Terry Carnation (19:28)

You see, this is why I don't run. Nothing good can possibly come from running. Was it worth it? Was the improvement in your cardiovascular health worth the emotional scarring? Worth the toll? Was meeting a real life witch worth it for the Fitbit Score? If the answer is yes, then honestly leave my store right now. I'm not kidding. Leave and just get the fuck out. In other news, let's run some ads to pay the bills. Please enjoy.

Unknown Advertiser (20:08)

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Unknown Advertiser (21:12)

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Terry Carnation (22:21)

I'm sorry, no refunds. That's the policy. Save your tears for someone who cares, kid. I told you it was going to be scary and maybe even a little bitty bit dangerous. It's a. Here, just take this microwave popcorn packet. Now beat it. I'm so sorry. That kid was trying to claim he got hurt in the maze. Well, look, I'll admit the whole operation is a little rickety. Listen, the occasional exposed nail is just part of the spooky charm. It's old fashioned. Sorry, I'm not Frank Geary. It's a haunted maze and a dilapidated video store, asshole. Plus, the kid signed a waiver, so it's fine. Now let's get you set up with a whole other tape and let the spooky thrills continue. Oh, this one should be good. Mmm. Maybe I should have you, the listener, sign a waiver too. Don't read the fine print.

Unknown Storyteller (23:38)

