Radio Rental - Episode 23

Episode Date: April 29, 2022

On today's tapes... >> The Library > Angel

Thank you. stories we tackle next. Plus, you could win a nice prize just for sharing your thoughts. Head over to tenderfoot.tv slash survey and let your voice be heard, and you'll be entered to win a $100 Amazon gift card plus a Tenderfoot merch pack. It only takes a few minutes, and it makes a big difference. Thank you for being part of our community. We can't wait to hear from you. Hello. Hello. Welcome, dear listener. Welcome to Radio Rental, the video shop of your worst, as in best, nightmares. I've missed you during our hiatus. As you can see, many things have changed in the store since I last saw you. For example, that shelf over there moved. Oh, I can't believe I almost forgot.

I also found a secret basement. I know, how creepy. It seems too good to be true. I found it when we had to redo the highly soiled carpet. I will give you one guess as to who is responsible, and he rhymes with alibi. Anyway, the carpet was ripped out, and voila, here it was. A secret basement door.

And I know what you're asking, dear listener. Have you ever actually gone down there? Well, no, no, I haven't actually gone down there. Why? Well, frankly, I was waiting for you, for one thing. And, well, I will go down, of course. It's not like I'm afraid to go or anything. So, off we go. Here we go. Oh, boy.

It's dark down there, isn't it? Oh, you know, not to change the subject, but how about I play you one of my scariest tapes from my secret collection as I collect myself? Hmm? Yes? That is why you're here, after all. Okay.

All right. Here we go. I was 18 years old at the time. It was 2004. This took place at a small town public library. Our town is like about 10,000 people, so farm town for sure. A little backwards, slow, simple type of town. It was my senior year. I was working part-time at the library. As the high school employee, most of my duties were to help the children's librarian. Like I did a lot of my work downstairs in the basement. Aside from that, just general kind of checking books in and out, helping people get on the computers, just answering any

sort of like general reference questions. Being a small town we don't really have a lot of homeless people necessarily but we had definitely some very impoverished people who would come to the library just because it was a warm place or in the summer a cool place that had, you know, a public restroom and things like that. We had a lot of creeps, especially where the computers were involved. Like I said, we were a small library in a small town, so on Saturdays we would just have

two staff members present. After we opened, I was upstairs to help my coworker just with kind of the general rush of opening, getting people signed into computers, getting things checked in, sorted, everything like that. So after I was done upstairs, I went to do my duties downstairs, which were putting away any sort of children's books

that had been returned, just making sure things were okay downstairs. I went downstairs, the main stairs. I went to the cart where we would keep all of the books that needed shelved. And so I was just kind of sorting them into the order that they needed to be in for me to put them away. So I was standing at this cart for maybe two, three minutes, and then I turn around and there's somebody there in the doorway staring at me.

Definitely startled by him. It wasn't totally unusual to be surprised by somebody down there, but it definitely felt off. He was maybe 10, 15 feet away in a big doorway that we had leading into the actual children's section. I don't know how long he had been standing there watching me, but it definitely felt odd and startling. There was just something so unsettling about his presence

and just his mannerisms. Basically just catching somebody blatantly watching you without you knowing. He had this intense gaze the whole time. He had these brown eyes and they were just very intense, like they were studying me. I kept doing what I was doing. I grabbed a stack of books to go and put away.

I figured if he needed something, he would say something. And he didn't at first. He just kind of watched me. So he followed me for a little bit and I just tried to kind of be natural, I guess. Like I felt a little nervous, but I felt like I shouldn't let him onto that because there's really no reason for me to be nervous, except that he had kind of startled me. Things just got progressively more creepy from there. Eventually he started talking to me.

Like, I didn't really get hit on much, and to have him just, like, be so blatant about it just seemed odd. There in the basement, there's nobody there. I had an employee who were upstairs, and there were probably a couple people on the computers, but otherwise nobody else was down there, just the two of us, so it definitely felt kind of intimidating. Your brain definitely kind of jumps to all the things that could go wrong and all the what-ifs. I have this one side of my brain that's saying, you're in danger,

this is not right, you have to get out of here, but then I have this other side of my brain saying, he's just a dude in a public library. He's not done anything aggressive. He's not shown like he has a weapon or anything. I've never had a panic attack but I feel like that situation was the closest I came. I just knew something was very very wrong. So he was standing two or three feet away saying all these kind of creepy things and I just was so focused on the books in my arms, the books on the shelves, just rush, rush, rush, you have to get this done so you can get out of this situation before it progresses

into something potentially violent or dangerous. He asked me for my phone number and I was so thrown off by that. And this was 2004, so it was pre-smartphone and social media and all that. I just mumbled some nonsense about it being unlisted. And he's like, Oh, yeah, your mom probably has you unlisted for a good reason. And it was just creepy. Like, who says things like that? And so I'm going about doing my job, putting things away.

