Radio Rental - Episode 32

Episode Date: April 14, 2023

On today's tapes... >> Where the Stars Stay

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Listener discretion is advised. The End Hello? Oh, hello! Beautiful day, isn't it? Yeah, it totally is. It's totally... Sorry to ask this, but just out of curiosity, do I... Do I know you?

Sorry, I mean, also, do you know me by any chance? Oh, rats, another dead end. You see, it's the strangest thing. I cannot remember who I am or even where I am. So it's safe to assume I also don't know what I am, besides a virile mid-forties male. But I seem to be in some sort of depressed hoarder's basement, an archive of sadness. Anywho, I just woke up this morning with the biggest headache.

And now I'm just a blank canvas. A tabula rasa, if you will. Oh, perfect timing. Come here. Is this animal of unknown origin yours by any chance? Oh, good. Because he's so darn cute. I think I'm going to keep him.

I think I'll name him... Evil Dead 2. I don't know. Those are just the first words I saw on that shelf over there. On that little box. Okay, Evil Dead 2, down you go. This is just the most peculiar place. I saw there's a sign that says Radio Rental,

but I don't see for the life of me one single radio in here. Well, I was just about to watch some of these old tapes in this box. I'm hoping they can put some memory pieces together, you know. Jog the old toboggan. Would you please join me? Maybe you'll help me jar loose the old dome. Okay, great. Um, what do we have here?

Home video tape number one. Hmm, I hope it's my birth. Or maybe my first recorder recital. Do I even play the recorder? Hmm, I hope it's my birth. Or maybe my first recorder recital. Do I even play the recorder? Oh, I really hope I play the recorder. Or at least the lute. I love the lute.

So underrated. Here we go. I've been a full-time dealer in the odd and macabre for about a decade. We have one of the biggest collections of antique Ouija boards in the world. Our home has antique human medical remains, skulls, skeletons, all kinds of dark objects. But I'm very much not a believer in the paranormal or dark energy or anything like that. Part of my job a few years ago, right before the pandemic, we were throwing these traveling markets across the country.

Other dealers like myself that sold odd and macabre objects or art could set up and have a crowd. We were setting up a show in Nashville, Tennessee at the fairgrounds there. About a month before the show, I went up to distribute posters and flyers and things like that. I've always been a sucker for 50s kitsch and old motels, and I found a motel online that had a beautiful neon marquee. It's one of the typical U-shaped motels that you would picture with a swimming pool in

the center. They were bragging about Dolly Parton or Loretta Lynn or Elvis Presley. The tagline was, where the stars stay. As soon as we're pulling up, we notice the neighborhood's bad. It's really bad. Blatant drug dealing and prostitution going on at 11 o'clock in the afternoon. I went into the front desk to check in the lobby. As I ring the bell, I'm looking around and I'm noticing all these 8x10s that are framed from all these country music stars and rock and roll stars that stay there in the heyday.

And all the 8x10s are a bit faded with the signatures are fading and just was sort of a great metaphor for the entire place. This place was, at one point, the place to be. We were coming into it and it's twilight where it really had turned into something very seedy. So I got the keys to our room and apparently a music video had been shot there. I was like, well, that's kind of exciting. This was a selling point for the front desk clerk.

Myself and my wife, we ended up going to the room. As soon as we opened the door, she didn't want to go inside. When you walk in the room, the first thing you would notice is there's a jacuzzi in the middle of the room. The tile's all cracked and stained. The jacuzzi's dirty. We went in the bathroom. The top of the toilet was missing. The sink was off the wall. The shower curtain was molded.

This is not a place that respectable people stay. It's just a place to sleep. It's not going to be a big deal. It's not going to affect us in any way. We spent the day in Nashville handing out flyers, going to record stores, vintage stores, antique stores, whatever. Had a good time in Nashville. We came back that night,

it was hard to even make ourselves get into the bed. I woke up to someone getting hurt. And it was right outside our door. I heard the person fall against the door. This huge thud. And my wife is stone asleep. I remember shaking her and she wouldn't wake up. And I saw the door move inward and shake. Oh God, someone's trying to get into our room. And I got up to go to the door to see what was going on, and I looked outside. There were five or six guys beating someone to death.