My wife and I, we moved our kids up to New Jersey from Florida in the fall of 2021. We lived in this little apartment. It was really cramped. We were renting at the time and we thought, you know, we really want to try and buy a house up here because we know this is going to be a permanent move and we want to make this into something long lasting. So let's start house hunting. Found a couple of houses that we liked. We put in offers. Nothing ever came from them. They were always asking for more than what we were willing to pay. Our real estate agent was so sweet, she actually found one for us. It was in a town we liked, in a really nice neighborhood. And from the pictures, it looked big and spacious for what they were asking for. It was reasonable. So we went to go check it out and the only time that she had available was 8 o'clock on a Friday. We ended up meeting her there. We brought the kids with us because it was so late. We pull up to this thing at 8:00 at night. Tons of trees, very creepy gravel driveway. I was thinking already from the outside, like, I don't know if this is going to be our place. It doesn't feel very welcoming. It didn't look like any of the others on the block. The others looked very suburban America. This one looked like a shingled big square, like a block just put there. There were no parts that came out. There was nothing that was sticking out that was different. There wasn't even a backyard. It was just a box of a building. We walked into the house. The first thing that hit me was the smell. In fact, all of us noticed it. Even my kids held their noses. Big smell of cigarettes. It was stale and musty and it smelled kind of damp and wet. It smelled like somebody had been a smoker there their whole lives. And it had seeped into everything. It was fully furnished. Everything was still left in it from the previous owners. There were couches, there were chairs. The kitchen still had dishes. I believe that there was maybe even still a dish in the sink or two newspapers that were still on the table. There were books that had been, you know, splayed open as if somebody had been in the middle of reading them. Magnets with pictures, family pictures. There was a bulletin board up on the wall with family things. I mean, nothing had been moved. Everything was still exactly where it was. Immediately made me feel like this place is just not a comfortable house and we were going to have to do a ton of work on it, not just from the outside, but also the inside. We needed to get rid of some things and whatever was causing that smell needed to be taken care of. There was no seller. It was the bank that was doing the selling. The courts were still deciding as to who was going to be selling it, where the money was going to. And normally what happens is that if there is no next of kin, then the bank gets it or the courts have that decision. We knew that there was maybe the possibility that maybe this is the last in a line of family and like, there was no one to sell the house. So it was maybe going to be a bit more of a complicated process to actually get this house because there were some decisions that still had to be made legally, but we still wanted to give it a shot. I had that in mind when I was looking at it. And I thought, okay, maybe that musty smell is, you know, years and years and years of being lived in and there's nobody that's been around to Clean this place out. So my first thought is, if we do get this house, we need a dumpster or a few dumpsters because there's a ton of stuff in here. It wasn't a hoarder house, but it definitely felt old. But it was really big and I liked the layout. It was going to need work, but I thought, okay, there's potential here. With a little bit of elbow grease, we could actually make this place pretty livable. So we're moving through the house. I'm still smelling that mustiness, still feeling like this place is just a little humid. It's a little damp. Maybe the air conditioner hasn't been working. We go up these stairs and we get to the bedrooms and the smells got stronger, mustier, wetter. That was when to me, I was putting the pieces together of the house is being sold by the bank. It's being arbitrated in the courts. There's a lot of different questions about this place. And I thought, okay, maybe somebody passed away in this house. It's very possible that they just got rid of the person and they just kind of left the house alone. That wasn't something that bothered me. It wasn't a deal breaker. I felt sad that that might have happened. But people pass away in houses all the time. It definitely wasn't something that stood out to me as a red flag. Then we get to the master bedroom. The master bedroom was red. The carpet was red. There were red drapes. I think the wallpaper was even like a burgundy. Everything was red. It was kind of scary. It was like a thing from, like a villain in a Disney movie. The smell of that must was really, really strong in the bedroom. My first thought is, okay, if this was an older person, they probably died in the bedroom. Then we look in the bathroom that's connected to it, my wife's. And my first reaction was to hold our kids back so they didn't go in there. The first thing I thought was that there was a carpet in the bathroom. And then when I looked closer, I actually thought that it was a moldy rug because it was stained with blacks and greens and browns. And I thought, oh my God, what happened here? And how could they just leave it like this for the showing? And then I noticed that it wasn't regular. It wasn't rectangular, it wasn't circular. It wasn't like a bathroom rug. It was an irregular shaped, huge patch of mold that almost covered the entire tiled floor. A carpet of greens and blacks and browns that was literally carpeting from the entrance where the door was all the way to the tub and to the toilet. Even our real estate agent said, what the hell? She didn't know about this. This was the first time she'd visited this house. We're looking at the floor. I've seen mold before. Mold doesn't grow like this just from wetness. And bathroom floors, tiled. Like, things evaporate. Things don't sink into the floors. This is something that hasn't been cleaned. This is something that has been left. This is something organic. It was where the smell in the house was coming from. That mustiness was kind of centered just in that room. And then I looked at the toilet. The toilet was kind of positioned in the corner of the room, so there was, like a wall next to it as there was one behind it. The wall next to it, about four or five feet up. It looked like somebody had scratched into the wall and had tore out chunks of the wood and the drywall and the studs behind it. It looked like it had been clawed. And I thought, that's really strange. Unless there was, like, a picture hanging there, and it just. Somebody knocked it hard down off the wall. Like, what would cause that? Were they working on something? Were they trying to install something? Cause it was straight through the drywall, and there were literally chunks of wood that were, like, poking out. It was when we were walking away from that that I thought, you know, that's interesting. That's right at seat level. That's where somebody's head would be. If you're sitting on the toilet. I feel like I kind of got my answer when we got to the basement. The basement was massive. It was the size of the entire house. Everything under the house was this very finished basement. And I thought, oh, my God, this is great. This is going to be a place I can do projects and hobbies, and the kids are going to have a playroom down here. First thing I noticed was a gun safe right at the bottom of the stairs. And there was a revolver sitting right on top of the gun safe. The