Radio Rental · Tenderfoot TV & Audacy

Episode 70

·46 min·4 clips

In a deserted town, a man sees a person with a kitchen knife staring blankly from a diner window.

1. Radio Rental Episode 70 presents two listener-submitted supernatural horror stories, hosted by Rainn Wilson as the eccentric Terry Carnation, framed around a Day of the Dead observance. 2. Terry Carnation, played by Rainn Wilson, hosts from a fictional video rental store, setting up each story with deadpan humor; the storytellers are anonymous listeners sharing first-person experiences. 3. The episode asks whether seemingly unrelated and inexplicable events — animal behavior, visual omens, and mass human reactions — can be premonitions of disaster. 4. In the first story, a man and his wife drive to Elk River, Idaho, a small town near Moscow, roughly 20 years before the episode aired, planning a camping trip. 5. On the mountain above Elk River, they find all campsites packed, secure one last spot, and then watch a steady bumper-to-bumper stream of cars evacuate the mountain without explanation. 6. After the final car leaves, the couple hears screams from two directions — one from down the mountain, one from the woods directly behind their tent — which begin to answer each other and grow less human-sounding. 7. The couple breaks camp in a panic and drives down the mountain, passing an abandoned campsite where gear remains but the car is gone. 8. At the base, the town of Elk River appears entirely deserted — no cars, no people, only a single flashing red light — despite having been bustling with tourists and hunters hours earlier. 9. A figure in a stained apron holds a kitchen knife inside a diner-style building, staring blankly out the window at the empty street, then begins yelling at no one visible. 10. On the highway out of town, a tall figure in a long black trench coat walks down the center of the road; as the couple passes, the figure slowly turns to reveal a pale jaw and an extremely wide grin. 11. As they reach the highway turnoff, a dark farm truck with round headlights roars to life, pulls in behind them, and tailgates them at speed along a mountain road with no shoulder for miles. 12. The pursuing truck vanishes without any sign of slowing, stopping, or turning around the moment they pass a 'Thank you for visiting Elk River' sign. 13. The narrator says the couple drove home without stopping, didn't sleep, and ultimately accepted the experience has no logical explanation, with the possibility of a supernatural cause being more credible than any rational through-line. 14. The second story is set in rural Michigan in late September 2020, during COVID lockdowns, where a woman lived with her husband — a large-animal veterinarian — her two children, and her visiting mother from Arkansas. 15. On the night of September 24th, their large black rooster crowed continuously every five minutes from sunset until dawn, which the narrator states is abnormal behavior signaling danger, having kept chickens for over 10 years. 16. The next morning, the narrator found a clear toothpaste skull imprint on her dark granite bathroom vanity and immediately texted her husband 'something bad is going to happen,' a certainty she describes as completely clear. 17. The rooster was found dead in the back of the coop with no injuries, no feathers lost, no signs of disease or predator attack; the veterinarian husband concluded it had crowed itself to death, possibly from a stress-induced heart attack. 18. Days later, while driving to Colorado, the family received a call from an ER nurse asking about her brother's medical history; he had been found collapsed and alone in his Chicago apartment with aspirated pneumonia. 19. Reviewing screenshots of her brother's texts to his best friend, the narrator confirmed her brother first reported severe symptoms — fever and uncontrollable shaking — on September 24th, matching both the rooster's death and the toothpaste skull to the hour. 20. Her brother was hospitalized for 150 days with a brain infection and, according to the narrator, will never make a full recovery — a detail the narrator frames alongside the folklore that a black rooster crowing at night and dying suddenly is among the worst omens of death.

As heard by us

A plainspoken road scare that turns an ordinary drive into a disappearing act.

Radio Rental Episode 70 turns a roadside encounter into a steady, low-key slide into dread. It starts in the show's familiar video-store frame, then narrows to a first-person account that stays plain on purpose: a figure on the shoulder, a truck waking in the dark, headlights…

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Why you'd press play

You get a mountain-highway tail that vanishes at the turn.

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