Radio Rental - Episode 17
Episode Date: October 15, 2021On today’s tapes… >> The Dream > The Trucker ...
Transcript
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Oh, it's you. Hello, welcome, welcome.
You just can't get enough, can you?
Well, you have come at an opportune time.
Malachi and I are trying to decide on our Halloween costumes this year. We were a hit three years ago going as David Berkowitz, the son of Sam, and his demon dog.
Guess which one was the demon dog?
So cute.
So let me read you from the list of possibilities this year.
Here, bear with me.
Ah, let's see.
We've got zombie blockbuster employees
returning for their final paycheck.
Interesting.
The Grady twins from The Shining.
A little overdone. And light blue
really isn't my color.
Two of the three Powerpuff Girls.
Too edgy. Plus,
Malachi and I will both fight over who gets to
be Blossom.
Sabrina the Teenage Witch and that droll talking cat.
Eh, predictable.
And two stacks of old National Geographic magazines.
Okay, okay, I'm picking up that you're not very excited about any of these options.
Let me noodle on it for a while.
And while I do so, why don't I pop in another tape for you?
Off you go.
I have had nightmares for a very long time. I think like 5% of people have night terrors
over the age of 10. And I continue to have them into adulthood. That's the kind where you're
waking up screaming in the night. Sweating, hyperventilating, sometimes
crying, wake up and I'm already sobbing, cry myself awake. In my teenage years my
mother would come running down to my room and be waking me up and I would
already be screaming or I would wake up to the sounds of my own screams.
My dreams, even now, will go one way or the other.
Either it feels so real that I can't recognize it's a dream
or the other 30% of the time,
I am able to recognize that it's a dream
and then I can kind of like lucid dream
and that tends to be okay.
I dreamt that I was in Denver
where I had just moved from.
It felt so real and so realistic.
It didn't feel like a dream at all.
It didn't start out as a nightmare whatsoever.
It started out as me actually deciding to go for a drive.
It was just like an April day would be.
Felt like I had been transported.
The sky is this crisp blue.
There's still a lot of dead leaves, dead grass.
Things haven't started blooming yet.
Still some patches of snow here and there,
but you can feel the warmth of the sun
coming through the windshield.
It was so realistic that I could even see the street signs of my old neighborhood.
I was taking the route that I've taken many times in real life to go drive up to the mountains
because I guess dream me decided that she wanted to go up to the mountains.
Oftentimes in dreams, I think it's common experience that you can kind of bounce around
in one place or the other.
There's that element of surrealism.
And this didn't have that at all.
This felt like it was happening in real time.
Thinking thoughts that I would think to myself as I was driving in real life.
Oh, put on your blinker.
I could hear the blink.
Click, click, click, click, turn.
I'm doing my whole route that I do,
get on I-25, take the junction over to I-70. My plan and my dream was that I was going to go
for a little day hike around Arapahoe National Forest. It's a spot that I've been to many times
camping. I'm familiar with the specific area that I was going to go to.
As I'm driving up the hill, there's a steep incline as you start to go into the mountains
from Denver.
As it does all the time in Colorado, the clouds immediately rolled in and got very gray.
All of a sudden it came in extremely cloudy. There is always something sort of eerie about that, even in real life.
But of course in the dream it felt a little bit more foreboding.
It sort of felt like a time lapse.
The sky went from being this bright, crisp blue
to suddenly having lighter clouds come in
and then darker and darker and darker until it
really looked like a deep, angry, stormy sky that was going to open up at any minute.
This isn't good. In real life, I would have turned around, but in dream life,
something was telling me to keep going. In the dream, I was listening to the radio before.
I could hear when I would turn my blinker on.
I could hear the sounds of the car.
Once these clouds rolled in and things got a little ominous,
there's no sound.
It's completely silent.
I'm starting to get into the deep forest.
There's a lot of kind of switchback roads.
Then as I'm rounding a particularly dark corner where the forest is so thick it looks black, like you can't even see light through it.
I'm turning left, and it's out of my right side that I see there's a clearing, and I thought I saw a woman walking by.
Considering the clouds and everything,
it concerned me.
Something kind of told me to stop.
I get out of my car.
It's dark.
It's not nighttime, but the sky is so dark it could almost be night.
I'm following this woman down a clearing.
You can't get a full view of her, and I just kind of mainly see this long brownish-black hair.
It was dirty.
She had been out in the woods for a while.
She's nude.
She turns around.
