Radio Rental - Episode 81

Episode Date: July 11, 2025

Welcome to Radio Rental, a mysterious video rental shop with a collection of VHS tapes with TRUE scary stories narrated by the people who experienced them... On today's tapes... >> Underneath the Dock > Bottom of the Lake

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on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. Attention Radio Rental listeners, we've gotten all your emails and DMs over the last five and a half years and we're happy to let you know that Radio Rental merch is finally here. And some of the designs are already selling out so go check out shop.tennerfoot.tv. You might be excited to see that our most popular t-shirt style, titled Open Late, now comes in a hoodie too.

Stay tuned for exclusive drops and limited edition designs because we've got big plans. So shop small and support your local video rental store today. Go to shop.tenderfoot.tv for Radio Rental merch and tag us on Instagram at Radio Rental so we can see your selections. Hate waiting a week for the next episode of Radio Rental? Subscribe to Tenderfoot Plus to get early access to episodes, ad-free listening, and 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-ofa-kind videos, so frightening, so mind-bending, you won't be able to sleep at night. You've gone Radio Rental. Oh, hi. Welcome to Radio Rental, a video rental shop with a collection of the scariest stories

you've ever heard. All told by real people. Come on in. Don't be shy. Actually this is great timing for me because I have an itch on my back and I can't really get it on the corner of the front desk. Could you get that for me? Low back.

Actually under the chin would be nice too while you're at it. Okay you don't have to scratch me if you're going to be all weird about it. Uh it seems like you don't realize what's happening here. I'm Malachi. I'm Terry's cat. We've met like a lot of times. I get it. I'm not naive. You're a little surprised I can talk right now. Is that it? Kind of hypocritical, I might say. You come here fiending for paranormal stories and weird, unexplained events and stuff. And then when one actually happens to you, you're put off? Classic humans. They always want to put you in a box, except when you actually want to get in a box, then that's when they take it out for recycling. Anyway, I don't know what to tell you. A witch visited me in the middle of the night. Yeah, that's what I said. I was sleeping over there

on a perfect rectangle of newspaper and I opened my eyes and there was a witch in front of me. And she waved her hands in my face and then said I would be able to talk for two weeks. I don't know, I'm just telling you what happened. And yeah, I didn't think this is what my human voice would sound like either. I'm as surprised as you are. Anyway, Terry left the store all of a sudden and now I'm in charge. No quote-unquote babysitter showed up this week to help me. I mean, better than the last guy who kept

trying to high-five me. Do I look like a golden doodle? God, I hate, hate golden doodles. The dog equivalent of an inbred popular girl beautiful and so dumb Okay. Well anyway scary tape time. I'll nudge the right tape with my nose But you're gonna have to physically put it into the VCR though I may have a, but the witch didn't grace me with opposable thumbs. Great, thank you. You never really know what's lurking nearby. If your feet are on the floor right now, what's beneath the floor?

If you reach out and touch your wall, what's behind the wall? Things can surprise you. There are all sorts of places where things can hide. Every year I would go to summer camp. Camp every summer happened in August. Something that we would do regularly as an activity is we would go swimming. The whole camp was situated around a big man-made lake and there was a section for boating and then another section that was sectioned off for swimming. One day my group and the group of corresponding age boys went for a swimming session. There were probably about a dozen of us. We would run down this long wooden dock, jump into the water, swim out to a floating dock that was like maybe 10 yards ahead of us, climb off the dock, mess around, jump off, just goof around and have a good time. There was another floating dock very

similar to the one that we would always swim to, but it was way further down the lake, probably about three times as far distance as the one that we would normally go to. The years that I had been to this camp, I'd never seen anybody go over to this other dock. One day I had the bright idea that like, hey, instead of doing what we normally do, why do we go check out that other dock? It's pretty much the same thing, but you know, it's a little bit of a challenge to have a longer swim. It's just like, you know, but you know, it's a little bit of a challenge to have a longer swim It's just like, you know something a little bit different

So we swim down to this other dock. I'm not the best swimmer You know, I don't swim that often so, you know by the time I got there is like a little bit worn out Everybody's climbing up on the dock. I'm treading water and as everybody is climbing up in front of me. I see on the ladder to go up to the dock this strange looking spider that I'd never seen before. It was pretty big. It was probably about two inches long end to end. And most of that was legs.

