Radio Rental - Storage Unit >>

Episode Date: May 12, 2023

Two brothers buy a storage locker with quite the surprise inside it. Is it enough to call the police? >> Home Alone

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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. Oh, hello. Welcome back to Radio Rental.

I'm so, so glad you're here. I, uh, might need someone to spot me. As you probably remember, last time you were here, my feline companion Malachi fell into the strange nebulous void that's been growing in the corner over there. Uh, yes, that one. That void. So, I've decided I'm going in. To save him. To save dear Malachi.

I have concocted a pretty good plan, I think. As you can see here, I've anchored myself to the cash register with this heavy-duty rope. And I've lubricated myself from head to toe with Crisco so I can better fit into the mouth of the void. To fit in there, I need to be svelte like an otter. Or a stick of butter. Or an otter covered in butter. Hmm. Hmm.

Plus, I've also got this trusty little headlamp right here, which is actually pretty nifty. I've been using it to read my mystery novel at night. And most importantly, I am bringing some tuna niblets. Just in case I can't find him down there and need to shake the bag. I imagine he's probably terrified. Poor little guy. Little Malachi. And also, I'll have them by my side in case I get hungry. Win-win.

Oh, here we go. Oh. Oh, the fear. The fear. Hmm. I know what you're probably going to say. Don't be a hero, Terry. You're too much, Terry. Look at your fearless nature,

taking on the void with nothing but tuna nibblets and a headlamp and a length of rope. But you know what? Here's what I have to say to you. It's hard not to be a hero when I... Oh, okay, okay. Good void. Nice void. Settle down, void. You know, on second thought, maybe I should do this tomorrow. Really doesn't feel like the day for spelunking a supernatural void.

I had a big breakfast. Farmer's breakfast. An English breakfast. And I still don't really have the right shoes for this. I mean, Crocs in a void. Oh, Malachi! Is that you? I'm coming! I'm coming, Malachi! I'm coming to save you! Okay, Terry, pull yourself together.

Here, I need you to spot me. I'm going to stand on the edge, and I'm going to give you a signal, okay? But lay on, or wait. Did you say that part? It's been a little while. Oh, oh, oh! Ah! Ah!

Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Hello? Hello, can you hear me? I'm in the void. It's actually kind of surprisingly cozy in here. It's nice in the void. It's a good temperature.

You know, I think you could throw on a light sweater at night and be quite comfortable, actually. Ah! Terry, don't get distracted. Okay, listen. While I'm figuring out my surroundings, how about you pop in a tape for yourself? Right up there on the top of the box. Ah, it's gonna be pretty hard for me to host this episode. Just, just stick it in. My brother and I were working together on a piece of property that my family had owned. This piece of property, it was really big and open. There were a lot of points in time during the day where we had excessive amount of time

to fill and to keep ourselves amused. There was a big waterway, sort of an inlet that went through this property that seemed to be really good for fishing. We would often catch people trespassing and troll down the waterway. So we figured at some point we'd like to get fishing poles and just be a fun thing to do. It was just one of those things that was in the back of our mind. Right across the street from this piece of property was a mini storage complex. And my brother and I rolled into work one day and there was a sign out in front that said, Storage Unit Auction Today.

Maybe there'll be fishing poles. There might be an old bike, something interesting. It was a slow day to begin with, just thought it'd be fun to go over and see what it was all about. Having been a mini storage unit owner as a family business, we had often been on the other side of these where people were abandoning their units and we were auctioning them. When someone abandons a unit, by law the unit's contents need to be auctioned off. So the facility will contact an auctioneer, they'll put ads and papers, they'll show up, get a group

of people there, they open the storage, get a group of people there. They open the storage unit door. Everyone gets 30, 40 seconds to peek in and they start the auction. From that point, the new owners of the unit typically have about 24 hours to vacate that unit. So my brother and I walk over to the unit. There's a small group of people there and the auctioneer. He kind of walks us through. We start at the first unit.

There were probably six or seven units going up for auction that day. They roll open the door. It's typical storage unit fare. Old mattresses, old boxes of VCRs, stuff that it costs more to throw it away. We passed up a couple of them, and at the end of the hall, they had a series of really small units. They're about four feet by four feet, and the auctioneer opened this one up. My brother and I got excited because we saw fishing poles. There are about five fishing poles in the back.

