Radio Rental - Episode 31

Episode Date: October 28, 2022

Episode 31 - Halloween Special - On today’s tapes… >> Village Ghost > Message from the Future

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we have a surprise episode for you today. But don't worry, there is much more to come very soon. We've been hard at work gathering some of our scariest stories yet. So stay tuned early next year for the next full season of Radio Rental. Aha! Come here, you little bugger!

Oh, sorry. I didn't mean you, my beloved fan. Welcome in! I have a lot more macabre insanity in store for you to... Hold on a second. I will not be upstaged by this tiny winged beast. Damn it. This fly, which I have now named Dave, is a relentless drunken party crasher.

Anyway, as I was saying, today's programming is going to keep you on your toes. As I was rewinding the tapes yesterday, I came across two of my forgotten favorites. I hope you enjoy. First tape. So this was in November of 1999. At the time, I was a sophomore in college. And for my first two years in college, I attended a sort of medium-sized university in the North Carolina mountains. I had already attended there my freshman year and I had lived on campus at kind of a regular dorm,

roommates, the whole deal. But what I liked about this college, at the time, once you became a sophomore, you became eligible to live in a place called Governor's Village which was a series kind of a complex of dorms that were all single rooms so you did not have a roommate. The way that the individual dorm room was set up it was a small room but it was more narrow than it was wide. It was sort of like a rectangle shape. I had my bed up against the window, so the head of the bed was against the window and the window kind of looked off into the parking lot and some woods. And so if you're laying in bed your feet were pointed towards your door and it wasn't

too far from the end of the bed to the door, probably eight feet, something like that. The way that this building was set up was that it was an older building. I would say it was probably 80 years old at the time. The construction had kind of gotten older. Not everything was flush, and there was no bathroom in your actual dorm room. The dorm would lead out into a small hallway where you had the shared bathroom that you share with everyone else on that floor and they had these fluorescent lights that were out in the hallway and they never shut them off they were on 24 hours a day if you were in your dorm room or at least

mine with the lights off the light from those fluorescent lights would shine in through the doorway and it would form this almost perfect rectangle of light. You could see the outline of the door just from the lights. And you just would kind of get used to that. Because you could always see this rectangle of light. This was a Saturday night. I remember staying up. I was a night owl.

I stayed up and watched Saturday Night Live. And I was chatting night owl. I stayed up and watched Saturday Night Live. And I was chatting on AOL Instant Messenger with a friend at another university. So that kind of wrapped up. It was about 2 o'clock in the morning, and I just decided to go to bed. I'm laying there in bed, and I've shut all my lights off, and I've got the blanket on me,

and I've kind of got my head propped up, and I'm just sort of laying there thinking about what I had to do the next day. And I'm laying there, and I realize something strange. I realize that I could not see the light coming in on what would have been the left-hand side of the door. It was like something was in the way. I could see the light from the right and the top and a little bit sort of the top of the door on the left side, but it just sort of stopped like something was physically blocking it. And I laid there for 20, 30 seconds, just sort of looking towards my feet,

idly wondering, what's blocking the door? Did I leave something there? Did I stack something up there? Did I hang my backpack on the hook on the door? I don't think I did. And I remember thinking, is it my fan? Because these dorms had no air conditioning.

It was November, and I think it was late November, and I put the fan in my closet. My fan's not there. And I'm just kind of idly wondering, and my eyes sort of drift upwards. I see this face. And what I realize is blocking the light is an old woman standing at the foot of my bed.

She was maybe five feet tall. She looked grandmotherly to me. You could see the wrinkles on her face. I remember her nose being fairly prominent. Her hands were at her sides. And I can remember seeing sort of the whites of her hands on the sides of her body. And she was pale. She wasn't translucent. She wasn't shimmering, anything like that.

It just looked like an old woman standing in my dorm room. She was wearing like a shawl, a dark shawl. It looked black in color. I remember she had on a rain bonnet, kind of like my grandmother used to wear. And it felt like she was leaning forward a little bit. She had these big, expressive eyes. And she is just looking down at me.