It was very leggy, had a long skinny body. And something that was very strange to me about it was it had these really large mandibles that kind of protruded out. And so I was just like kind of there in the water looking at it, waiting for my turn to go up. And so I walk up the ladder past the spider. I made sure to like leave as much distance

as I could between the spider and myself. We climb up on the dock. We were all a little bit tired from the long swim. We lie down in the sun. We're just kind of resting for a little bit. It's like a beautiful childhood memory, you know, or maybe just a perfect day. We got up and started playing our normal games,

jumping off the side of the dock, normal horse play, joking, laughing. One thing that we would normally do is we would sink the dock. Everybody would get together, stand kind of near one of the corners and move further and further into the corner, putting all of the weight on the corner of the dock so that it would sink down into the water and then everybody would just like kind of jump off and the dock would pop up and everyone would laugh and you know, get back on and you know,

whatever from there. The dock filled with water and as it filled with water, hundreds of the type of spider that I'd seen on the ladder came pouring out from in between the boards, all between our feet, all in the water with us in the part of the dock that was already submerged. Full grown adult spiders. They started running over the feet of the children who were standing on the dry part of the dock.

The dock exploded with spiders in every direction. Their long legs going everywhere, climbing over each other. There were several different sizes of spiders amongst the horn of them. amongst the horde of them. There was a large number of spiders who had just been very disturbed. We all panicked. We jumped off the dock into the water. We jumped in all Helger's Gelter,

all different directions every which way to try to get away from them. The spiders were all around us. They were faring better in the water than we were. The surface tension was holding them up and they were kind of almost walking on the surface of the water. Everybody started to scream. Everybody was splashing and panicking. As I looked around and realized how many spiders were around us in the water and how hard it was to get away from them, it occurred to me that my long hair was not tied back. Oh my gosh, are there spiders in my hair right now?

I reached my hands back and I could feel, you know, strands of my hair kind of floating on the surface of the water. And sure enough, I could feel those long legs of those spiders. I could feel their little bodies mixed in with my hair. And immediately I just panicked. I dove under the water as fast as I could, just shaking my head, trying to get them off of me and away from me. It was hard to move away from the spiders because all of the movement going on in the water

was so unpredictable. I didn't know which way to go. Every way seemed like the wrong way. There were spiders everywhere. We were trying to get away from them, but we really couldn't. It was difficult to get away from them. We swam back to shore.

Swam back to another dock that was connected to the shore. Got out of the water. We were all done with swimming for the day. Everybody was quiet. We didn't say much to each other. We were just all very shaken up and we just wanted to go back to our tents. I don't know that much about spider habits or if these spiders like live in a community or whatever.

The whole dock was full of full-grown spiders living there in some sort of a colony. I wasn't very afraid of spiders before this incident occurred, but I was arachnophobic for many years after this. That whole time, they were inches from us, right below the boards that we were lying on. You never really know what's lurking where. Oh man, I love that story. Is that scary to humans? I would be having a field day batting around all those little spider bodies. Oh man, I love when I find a bug in the corner. Best day ever. All right, let's take a break for ads.

I think I saw a moth over there, so obviously I'm going to go investigate that. Okay, hope you enjoyed your ads. I really enjoyed eating that moth. All right, let's listen to another story, shall we? Here's your next tape. Are you going to put it in? Yeah, cuz you know still no thumb growth in the last five minutes This was about 24 years ago my Child was about a year old

barely walking During that summer, we liked to visit a local lake. It was a small lake, it was actually more of a pond. The bottom was clay and seaweed, the bottom of that lake. Other people brought their little kids there and there would be picnic and swim. On this particular day, it was about six o'clock in the evening, there was quite a few families there, 20-25 people at the lake in the swimming area. I was holding my daughter, my wife was swimming and I was talking to my daughter while we were watching the water and I heard my wife shout my name. I looked over at her and she was standing there uncomfortably, kind of grossed out look on her face, kind of a little bit scared.

