Radio Rental - Episode 93

Episode Date: October 24, 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:>> Virginia City > Roar

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The following podcast includes scary stories with content that could be triggering to some listeners. Listener discretion is advised. Hey guys, it's Payne. Guess where I'm at? Time Square. And guess who's with me? Radio rental. We're on the time. square billboard thanks to amazon music and if you're in new york you can check it out too today through the 30th thanks for listening guys enjoy the show 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-of-a-kind videos, so frightening, so mind-bending, you won't be able to sleep at night. You've gone. Radio Rental. Welcome. Welcome, welcome to Radio Rental. Welcome, welcome, welcome. Come on in, kick your shoes off, make yourself at home. It's me, it's me, it's Ricky Lee, cosmetologist, and newly appointed head honcho of this here video shop, Radio Rental. And I am excited to see you today. I'm not going to lie. Hold on. Dadgummit, getting one already. One of my cosmological blasts. It's coming into my head, and today's blast is for Capricorn.

Capricorn, I'm getting a message for all y'all right now. Capricorn, quit being so dang shady. You're like a big cubbillambulous cloud or something. You're raining on everybody's parade with your constant pessimism. How about the cup is half full for once? How about that? Or even better, how about my cup? cup runneth over.

Think about that. Seriously. All right, well, that's enough for the blast. But let's get to our first story of the day. Let me wheel on out the TV VHS machine. Get a tape and let's pop his puppy in. I predict this one is going to be a real dozy. About 45 minutes southeast.

the Reno. There's this little town called Virginia City. It's an old silver mining town. People are taking the silver tours to the saloon casinos that you can go in there and have a drink. You can go down like mines. There's gunfights in the street. It's really kind of an authentic, old mining town that they turned into this tourist town. It's super cool. So I was like, wow, this is going to be a fun thing for the wife to go up there and spend a weekend in Virginia City. We're walking around touring the buildings. Streets are packed and things are really bustling. We're getting set for a three o'clock check-in at this hotel, which is right on the main drag. So we go check in at the hotel. Downstairs there's like a front lobby

area and all the rooms are up this very large narrow staircase it's like one of those very old farmhouses it's a very narrow staircase very steep so we climb up the staircase we get to the top and our room is right at the top of this staircase we walk in there it's a big room but it looks old all the furniture in the room is old, old quilts on the bed, there's old books on the bookshelf. It also had one of those toilets that had the tank suspended from the ceiling with like the chain that you pull at the flush, and it's got that musty smell to it. This room is truly authentic. We decided, okay, let's just change our clothes, we're freshen up, we'll go out and we'll hit the big streets of Virginia City. There's nothing modern about this town at all.

They say the theme of the city is, you step back in time. Well, you truly step back in time because when we walked out of this hotel, all those people that were there earlier in the day are gone. There was nobody on the streets. I mean, you could hear a pin drop. So we're just like, okay, well, let's make the best of it. So we started walking around, and we ended up having dinner at this small pizza place. That was pretty much the only restaurant that was open.

By this time, it's like 7.30, 8 o'clock, and we're like, now what the hell do we do? Down off the main drag, there was a couple of, like, small taverns. We're like, well, we might as well get a drink. We walked in there, and there was a bunch of hillbilly-type people sitting in his bar, which were probably like old bikers, locals, whatever. As soon as we walked in the bar, you could see it in their eyes that they do not want you there. we immediately got a feeling like we weren't welcomed that we kind of stood out that we were the tourists

and we weren't welcome in this bar wife and I we excused ourselves and just kind of went like well we'll find something else to do so we stumbled back to the hotel walked in the lobby there was nothing happening in this hotel I mean it was quiet and it was dark we're like okay well this is not like the big bustling night that we thought it was going to be in

Virginia city so we walked up that long staircase again and went into the room it's not like there's any TV in the room there's no TV there's no Wi-Fi barely electricity I mean you truly felt like you were stepping back in time so we ended up finding there was a couple of games in a room a couple of decks of cards. So we played some cards. And that lasted for about an hour, hour and a half. And we're like, let's just go to bed.

You know, let's just get through the night. We'll leave in the morning. We drifted off to sleep. It was probably 1.130. We started hearing some sound. Out in the hallway, you could hear, like, people laughing and carrying on. And then all of a sudden it started getting louder.

