Radio Rental - Episode 91

Episode Date: October 10, 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: >> Late Night at the Lab

Radio Renzel was back with new episodes and new merch just in time for spooky season. Visit shop.tenderfoot.tv to grab merch from your favorite shows. When you're with Annex Platinum, access to exclusive dining experiences and an annual travel credit. So the best hapice in town might be in a new town altogether. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Terms and conditions apply. Learn more at Amex.ca.com.

Hate waiting a week for the next episode of Radio Rental. Subscribe to Tenderfoot Plus to get early access to episodes, add free listening, and even some 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 block

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-of-a-kind videos, so frightening, so mind-bending, you won't be able to sleep at night. You've gone. Radio Rental.

Hey, hey, hey, welcome to Radio Rental. It's me, Ricky Lee, your favorite astrological guru, and I also happen to run this little video rental shop. Now, the legendary Terry Carnation has tossed the keys to me along with a hefty amount of debt and a potential mode issue. I'm telling you, my nose will not stop running. But I've been looking through the financials, and you know, I thought this business would be a little bit more lucrative, but it turns out it's harder selling Blu-Rays than it is selling my astrological predictions. And you may have noticed I don't use the word horoscope. See, I don't do horoscopes. I do forecasts like the weather.

And see, I feel like I deserve just as much respect as belly down there at Channel 2. I mean, I think horoscope is a disrespectful term for what I have to offer. Kind of cheapens what is ultimately a divine gift from the start. heavens. Hey and speaking of divine gifts, do I have a gift for you today? Woo boy. Now, today we're going watch a couple of truly horrific stories on VHS, just like y'all like it. Okay, now let's get started. Okay, I'm going to reach into this cardboard box. I mean, this exclusive collection, which makes me wonder, does this thing ever run out? Do we ever make it? Do we ever make a it to the bottom of this box, or am I supposed to refill this thing? Because nobody told me

nothing about that. I guess we're just going to find out together. But in the meantime, let's rip through them. Why don't we? First take. I took a faculty position as a professor of zoology at a small university. I was really excited about this position because the university itself is small. So you get really good contact with students, but the resources that were available for students to use are unlike anything that I have seen at another university. We have a really good collection of taxidermine specimens and wet specimens, which are really valuable for teaching students about evolution, about anatomy and physiology. We have a lot accessible to students

that you don't often see at an institution that is primarily dedicated toward undergraduate education. I take this job and I'm really excited about being able to engage with these kids, these young adults, and as with any faculty position, it's long hours initially. You're building your curriculum,

you're learning what tools you have available, you have available to you at the institution you're at. And so I was often on campus by myself, early in the morning, before dawn, well after the time that everyone else goes home, close to midnight some days. It feels like science buildings or buildings that house science curricula are often older, and they just have kind of a creepier sort of aesthetic to them. The building that I work in is not any different. It's an older building. It feels very Cold War era, very kind of minimalist in terms of architecture. There's nothing pretty about it. And the hallways themselves are dark. So it's a dark stone floor. It has tile walls. There are offices and classrooms down either side. So there's no natural light into the hallways. The building was in the process of being phased out for new construction.

So it felt like maintenance in the building was being kind of delayed. Lights would burn out in the hall, and instead of being replaced, we just rolled with a semi-dark hallway. That's all fine and dandy when classes are in session and the building is alive with students. But after everybody else goes home, there are no students. There's no faculty. There's no staff. It's just me. And this very spooky scene of a horror movie that takes place in an insane asylum.

things echo it feels cold feels sterile but it also feels kind of shabby so it's my first quarter at the university i'm starting to get more comfortable with my collection wet specimens are housed in glass jars filled with ethanol since they're all housed in ethanol they have to be stored in a safe space. A room that students generally don't have access to on a day-to-day basis. These specimens were all kept in a preparatory lab that was adjacent to my teaching classroom, and it had this big steel door on it. The door, because it's a lab, per fire code, the door has to swing out into the hallway. So I'm in this prep room. It's got to be close to midnight one night. In the middle of the week in autumn, I'd been in this room for hours by myself.