She's saying, I think I just stepped on somebody's face. I thought she was joking. I just thought she felt something weird under the water. Then she repeated it. I really think I just stepped on somebody's face. It wasn't deep water. Where she was standing was up to her waist. But I remember her shifting her weight back and forth trying to kind of get out of there. And she got out of the water pretty quick and she said I felt a nose and an eye socket. It's what she felt it's that a feel of it the softness when she said she felt that eye socket she felt that nose. That's what made her sure. There was a lot of people at that lake and they could hear what she said. She was talking to me but obviously everybody in the area could hear what she had to say.

Nobody really cared because it's a lake. You find strange things in the lake. They heard and saw what I saw and nobody really reacted. Nobody came and talked to us and said, where was it? You know, there wasn't a circle around us saying, should we call the police? It's just people continued doing what they were doing and they just assumed that it was, that it was nothing. That's when I considered going in the water and investigating myself. It was kind of a, more of a morbid curiosity. You know, what would happen? What if it really is a body? If it wasn't a body, great. If it was a body, I

didn't like that scenario. I didn't think that would play out very nicely at the lake. I would have reached down, grabbed what I thought might have been a body, pulled it up. How terrible would that have been? It would have ended up with me throwing up in the water, dry heaving. Maybe other people would have seen what I pulled up, traumatizing everybody there, traumatizing ourselves. So we decided let's just let's just go I left

it and we left by the time we got home we had convinced ourselves that this wasn't a face this wasn't a body this wasn't this face. This wasn't a body. This wasn't. This was just seaweed. This was rocks. This was mud. This was clay. If there was a body right there, don't you think we'd know about it? And we'd convince ourselves that this was nothing.

This was just, this was just nothing. Weird things under the water. That's what it amounted to. Two days later, I came home from work and we had to do some shopping. So we loaded up our child into the car. My wife got into the car and as we left, she said in the newspaper today, it says that there was a body found in that lake. The body of a little boy. That's when it comes back like, my goodness, this was real.

This was real. This was real. There's a very good chance that that was a real body that my wife stepped on. Fear of the water is a very real thing and when I'm telling this story to some people they're just, it terrifies them because the story seems to confirm their fears, their fears of the water. How many places have we gone swimming where there's things under the water that we don't know about? The fear of the unknown terrifies people and maybe it should. Jesus, I don't know why humans feel the need to go in water. I just that that really doesn't resonate with me. I mean, I hate water. It's a zero out of 10 experience.

Honestly, I barely like even drinking out of my own bowl. I'd go weeks if I could. All right, now I need to run around the room as fast as I can for no apparent reason. So let's take another break for ads, shall we? Hey, thanks for stopping by Radio Rental again today. Even though you didn't recognize me and you didn't scratch my chin, I still had an overall non-offensive time with you today. Your company was adequate. That's a pretty high rating in my book.

So I guess we'll see you next week at Radio Rental. Hey, real quick last thing, if you could toss that fabric mouse over there as hard as you can, I'm going to run around the room again while I look at it and pretend it's stalking me. Thanks. Radio Rental is created by Payne Lindsay and brought to you by Tenderfoot TV. Showrunner is Meredith Stedman. Lead producer is Eric Quintana. Executive producers are Payne Lindsay and Donald Albright.

Our main host is Rainn Wilson. Guest host is Tig Notaro. Written by Meredith Stedman. Additional writing by Mark Loughlin. Original score by Makeup and Vanity Set. With additional score by Jay Ragsdale. Editing by Eric Quintana, Stephen Perez, Meredith Stedman, Tristan Bankston, and Sean Nerney. Sound Design Mix and Master by Stephen Perez and Cooper Skinner.

Additional Editing by April Ruha and Dayton Cole. Our Production Manager is Jordan Foxworthy. Our Social Media Manager is Caroline Orojema. Video Editing by Dylan Harrington. Cover Artwork by Trevor Eiler and Rob Sheridan. Radio rental merchandise by Byron McCoy. To shop Radio Rental merch, visit shop.tenderfoot.tv. Special thanks to Oren 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 yourscaryistory.gmail.com. Or contact us via the form on our website, RadioRentalUSA.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.