I can hear the wet thuds. I can hear his screams and his pain. Begging for his life. And then I went to the window and that's when I saw the whole thing unfold and the guys trying to get away from him and they're kicking him in the ribs and they're kicking him in the head. I was watching someone die. Looking for my phone, I couldn't find my phone anywhere because I was going to call the police and see if I could help this person. It started feeling more frantic because I'm like, this guy is not going to live.

He's going to be dead. I'm still looking out the window. I have the curtain pulled aside. And they all turn and they look at me. I felt more intense fear than I've ever felt in my entire life. I just felt this all-encompassing dread and fear. My body was cold.

They started approaching the door. I jumped back in bed like a child and pulled the covers over my head. I just went stiff. More afraid than I've ever been in my entire life. I ended up pulling the sheets down, like, right below your eyes to look up. And there were four or five people staring at me. There were these figures surrounding our bed, and I tried to scream, and I couldn't. I was frozen. My heart was going a million miles an hour.

At some point I was able to get the cover back over my head and I fell back asleep. I woke up feeling physically ill. She was like, wow, you had a really bad dream. I'm sorry. It felt like I was awake the entire time. I felt like I saw this. I watched the door shake. I could hear the sounds.

It didn't seem like a dream. It makes no sense to me. It didn't feel like a dream, and I certainly didn't feel like it was a dream the next day. As we're checking out, I'm really seeing this hotel again. I'm seeing that people are blatantly dealing drugs out of the rooms. There's prostitution happening two doors down. There are all these old mattresses that are stacked and stained. Needles are everywhere. there's syringes.

I had taken the key back to the front desk and the front desk worker was coming to like thank me or whatever. I couldn't even talk to them, I just put the key down and I ran out the door. I told my wife to have the car waiting and I got in the car and we immediately drove away. I couldn't get away from the place fast enough. Everything felt wrong. My body ached. I felt nauseous. I couldn't keep my thoughts straight.

I felt more uncomfortable than I've ever felt in my life. While we were in the car on the way back from Nashville to Atlanta, I was looking at reviews of this place, which I'd neglected to do before we went. After a while, I found this review, and my blood went cold. I started out and said all I can say is I believe in ghosts and staying at this place. My husband and nine-year-old son and I stayed last summer and I'll never stay again. I don't care who believes me. We got a one bedroom and at first it was clean smelling and we liked it. But as the day went on, it seems like the room started smelling worse. I had a really uneasy feeling and went to bed about 11pm. 12am I woke up and it felt like 5 or 6 people standing over me.

I cut the light on and no one was there. I felt incredibly uneasy and sick. I whispered to my husband and said, I didn't like it here. And I got up and went to the bathroom, and my nine-year-old son said, Mom, I can't sleep. I asked him what was the matter, and he said, I feel like people are watching me and people are standing over my bed. Eight years before, we went. What is this? How is this possible that I had this experience that this other person and their child had? And I started finding more.

There was a news article. The room I was in, a guy had checked in, and he was complaining about a bad smell. Turns out there was a corpse in the closet. A maid had cleaned the room earlier in the day had been covered in blood. Didn't think twice of it

because this kind of thing was so common at this motel. I also found out that someone had indeed been beaten to death by several people in a drug deal gone bad outside our room. And that had happened years previously. This place is very bad and very scary, and a lot of really bad things have happened here. They've happened in this room.

I felt like my notions of death, life, the afterlife, were kind of shaken to their foundations a bit. It asked a lot of questions of what happened. And it felt like something that was happening to me. It felt real. It's etched on my memory like it's something that I physically experienced. I really have no explanation for that besides the fact that if I weren't a skeptic, then I would think it's somehow I witnessed this event firsthand.