And he's like, how about you come and party with my people tonight? I was an 18 year old kid. I was pretty naive and sheltered, small town kid. I don't even know what partying with his people would entail. I didn't know this man. I said that my boyfriend was in town for the weekend, and I had already had plans.

I was going to be busy all weekend. He just wouldn't leave it alone. Rather than saying, let's go out after work, he was saying things like, why don't you just leave now? Come with me now, let's just go now. And that's when it really went up to the next level, it felt like, because not only was I really, really uncomfortable to start with,

now he's asking me to just leave my job to go with him. Eventually, I heard the phone ring upstairs. I leapt at that opportunity and I said, oh, she's gonna need help, I've gotta go. When that phone rang, it was like the angels singing. I finally had a clear, good excuse to just get the hell out of there. I think I even had books in my hand still, and I just set them down, and I went upstairs, and I never went back down.

I was scared to death because we had just a two-person staff on a Saturday, which means that when lunchtime rolls around, I was there totally by myself for an hour. I just kept waiting for him to come back up the stairs because he was obviously very bold and brazen, and he probably wouldn't even care to do anything upstairs with people around. I did tell my coworker, there's a really weird guy downstairs.

I was worried for my coworker then when I had to leave for my lunch. She said everything was fine. And when you work at the library for a while, you kind of know you're weirdos. Like there are some very strange characters who come into the library. Closing time came around.

My coworker was very elderly, so she would typically do like the closing routine upstairs, which meant that I'd have to go downstairs again by myself. I remember checking every little nook, cranny closet we had, just thinking, he's going to be down here somewhere, just waiting. I didn't know if he would try to come after me or if he would just try to spend the night in the library.

I felt like he could be anywhere downstairs. And then even later, after we had closed, after I was walking out to my car in the parking lot, I was just thinking, this guy could be in the bushes. He could be around the corner. He could be watching me from anywhere. He just left such an uneasy feeling in me that I felt like I could potentially see him anywhere.

It was a feeling that I could only describe as like animalistic. I felt like I was being hunted almost. He had his sights on me and it felt like he wasn't going to stop. I got in my car. I had to stop by the store for something before I went home. Even then, like, in the grocery store, I felt like I need to let somebody know how I'm feeling right now because I'm feeling really paranoid, and I felt again like, well, he could follow me to the store.

Nothing happened again, so I got home. Nothing happened again so you kind of finally lull yourself into that easiness. I was convinced that I was totally overreacting. It wasn't as big of a deal as my brain had made it out to be. He was harmless, just a weirdo. Your run-of-the-mill weird guy. The next day, you could just feel an energy in the air like something had happened. And being a small town, news travels fast. We had found out that there was a double murder, a double homicide that night. Two bodies were dumped in a ditch out in the country. They were shot in the head.

I think early on they were speculating that it was maybe a drug deal gone bad. I think they eventually ruled it as just being a robbery, but two people in our town were murdered. I was working in the library and we got our local paper delivered. His mugshot was on the front page. I think they arrested him within a week or so. I'm not sure exactly how they discovered that it was him, but he had killed these two people. It just added up in my head and I just knew this guy was clearly up to no good and maybe I was kind of justified in my thinking all along.

When I saw that mugshot and I saw those same intense eyes just glaring into the camera, I knew those eyes. It really hit me like this is real. This could have been me in the ditch. It's just crazy to think that that person was right there with you, like saying all these crazy, kind of intimidating things, and then goes off to do something like this, like immediately after, pretty much.

There's just so many what ifs. What if I had gone to party with his people? Would those two people be alive still? Would anyone be dead? Would I be dead? It's one of those moments where you don't really realize the heaviness of the situation until afterwards. You realize you really dodged a bullet. Maybe literally.