She leans into me and whispers,
I'm so cold.
I'm so cold.
I go back to the car.
I go to grab a lighter to start a fire.
And when I turn around, there's a bang.
And then she's in the snow, naked, with a bullet hole
through her head.
The panic was almost delayed.
It felt so real that when I was waking up,
it felt like I was waking up into another reality,
not coming out of a dream world.
Okay, that was a wild dream.
I can't believe it was that realistic.
And text my mom, I just had the scariest dream.
Went to sleep, woke up to my alarm clock,
and it was time to go to work.
Driving to work, it's a regular day.
I get to my desk, and I just barely sit down and start logging into my computer.
One of my coworkers, he tells me that there was a woman from Florida who had bought a flight out to Denver.
The authorities had found online message boards
that suggested that she had an obsession
with the Columbine shooting.
April 20th, I believe, is the anniversary,
it was going to be the 20th anniversary of the Columbine
shooting that year. Right now, FBI agents are in Miami. They are questioning the family of this
woman. They're desperately searching to find her. Sol Pais, her father, says that she hasn't been
seen since Sunday. Officials say Sol is infatuated with the Columbine shooting and made threats
against Denver area schools days before the anniversary of the massacre.
Most Denver area schools are closed today because of that search.
Officials say she flew into Denver from Miami on Monday.
She purchased a shotgun and then she disappeared.
Police describe her as armed and extremely dangerous.
Saturday marks 20 years since shooters killed 12 students and a teacher at Columbine.
They start coming out with more photos of her, putting out all the wanted messages and everything, and I was shaking.
That was the face that I saw in my dream.
That's the person I saw in the woods.
I try to go on with my work,
and I'm refreshing the news in the background.
Hours are going by.
She's being chased by the police,
and she's retreated up into Arapaho National Forest,
where I was in my dream.
My hands were shaking.
The police were either going to catch her or kill her.
Those were really the only two options.
They were going to find her.
I felt like she's going to die.
Ultimately, the police do find her.
She was found naked.
She shot herself through the head.
Self-inflicted.
After work that day,
I called my mom,
told her the full story.
She whispered into the phone,
you know,
that has happened to me before.
And it happens to your grandmother too.
I knew that my grandmother and my mother
also suffer from nightmares
and really realistic dreams, vivid dreams.
I didn't know that they had experienced
any similar events.
So I don't know, they had experienced any similar events.
So I don't know, maybe it's a gene.
Is there a gene where your dreams pick up weird, obscure things once in a blue moon?
I like to think that everything has a scientific explanation,
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August of 2008, I had just gotten into truck driving, and it was like second trip out by
myself.
Like, this is brand new to me.
I used to do this thing that they taught me in trucking school where you take a ratchet
strap and you'd ratchet through the inside of your door and come back together to keep
it so somebody couldn't open your door while you're sleeping.
I was just so nervous from everything everybody had said before going into it.
So I had been near Zanesville, Ohio, and and I stopped at a rest area, an actual interstate rest area
with the little restrooms and the vending machines. And the rest areas out
in Ohio are kind of different in the sense that out there near the toll road
they're like travel plazas where they're one step below a truck stop. They don't
have showers but they're convenience stores, they're a big long row of trucks,
probably park like 30, 40 trucks there,
and who knows how many cars.
You know, it's a pretty wide lot.
This place that I was pulled into was in a more darker area.
Like, this area was significantly darker than the front of the store.
And I remember when I pulled in, I pulled into this spot, I stopped there,
I clicked my brakes, and I'm sitting there looking down at my logbook,
doing my deal, and I looked up, and I noticed that there was a female walking towards me. Probably like
a five foot four or five foot five blonde gal, looks to be in her late 30s,
comes walking up to me knocks on the door and said hey do you have any money?
My instant thought was oh here we go. She's gonna come to me and she's gonna
say hey you know 50 bucks you want to have some fun and I'm thinking well I
even if I wanted to I ain't got 50 bucks I just want to get on with my day you can tell that she was
probably in her late 30s but she looks pretty rundown she's probably in a bad
situation in her life maybe she's homeless but if I would have had some
spare scrib to buy her dinner I would have I said no I'm a truck driver I don't
have any money a lot of the times when somebody asks you for money,
and you say, no, I ain't got none, they're like, well, come on, man,
you ain't got a couple bucks, you ain't got some change.
Well, hey, can you spot me five bucks or something?
No, man, I ain't got it. Well, what about 50 cents?