Because that's certainly what it felt like. I know everyone's had bad dreams and nightmares. How many nightmares have you had in your life that have stuck with you? 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 have skipped it. Shoulda skipped it.

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please contact comics, Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. Then MGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement without gaming, Ontario. Dear God, that was terrifying. You people actually like this sort of thing? What are you, a bunch of sick freaks? Well, maybe we should just put in another one.

I'm sure they all can't be that bad. Here we go. This one's probably a birthday party, or a bat mitzvah, or a bar mitzvah. I can never remember which is which. I wonder how many friends I have. Probably a lot. Mazel to me. My cousin, Austin, he was about three or four. He had these imaginary friends.

Nobody really took them too serious. It was cute. Three or four year old kid has made up friends. Just kind of a cute story that we were talking about back and forth. He didn't call them imaginary friends, he just called them his friends. It kind of went on for around three months or so. He would go out to my grandparents house and he would come back with stories. These friends that he had made out at my grandma and grandpa's. They lived on a farm, kind of rural, Midwestern town.

Kept bringing up the same names. This John Dillon and Willie Lynn. Stories about riding around out in the country in a truck, going for walks. He always talked about John Dillon, how he had cows and raised other farm animals. My grandpa, he's a farmer. So we kind of tied that back to what my grandpa did for a living. Austin would talk about them mostly with what they were doing. Driving around out in the country, talking about visiting John Dillon's farm, just hanging out.

They weren't mean to him. All of his stories were feel-good stories. Walking around in the woods there, feeding the cows, riding around in the country in John Dillon's truck. Just a made-up playtime friend. My mother had asked Austin to describe his imaginary friends. She fixated on Willie Lynn and said, does he look like your grandpa? He said no.

My mom said, well, what does he look like? Well, he's little like me. Well, is John Dylan little like you? And he said, no, he's's little like me. Well, is John Dillon little like you? And he said, no, he's not little like me. My mom said, well, you know, is he like my dad in his 50s at the time? He said, no, he's not. Is he kind of like your papa? He said, yeah, yeah, he's like papa.

And he wears clothes with two straps and kind of described bib overalls to us. A few weeks later, my grandparents are sitting outside at their house. They live out in the country. They don't get a lot of traffic. They saw this rental car kept driving up and down their road. My grandpa thinks they're lost. They pulled into the house, and they said, I'm here doing research for my great-grandfather. He used to own land right here.

My grandpa said, yeah, I know who owns the farm now. And he told him the name of the farm. What's your grandfather's name that you're looking for? And they said, it's John Dillon. The hair on their neck stood up. A cold chill went over them. That this could be a little more real than what we were all believing. This was the second name that my cousin was talking about. My grandma and grandpa started making phone calls, started telling everybody, hey, you know, something's going on here.

This is real. My grandmother, she brought up the name Willie Lynn to my grandparents' neighbor. Their neighbor brought up, they said, well, you know that there is that abandoned cemetery down the road called the Lynn Cemetery. My grandma, being curious, gathered a party, my mom, my dad, my aunt, and they went out to the cemetery just to look around.

So they drove out there, half a mile from the house, and they started looking at the old tombstones that were all covered up. When they cleaned it off on the stone, they saw the name Willie Lynn. Dates indicating the boy had died around the ages of four or five. Everybody's freaked out. Everybody firmly believes that Austin can see dead people. This was the defining moment for what Austin was going through.

Every time I come home, it's dominating the conversation. Something supernatural that was happening before my eyes, and I couldn't believe it. Austin used to spend a lot of time at his grandma's house. They called her Meemaw. And they had a family room that they had redone and they called it their man cave. So Austin was at his Meemaw's house staying the night. One night they were watching Mrs. Doubtfire.

Turned the movie on, and his grandma fell asleep. So Austin stayed awake and finished the movie on his own. Once the movie finished, he started shaking my aunt, saying, Meemaw, Meemima, where'd the lady go? My aunt said, what lady? The lady in the room. You mean the lady on the show? He said, no, the lady in the room.