Welcome back. I hope you enjoyed that. And guess what else? I have decided that I am going into this scary-ass basement. No time like the present for an adventure. It sure is dark down there, isn't it? Is what one would say if they were scared of the dark. Not me. I actually see very little difference between dark and light.

I'd be terrible at Vanna White's job on Wheel of Fortune. Where's my flashlight? Oh, that's better. Oh, God. Oh, my God, I thought that was a person. It's not. It's just a life-size cutout of Timothy Dalton. Looks like it might have been a promo item from License to Kill,

the 24th most popular James Bond movie. Whew, what a relief. While I'm checking things out down here, we might as well pop in another tape. I assume I can trust you to push the buttons yourself? Here we go. Enjoy. Disfrute. Download the BetMGM Casino app today. BetMGM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly. BetMGM.com for T's and C's. 90 plus to wager. Ontario only.

Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Crime Writers On is the podcast where authors and journalists talk about the latest true crime series, documentaries, and podcasts. Talk about what's on the charts and find those up and coming podcasts. You'll be talking about.

It's like a fun and smart book club discussing what makes good storytelling and teaching how to become a critical listener or not. And stick around for the crime writers, thumbs up, thumbs down reviews. It's the original true crime review podcast crime writers Writers On, wherever you get your podcasts. Like probably right here. I was in my early 20s, liked to party, liked to hang out with all my friends, go out drinking.

I had a lot of excitement. I would do things that weren't necessarily safe all the time, but never got in any kind of trouble. I had no ties to any girls at the time. I had an on and off relationship, but very casual, nothing concrete. I wasn't involved with anybody at the time. I would usually just go to bars, meet girls at bars, and through friends, and through work also. I never used any kind of dating services or anything like that.

I would go on, I think it was either AOL or Yahoo Messenger or one of those, and I would talk to girls on there, but never met anybody off of those. The night that I did this, I was supposed to go out with some of my friends. For whatever reason, nobody wanted to go out that night. I remember it being really snowy, lots of snow on the ground and I had an SUV so I could go places, but a lot of my friends didn't have that kind of a car so they didn't want to go anywhere. So I decided to go online and chat a little

bit. I don't really remember what her screen name was. It was probably something flirty. I do remember that she had a webcam and she invited me to see her on webcam, which is what I did. She actually looked pretty cute. The resolution back then wasn't what it is today, so you couldn't really see exactly

what people looked like, but you got a general idea. She wasn't that bad looking. Her and I started chatting. She invited me over. I said, yeah, why not? I'll come hang out. What do I have to really lose? So I wound up picking up a six-pack on the way over. She only

lived maybe 15-20 minutes away from me. Pull up to her house. It's a normal suburban house. She comes to the door. Immediately I see that she's wearing an inordinate amount of makeup. Michael Jackson levels of makeup. And it was bizarre looking. Definitely saw that she was trying to cover up something, scarring or bad complexion, very, very bad complexion. The only scarring that I could really see was on her chest, almost like a burn victim scarring from what I saw. She was wearing a low-cut top. You could see that she was trying to cover up some scarring.

My gut instinct was just to turn around and leave, but I wouldn't want to hurt somebody's feelings, just their appearance. What I was expecting was an average-to-above-average-looking girl. What I actually saw was a girl that just had makeup caked on her face. She invites me in. I walk in. It seems like a normal house.

She tells me, yeah, pop open a beer. Let's go and watch a movie in the living room. I said, oh, that sounds good. So we go and get ready to watch a movie. I forgot what movie it was, probably some comedy or something. She sits next to me on the couch. From there, it seems like she's trying to get touchy-feely with me. I remember her putting her hand on my knee,

but I really wasn't having any of it. So I got up, said, hey, I have to go to the bathroom. Tried to make it clear that I wasn't interested. And I think she got the hint as far as that goes. I wound up leaving the room, coming back in, walking how you go into people's houses, you look at the decor and stuff. And I realized that she had all these pictures of a little boy

all over the walls in her living room. It looked like a young boy around three, maybe four years old, playing with different toys and just lots and lots of pictures of that. A little boy playing with a puppy, those kinds of pictures. There was just like 20, 30 pictures of the same little boy. And I didn't hear any little kids in the house or anything like that. So I asked her, is this your son? And she said, yeah, that is my son. And I said, oh, is he here right now? She said, no, he's an angel.

