Radio Rental · Tenderfoot TV & Audacy

Episode 72

·48 min·4 clips

Tim asks if they want to see where the guns were kept, hinting he might be his mother's killer.

The store has a doll now. Nobody explains where it came from, which feels about right for Radio Rental. The host welcomes the customer in and keeps the video-store bit crooked and loose, selling the tapes as true scary stories from real people without getting too polished about it. Then the ads crash the mood. After the break, he calls for another tape and talks to Dolly like she is part of the inventory system. Dolly gets approval. He almost immediately seems sorry there is another haunted object with its own agenda, since the piano is already interrupting him. The piano interrupts right on cue. That turns into a censorship bit, silly enough that the next hard cut lands colder than it should. Then the guest takes over. The story begins in the summer of 2011, when the guest is a college student who has transferred closer to home and needs housing fast. Their mom has more time to search, so she looks online while the guest works. Craigslist ads start showing up. The excerpt only gets to the moment when the mother sees one, so the danger is still tucked inside boring logistics. That is the creep of it. Nothing supernatural has happened in the tape yet. It just sounds like a memory being pulled back together, one plain detail at a time.

As heard by us

A cheap-room lead and a scruffy frame let the dread creep in sideways.

Radio Rental pairs Terry Carnation's haunted-video-store framing with a true story about a summer 2011 college student looking for housing after transferring closer to home.

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Why you'd press play

Play this if you want a creepy bargain that curdles fast.

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