There was some arguing. You can tell that they were definitely older gentlemen. They sounded like hillbillies. Four to five people in the hallway. I mean, they were like mumbling. You would hear words like silver stealing words like claim. and I believe we heard one person referred to him as a dirty dog

I mean the conversation definitely got heated and it got heated quick like full-blown yelling at each other pushing each other and the next thing we know we hear one of the people get pushed down the stairs you could hear every thud

with this gentleman going down the stairs bouncing off the walls, bouncing off the steps. You heard that loud thud at the bottom of the stairs, and you knew it did not end in a good way. And then it was nothing. You couldn't hear a damn thing. The silence was eerie. Totally eerie.

We're just holding on to each other's hands laying in this bed. I do remember her saying, I'm scared, and I said I'm scared too. I think we were in shock because we were terrified of what was going to be outside the door because there was definitely more than a couple of guys out there in a hallway. We didn't want to get stuck in the middle of this thing. We laid in bed for a few minutes more, and we fell back asleep. It was a few hours later the sun started coming up.

We knew it was time to go. We just kind of got out of bed, got our things together, threw it in a bag, and we're just like, let's just go. We weren't really sure what we were going to see when we opened up the door, because after the guy fell down the stairs, we didn't hear anything. There was no ambulance, there was nobody rushing to his aid, including us, because we were terrified in our bed. Went to the door, opened it up, we looked down the staircase, and to our amazement, there was no dead body at the end of the staircase. We walked down the stairs, walked into the lobby, and there was only one gentleman in the lobby, the hotel worker, and we walked up to the front desk. He said, how was your night? And my wife and I kind of looked at each other, and we're like, is this guy really?

really have no idea what went down last night? I made a comment to him. Yeah, there was something that went down at one, two o'clock in the morning. I think there was a fight outside of our room, but it definitely sounded like somebody ended up falling down the stairs. He very deadpaned looked at me and he goes, well, that's odd because you were the only guest in the hotel last night. The hair is in the back of my house.

neck we're starting to stand up. I mean, we were freaked out. He asked us to tell him a little bit more about what we experience. Sound like a bunch of hillbillies? They were fighting over either claims or silver or something. He just kind of laughed a little bit, and he goes, oh, the miners must be back. We've heard reports of the miners. They must have had a night last night. And it was just the way that he was laughing. He was like part of it. It was almost kind of like a big joke to him. But to us, it wasn't a joke.

We weren't laughing. I think the freakyest part of it is it seems so common for him. Like this is a regular thing with these miners and them having their activities in the middle of the night. As soon as he mentioned the miners and that they've been there all the time, and that there was nobody else sleeping in the hotel rooms, it was clear as day to us that we experienced the spirits of former miners of Virginia City. I've heard of ghost stories, I've heard of spirit encounters, but to be honest with you, I never really believed it.

But once we experienced it, we believed it. I remember what I heard. I remember what I felt, it was real. Okay, just be honest with you, that's beyond a pair of normals. That's like four or five normals. All right, let's do some ads. With Amex Platinum, access to exclusive Amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot trackside.

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and I think it is time for another tape, so let's pop this one in. I've been going into the woods my whole life since I was a kid. I'm not a hunter. I'm not a fisher. I just like to be out in nature, bird watching, looking at plants and animals and hiking around and camping. In 2020, in the height of the pandemic, Oregon was really locked down. No restaurants, no theaters. There's really nothing. to do. I discovered that the Forest Service rinse out these old guard shacks that forest rangers

used to use to maintain the forest and watch out for fires and whatnot. I rented one that's down in southern Oregon and southern Cascades in the Rogue River National Forest. I was pretty excited about that because the Sky Lakes Wilderness is there, Mount McLaughlin is there, and if you've ever seen that it's this really pointy volcano that's pretty cool to see it's about a six-hour drive from my house I drove down there and into this really vast forest that's full of remote areas came to the turnoff from the main road and it was a like a really rocky four-wheel drive trail I've got a Jeep so I was able to get down that trail pretty easily but it had a lot of really tall rocks and a lot of pointy rocks and

It was very closed in with trees. And it opened up to this meadow out in the middle of the woods. At the head of the meadow was this old guard shack. It was just four walls and a roof, but on the inside it had a couple of bunk beds and a wood stove. Parked my Jeep about 100 feet away from the cabin. Hold all my stuff to the cabin, set up, put my chair out by the fire ring. I spent the day just reading books and the day was dragging on

and it started getting towards like twilight hour. I was sitting in my camp chair with my legs kicked out on a stump with my binoculars, with my book, just watching nature go by. As I was just sitting there,

I just heard this roar come from the distance. And the sound was coming from behind me. I froze. Everything froze. Just got dead quiet, which is really unnerving in the woods. That's when the sound came again. That is a closer noise.