Lab spaces, they're supposed to be clean work spaces. You shouldn't have food or drink in that sort of an environment. So after several hours in the lab, I just needed to pop out. I needed a break. I needed to get away from the jars of ethanol. I needed to get some water. I needed to get something to eat. Ordinarily, during the school day, I would open the door just a little bit, just enough so that I could see out to make sure that there was no one coming towards the door that I didn't hear someone coming from behind the lab. You don't want to open the door wide into a hallway full of students and smash a student with a giant steel door. But it's close to midnight. There's no one left in the building. There's no faculty, no staff, no students. So I threw the door open

to walk back to my office. And when I did, there was a woman moving through the hall and she was wearing a bright red sweater. It was a vivid red sweater. It was red like the color of the university. I stepped back and shut the door and turned to apologize to her for nearly hitting her with a steel door, but also for nearly running her over. And I was completely alone in the hallway. It was just me. No one else. I threw the door open and I came out of that room with so much speed that I nearly collided with her. I saw this woman. Like she was corporeal. She was solid. She was a human. She was my height, average build, middle age. It was like seeing me, wearing red outside the office space.

she was right there. She was in the middle of the hallway, by herself, walking in the direction of my office. I saw her dead on. It's not like I saw her out the corner of my eye. I saw her. I veered off the trajectory that I was walking on in order to avoid colliding with her, not just hitting her with the door, but in order to avoid colliding with her. I was stunned.

I thought that I was starting to hallucinate. hallucinate people. At that point, I decided that it's midnight. I've been in a room by myself for hours. I'm done, I'm going home. I don't have the bandwidth to deal with this. I'm not going to have an internal fight with myself about whether or not the person I saw in the hall was actually there.

It's immaterial at this point. She's gone now. There's no one for me to apologize to. So we're just going to go. And we will revisit this. Later. The next morning I came early before everyone else did. My office was at the end of the hallway,

so folks coming up the stairs would always pass by my office en route to theirs. And one of my colleagues came in to talk with me, to chat, kind of their normal morning pattern. How's it going? How's the week been? How was your night? And I said,

things are going well I was here late last night I saw a ghost in the hallway I nearly hit her with my wet lab door I mean I came out point blank there was no beating around the bush I fully expected her to laugh at me or to tell me that I needed more sleep

or that I needed to go home earlier I expected some pushback right from a scientist you expect a little pushback when you tell them you've seen a ghost No smile, no laughing. She just says, oh, that doesn't surprise me. Your wet lab is right across the hallway from the old cadaver lab. Undergrad schools generally don't have cadaver labs as a part of their regular curriculum.

You find cadaver labs at larger universities that may also have a medical school associated with them or a physical therapy school, but larger post-grader. educational programs. So the fact that we have a cadaver lab for our undergrads is uncommon. I knew we had a cadaver lab, but I didn't know where it was. I don't work with humans. Cadaver labs aren't like tourist locations out of respect for the decedents. We don't put it on the map. I had no idea that was the old cadaver lab because, again, our building's going through renovation process. And she says the only way that the cadavers were able to get into that lab is that they had to come from the freight elevator, and then they came down this hallway right past your wet lab.

This is where they were housed, was in this facility across the hall from the wet lab. I was in that building for another five months or so before the state of the building was just such that we couldn't use it anymore. I'm talking like rain coming down inside the building. But over that five-month period, as I'm now effectively moved into my office and there by myself, I would hear shuffling out in the hallway on those stone floors or the women's restroom was right across the hall from my office. I'd hear the water turn on and I'd walk over to the bathroom and the bathroom's completely empty. Later, I did have cause to go into that room. They needed help cleaning that room out.

