Radio Rental - Episode 111

Episode Date: June 19, 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:>> Crash Landing >> This storyteller experiences a horrible car crash... Or did he?>> Calling My Name >> This storyteller believes his family may be cursed with mimics.>> Tent Camping >> Two campers hear voices at night, but something's not right...Meanwhile, at the store:School's out for summer. That's right. Vince (Tony Cavalero) packs up the store. But never fear, Radio Rental will be back in October... So actually, I guess you should fear... just a little bit.Want more Radio Rental?For early access and ad-free listening, subscribe to Tenderfoot+ at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://tenderfoot.tv/plus/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.Follow the show at @radiorentalVisit the website at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠radiorentalusa.com

Terry merch is back in stock. Grab our latest designs. Foreign film Terrydub and Headshot before they sell out again. Head over to shop.tenderfoot.tv. And don't forget to pick up our new Radio Rentals Somewhere hat. Or take the Radio Rental store home with you with our limited edition Lego set. That's shop.tenderfoot.tv. Thanks for listening.

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. Come on in, welcome to Radio Rental, video rental store with the collection of scariest stories you've ever heard. All Told, I-R-L, by Normies. That's real people, man. These stories are legit.

Next-level legit. You just came in the nick of time. Today's the last day radio rental will be open for a while. Yeah, we're closing till fall. And guess what? I'm on closing duty. Here by myself cleaning and packing things up. Starting to think I'm the only one who works here.

Oh yeah. Sorry, Malakai, my bad. He's helping too. Mostly he's just playing with packing peanuts. It's actually pretty cute, though. Oh. Look at all these Legos I found over the last couple months. Whole popcorn box full.

Mysterious. Anyway, let's pop in our first scary tape when I finish up taping, using the tape to tape up the... Here's the tape. Into the VCR, we go. I'm a real estate photographer, and so, like, I kind of travel all over Michigan. I had just finished up at my last photo shoot for the day

when I was heading home. It was around three or three. On this route, this is the last gas station between my house and the shoot that I was leaving. And it's exactly 33 miles from my house. So it's a long stretch before you get to another gas station. I've driven by this place half a dozen times as I'm going to different areas out west of my house. On this occasion, I was going about 60 on this road. And as I'm coming up to the gas station on the left-hand side, I have a semi-truck

that is coming down the oncoming lane. And on the left-hand side where that gas station's at, there's another semi-truck that's ready to pull out as I'm passing this semi-truck. I don't know if the truck didn't see that I was there, but the semi-truck that was waiting to pull out from the gas station pulled out behind the other truck that I was passing, and the front end of it came into my lane.

It happened so fast that I wasn't able to react, and I ended up basically blind-siding side of that. truck. The impact was so forceful. My front headlight ended up caving into the dashboard and pushed the steering wheel into my chest. Under the driver's side door ended up buckling in and the window on the side and the windshield shattered. I hit that truck with so much force that it ended up lifting the back end of my car and spinning it around to the front of that truck. And the passenger side of my car hit the front of that truck before I spun out and went into the ditch across the street. My phone went flying onto the floorboard. And when the car came to a stop, I couldn't breathe.

I was gasping. I remember when I was struggling to reach for that phone. I couldn't bend. I couldn't stretch. I had blood starting to come down to my face and it was getting harder to see. And I was just thinking that I just, I needed to call somebody. I needed to call and just tell somebody that I probably not going to be making it back home. I turned to look out the window and I saw somebody that started to get out of their truck. This wasn't the truck that had hit me. It was a pickup truck that had stopped. And the man was coming out of the truck. And that's when it started to get hazy. I knew that I was about to lose consciousness. Everything started getting dark. I've been knocked out before and this wasn't entirely like that. This was weird. It was this gray,

purple, dark hue thing that caused like this really weird tunnel vision and everything started getting like really echoy. And I could feel my heart beating in my throat. When I was fading out, I felt like I wasn't going to be able to say goodbye to my kids. And that they were going to get a call later and that they were going to find me on the side of the road. It was one of the scariest moments in my life. Very quickly after that, everything just went lights out. A few minutes later, I was pulling into my driveway. That same purple dark hue that had faded out kind of went in reverse and it faded in and everything kind of came into view.

