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Radio Rental · Tenderfoot TV & Audacy

Episode 69

·47 min·4 clips
A runner alone in the woods hears a gut-wrenching shriek that sounds human and distressed.
Radio Rental opens with retail theater. The listener gets walked through the haunted video-store bit, with Terry Carnation treating terror like a rental counter problem that happens to need a waiver. The promotion has to be dodged. What is left is the show's usual hard turn: goofy, self-amused weirdness, then somebody's plain memory of a place that felt bad. One tape starts in Philadelphia. A guest says they moved there after college and got into running, though the excerpt cuts away before that story has much room. Terry comes back riffing. He complains about a kid saying he got hurt in the maze, admits the whole setup is rickety, and calls exposed nails spooky charm. The waiver joke is dry and dumb on purpose, and it clears space for the colder story: a family trying to buy a home. The guest keeps it ordinary. He and his wife moved their kids from Florida to New Jersey in fall 2021 and were stuck in a cramped apartment. They wanted somewhere permanent. House hunting had already burned them out, with offers dying because sellers wanted more than they would pay. Their real estate agent found one. The pictures looked big, spacious, and reasonable in a town and neighborhood they already liked. The slot was late. At 8 o'clock on a Friday, they pull up with the kids because there is no better time. The outside is wrong right away. Trees crowd the place, the gravel driveway feels creepy, and the house does not match the suburban look around it. Just a box. No odd parts, no backyard, nothing welcoming. A shingled square sitting there like it missed the memo.

As heard by us

A goofy rental-store frame gives way to grounded, slow-burn unease.

Radio Rental works here because it knows when to stay silly and when to get out of the way. Terry Carnation keeps the frame loose and a little dumb on purpose, then the stories slide into something more grounded: a move to Philadelphia, a new attachment to running and unfamiliar…

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Why you'd press play

Want creepy true stories dressed up as a deranged video-store rental?

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