Having just wanted a couple of fishing poles, we thought this would be great. A good fishing pole can be fairly expensive. They looked nice and there were five of them taped together. We throw down our bid. This one actually gets bid up a little bit, but it only ends up going for about $35. About 40 seconds after the auction starts, that whole unit full of whatever else is in there and five fishing poles is ours. We go back across the street, we get some big garbage cans out, we wheel them over and

we start sifting through what's in here. Legal boxes, a small broken desk, there's piles of books, nothing that you would look in there and say, oh, there's some great value here. Clearly someone's stuff that for whatever reason, they just didn't want anymore. And you could understand why they left it behind. We're throwing stuff away. We're kind of laughing about it. We get to the desk and we have that thought,

what if someone has left their Mickey Mandel baseball cards and gold doubloon collection in here. We're going to retire from this $35 unit. We're going through and we're throwing stuff away and the first thing that was just really odd in this unit was the sheer amount of anatomy books. There was just anatomy book after anatomy book. We just thought it was weird. We're kind of sorting all those books aside, and my younger brother, who's in the actual unit, it's too small for the two of us to be in, he's in it and he's handing things

out. He gets all excited because he found this tied up garbage bag. And he goes, hey, hey Ty, here, here, check this out. So he hands me this garbage bag and I look at it and it's tied real tight. You can't see what's inside of it. Key pops out and we're both kind of like, what's in here? I open up the garbage bag and I pull it out and it's just another garbage bag. I untie that garbage bag and I pull that out and it's another garbage bag.

And they're black. They're like the black thick ones. So you can't see through them. We untie it again, and I pull it out and there's another garbage bag. And my brother's asking me, what's in there? And I keep saying, it's just more garbage bags. And so I pull it up. His face gets real squinty. He just stares at it. This garbage bag was the thin, translucent bag. And I look, and I see at the end, a tail's poked through.

This curled-out tail has poked through the bag. He's looking at me, and he goes, Is there a cat in that bag? We both kind of get that look where I don't want to open the last bag. Because at this point you can see it and it's circular and it's skeletal. Sure enough I open it up. There's a dead cat in this bag. It was the most offsetting thing I had seen. It wasn't like it was a taxidermied dead cat. Its mouth skin had gotten so dry that it had pulled back over the actual skull. This cat was just put in this bag and tied up and left.

We just looked at each other. This is just absurd. And we're looking around, and then all of a sudden we're noticing that these anatomy books, a lot of them are animal anatomy books. We just get kind of oddly nervous. We turn back around and we look back in the unit

to get more stuff, and we find there's just a bunch more garbage bags in there. He brought out another bag and then another bag. We just sat them in the hallway of this mini storage complex and we're just looking at them. Then he starts bringing out these odd drawings of cats. Anatomical drawings. They weren't art student drawings. They weren't studies on bones and where bones connect or anything. They were just weird drawings. We found a few of the little pink plastic cat food and water dishes in there. And it just all together it told just the eeriest story.

At that point I couldn't help myself. We had to open it up and see what's inside. And so you open up the second bag, which is another bag full of bags, and a bag and a bag. You get down there, and then there's just another cat. Except this time, it was more skeletal. We open up another bag, and this was just a bag filled with random bones of animals. As far as we could tell, not understanding full cat anatomy, There had to be three or four cats, at least worth of random parts.

And we both had this look, and we kind of looked at each other, and we were like, did we just buy a serial killer storage unit? What is this? It didn't feel scientific. It didn't feel artistic. It just felt weird. And gross. It's one thing if you found a taxidermy, something someone had did purposefully.

This was just dead animal body hoarding. Full abandonment of it. What would make someone put a dead cat in bags in a storage unit? None of it made sense. We find all this stuff. We don't really know what to do with it. Something about it just didn't feel right, just throwing these animals in the garbage can.

And I asked my brother, I said, should we tell someone about this? Is this something you call the police about? What do you even say? So we just kind of figured, let's finish what we're doing. We put all the bodies and weirdness over in the corner, wrapped up the rest of the day, took everything that of use back over to our property. We reopened the bags just because we were mentally trying to piece together exactly how many animals we had here.