I was in motion as I was pulling into the driveway. I was literally pulling down the driveway as everything was fading in. It was just one of the biggest what the fucks of my life. I could feel the impact. I could I could smell the smell of the gas and the grass and the dirt. And it smelled like a bag of coins. I don't know how to explain that. It smelled like metal.

And I was just smelling that and thinking, this was it. But here I am. So did that just happen? Am I going crazy? I literally just left work and died. And now I'm. home and I can see out my window that is no longer shattered. I don't know if I've ever been that confused because it's literally like I was in two different

places. When I was pulling in, my partner at the time, she was standing on the front porch and she was talking on the phone like she usually is. I pulled in and I put the car in park and I didn't understand what happened. I slowly get on my car and I'm just standing there and it was a good five minutes to I was standing there and she was still on the phone. And then she comes down and she says, are you okay? And I couldn't really say anything.

Because it really didn't make sense. I eventually was able to tell her, like, I don't know. I was shaking and I was, I was starting to break out in like a cold sweat. In my head, while I'm trying to process this stuff myself, and I know my kids are home. I don't want anybody to pay. panic any more than I'm already panicking. And so I just had to

kind of swallow it and just be like, okay, I've dealt with crazy stuff before. Nothing like this. Compartmentalize it. Store it for later. I have things that have to be done. I know I have to get my uploads done.

I know this is real. I know this is what I can control. So that's what I put my focus on. That was like the way of me like holding on without completely losing my shit over whatever, whatever that was. Didn't have a way to not only prove anything. I didn't have a way to explain it. I was just in one spot gasping and knowing that I wasn't going to be able to make it home, but I'm home. Once I'd finished my uploads, I went upstairs.

who I was telling her, like, I need to talk about this because I really don't know what. I don't understand what happened. I feel like I'm having, like, a mental break, or I had some weird psychosis moment. I explained to her the whole story about everything that happened, and all she had to say was, well, that's kind of weird. That was it. And then I ended up telling my mom the next day about this kind of same thing. And there wasn't a lot of support with that either, and she kind of told me that I needed,

like, go see a therapist or talk to somebody, but I didn't want to talk to somebody because it seemed really crazy. I kind of just swallowed it and dealt with that for a really long time. And then I finally came forward to everybody and started talking about this weird event in my life, and people started asking me if anything has been different or anything seemed weird since then. Then I kind of started thinking about it a lot harder because I hadn't really pieced anything together before. Growing up from the time that I was a teenager, all the way up into my adulthood, I had consistent, really severe migraines,

almost on a weekly basis. Probably I was like 13, started going to the doctor, getting on a whole bunch of different medications, eventually ended up going to Imitrex injections, all this kind of stuff. Since whatever this was, I have not had a single migraine.

The logical side of me would have been, like, you just had some kind of mental breakdown. Somehow you had some kind of hallucinations that were so real and so vivid that not only could you smell and feel them and taste that it mentally scarred you, I started looking for reasons beyond, reasons beyond logic,

because I couldn't just settle on, it's just a mental break when I seemed to be fine up until that. Was it some type of time? line shift paradox, is it possible? I don't know. I don't like to think that it could be health-related if I'm now healthier. And I think that might be why I'm healthier, that there could be something else to this.

I had to work the next day. And so the first thing that I'm thinking, when I'm looking at that car, is like, well, is that a premonition? Is that something that's going to happen today? It became something that I was constantly thinking about and almost got to the park where I was getting paranoid about actually driving again. I can't really explain what it's like to go from an experience like that to trying to act as if everything's normal.

If it happens to be something like a strange timeline jump, or if it happens to be what I've heard is quantum immortality or something, what would happen to the people I leave behind? It's kind of terrifying, but you can't live in fear of like, what if something could happen? You just got to work with what you have now. There's so much unanswered there. It's like I experienced this traumatic event without having it physically.

