to go out, put the dog in the kitchen, my friends were all at work, so he was all alone.

I wasn't gone long, I didn't like to leave him that long. I was always conscious of the times that I was leaving him. I don't think I could have been prepared for whatever. found when I returned. I opened the front door and was immediately struck with the smell of excrement. At first I thought the dog had had an accident, all was unwell. I ventured further down and I found this wasn't the case. The kitchen door was closed but excrement was all along the wooden floor in a trail as if it had been dragged. But even more disturbing was it was also smeared along the wall.

Initially, I thought the dog had had a huge accident and got covered in the stuff, but I realised the door was closed, the kitchen door was closed and opened the door, went in expecting to find some more mess, you know, he'd messed in the kitchen, but found nothing. The dog was clean, the floor was clean, no smell, and the dog was visibly distressed. He was underneath the table in the kitchen, squashed into the corner, just quivering. I'd never seen him this scared. I put him in the garden, as I knew whatever happened, I would need to clean it up and didn't want him walking through it, basically. I pulled out all the cleaning supplies without really questioning it much further. But the excrement on the wall of the hallway was too high up to have been the dog.

Even if he was covered in the stuff, the smears were above human waste height. But as I cleaned, I realised the smears did not just stop in the hallway. The smears continued up the stairs. With the smears continue on the wall on the side of the stairs, again above the height of a German shepherd. At this point, I just decided to silently follow the smears and see how far and where they went. At the time, I wasn't really thinking of a breaking or intruder, like who's going to break in and, you know, go to the toilet. all over the place. Well, I was stunned horror at the extent and the amount of the excrement

as I slowly ascended the stairs, following the trail as it extended to the top of the stairs, rounded the corner and went straight into my friend's bedroom at the back of the house. I slowly pushed the door open as it was closed. And I found his bed, his quilts, comforter of your US. Pillows, all covered in excrement, but not a poor printing sight, just smeared, rubbed, almost kind of ground into the sheets and the pillows. It was then that I realised even if the dog had have gone out

and had an accident and covered himself in excrement, there was far too much for one dog to produce, and the way that it had been spread looked too intentional for, for, for, lack of a better word. As I was about to start panic stripping my friend's bed to clean it, I again realised there was smears on the floor as well as coming in. The smears also went out as well. So I followed them out and around into my other housemates room at the front of the house where I found exactly the same scene. The door was closed but again excrement was smeared and ground into the sheets and the pillows.

By this point he was now an ungodly amount of excrement. It covered the floors, the walls, two beds. But strangely, my bedroom was unaffected. Nothing in my bedroom. As this all began to sink in, I realised my buddies would never believe that he wasn't my dog. As much as I loved him, he would be the obvious culprit. And I needed to clean all their stuff and hide it before I could even question what the hell had happened. I began stripping the beds, the covers, the pillowcases, everything that was covered.

I threw it all in the wash. High heat with bleach, softener, anything that smelled good just to get rid of the smell. I then began mopping, wiping down the walls. The worry of them thinking it was a dog and then wanting me to move out just drove me to kind of clean it up without really giving it much more thought of what it caused it. I just had a mission to clean it. to clean it up before they came home. It wasn't easy.

I pretty much scrubbed until my fingers bled and put their bed close through as many washes as they could over and over before they got home. Luckily, this was relatively early in the day and they didn't return until the late evening. I never told my friends what happened. We continued to hear the toilet being flushed

and the door being left open. And we carried on joking and, you know, to play it all off. but as much as I love living there with my buddies, I had an uneasy feeling and apprehension came over me. Every time I left the house and I had to return home, especially when I was on my own. I've not told many people this story.

I know myself it sounds weird, it's hard to believe. It's just difficult to explain. All I know is what I saw and what I had to clean and how scared and unsettled. that my dog was. Don't believe in ghosts or the paranormal, but I honestly cannot explain what happened in the house, and sometimes I still think about it.

Okay, the first story was unsettling, but that, that's a maintenance man's worst nightmare. It was everywhere, all over the walls more than one person can produce. That's bringing up things I've really been trying to forget. Yeah, I've seen. things. All right. Thanks for hanging out at Radio Rental today. I'd say it was a good time, but these tapes actually kind of leave me in a weird mood. So yeah, it was an interesting time. Hey, do you see Malachi? Malachi! Oh, come on, Malachi, get off the ladder. It's really high. I don't want you to break your

little foot when you jump down. Hey, hey, how did my coffee get up there? How did you get my coffee up there? That's impossible. No, no, no, no, no, not this again. Don't do it. Don't you do it. I thought we were finally getting somewhere. Wait, wait, the bird's still here? 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 Josh Radner. 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 Buy 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, 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. 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. Video's 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 IHeart Radio 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.