And that's when we figured it was probably four or five total. And then we're just generally left in sort of a state of disgust for the rest of the day. It felt like we had walked in to somebody's secret, but clearly a secret that they didn't care about getting out. So the next day, it really bothered me. If I don't tell someone this and something happens, I could have done something about,

I'm going to feel responsible for that forever. I didn't feel good about calling the police, because again, it didn't seem like a crime. It just seemed odd. I called the mini storage unit complex the next day and I explained, you know, hey, my brother and I were there yesterday. We bought the 4x4 unit. And I said, is there any chance that the guy who owned that unit was maybe a high school science teacher or was he some sort of biologist?

And the person that answered the phone just laughed. And she goes, ha, not that guy. Why do you ask? I said, well, you know, we bought his unit. It was filled with dead cats. And she pauses for a second. I kind of assumed she was pausing out of shock. But then she goes, that makes so much sense.

And I said, why? And she goes, well, we opened up another one of his abandoned units, and it was filled with empty cat carriers. Oh, wow, what a disturbing story. Hey, are you still up there? If you are, it's time for your ads. Listen to the ads. This is an ad break. Don't skip forward on them. Listen to them. This is an ad by BetterHelp. What comes to mind when you hear the word gratitude? Maybe it's a daily practice, or maybe it feels hard to be grateful right now. Don't forget to give yourself some thanks by investing in your well-being.

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BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Uh, update from the void. Still no sign of Malachi. But I did find my missing sketcher. So, small victories. We take our victories where we can find them. I really sincerely hope

I haven't lost poor Malachi to this abyss. Malachi! Malachi! Little Malachi! Mama pew! Pew pew! Come get your niblets. Get your tuna niblets.

Here they are. Maybe he doesn't like these that much. I'm not sure. I mean... They do smell revolting. Mmm. Mmm. Mmm. I believe you don't have bad. Hmm. Hmm. Our treats aren't half bad.

I am a bit peckish. That breakfast really burned off. Okay, Malachi, come get your treats before Daddy eats them all. And you, up there, out there, wherever you are, back in your dimension, how about you pop in another tape for yourself, okay? And I'll pop in another tune and niblet. Let's do it. This happened about a year ago and probably around August. I have two little boys with my husband. I also have a dog. We live in southern Orange County. Nice

house, single-story. I'm a stay-at-home mom. My husband works a lot, travels quite a bit for work, maybe a few times a month. So I'm pretty used to that. It's not a big deal for me. This happened on a Thursday. He was gone and he wasn't going to be back until about Sunday. It was a normal day. School, come home, dinner, put my boys to bed probably around 9 o'clock, sleep probably around 10.30, was woken up in the middle of the night by my dog. She's a big black German Shepherd. She's like usually dead silent. It's very unusual for her to wake me up in the middle of the night.

And even though it was dark, I could see her outline. She had her ears perked up. She looked frozen like she saw something. Grabbed my phone thinking immediately I'm going to call the police. You can't just call the police because your dog's freaking out. So I put my phone down. call the police. You can't just call the police because your dog's freaking out. So I put my phone down. I got up, went to go see what her problem was because she started barking. We have a long hallway that's all windows. Our front door is also half clear glass. It's all pretty open. So I start walking down the hall.

I'm yelling at her. I'm trying to get her to calm down, but she's just going nuts. I look out the window. I'm assuming it's gonna be a squirrel or a rabbit that's making her lose her mind. And I look out the window to my left, maybe 10, 15 feet away from me,

there's a man standing there. I clearly don't know who he is. It's not my husband, I can tell you that. He's taller than my husband. He's taller than my husband. He's bigger than my husband. And on his head, he's wearing one of those latex horse heads. It was terrifying. He's not moving.

He doesn't say anything. I honestly just froze for a few seconds. My dog did as well. I was sort of still half asleep, so I'm kind of like trying to recognize what the hell is going on and who this person is. They don't move. I don't move. We just stand there. Blue starts barking again. I honestly didn't know what to do. I couldn't run back and go get my phone. My kids are in between me and this guy. So I wasn't going to move or go anywhere.