And the old morgue cabinets that you see in TV shows, those stainless steel cabinets with the refrigerator-style doors on them, they were still in the room on a back wall. They hadn't been disassembled. They're not state-of-the-art equipment anymore. That's not how we currently house our cadavers. But they are still in that room. seeing those cabinets actually did unsettle me.

I never went back in that space after that. How many people have rested in those cabinets in the space between passing away and being returned to their families so that they can rest in peace? They're not resting in peace in those cabinets. They're in limbo. This isn't something that we can falsify.

The existence of a ghost or any of these other paranormal sort of experiences or entities or oddities. And that's what science is, is falsification. That's the basis of the work that we do. And so the fact that this cannot be falsified doesn't mean that it's not real. I once heard a theoretical physicist talk about how something like only 10% of the matter in the universe can be explained by the particles that we know of. That means 90% of the matter in this universe has no explanation to it. There's a lot there that we can't. touch. We can't put it in a container or under a microscope. I find it encouraging that more

often than not, the experience resonates with people. They often follow the story with similar experiences that they've had in their own spaces. Antidotal evidence piles up. It's hard to discount. Oh, now that was freaky, and that's one thing I don't like. That one made the hair on my hair stand up. Labs are creepy as hell, y'all. I refuse to go into a lab. Heck, I won't even get my blood tested.

My blood stays right there in my arm where it's supposed to be. Thank you very much. Mr. Labtech, go on your way. All right, let's take a quick break for some ads because I got a feeling we're going to need some advertising money to deal with the previously aforementioned mold issue in this joint. That cleared it out. This episode is brought to you by Peloton.

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We all know you're a romantic. But look, let's be honest. Likeing Jeremy Allen White's pictures on Instagram, ain't going to make him like you back. Or being president of the Jacob, a Lordy fan. Club ain't going to get you any closer to his heart. Timothy Shalamette is unavailable at the present moment. So pick yourself up and get out into the real world and meet some real dang people.

There, I said it. You're embarrassing everybody. Most of all you sell. All right now, I'm not going to harp on that, but it needed to be said. Let's get on to our next story. Fresh out of high school, didn't really know what I wanted to do in life. It was that just weird phase where just living one day at a time, one of my friends in high school, one of my best friends. He moved away in our freshman year of high school. Our freshman year of college, he said, hey, my parents bought this rental property. They're going to be coming into town and making renovations, but whenever they do, I'll come with them. And that was awesome.

It was, you know, a good news because not only was he a big part of our friend group, but it's also going to give us a place to kick it. And, you know, we didn't have to worry about parents. His parents were actually going to let him stay at the house weeks at a time. And whenever they would make renovations, they would come. But the thing was, his grandparent, I guess his grandmother, lived right across the street from the property so she could kind of keep an eye on him. I was like, hell yeah, you know, let's do this thing. And he's like, hey, come over, I want you to see the place. When I pulled it up, I remember just thinking, like, it was very normal.

You know, it was a three-bedroom, one and a half bath, kind of like a little carport on the left side. he kind of showed me around and it was normal and then once we got to the back bedroom I just remember like filling this heaviness that it was really hard to explain but if you've ever felt it

you know what I'm talking about it was hard to pinpoint but it was just very evident when you walked in that back bedroom there was something going on I just usually try to avoid that area of the house no furniture

in the entire house. There was some, like this patio furniture set that was in that bonus room and a little bitty TV. In the back area, there was like a mattress on the floor. I mean, we kind of joked it. It looked like a trap house, even though there was none of that going on.