And as my eyes are adjusting to the dark, I can make her out more and more the more she stands there. It looks like a real person in my room. It was this immediate rush of adrenaline. There's no way someone snuck in. I would have seen someone sneaking in. She can't have been hiding in my closet. I have a fan in there. There's no way she could have fit in the closet. And even in my brain thinking, why would this 70-year-old

woman want to come into my dorm room? That doesn't make any sense. That all was kind of going through my head. The thought that someone might have snuck into my room would not have been crazy because all of us living in the village had gotten a flyer under our doors a couple of weeks earlier. One of the students who was staying at one of the other dorms in the complex had come back from the shower into our dorm room and there had been a man hiding in her closet. I shouted out something, you know, who are you? What do you want? And there was no answer. She just kept staring at me. I remember doing the thing you see in cartoons where someone sees a mirage in the desert or something

and they rub their eyes and kind of shake their head to make sure it's real. And I did that. I remember rubbing my eyes and shaking my head and kind of gathering myself and opening my eyes again, halfway expecting her not to be there, and she was still there. She's still just standing there, just looking at me. And I've got this surge of adrenaline

because you're in bed, you're already kind of vulnerable, and there's someone at the foot of your bed. I start up out of bed. To get out of bed, I would have to get out of bed to the right side. And I remember swinging my right leg out of bed from underneath the blanket, swinging it and putting my foot on the floor to start standing up and as soon as i did that motion she started moving and she moved backwards she kind of slid towards the door and when she got to the door, she was just gone. So I turn on my lamp, and I start out of bed, and I'm wearing a t-shirt and boxer shorts. I run to the dorm room door. I open it.

Of course, all this fluorescent light comes pouring in from the hallway lights. I look up and down the hallway. Nobody's there. I run down the stairs barefoot. I've got to get down two flights of stairs to get to the entrance to the actual dorm building. I'm looking around the whole time trying to see if anybody's there. Nobody's there. I open the front door to the dorm. So now I'm outside, but I don't see anybody. It's just completely quiet. Close the door, go upstairs, hearts racing.

I just can't stop thinking about this experience, which I would say lasted for a good minute. And I turn on every light I had in my dorm, went back in bed, and actually did eventually fall asleep. So the next morning I wake up and I cannot stop thinking about this experience. I am self-critiquing in my brain all day as to what could have possibly happened. I wasn't drinking. I don't do drugs.

I wasn't even particularly tired when I laid down. I can remember that. I wasn't drowsy or anything like that. It was just kind of time to go to bed. So I couldn't dismiss it out of hand by just thinking about, well, what could have happened last night? I know I wasn't dreaming. The next day was a Monday, and my first class was news writing.

And I sat in the back of the room, and a few minutes before class started, my friend Mason came in and sat down next to me on my left. Before he could really say anything, I said, you'll never believe what happened to me on Saturday. What happened? I swear, I think I saw a ghost in my room. I think I saw a ghost in my room. And that's all I said. Literally the only words that came out of my mouth. There was a girl who sat in front of us.

Her name was Katie. And I didn't know Katie very well. But she had overheard me talking. Katie spins around and says, You saw a ghost in your room? That initial question just chilled me. And I said, yeah. And she said, do you live in the village?

Yeah. And she said, did you see an old woman in your room? I remember her putting her hand on top of my hand. I must have been shaking. And she said, you saw the ghost of the village. Other people have seen her. And then class started. She wouldn't have known about this.

She wouldn't have had any idea this had happened. And I didn't know her very well. To have this other puzzle piece sort of fall into place was, it was so chilling. It's hard for me to describe just the hairs going up in the back of my neck, the sensation of cold water going down my back. I remember just sort of staring out the window and it was like class was happening. It was like a Charlie Brown teacher kind of a thing. I have no idea what we talked about. I just remember staring off into space. This was real. This was real and replaying it, replaying it, replaying it.

I remember asking her after class, you know, did you ever see it? She said, no, no, I've just heard stories. I never found anyone else who had seen this before. Who was she and what did she want? Looking back, as terrifying as it was, I never felt like she was there to threaten me or even really scare me. I think she just seemed lonely. Maybe this was her way of keeping some connection with one world, wandering through this place and seeing us. Maybe every now and again we get to see them. I am so dreading groceries this week. Why?

You can skip it. Oh, what? Just like that? Just like that. How about dinner with my third cousin? Skip it. Prince Fluffy's favorite treats? Skippable.