And yet, it's affecting me. Quantum immortality, you say? That's like some Marvel universe shit right there. I don't know. I wonder what I'm like in another parallel consciousness. Maybe I'm really popular and I got a lot of friends. Okay, we've returned. And now, let's play another day.

So, a little bit of backstory, born and raised in Miami, to Hispanic parents. Lived most of my life in, like, the same area, which is called Little Havana, right at the heart of Miami. This was a two-story building. When you would look outside the door, there was a giant front yard. surrounded by trees and bushes and flowers it was surrounded by like a chain link fence which divided like the building from the street and the sidewalk because there was a fence and it was all gated

my mom would allow me to go and play outside her only rule was that the door had to be open and I couldn't really like stray far from the door she had to like have visual of me and like hear me just a regular day I'm outside playing with my toys, I hear, like, it sounded like someone whistling, like someone trying to get my attention.

But I don't pay mind to it, and I'm still playing. Obviously, I'm outside. There's different types of noises. But then I hear someone calling out my name. Like, if it was, like, right next to my ear, someone is calling out my name. I look towards the end of the front yard,

towards the fence. Standing right there, looking straight at me is my mom. Without a shadow of a doubt, I know it's my mom. Like, I could see her. My mom has a very distinct streak of white hair. That's super noticeable because she has jet black hair. It's my mom. And I'm like, hey.

So, of course, I get up and, like, I'm running, smiling towards my mom. She's just standing there, and I'm like, what are you doing? She doesn't really answer me. She's just staring at me smiling and just start. telling me how much she loves me. She tells me how special I am. She's like, I love you, I love you. We have to be together.

Like, don't you want to come with me? And she was walking sort of like in slow motion. And her voice was like very, very soothing. Like, very loving. She starts walking aside the fence, leading me, telling me like, come on, let's go, let's go. And I'm just walking, just talking to her. And she just keeps telling me how much. much she loves me. And I noticed that she's directing me towards the gate to like walk out,

like the only way to go in and out of this building. And she's like, okay, come on. Let's go. It's time. I promise you, I don't know what it is, but something stops me. You know how people usually say like they have like a gut feeling or something? No, with me, it was like something was physically like stopping me. Like I promised I felt like hands. like on my chest, like pushing me back. My mom is just staring at me like, what do you? Come on, let's go, let's go, let's go.

I hear my mom's voice again, but this time it's not coming in front of me. It's coming behind me from where my house is. I'm hearing my mom like asking, calling my name with like a concerned tone. I look back and then I hear the person I think is my mom yelling No. But this time it doesn't sound like my mom's voice.

It sounds like a mixture of her voice with like a man's voice. It went from very loving to very demanding. I look back and I'm staring at my mom, but not really. Some of her features are there, but they're like shifting. And it's still telling me like, we have to be together. Let's go. Let's go. And I just start crying.

I just start crying. I start running towards my house. And my mom goes out, she's like, what's wrong? What's wrong? Because I was so young, I didn't know how to explain myself. I was just telling her, like, you, like, you were telling me to go outside. You were telling me to go outside. And she couldn't, like, really comprehend what that meant.

I just remember from that day on, like, she didn't let me play outside. She was very watchful of me. A couple years passed by. I have family over, like, we're all, like, at the dinner table just talking about, like, life and past experiences. The paranormal becomes the topic. And everyone's, like, sharing experiences. And I hadn't really, like, spoken to my mom about this because, like, I had said, I wasn't really sure if this was, like, a real memory or something I had just made up.

And I was just like, mom, by any chance, like, did this ever happen to me as a kid? And like, I went into full detail about everything that I had experienced. And she was just shocked. She was like, wow, like, you remember that? Yeah, I was, I remember, like, seeing someone that looked like you being outside. She proceeds to tell me that she never liked that building that she would, had always had, like, different experiences there. It actually turns out that there was a lady that lived.