And I certainly didn't have, like, a weapon handy, like a baseball bat. I thought, like, is my door locked? I reach out, and I grab my front door handle, and it's not locked. So, snap it closed, he starts coming closer to the door towards the glass all of a sudden I just kind of freak out

and I'm like you're not getting in my fucking door I just kind of lose it and try to be tougher than I am trying to appear to be scary. He came forward and he says very, very clearly, he's not even home until Sunday. He looks down at my dog and he says, Blue, you shouldn't wake the kids until seven.

The last thing that he ever says to me, which is like still very haunting, he's like, Mama, you don't even have the code to the gun safe. I don't recognize the voice. I don't know the voice. But he's right. My husband is not going to be home until Sunday, which is a very strange thing. It's not like something I necessarily tell people when my husband is gone. We do have a gun safe.

It's one of those hand safes that you put your hand in and it reads your fingerprints. A very strange fact for him to know. but you put your hand in and it reads your fingerprints. A very strange fact for him to know. I'm starting to kind of back up and sort of snap out of it a little bit. And then he just pulls his horse mask off the glass. He waves at me. He just turned around, walked down the driveway, and he's gone. I was expecting him to come back. I remember, like, running into our room.

I grabbed my phone. I called the police. I checked on my kids. We live in, like, a one-story house. There's windows everywhere. Maybe he's not gonna come back to the front door and make a move. I checked on my kids. We live in like a one-story house. There's windows everywhere. Maybe he's not gonna come back to the front door. Maybe he's gonna go to the back door. And then I just waited for the police.

I was terrified. I just told them this story. I said, there was a guy in a latex horse head who came to my door and was saying really creepy shit. And he knew stuff about my family and he knew things that nobody else would know. So of course they thought it was my husband. Physically, it was not him.

This guy was very tall and very big. There's like no possibility that it was him. They basically made it pretty clear that there was nothing that was going to happen. My next-door neighbors do have cameras. The closest thing to being caught on camera was a figure, a black blob. But if you really look at it, and if I said,

oh, do you see the horse head? You could see it. I mean, you could see it's like an outline. It's definitely not like a normal human head. Aside from that, nothing. Called my husband. He's like, what the hell is going on? My first question was like, who would you tell about this?

And he's like, well, I've told friends offhand. He knows a lot of people. He's a pretty social guy. I just cannot imagine anyone doing something like this. It wouldn't be necessarily the stuff that this guy knew. I expected something else to happen. I expected him to come back expected something else to happen. I expected him to come back or something bad to happen. We have cameras covering now our trash cans, our front door,

our back door. Everything is secure. We've alerted our neighbors. We've talked to people. Nothing happened. No one ever came to our door, nothing was left, absolutely nothing. I think about it a lot. I just feel extra cautious about locking doors and windows and just being super aware of my surroundings, people that I meet, people I talk to.

It doesn't go away. I'm constantly trying my surroundings, people that I meet, people I talk to. It doesn't go away. I'm constantly trying to figure it out. Who the fuck is this guy? Is this person watching me in the grocery store? It's like a mind fuck, right? Because if there were resolution to it, then I'd be fine right now. Crime Writers On is the podcast where authors and journalists talk about the latest true crime series, documentaries, and podcasts. Talk about what's on the charts and find those up and coming

podcasts you'll be talking about. It's like a fun and smart book club discussing what makes good 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.

Hey, look who's here! I think he was attracted to my scent. I mean, I do have Crisco all over my body. Oh, Malachi buddy. Oh, it's so good to see you. It's so good to see you. Hum hum hum hum. Tongue kiss.

Okay, up there, time to hoist us up. Okay, hoist us, hoist us up now. I hate that word, hoist. Hoist, hoist away. How do they say it? Belay on. Belay, belay off. Belay up.

Can someone please belay me? Wait, whoa. Oh, oh my god, what happened to the rope? My rope, it slipped off of my oily body while I was looking for Malachi. There's no rope! Oh my god! We're doomed Malachi, doomed! Oh shut up Void, this isn't funny. Well friend, I'm so sorry I can't be there to see you out, but uh hopefully next week I'll find my way out of this

pit of despair. Oh, ha ha ha. You're hilarious, boy. You're hilarious. Hardy har har. Until next time. We'll be right back. posted 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 Lachlan. 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. Search for Haunted Canada on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you're listening right now. Then join me if you dare.