Radio Rental - Rewind: Episode 05

Episode Date: August 21, 2026

Welcome to Radio Rental: Rewind, where we go back in time to where it all started. Hang out with us as we play our favorite, scariest tapes from the archives... and also have some fun with the fans.Today's topic: << Haunted Places <<Hosted by Producer Steven Perez and featuring the creator of Radio Rental, Payne Lindsey.Watch on YouTube @RadioRentalUSAAnd don’t worry… Radio Rental (our main store) will re-open this October.Want more Radio Rental?For early access and ad-free listening, subscribe to Tenderfoot+ at ⁠https://tenderfoot.tv/plus/⁠.Follow the show at @radiorentalVisit the website at ⁠radiorentalusa.com

Hey, what's up guys, I'm Steven and this is Radio Rental Rewind, where we check out the archives, the scariest stories we have, the greatest hits to fan favorites. And today we're going to be talking about haunted places. So if you like that, you're going to love this. This one is from episode 34 and it's called Haunted Living. So let's check it out. Yeah. Battery looks full. Yep, and we're at 13 seconds. So just set it right on the table and leave it alone. Okay. It all started back in 2016.

We had just purchased this house and moved in. We said it was our dream house. It's everything that we both had ever wanted. About two weeks after we moved in, we had an explosion, been on the side of our house. The air conditioning unit started a fire. in between the wall of our two kids' bedrooms. We had the fire department out.

We had a bunch of electricians out, and nobody could really tell us exactly what had happened. They just knew that a fire had started from a big surge of electricity that was inside the house. We were just told that we were lucky that it stopped. We figured it was just a fluke, and we could start living normally again after that, now that everything had been replaced and fixed.

After that, everything strange started happening. Lights flickering throughout the house. It wasn't normal flickering, like a light bulb has gone out. We'd be eating dinner, notice that the lights were flickering. We'd be up in our bedroom, the lights would flicker. We would look up when they would start flickering in the chandeliers. Would be swinging back and forth on their chains. We called electricians.

out to try and fix the problem and they replaced everything that we could think of replacing and nothing was fixing the problem. Our smoke alarms started to have a mind of their own. It wasn't just chirping like smoke alarms go off when they're losing their batteries. The smoke alarms would go off just long enough to make us think there was an actual fire. Start moving out of the room, start gathering the kids, and then the smoke alarms would just turn themselves off. I would be walking on the treadmill, and I'd be going at like a three-point speed,

and all of a sudden it would start increasing faster and faster until I was yanking the emergency chain. We would be in other rooms when our TVs would turn on or off. Everything that was happening was just unexplainable. We were trying pretty much everything we could think of to solve these issues. We spent so much money on electricians, to get answers. We had the fire department out here inspecting everything. Experts going through the house trying to figure out why our house was having the issues that it was having. And the only

explanation that we were getting was that our house has electric surges from within it. Nobody can explain why. At this point, it's definitely intruded our thoughts on a daily basis, especially when noises started happening in the house as well. Footsteps that we would hear upstairs, those are hard to ignore. I'd be in the kitchen and I'd hear a big bang on the other side of the wall. It would be as loud as a chair falling over. And I'd come in here thinking I'd see a chair had fallen over and there was nothing out of place. Just hanging out in the family room with the kids and we'd hear a bunch of stomping upstairs

and us trying to explain away to the kids that it's probably just the pipes upstairs. But it's a pretty new house. new house. It's only about 20 years old. It was starting to feel like the house was alive. Kind of had a mind of its own. We started talking about moving pretty early on, but we felt crazy. Are we really going to make this massive financial decision off of a few thumps and a little weird electricity? I worked from home at the time by myself while the kids were in school. I started hearing noises where I thought somebody was breaking into the house every day. I would hear a huge crash against the back window every morning at about 10 a.m.

And I would come running out of the office thinking that somebody had tried to break into the back door. So I started telling my husband that I was experiencing these noises while he was at work. All the walls had either banging or sounding. like something was running its hands down the wall. There were so many noises happening on three out of the four walls in the home office. I kept running out thinking that I was going to find somebody in my house. The noises just kept amplifying and getting worse and more frequent.

I felt like I had to get out of the house. And I grabbed my laptop and my phone and my keys, and I ran out out to the garage and got in the car and drove away from my house to a different part of the neighborhood and just started crying and telling my husband, I can't live here anymore. I don't want to do this. I'm sick to death of this. I can't focus. It's making me feel crazy. Everything crossed my mind from maybe the former owner still had a key. They were trying to get in. I couldn't figure out what was happening. Shortly after that, my husband also started working from home.