It was a bare minimum. Tim, he started to tell me about after the first week or two, after he was spending the night there by himself, man there's some weird stuff going on loud bangs when he was walking past the bathroom

just a light would flick on footsteps one story that really freaked me out initially he said he was in the middle of the night and he was sleep on the floor one of the patio furniture chairs slid across that laminate hardwood flooring

two or three inches knowing Tim He's a plausible and grounded guy, and he's not the one to embellish any kind of story. And so I believed him immediately. I was trying to keep him, I guess, relaxed about the whole thing, and I was like, it's an old house. You know, it's dead quiet at night,

and there's nothing to drown out the little noises. One night, a group of us was, we were all hanging out, drinking, just partying. One of our friends, he was going to get, I guess, to drink out of the refrigerator and something basically tugged his shirt on the back. When he turned around, there's nobody there. I just remember him coming back and he was white as a ghost. Five seconds ago, he was Life of the Party and then all of a sudden he comes back and he,

all the color out of his face is completely gone and he was like, man, something just tugged my shirt. His whole demeanor was changed and he wanted nothing to do with that house. so he wanted to get away as fast as possible. It just kind of left a sobering effect over the entire group of friends that were there. And I was like, you know what? I think it's time for me to go too. You know, that's a sign.

We need to, I'm going to go ahead and go. Basically kind of developed a reputation pretty quickly. We'd all be hanging out there, a group of six or seven guys, playing FIFA on that little bitty, TV. We'd all be there, nobody else would be in the house, and we'd just hear this crashing sound in the back of the house. What in the hell just did that? You know, it's like, wow, that is crazy. People wanted to come over and kind of experience it, you know what I mean? And became like

a normal thing, honestly. Up until that point, though, I had only experienced the noises and the weird vibes but that changed soon after all that. Tim had an older sister. She was coming to visit Tim and stay at the rental property for the weekend. There was a house party that we went to that was in town. We went and we had a good time. We came back and we were just me, Tim, and his sister, we'd party some more, just kind of goofing off. And Tim was like, you know, hey guys, I'm going to go to sleep. I think I'm about to crash. Instead of going back to that bonus room, he went to the second bedroom down the hallway. His sister and I were in the front room. And in that room, there was another little bitty TV on a little TV stand. And it was one of those

DVD, VHS TVs you know. We were watching Madagascar. I don't know how we ended up watching Madagascar, but we were about halfway through the movie. It was really late. We're talking 3.30

in the morning. I just remember hearing footsteps, which we immediately assumed was Tim. We were doing some things that, you know, I wasn't really wanting Tim to see or you know just walk in on we both were kind of like oh crap that here comes to him the footsteps

got closer and closer we kind of just got up and we were in position of acting normal the footsteps kept coming and kept coming i was thinking oh tim's about to walk in the door part of the floor to get into this room that we were at whenever you walk past it there was a very noticeable and distinct creek and that's when we heard it that completely just freaked us out that's when I turned around and I saw it wasn't Tim it was unnatural. It was nothing of this world. This thing was not an apparition. It wasn't a figure. It was almost distortion of space. It looked like pixels or just a distorted space of like an area. It was very noticeable and it was just hovering. It was nothering. It was not

not like standing on the floor. Tim's sister, she screamed and she ran out of the room as fast as she could. I was trying to leave as quickly as possible because I was freaked out. I was so freaked out. And to get out of that room, I had to go past it. It was on my right. And I just remember when I passed it, it was like I was walking past a deep freezer. It was so cold on that side of my body. Every single hair on my body was standing up. We immediately went to Tim, and Tim was sleeping. He woke up, and we are screaming.

I'm screaming. She's in the floor, just rocking back and forth in a fetal position. She can't really even form words. She's so freaked out. I was kind of in a frantic state. I was saying, it finally fucking happened, man. Like, it finally happened. It showed itself.

It's not just sounds or knocks or things, like it actually came in on us. He was like, all right, hard, you know, like, just calm down, calm down. He's like, I'm going to go check it out. So his sister and I kind of get behind him, kind of like in a cowardly state and we're like, he's walking, you know, walking towards that room. I remember when he got in that room, he was like, holy shit. And he sticks out his arms. He looked, and his arms are completely engulfed in cold chills everywhere.

As fast as it came in that room, it was gone. We were all just kind of shook and in disbelief. I was no longer in a frantic state. I just wanted to get the hell out of there. This was near in 4 o'clock in the morning. and I just wanted a ride home. I wanted a ride home immediately. It's one thing to have a paranormal experience by yourself.