In the second floor, she was heavily into Santaria, which is like really big here in Miami. The lady had told my mom, hey, listen, like, don't let him play outside. I feel like a weird energy whenever he's outside, like make sure that he stays indoors or if he does go outside that you have to be with him at all times. my mom didn't really like think much of it until i told her that story about someone trying to learn me out so i'm telling her all this my family's listening to all this i realized that my dad's there and his jaw is basically on the floor he is just shocked hearing all this my dad's very like no nonsense very like by the books doesn't super sketched

doesn't believe in anything paranormal. As soon as I told him this experience, he just stares at me. He's like, this happened to you? Like, this actually happened? I guess my mom had never really told him about this story. And then he proceeds to tell me that in his country of Honduras, when he was a kid,

something like this happened to him. Where someone had come to his house and actually lured him out. And if it wasn't for a neighbor, like, he would have been basically, like, kidnapped. After that, for a couple of months, someone would come to front of his house and just stare at him, telling him that they had to be together. This doppelganger or whatever was, like, it mimicked my mother. In my father's experience, it was one of his aunts.

And the scary part is his aunt had passed away. He told me that, and I promise you, I was shh. I tell my wife, what if I have like, if this is just like a generational thing that just happens with males. The biggest fear I've had, and I've had this conversation with my wife, is I am so scared that we have a kid, especially like a boy, and he goes through something like this. You know, this isn't like a really a conversation that you have with like a child of like, hey, buddy, just letting you know something might come visit you. So just be on alert. But it is definitely something that's been like in the back of my mind. I can tell you like till this day like it still scares me.

Whoa. Generational curse. Crazy theory. You know, I think I might have a generational curse because every man in my family is cursed with amazing charisma. Ads time. Now the guy, don't eat the packing peanuts. You're not gonna like them, trust me.

Star-oform does a number on your guts. Well, that's basically it. Got everything packed up for the summer. Oh, damn. Forget to pack up one of those tapes. Well, hey, how about one more for the road? I'll play you this last tape. Then don't forget, we're closing for the summer.

But we'll be back in October with more. As always. Oh, yeah. We have one more surprise, brewing for you. Follow Radiorento and Tenderfoot TV on YouTube's. That's all I'll say for now. That's something big is coming. All right.

Last tape before summer break. School's out. Okay, here we go. My friend and I, let's call him Travis, we were camping up at my vacation. family's vacation property in the Lake Winatchee area of Washington State. A pretty rugged area. I had been going there my whole life.

Just a lot of kind of like wild territory. We were camping, planning on staying a couple nights. And I think the second night, we just decided we'd rather kind of be a little adventurous. And walk off up into the mountains and just camp somewhere out in the middle of nowhere. We both had a little bit of experience with that. enough to feel comfortable without GPS or anything like that. We started hiking and went for a few hours until we were satisfied with how far away from everything we were. We just wanted to feel like we were away from everything.

Pitched our tent, a small tent. It was just big enough for the two of us. We camped right in the middle of the clearing. We knew better than to camp near the forest. you're safer typically if you can see your surrounding. So we camped in the middle of this clearing. There was absolutely nothing around us. The ground was kind of like, you couldn't walk in a way that was quiet unless you maybe were a deer or something like that.

It was sticks and rocks just kind of littering the whole area and old growth like moss over everything. We pitched our tent. We were pretty tired. We got some food in our bellies, and we fell asleep pretty quickly. I woke up in the middle of the night. I don't know when it was. I heard a sound.

Something off in the distance kind of startled me. And I noticed that Travis was already sitting up, listening really intently. He was like, shh, listen, because I asked him, I was like, what's going on? He said, shh, just wanted me to shush. I'm listening. There's nothing. And I say, well, it's probably just like a coyote. And then he was like, shh, like really like intently.

Like he was freaked out about something. It wasn't too long before I did hear something. Off in the distance, it sounded like it was past the tree line, probably. It sounded like people. But I couldn't tell what they were saying. It sounded organic. It definitely didn't sound mechanical. You could tell that there were, there was a little more complexity to it.