I offered my condolences. I said, oh, I'm so sorry about that. It's a terrible thing. She said, yeah, he is an angel now. I felt really bad about asking about that because I don't want to bring up bad memories or bad thoughts about her son passing away. The rest of the night was kind of uncomfortable

just because I didn't really want to be there. I figured what harm is it to finish a couple beers and finish a movie? The movie ends. I believe she may have made a pass, hey, do you want to hang out a little bit longer? And I said, nah, you know what, I need to get home. I got to work in the morning.

I remember her giving me a hug, and I wound up leaving. After I left her house, through the snow, I get home. I really had no interest in ever seeing her again, so I did ghost her, deleted her account. I blocked her on my cell phone, figured that would be it. Seven months later, I open up my store. It was a Sunday morning, I remember. The Sunday edition of The Plain Dealer was sitting out in front of our store, so I pick it up and bring it in for our opening cashier. I happen to look on the cover, and there's this girl that I met on the internet on the cover of The Plain Dealer.

It's a picture of her without any makeup on, which she had horrible scarring on her face, but you could still tell that it was the same girl. It said, Nicole Dyer convicted of murdering her son. It absolutely floored me. I read the article about 50 times. I felt ill at first. I felt scared. It was one of those things where I'm immediately thinking, am I in trouble for anything? Did I do anything wrong? Should I tell anybody about this? What do I do? I'm still a young person, a young adult, and I was scared to read the horrible things that she did. She got arrested for arson and I believe first-degree murder. They said that if memory serves, that she strangled her son and murdered him.

And then she tried to set her house on fire to cover up the crime. I believe that they didn't find any soot in her son's lung, so that's what leads to that conclusion. When she was a little girl, she was involved in a house fire. Her undergarments caught on fire and it caused her to have these horrible burns all over her body. Apparently she got a settlement for that where she was living off of that settlement

for the rest of her life. And she almost recreated what happened to her with her son. What I would think is that she was still under investigation for murdering her son when I went over to her house. Are there cops outside like scoping people? I mean, I'm innocent of everything. I didn't do anything wrong, especially now that I'm older. I know that I didn't do

anything wrong, but at the time it's like cops were looking at me going to her house. It is beyond freaky to me that she had all these pictures of this little boy hanging on her wall, staring back at her knowing that she's the one who made him the angel. To be that close to evil was an eye-opening experience because I've never been close to that kind of evil in my life and that's exactly what she is,

is an evil person. To find out that they did that to their own child is just super freaky. Another thing that freaked me out about it was apparently she did this so that she could go and meet guys on the internet and at bars like me. The shocking part was that I was so close to somebody that evil. Did I think that she was capable of something like that? No. Your child is your entire life. My child is my entire life.

He's the reason that I'm on this earth right now. And to think that anybody could eliminate that type of a person from their life just so they can meet guys. There's something very, very evil about that. Not many people can say that. They've been close to somebody like that. Scared? Huh? Well, me too. Ran up that rickety ladder as fast as I could.

I think there's something a lot scarier than Timothy Dalton down there. Oh, that place gives me the creeps. But, well, I suppose it does have a sort of rustic charm. Do you think I could Airbnb it? Hmm. Hmm, I wonder. Romantic subterranean staycation or deluxe reverse treehouse. Oh, or how about love crypt? Excellent. Yes. I'll market it to all those Instagram travel couples out there. You know what I always say? There's a shoe for every sock. Or is it a sock for every shoe? I don't know. Personally, I don't wear socks. Anyway, never mind. Thank you so much

for joining me today, my fellow fear junkies. I will see you again next week. Same rental place, same radio time. XOXO, Terry Carnation. 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 the form on our website, radiorentalusa.com. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter at Radio Rental. You can also follow the illustrious Terry Carnation on social media.

Just search at Terry Carnation. To hear more from Terry, listen to his podcast, Dark Air. Special thanks to Grace Royer and Oren Rosenbaum at UTI, the Nord Group, Station 16, Beck Media and Marketing, and the team at Cadence 13. On behalf of the Radio Rental Store, we'd love it if you'd subscribe, rate, and review. And don't forget to share our show with a friend of the genre. Thanks for listening. I'm Nadine Bailey. I've been a ghost tour guide for 20 years and have taken people into haunted places to uncover macabre tales and dark secrets. On my podcast, Haunted Canada,

I share bone-chilling stories of the unexplained. Search for Haunted Canada on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you're listening right now. Then join me if you dare.