And my aunt said to Austin you know, there's no lady in here, but it's time to go to bed, so we'll shut off the movie. And so she shut it off and she said, were you talking about Mrs. Doubtfire? No, the lady in the room. Austin, there's nobody in here. He used his hand above his head and kind of motioned in a circle and said, the lady with this. My aunt, being a little creeped out from what has happened at this point,

just kind of said, Austin, we're going to bed. And so they went to bed. My aunt afterwards was doing some research into the house that she had been living in for 20 plus years. Back in the early 1900s, there was a doctor that lived in the house and treated patients in and out of the house. She found an old photo of the doctor that used to live there, and his wife was in the photo.

And his wife had this updo bun on the back of her head. As soon as my aunt saw that photo, she was convinced that this was her. My sister, who lived with my parents, refused to let my cousin Austin in her room. She didn't want him coming up to her room and seeing or talking to anybody. Austin, his dad, at this point, was really freaked out, kind of discouraged my cousin Austin from talking about him. After that, he just kind of stopped and he never really talked about him again.

I have always been an analytical person. I went to school for biology. I usually write things off that don't make sense. After this, I started questioning everything and I kind of thought, well, maybe there could be something. This at least brings a little bit of doubt to my mind that maybe death isn't finite. There's something else out there.

Over the years, thinking about it, I'm convinced that there's something. Whether these were past lives of his or whether these were people who had died who were communicating with Austin, I don't know. But it definitely is too much of a coincidence to me to not have some merit to it. It kinda, I guess, woke up something inside of me. I never believed in reincarnation or the afterlife talking through people.

I started having some serious doubts about all that. You see it on TV and you just think it's fake. Children are uniquely gifted. I feel like they have malleable minds. I feel like kids are the ones that are the windows to the soul and windows to the past. We'll be right back. 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. All right, that's it. If these have anything to do with my past, I don't want to know who I am. I'll just assume a new identity. From now on, call me... Tootsie.

Oh. I'm sorry, I just keep looking at the same shelf. It's no use. I'll never remember who or what I am. Ah! Ah! Get this cat off me! Get Evil Dead 2 off of me! Ah! You'll never remember who or what I am. Get this cat off me! Get Evil Dead 2 off of me! My head... Hello. Greetings, dear friend. I didn't see you come in.

How long have you been here? Welcome to Radio Ren... Oh, God, my head. What happened? Oh. Another crazy night of partying or something. Getting too old for this. I can't be manning this store by myself anymore.

Maybe it's time I put out an ad for an assistant. Oh, hello, Malachi. You seem rather happy to see me. And I'm happy to see you too, you old fur devil. Thanks for stopping by Radio Rental, the video shop of horrors.

We've got quite a season in store for you. We'll play a selection of my creepiest tapes. Tapes that will make your nightmares run wild. Don't wet the bed. Okay, well, maybe that wasn't my best tagline. But I guess bad taglines are kind of the thing around here. You get what you pay for, after all. I'll see you next time at Radio Rental.

Uh, can someone please help me up? Not you, Malachile Crusher Tinybody. tiny body. and Donald Albright. Hosted by Rainn Wilson as his character, Terry Carnation. Written and produced by Meredith Stedman. Supervising producer is Tracy Kaplan. Associate producer is Jaja Muhammad. Editing by Eric Quintana,

Mike Rooney, Sean Nerney, and Sydney Evans. Additional writing by Mark Laughlin. Sound design, mix, and master by Cooper Skinner.

Additional sound design and mixing by Devin Johnson. Original score by Makeup and Vanity Set. Video editing by Dylan Harrington. Cover artwork by Trevor Eiler and Rob Sheridan. Special thanks to Oren Rosenbaum and the team at UTA, the Nord Group, Station 16, Beck Media and Marketing,

and the team at Cadence 13. 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. On behalf of the Radio Rental Store, we'd love it if you'd subscribe, rate, and review. 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. and dark secrets. On my podcast, Haunted Canada,

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