Midnight snacks? Skip. My neighbor's nightly saxophone practices? Uh, nope. You're on your own there. Could've skipped it. Should've skipped it. Skip to the good part and get groceries, meals, and more delivered right to your door on Skip. Get ready for Las Vegas-style action at BetMGM, the king of online casinos. Enjoy casino games at your fingertips with the same Vegas-drift excitement

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Oh. That curating the- The- Curate. Curate. Curate. Curate. Curate.

Are you quite done? How are you even still alive? This fly, Dave, has like 15 minutes to live and is bound and determined to spend the entirety of its energy interrupting me. Go, Dave, be free. Make love to an overripe melon or something. Okay, anyway. Tape number two. I grew up in rural southern Arkansas.

It was definitely like the middle of nowhere. When my mom graduated from pharmacy school, we moved into this big house. Whenever we moved in, I always got kind of weird vibes about the house. I had never lived in a house before. We'd always lived in a trailer, so it seemed like a castle to me. But there was like lots of dark corners around the house. I wasn't used to my imagination running wild with having a house and all the places there are to hide. We actually had three stories and the second floor was where all of our bedrooms were, the bathrooms, kitchen, everything. And then the top floor was just this one large room.

It looked like maybe it was designed to be like a game room or like a really nice guest suite. If you were walking around up there, you could hear footsteps on the second floor. It would sound like someone was walking around upstairs at night, but we were all in the bed. So I started thinking that the house was haunted. My kid logic was, well, we were the first family to live there, so there's no way that it could be haunted because no one's ever died here. I mean, that was just kind of how I rationalized it. I think that was just what kept me from getting scared and just keeping myself okay with the noises that I would hear. They always say big houses just make noise,

like the wood expanding or the pipes just rattling, so I just kind of chalked it up to that. I lived there with my parents and my brother and my younger sister who was ten years younger than me. I was like her go-to babysitter anytime my parents were gonna be gone I was in charge of taking care of her. So at the time that this happened, I was 13 and my sister was three. My house had actually been broken into that year. So we had recently gotten an alarm system and I was super paranoid.

So anytime I was home by myself, I turned the alarm system on and it had like a stay option. So if you were at home, it would only go off if somebody opened one of the doors or windows. The motion sensors inside the house were not on. I had that on because I was home alone with my little sister. My parents were at work, and I think my brother must have been at a friend's house or a school event. I had been watching my sister all day. She ended up going down for a nap, and I wanted to go take a shower.

The bathroom door was actually unevenly hung on the hinges, so when you would open the door, the bottom of the door would drag across the tile and make, like, this really horrible sound. You always knew if someone was going in that bathroom. Like if I was in my bedroom and had the door closed, I could hear that door opening because you just hear the scratch across the floor. If you held onto the knob and pulled the door up

and like held it up while you were going in, you could make it to where you could hear it on the floor. But only my family knew that. Someone just coming into our house wouldn't have known that. So I went to take a shower, and when I got out, I saw the mirror was all fogged up like it is.

In the steam on the mirror, there was writing. Someone had taken their finger and written in the condensation. My heart just kind of sunk because I thought, oh my god, there's somebody in here. I had not heard anybody come in. Obviously, the door, like I would hear if someone had come in the room because the door would drag.

Someone's hiding in here. It wasn't a big bathroom but the cabinets that were underneath the sinks, I could fit under there if I really wanted to. I like opened all the cabinets so it's checking to make sure nobody was hiding in there and there wasn't. And then I actually read what was on the mirror and it said, if you can read this, it worked. Time travel through words. Threw was spelled T-H-R-E-W. There was no punctuation, and all the letters were lowercase, and it was just very neat, like someone really took their time with it. Honestly, I think I stared at it in the bathroom by myself for like 20 minutes.

I think I was just kind of in shock. I just didn't really know what to do, and I thought about just staying in the bathroom because I was just kind of in shock. I just didn't really know what to do, and I thought about just staying in the bathroom because I was scared, and I thought maybe someone had broken in again. But I had set the alarm, so if somebody had come in, the alarm would have gone off immediately.

Big sister instincts. I was like, I can't leave my 3-year-old sister by herself. You know, I need to go make sure she's okay. And so I went to check on her first. She was still asleep. Maybe someone in my family came home and is like messing with me. And so I started looking through all the rooms in the house.