He started thinking that someone was breaking in to the point where he started taking a knife in the morning before he would go downstairs to work. There was so many times he came running upstairs thinking that somebody was here. Nobody ever was. It was just his turn, I guess, to start hearing all of the same things that I was hearing.

If my husband and my kids weren't hearing what I was hearing, I would be seriously questioning my sanity. They did hear a lot of stuff. We explained a lot of things away to our kids. Up until this point, my husband and I had been really careful. We still are, to this day. We have an explanation for everything so that they don't grow up thinking that they live in a haunted house. They had never heard us talk about any of this stuff. We always did it when they were not home or asleep.

The kids were in the basement. At this time, they were about five and six years old. They had come running upstairs. Mom, mom, we saw something in the basement. My heart drops. I said, what did you see in the basement? And they said, we saw a shadow figure. My blood goes cold.

What did it look like? The older one kind of motions with his hands. It was like a shadow, but I couldn't really see. see through it. I said, what did it do? He said it just kind of glided across the room and he showed me with his feet. And then it went through me and then it went into the wall with an outlet. You didn't see a shadow person. That was just your shadow in the basement. They were adamant that they saw it. So I took the older one downstairs first. I left the little one upstairs and said, show me where you saw it. And he retraced the path of this shadow person in the basement. And I said, interesting,

you know, trying to keep it pretty calm, neutral. I took him back upstairs and then I took the younger one downstairs and said, show me where you saw this thing. And so the little one shows me the same path and the exact same wall. And I just take him back upstairs and said, well, if you ever see it again, let me know, but I just think you saw your shadow. They didn't talk about it again until within the last three months. He said that he saw a shadow figure again, only. This time he said he opened the basement door, and it was standing at the bottom of the basement stairs.

He opened the door and saw it, slammed the door again. The older one told me what happened, and I said, You haven't seen anything like that in years. And he said, this time it was different. And I said, how was it different? This time it had legs. What do we do with that? I told my husband, if it keeps happening, we got to go.

I'm not going to have our kids grow up in something like this. There was one night I came home pretty late. My kids were already upstairs asleep. My husband was sitting on the couch. I came in, start asking him how the night was, telling him about my night. And I hear a kid's voice singing. It's late. Why are the kids awake?

I thought they'd be asleep by now. In total seriousness, my husband looks over at me and says, that's not the kids. Yes, it is. Of course that's the kids. He's like, it's not the kids. I've checked on them. multiple times. This thing starts stopping and starting,

and I don't know how to explain it. There's no speakers on. It's not really a song. It's more just like a lazy melody, like if a little kid was kind of just humming to themselves. It wasn't anything that would have been recorded on the radio. It just was this meandering tune in this child's voice.

And I kept arguing with it. my husband like, stop. Of course that's the kids. I'm telling you it's not the kids. So I raised up the stairs. I opened my son's door first. I looked at him and he was asleep in his bed. A foot away is my daughter's door. So I opened her door and she's asleep in bed. And I'm just standing there in the hallway. Looking in their two doors, seeing that they're both asleep and still hearing this music. Since I was letting light into my daughter's room. She pops her head up, and I'm looking at my daughter, and she's looking at me. She sleepily looks at me and says, what is that?

And I said, what is what? And she said, what is that singing? Don't know, honey, you might just be dreaming, just go back to sleep. She looks at me and says, I think that's just my brother trying to scare me. And then she lays back down and goes to sleep again. It eventually stopped. but I still can't explain it. We were out of ideas at this point.

We had done saging. We had called more electricians than I can count. We had spent thousands of dollars replacing wiring, lighting, TVs. We had already done everything that we could think of. We had a priest out to the house. He came over in full priestly attire, and brought his holy water with him. He just wanted to do a little blessing on the front door.