You got any change at all? No, I ain't got nothing.
Well, what about a cigarette, man? You got a cigarette?
She didn't do any of that. She said, okay, well,
I need to walk to the restrooms, do you mind following me to the front?
My observational awareness carried out, and kind of looking around, I'm like, well, that's
a strange question.
We were not even a football field away from the travel plaza itself, because those truck
spots are kind of far back.
We weren't really far enough for me to justify needing an escort.
I looked at her and I said, you know what, no, I'm not going inside the building.
I don't want to go inside the building.
Inside my head, something wasn't right.
So I got back into the truck and sat there for a second.
And there's a guy that's kind of pacing back and forth
with a cigarette in his mouth.
He came around some sort of like four-door beat down car,
watching both of us with a cigarette in his mouth
real intently, just sitting there staring.
And you could tell that he was dart eyeing towards us.
Doing that slow nervous gait back and forth, back and forth, staring at us.
He was watching what I was doing and it was watching in a very, he had that look on his
face like I'm going to get you and I'm just waiting for you to come here. He didn't look
front, he didn't look to the side. He just looked straight at us.
And you could see,
cause he was standing underneath one of those sodium lights,
those orange lights that are real bright.
And you could see he had tattoos on his head.
You could tell that that was a head tattoo from a mile away.
The expression that he had was kind of like a come on guy.
Like, come on mother.
Like he was ready for an altercation.
It was like, I'm waiting for you
because I'm going to attack you.
She had a good vantage inside my truck, so she knew that I was alone.
So I was like, man, I just need to get out of here.
I carry a firearm everywhere I go, including that day.
One of the things that you train on is always have an escape plan.
Always get yourself out of conflict.
If this guy is going to have a conflict, I'm in Ohio.
I really don't want to have to do something bad here in Ohio
and have to answer for it.
I just need to get out of here.
She had walked past him, and he stayed staring at me.
And I'm like, well, this guy already knows that I'm alone.
So I got back in my truck and drove off.
I third geared the truck, because big trucks got more gears than standard. So I third geared the truck, okay, because big trucks got more gears
than standard, so I third geared the truck out of there and I'm pulling out and I kind of watched
the mirror a little bit as she kind of just stood there, started to stroll up towards the front,
not exactly towards old boy, but I could see that he was watching too as I pulled out and I'm
driving down the road and I thought, I said, well well that was pretty strange I called a buddy of mine he was like yeah man that's pretty weird
haha maybe she was trying to get in your truck and have some fun and he made some
jokes about that and I thought that's the only thing that I could be because
that's what I figured is that's the only thing is that this she looked like the
type that would probably engage in that activity so I figured that that's what
it was when I left actually I had half a mind to call 911.
And when I left, I thought, well, maybe this gal was afraid of this guy.
But the problem is, is when you're by yourself in a state that you're not from,
they're going to rob me or, you know, maybe this is a guy that's trying to put her out on the street
or something like that, and I just didn't want no part of it.
The way he was carrying himself was he was there with a purpose that was other than smoking a cigarette.
And that's when I made the decision where I'm not even going to go to the truck stop to use the restroom.
I'll use the restroom on the side of the road down the ways there.
Well about a year later, probably a little better of a year, about a year and a half, I'm watching a TV show.
And there's this fella on this TV show where they're talking to him about him killing a truck driver in Missouri. Wow, that's crazy.
Like I got to watch this because I'm a truck driver by trade. So when I'm watching it,
I'm looking at this guy and I kind of scratched my head and I'm like, this guy looks really
familiar. And I see this guy talking and the first thing I noticed is he's got tattoos
on his head. He talked about that he wanted to be like Bonnie and Clyde. So they nicknamed
them the Bonnie and Clyde murderers of Missouri.
They did the same thing, asked him for money.
Will you go inside the rest area with me?
Man followed her inside the rest area, thinking that he was helping her.
Guy was standing there watching him, came around the corner,
shot the truck driver in the face.
This guy was out to lunch with himself.
He was talking about on how he was the antichrist.
He loves to murder.
He wants the death penalty because he'll kill again.
That he had actually killed, like, three other people
and that he was murdering truck drivers
because they were easy targets.
These are people that are alone 99% of their time,
and when they get detention from anyone,
it's kind of like the dog that's never been
with its owner in 10 years.
It just all of a sudden, it's wagging its tail.
By chance, he got arrested in Nebraska for DUI, and just all of a sudden it's wagging its tail.