I don't know how much of handwriting transfers to like you writing in a mirror with condensation, but the handwriting didn't look like any of my family members' handwriting. It was a big house, so it took me a minute. Looked through all the closets and everything. There was nobody there, and the alarm was still set. And we also had a dog who would have barked if anyone had come home and I hadn't heard him. It was probably about 45 minutes or an hour that I just ran around the house like a mad woman looking for somebody.

There was nobody in the house but us. I got it in my head, maybe someone was living in the house, like in the crawl space or something. You hear stories about that happening to people all the time. I looked in our attic where the beams are exposed and I checked in the crawl space underneath the house. I was going on this manhunt looking for somebody that must have done it. I didn't find anything.

I was really scared, so I called my mom and I told her about it. She was like, okay, you know, like she didn't believe me. So I thought, well, when she gets home, I'm going to fog up the mirror again and it'll pop back up and I'll show her. Because sometimes if you like draw something on there and then you refog it up later, it'll come up. Maybe somebody wrote this earlier to mess with me, and then it had just shown back up when I turned the shower on. But when I looked at it, it was fresh. There was still condensation dripping from it,

like someone had just written it in the mirror. My mom came home. I went into the bathroom, and I turned the hot water on and I closed the door and I just waited outside the bathroom. And I just stood there waiting. Like I didn't go do anything else because this was like top priority. I needed to prove to her what happened. As soon as it was fogged up again, I went in there and it was like nothing had ever been written there. There was no sign that someone had written on it earlier and it had been like wiped off. You know usually you can see like streaks on the mirror from where it's been cleaned. There was nothing like that. I didn't have a cell phone at the time so I couldn't have taken a picture of it or anything.

So I couldn't prove it to anybody that it had actually happened. I think we still lived there probably like 10 years after that. All that time, every time I took a shower, I just I would check the mirror every single time thinking there was gonna be something else there and wondering who would have written that because nobody had lived there before us. Maybe it wasn't from the past. Maybe it was from the future. If I was putting stake in what was being written, what if it was me? What if I'm supposed to write that to my past self? I was thinking about it.

I would never misspell the word through. Like, that's just not me. I'm kind of an English nerd. I would never do that. I majored in English in college. Like, I wouldn't have done that. Those words are obviously from something else or some other time. And so I started thinking, well, if it was from like

in the past or in the future, is it the mirror itself or is it the house? The house was built two years prior to us living there. I don't know how long that mirror shelf life was before then. You know, had the mirror been used in other homes before it made its way to ours and somebody in a completely different part of the world that had that mirror in their home wrote it? Or is this something that someone else is going to write while it's in this house at some point in the future? What was someone thinking when they wrote that? Like, was this all like a

grand experiment? Like they wrote it with the intent for the words to go somewhere or did they just write it thinking this is nothing and just for fun, you know? And then it actually went somewhere. Literally thrown, like is that the verbiage they were using to describe like them traveling through time, like throwing the words through time? If so, what does that even entail? The fact that it said it worked makes me think,

is this something that was tested multiple times or somebody attempted to do it several times before it worked? If so, how would they know that it worked? I would have to report back, hey, you know, I got your message, but I don't know how to communicate that to whoever the message is from. Maybe it was another version of me in another dimension and it traveled over to me and I was able to see it because I was the one that wrote it. Was it intentional or not? Like is it saying the words are being thrown? Because in that case I would deliberately use the correct spelling of through. We'll be right back. 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 On, wherever you get your podcasts. Like probably right here. Oh, I know it's chilling. That one might leave a scar. If I were you, I would... Oh, God. Oh, Dave just flew into my mouth.

Oh, I feel so invaded. I mean, I've always wanted to be possessed, but not like this. Not by something that takes naps on dog feces. Well, I think I've had enough for today. I really didn't want you to ever see me like this. How about we forget this ever happened and...

I can feel it buzzing around in there. Dave, come out. Come out. Your mother sucks donkey dicks in hell. I was kidding. That was just me. Happy Halloween, dear listener. Radio Rental is created by Payne Lindsay and brought to you by Tenderfoot TV. Executive producers 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

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Thanks for listening. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. To unlock ad-free episodes, exclusive content, and bonus radio rental stories, subscribe to Tenderfoot Plus on Apple Podcasts or visit tenderfootplus.com. Happy Halloween. 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.