No, you're gonna go to every room in the house. So I walked around with him to every room, every corner of the house. He sprinkled holy water everywhere and did lots of blessings. He asked for more details. We explained what was happening in the house. He said, sometimes when people are having something like this happen, whatever the entity is that is in your house,

it's playful, tries to get you to trust it, definitely wants you to notice it, but doesn't do anything to make you feel scared or do anything that's enough to get you to leave. Then it starts to show its true colors after you start to trust. it. The night of Halloween, actually, my husband and I were woken up at about 3 o'clock in the morning to the smoke alarm going off in our bedroom. Long enough to get our attention. Always gave smoke alarms 10 seconds or so to stop because they were happening so frequently. This one went off longer

to the point where I thought there was an actual fire in the house. So my husband and I jump We opened the door to our bedroom. Let's go get the kids. We need to get out. Ran out onto the landing outside of our bedroom. At that point, the smoke alarm just stopped. My husband and I were just standing out on the landing in the dark, in total silence.

It wants us out here. It wants us to know it didn't work. How do you just go back to sleep? It truly just becomes part of your life. If something like this has never happened to you, you have all these things that you would do and all these ways that you would handle it. Really the only thing that you can do is just go back to sleep. You just have to go back to your everyday life.

Shortly after that, there was a night that my husband and I were sleeping. All of a sudden, what sounded like an old-fashioned music box, clanking away at an old-fashioned song, started blasting in our bedroom, full blast. I shot up in my bed, my husband shot up, jumped out of bed and started racing around the room trying to figure out where it was. He was racing around to his phone. It wasn't his phone. My phone wasn't my phone.

There was a TV in our room and he turned the power button on. It wasn't the TV. He turned the TV back off. There's nothing else in our room that it could have been. I sat in bed with the covers pulled up yelling, turn it off, turn it off, turn it off, turn it off, turn it off. All of a sudden, it just stopped. There's no reasonable explanation as to what it could have been.

I can handle noises, I can handle electric issues, but if anything starts making me question our safety or if I start seeing anything, that's my line in the sand. My husband was sick and when he gets sick with a cough in particular, he will sleep downstairs on a couch so he can cough freely and not wake me up all night. I was sleeping in our room. Almost every night I wake up at about 3 o'clock in the morning or so and fall back to sleep pretty soon. Out of nowhere, I feel the comforter behind me inflate.

It's here. As soon as I thought that, something yanks back my hair. I was trying to reach my phone, but I couldn't. The comforter flies over my face. I was trying to scream as lot as I could, but nothing was coming out. It probably lasted maybe five to ten seconds. As quickly as it started, it stopped. I have thought about it every day since it happened.

Maybe I was just asleep, maybe I was dreaming, but I don't think I was asleep and I don't think I was dreaming. And I've never had a dream like that. I don't get night tears, I don't get sleep paralysis, I don't get anything like that. My husband had to leave to go to a conference for four days, and I remember that. I remember telling him how crazy it is that I'm more afraid of what's inside our house than what's outside of our house when he's gone. How can you live in a house like that? You can't. As soon as the holidays are over, we got to go.

It seems to be very much attached to the house and in the bones of the house. I have to believe it's just attached to this house and hopefully when we leave it's going to stay put. I'm looking forward to that. I was like giving myself a pep talk earlier today. being like, oh, you're going to just do this. And I don't know. We'll see what happens. But, yeah, definitely nerves, for sure. That's why we don't talk about it with people. Yes. Yeah, I mean, things will. But yeah, I will, if anything major happens, I will reach back out and let you know. So the family still lives in the house. I know, I know. But last we heard,

heard they were safe and sound and happily ever after. But it has been a minute since we talked to them. Probably should do a welfare check or something on them. Anyway, we'll keep you posted. Yeah, I've never lived in a place that I thought was haunted, but, you know, I've had some friends who've lived in some haunted places, they said, and yeah, I wouldn't have lasted as long as that family, honestly, I would have gotten the hell out of there. But, you know, good for them.

They're okay. They made it. But let's take a breath. Let's take a break. And we'll be right back. All right, guys. So we know you all can't get enough for radio rental, right? Well, now you can.

Visit the Tenderfoot store at shop.tenderfoot.tv to grab our latest radio rental merch, like the Somewhere Hat and Open Late Women's Tee. Plus the exclusive drops like the Terry Carnation collection. You can even take the radio rental store home. Yeah, the whole thing. With our exclusive brick building Lego set. So treat yourself or grab a gift for a friend at shop.tendorfoot.tv.

And as we celebrate 10 years of Tenderfoot, yeah, that's right, we've got a special offer for our loyal listeners. Sign up for a new annual tenderfoot plus subscription or upgrade from your existing monthly plan and you'll get a free t-shirt from the shop. You can pick from dozens of radio rental, up and vanished, and tenderfoot designs. And yeah, exclusions apply.