By chance, he got arrested in Nebraska for DUI,
and he had a warrant out for his arrest for the Zanesville, Ohio murder for some truck driver.
Then they put two and two together with the one in Missouri,
and they were able to DNA trace it back to both of them.
When I went to bed, I had kind of a weird dream about the whole deal,
and I remember I woke up and I told my wife,
I said, those people are the ones that I've seen so I go through and I'm reading this article about these two people that killed a guy
at a rest stop in Missouri and talks about on how they killed somebody two weeks before in Zanesville
Ohio at the same rest area that I had been through they show a mugshot of the female whose name was
Dana Tudor I definitely had a sick feeling and it's the female that came up to me
and asked me if I would go inside the building with her
and if I had any money.
Not a doubt in my mind.
So this prompted me to think, like,
maybe if I would have said yes, I'm going to walk in there,
I might have got whacked.
Definitely a feeling that situational
and observational awareness is like a must no
matter what you do.
I think what happens is that there's people who they're born with mental illness already
and they get exposed to extreme traumatic events and they don't have the ability to
justify what they're doing and they almost become above godlike where they think that
it's appropriate. In the case of somebody like John Hughes that believes
he's the Antichrist that thinks that he's fulfilling a mission it gets pretty
dangerous we see it David Koresh we see with Jonestown we see with all these
major things where these guys think that they're on a mission and typically when
they drop terms like the Antichrist or I'm doing the devil's work or something
like that there are people that fully believe that what they're doing is of
such a higher power.
I would like to know his background and where he came from.
I think that is the kind of guy
that we wanna know where he came from
because it would tell us a pretty big story.
Once I got adopted and came to a foster family
out here in Arizona, I got real big in horse culture.
And the one things that I've always been taught about horses
is they are emotional
creatures. They do not react by sight whatsoever. Everything is by emotion. You can sit on a horse
and be 100% calm and have a horse act like the best horse on the face of the earth. And I can
put somebody that's hostile and that horse will act like she's brand new. So when I get into a
situation and I read the emotion of it and that emotion's hot and tense, I'm like,
bye, Felicia, I ain't staying.
I come from kind of a weird childhood in the sense that my childhood was very violent and dark.
So coming from that, I have a weird perception that I can almost recognize that,
where when I see somebody that doesn't look good,
I'm not the person that's like, well, maybe
he's just confused. I'm like, no, this guy is probably messed up and I don't want to come near
you. So I'm going to stay away, right? Somebody that robs somebody at the core, if somebody comes
up to me and says, man, I got to feed my family. I'm robbing you because I need to feed my family.
I'm going to turn over my wallet. I'm gonna turn over everything, whatever.
I got insurance, move on.
My bank covered.
I don't even care.
There's a whole different level
in somebody that takes your wallet
and then shoots you in the face.
Because that's like, what's the point?
You didn't want to just rob me.
You wanted to kill me.
Because if you came prepared
with the mental mindset of killing somebody,
it's because you wanted to.
It has nothing to do with money.
You look at his interview,
he has no problem alluding to that,
that he quote unquote says, literally,
"'I am the Antichrist.'"
Okay, so while you were listening,
we've come up with a few more costume options.
A couple of trash monsters formed from discarded Kerrig pods.
Gulardi and the Cryptkeeper.
Not bad.
Elon Musk with an alien facehugger.
And the last option is Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.
What do you think?
From your lukewarm reception,
seems like we haven't struck gold yet.
But don't worry, the muse will arrive.
Come back soon, dear customers,
for some more stories and some killer costume ideas.
We'll see you next time at Radio Rental.
Radio Rental is created by Payne Lindsay
and brought to you by Tenderfoot TV.
Executive producers, Payne Lindsay and Donald Albright.
Hosted by Rainn Wilson as his character, Terry Carnation.
Produced by Payne Lindsay, Mike Rooney, and Meredith Stedman.
With additional production by Eric Quintana.
Written by Meredith Stedman.
Additional writing by Mark Laughlin. Sound design by Cooper Skinner. Original score by
Makeup and Vanity Set. Cover art by Trevor Eiler and Rob Sheridan. If you have a Radio Rental story
that you'd like to share, please email us at yourscarystory at gmail.com or contact us via
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Thanks for listening.
I'm Nadine Bailey.
I've been a ghost tour guide for 20 years
and have taken people into haunted places
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On my podcast, Haunted Canada,
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