We thought it was saying something. We thought there were words. Just kind of like people, kind of having a weird conversation, maybe. Kind of like just distant chatter. Talking about I couldn't discern what words were being said. That freaked me out because animals are one thing. I really don't want to run into people when I'm out in the middle of nowhere because why are they? out there too, especially in the middle of the night.

We sit there listening. Right before I was ready to just kind of call it a flute, because we didn't hear it after a little while. I was like, okay, I'm ready to go back to sleep, but then I hear it again on the other side of us. And then it got up closer, and it sounded less like words and more like a, just a threatening, like sound.

And it's like, all right, that's pretty creepy. I would be surprised of a human, were able to make that sound, it was a negative intent of some kind. There was something going on with the voice, like it was warning us, it was trying to scare us off, or... I really don't know. It was the strangest sound, and yeah, no matter how much we, I would just strain to hear, to understand, like, there really wasn't anything discernible the whole time, not even so much as a word. There's nothing in that area that should be making these kinds of sounds.

It just kind of set a chill up your spine. When you don't know what it is, that's the scariest thing. Whatever we were hearing, we didn't know what to make of it. I just had no idea. It became more and more, I would say, threatening sounding. I was starting to be afraid for my life. I didn't have any weapons. I didn't know what I was going to do.

I did have a knife, like one of those little three, four-inch kind of pocket knives. And I grabbed that and I was just clutching it as hard as I could, just waiting. Travis, I could just hear his breathing, just ragged. He was terrified. He was frozen. And in my mind, I'm like, okay, well, I guess it's up to me if something happens. This thing kept getting closer and closer. And it gets to a point where it sounds close.

close enough that the fighter flight kind of kicks in. It's like either I'm going to sit here in this tent and just let something happen, or you're going to kind of try to confront it as terrified as I was. I unzipped the tent, I jumped out holding this knife, and I yelled, get the F out of here. Looking all around, and there's nothing. This was a night when the moon was pretty bright, and it was almost like daylight. You could see very easily, especially because our night vision was totally intact. There was nothing around us.

This entire 100-yard clearing was empty. There was nothing. And the thing, I mean, I guarantee you whatever I was hearing was within 10 yards. It had to have been at least within 10 yards. I just kept looking around, like, in disbelief. I'm like, there has to be something. There has to have been something. I was looking for, like, something in the air.

So, like a bird or something. Obviously, I didn't see anything. I kind of wandered around a tent for a couple minutes, just on alert. And I finally told Travis, like, I don't see anything out here. He crawled out of the tent, literally just kind of crawled out, like, sweating. I felt bad for him. Like, he was really freaked out. We basically just stayed the whole rest of the night until dawn sitting there around a tent, just watching.

Just watching the tree line. The second the sun came up, we packed up and we were out of there. I tried to, like, strike up a conversation at some point with Travis about it. he just wouldn't have it. I was like, that was a crazy thing. What do you think that thing was? And he was just like, I don't know. And that's all he would say is like, I don't know.

I don't know what he thought it was, but he was clearly a lot more freaked out than I was. I was more like, I want to know. Like, I'm freaked out, but I really want to know what that was. And he seemed to be more of the mindset of like, I want to forget that ever happened. He was also really religious. I felt like that might have had something to do with it.

Like maybe he thought it was like literally, like a demon. I don't know what he must have thought, and it's not like whatever he thought was invalid at all. Maybe it was a demon. He didn't want to talk about it. So for a long time, I really didn't talk to anyone about it. It would make a big difference if I was the only one out there. I might question my own sanity, I guess. I mean, I know he was hearing the same things I was, just body language alone. Some people say there are legends, and from that area, cryptids, entities, something happening, but none of the descriptions really matched what I experienced.

It felt like something was coming after us. It felt like something was stalking us. It's just a big mystery to me, and I'm a pretty rationally minded person. I really don't even like tent camping anymore because of this. It just freaks me out. 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 Tony Cavallero. 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 Studman, 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.tendorfoot.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, radior 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.