So head over to promo.tendrofootplus.com to claim your free shirt before they run out. And they will. And as always, thanks for being a loyal radio rental customer. Later. Saturday nights are usually with my friends. And now there's no more wondering how I'll feel the next morning. As a busy adult who enjoys going out to dinner and having a couple drinks to unwind,

I still need to be fully present and active the next day. Now, whenever I know I'll be enjoying a few drinks, I just make sure to drink a bottle of Zbiotics beforehand so I can wake up, ready to tackle a morning workout, or head straight to the park. Zbiotics pre-alcohol probiotic drink is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. It was invented by PhD scientists to break down acetaldehyde, a byproduct of drinking alcohol. Free alcohol produces an enzyme that is designed to break down this byproduct.

Make pre-alcohol your first drink in the night, drink responsibly, and enjoy your next day activities. Zbiotics has sold more than 14 million bottles and earned the trust of thousands, including us. Try for yourself today. And if you're unsatisfied, they will refund your entire order. No questions asked. Head to Zbiotics.com slash radial rental.

Code radio rental for 15% off your first order. Something is happening in dot. DOSEN Creek. A wave of violence has swept over this community of just 13,000 people. It's like the kind of stuff you only hear about on TV. 15 murders in the last five years. Some criminals, I put them into the category of supervillains. I'm Timothy Sawa and from CBC's On Cover and the Fifth Estate, an investigation into deaths and disappearances in Dawson Creek and what's behind it all.

I'm not saying another word, leave me alone. The Mile Zero murders, available now on CBC List or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. My favorite part, you've listened to us. It's time for us to listen to you and hear your weird voicemails, which never cease to amaze me.

Let's see what we got. It's always something. Always something. All right. I'm ready. Check it out. Malachi. I love you.

I love this show. Thank you for everything you do. I'm signing off. This is John. He was like, Let's sign off in a second. John out. Malachi's killing it though.

Hi, the truth is real. Alado from Colorado. Love the show. What is that? What is that going on in the background? Where are these people? What? Hi, the truth is real.

Alado from Colorado. Love the show. He sounds trashed. Yeah. This is real. There's real. A kid in the background. I was a kid. I'm at the playground.

Perfect time. It's like, whoa, like, whoa. Let me know if you want me to be in one of your episodes. Like, you might. We may end up in one. Yeah, you might only like that. On the wrong end. I love our listeners.

Yeah. Yeah, we love you guys. Hey, thanks, Payne. Fun hanging out. But now we're going to check out another story, even creepier than this first one. This one's called Village Ghost, and it's back from episode 31. So let's check it out. All right. All right. So typically the way we'd like to start is I'll have you basically kind of set the scene for me, kind of where were you in life? How old were you? What was going on at the time that this kind of all began.

Right, right. 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, size university in the North Carolina Mountains. I had already attended there in 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 toward 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 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'm kind of got my head propped up. 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 realized something strange. I realized 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 the top of the door on the left side, but it just sort of stopped like something was physically

blocking it. And I lay 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'd put the fan in my closet. My fan's not there. 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 side 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 it. 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 rubbed their eyes and kind of shake their head to make sure it's real. And I did that. I'm 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 interest of 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, heart's 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-criticking in my brain all day as to what could it possibly happen. 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 what could have happened last night. I know I wasn't dreaming.

The next day was a Monday, and my first class was newswriting. 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. They're 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 in a 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 in his face.

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 and seeing us Maybe every now and again we get to see them That else you can think of

I think that's it I've told it so many times that it's like It becomes like instinct to tell it No that was a blast thank you Yeah no problem glad it worked out Yeah no thank you Yeah now my wife I've just been telling me for years, like, you should, you know,

looks like our friend here came in contact with the famous governor's village ghost. And according to legend, an old woman, or elderly woman, is said to haunt the campus dorms. And if you're wondering what school he went to, it was the University of North Carolina, Asheville. So if you want to pay her a visit, or have her pay you a visit, you know where to go. Yeah, I don't know. I'd last in that bed as long as that guy did. I think I would have just tried to jump out the window or run out of there. But, you know, good for him.

Sounds like he's okay. Sounds like he has a cool story to tell. Good for him. But let's all take a break. Let's chill out for a second and we'll be back. All right, guys. Appreciate you hanging out with me. It's been a pleasure.

Hearing some haunted places, creepy stories. Join me next week. And we'll check out some more scary, weird stuff. And this has been Radio Rental Rewind. Later.