All the alarms and red flags. and my body were going off saying get inside this is dangerous as they were getting closer I was inching my way back to the cabin that's when I got my phone out and started to record so I'm holding my phone up sure enough a few minutes later there's that roaring sound again Quite a bit closer this time. As I'm standing there listening and waiting for the intervals to come, I'm getting more and more freaked out about this noise.

And then suddenly the roar comes again and it's very close. So I shut the door, lock everything, pull shut all the shutters on the windows and lock those and jump into my sleeping bag at the corner of the cabin and realize that I have left any sort of weapon in my Jeep. So I'm laying there in the pitch black darkness because there's no light in this cabin. I can't even see in front of my face. Suddenly I hear that roaring sound right outside.

I could hear it walking around the cabin outside. And I can hear it walking. I can hear the heaviness of the footsteps. I can hear it growling outside of my cabin. So I sat there with my head under my sleeping bag. I started hearing like a slip moment. Slip-thum. Slip-thum.

Its foot was raking across the grass and then plopping down really heavy onto the ground. And then the next one, raking across the top of the grass, and then plopping down really heavy. What I heard walking around outside was big. It didn't sound like a quadruped. It sounded like two footsteps at a time.

And I could hear it when it would walk around my side of the cabin, like it was examining how to get in. I didn't want to make a sound. I was holding my breath. After a little bit of time goes back, I hear it again and it's a little further away. And then a little while later, I hear it again and it's even further away. I can tell that it's moving away from me and I ended up falling asleep in that same position

down on my sleeping bag, covered up. The next morning I get up and I can see the light coming around from the cracks in the windows. So I get out of the sleeping bag, I'd slept in all of my clothes, even my shoes. I go and I open up the door and I walk outside and my camping chair is still there. My cup is still there. My water bottle and nothing is messed with. The cabin backs up to the tree line. In the backside of it is just some really tall grass.

And I could see very plainly a track where something had been walking around the cabin. it had knocked all of the grass down but I couldn't see any footprints in the ground the ground was too hard this was a very wide disturbance area in the vegetation as it went around the cabin whatever it was had some width

to it that night it was a perfectly relaxed night bird singing you know, bugs, bugging. So I was sitting in my camp chair, reading my book, listening to the birds, twilight was coming. There was some deer that were out in the meadow.

And I was watching them, and they were interacting with each other and looking around. They didn't really care that I was there. They probably see this pretty frequently. And then suddenly... Yeah. This time really close. And the deer bolted for the tree line. They did not stop to reconsider.

They didn't look around. They just bolted for the tree line. And that gave me an indication that this is a predator. That this is not something to be trifled with. I got up immediately, went and got my, sleeping bag, threw it in the back of my jeep, and immediately left. I'm sure that it wasn't a mountain lion. I have also heard bobcats and coyotes and wolves.

That's not what the sound was. I know it wasn't a person. I know it wasn't a deer, and it wasn't an elk. I've been around bear before, and they have a smell. they smell like a dirty wet dog I didn't detect any of that odor and I've heard YouTube sounds of bears making noise

and it didn't sound like that what it was I don't know I haven't been back but I told a friend about it he wants to go back because he wants to see what's going on down there the cabin is now unrentable due to what the website says is safety concerns, which I don't know what that means.

I did notice that area is thick with Bigfoot sightings, if you believe in that type of thing. The Rogue River National Forest has quite a bit of documented sightings from people. There's websites that you can go and see the date and time that people see things. and I've cruised through YouTube looking for similar sounds that people have heard in the woods and have not heard anything like that. Even thinking about the story

and telling the story gets me chill bumps. Pretty scary situation for me. Oh my word. Bigfoot is a lot. an Aquarius. You know what I'm saying. All right, let's do some ads. Okay, my friends, well that's it for today. I am all tapped out. But look, you know what next week is. That's right, it's the height of spooky season, the big hoorah. You ain't going to guess what

my costume is. You want me to tell them? No, I ain't telling them. I'm keeping it as a surprise. You've got to come see it. We'll see you next time. Rickie Lee, we gone. Radio Rental is created by Payne Lindsay

and brought to you by Tenderfoot TV. Showrunner 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,

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.