You know, that's pretty scary. But to have it and to share it with two other people, it makes it more real. I wasn't imagining that. Years down the road, I'm sitting there and I get a call to him and he's like hey I was like are you sitting down and I'm like yeah what's going on he says so I was having a drink with my dad and he finally came clean about the circumstances around how they got to be a landlord and how they purchased that house he said his dad told him that

his grandmother went and was walking to get the mail and noticed that there was water running out of the house out of the front door of that house of the rental property that was not their rental property at the time there was a single lady that was living there she was concerned so she got another neighbor to check and see if everything was okay they knocked on the door front door was

unlocked, they helped themselves in the house and was calling out for this lady. And the whole house was flooded pretty much. I think she had, I guess, stopped up the sinks in every sink that was in the house, which was, I guess, three. And they found her in that back bedroom. And she was rocking back and forth in like a blank state. She ended up. of getting admitted to a mental hospital, which is about a 10-minute drive down the road. I think the bank ended up owning the house, and so that's how he got it very cheaply. Whenever I heard that, I was like, that is crazy. Like, it kind of provided some validation to the story of, like,

there is something not right with that house. We always bring up that story. Whoa, boy, hey, this is why I do not, cannot, and will not, ever buy a quote-unquote fixer-upper. No way, Jose. Hey, I know that's code for haunted by demons. That's what fixer-upper means in Latin, haunted by demons. That place might look fine and dandy on the Zillow, but you got to listen carefully to that gut feeling when you go inside there, and that's how you avoid a haunting of hillhouse type situation.

And don't say I ain't ever done nothing for you because it just did. Maybe it's just a phase you're going through. You'll get over it. I can't help you with that. The next appointment is in six months. You're not alone. Finding mental health support shouldn't leave you feeling more lost. At CAMH, we know how frustrating it can be trying to access care.

We're working to build a future where the path to support is clear, and every step forward feels like progress. Not another wrong turn. Visit camh.ca to help us forge a better path for mental health care. Ontario, the weight is over. The gold standard of online casinos has arrived. Golden Nugget Online Casino is live. bringing Vegas-style excitement and a world-class gaming experience right to your fingertips.

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See Golden Nuggett Casino.com for details. Please play responsibly. Rumor has it, new NHL hockey cards have arrived at Tim's, and every pack tells a story. with rare finds, fan favorites, and exclusive prizes. Ready to score big, start collecting today, only at Tim's. I participate in restaurants in Canada for a limited time. All right, my friends, well, that's it for today, but this is officially spooky season.

It is, and that's a good thing, because I think I have got some more cosmological interference coming this time of year, and we've got a lot more stories in store for you, and I can tell because that box is looking mighty full already. I didn't put nothing in it, and it has filled itself up. That is spooky. So I'll see you back here next week.

I am Ricky Lee, and this is Radio Rental. Radio Rental is created by Payne Lindsay and brought to you by Tenterfoot TV. runner is Meredith Stedman. Lead producer is Eric Kintana. Executive producers are Payne Lindsay and Donald Albright. Our host is Jeff Foxworthy as his character, Ricky Lee Bagley. Writing by Meredith Stedman. Original score by makeup and vanity set, with additional score by Jay Ragsdale. Editing by Eric Kintana, Payne Lindsay, Stephen Perez, Cooper Skinner, Meredith Stedman and Dylan Harrington. Sound design Mix and Master by Stephen Perez and Cooper Skinner.

Our production manager is Jordan Foxworthy. Our social media manager is Caroline Ora Jemma. 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.tendorfoot.tv. Special thanks to Orrin 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 Your Scary Story at gmail.com or contact us via the form on our website, radior rental us on Instagram at RadioRental.com. On behalf of the Radio Rental Store, we'd love it if you'd subscribe, rate, and review. As always, thanks for listening. Thank you.