gun safe itself was locked, but there was an unholstered revolver just sitting on there. And there were a couple of bullets scattered around it. And I immediately went up to it and, like, stood in front of it so my kids couldn't see it or they couldn't grab it. I looked at it. There weren't any bullets in it. And I said the first thing to my real estate agent. I said, that's a gun. And she looked at it and she went, well, that is a gun. That's Interesting. I think that comes with the house. Do you guys want a gun? And I said, well, I wonder what else is in the safe. We start looking around the basement. There's tons of stuff there. This guy had hunting equipment, workout equipment, tools, everything. At that point, we went back up to the kitchen, and we started looking around, and the kids were kind of telling us their thoughts on the house. And we started talking to a real estate agent. And she said, you know, the fact that it's in arbitration right now and that the courts are still kind of deciding some stuff, that means you may have a lot of leeway, and it means that a lot of people might not be wanting to stick it out. Why don't you make an offer and we can see how it goes? We said, you know, all right, if we make an offer on this place, we probably are going to pay a lot less than we would anywhere else, and we could put the rest of that money into actually fixing it up. I don't know what it was that struck me, but I saw something on a bulletin board in the kitchen, and it was a thank you letter from a bunch of students. I googled the last name when I was standing there, because I thought, oh, maybe this is their house. I was curious about who the people were that lived here, and there was a lot of things that were all over the place with their name on it. So I thought, all right, I'll just check it out. The thing that I saw was the obituary for the husband. The wife had passed away a few years before the husband, and his obituary was very vague. It was very short. It even mentioned something about how he was sad and heartbroken since his wife had passed away. And literally, everything just kind of clicked in my head at that moment. I started making the connections. Okay, something spilled in the bathroom. There's a hole next to the toilet in the wall. And there was a gun that somebody must have just placed really quickly on top of the gun safe, because they couldn't get into the gun safe. And maybe that's close enough. And I came to the conclusion that somebody had probably killed himself in that bathroom. Nobody went and cleaned up anything in the bathroom after that. Nobody cleaned up the spills. I imagine it was just a really quick situation where they just wanted to get rid of it and leave. It made a lot of sense to me. So the first thing I did is I went and took my wife aside and I said that. She nodded and she said, wow, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. And I showed her the obituary, and she Asked me, does that change how you feel about this house? And I said, no, it doesn't make any difference. It's just really sad. And I just want you to be aware of these conclusions that I'm coming to. After we spoke to the real estate agent for the last time, we shared the idea with her. We told her that we were still interested. We left the house, walked back to the car. We realized how late it was, and the kids hadn't eaten. So we decided that we're going to go get the kids some burgers or something from McDonald's. Immediately, my daughter falls asleep in the back seat. My son is asking us questions about the house, and he's trying to chime in with his opinion as his mom and I are talking about what we just saw, what we experienced, what we believe happened. You know, just got that weird feeling and the mustiness that is biohazard. Like that's something we might need to take care of pretty quickly, because who knows what damage it could have done to the floorboards. But I definitely got a sense from my wife, and I think I was kind of emanating this, too, this feeling of just being very creeped out by that house. What about this really devastating, sad story that we've just put together in our minds, and do we want to live in a place where it has that kind of a history to it? We're still kind of chatting back and forth. My wife turns around to our son, says, hey, we're almost at McDonald's. Can you go ahead and wake up your sister? She turns back around again, and at that moment, we heard the sound of a deep, old man's phlegmy smoker's cough coming from the backseat. And it smells like cigarettes in the car. And we don't smoke. We heard it so clearly, so distinctly, that my wife and I looked at each other. We looked back at the kids, and my son is looking right at us with his eyes wide open. And then he turned his head and looked at the trunk. And then he looked back at us, and he looked terrified. My wife and I immediately do a double take. We look at each other. I said, did you hear that? And she said, I heard that. What was that? And I look at our son, and he just looks at the backseat again, and he looks at us again, and he goes, I think there's someone in the car. I immediately just froze. That was not my daughter. That was not my son. We all were thinking the same thing. Someone crawled into our van when we were in that house without saying Anything. I pull over the car. My wife is looking at me, terrified. Almost in panic mode at this point, because, like, what else could it be? There was nobody on the sidewalks. I definitely couldn't hear anybody through the windows as we're talking, as we're driving. That sound came from inside the car. I stepped out of the car and went to the trunk. My son was so scared, he didn't even want to look to see if there was anything there. And anything that I would do anytime, any other day, he would want to be there looking, seeing what he could do, seeing if he can get his hands dirty, too. I opened up the trunk, and I was prepared for anything. I didn't have anything in my hands. No baseball bat or wrench or anything. So I was thinking, okay, I'm going to have to punch him. And there was nothing there. I did a double take. I looked underneath things. I reached my hand under the seat in front of it. Not that anyone could actually fit there, but I tried anyway, and there was nobody there. The first question I had for my son was, you heard that too, right? And he went, yeah, yeah, there's someone in the trunk. And I went, no, there's nobody here. And I looked around at that point at the sidewalks and anything behind us. Was there somebody walking? Was there somebody in a car next to us? There's nobody here. There's nothing. I closed the trunk, and I got back in the car. My wife is still looking terrified. My son's still looking terrified. My daughter's waking up. She has no idea why we're still scared. My son kept saying, are you sure there's no one back there? Are you sure there's no one back there? And I said, no, there's nothing here. And he just went, no, daddy, there's someone back there. And I said, no, there's not. The first thing that I said to my wife was, did we just hear a ghost? Did something come with us from that house? In my head, I'm starting to immediately make these connections between. We just left what was definitely a smoker's house, believing and with the almost certainty that this person had killed himself. And here's this family that then leaves his house and we hear a smoker's cough. I have never believed in ghosts. I always feel like there's a rational explanation to things. It just was a very strange thing to happen. It's the only time in my life where I ever felt like, okay, I just experienced something that I can't explain. If this is a ghost, if this is Some sort of energy that has followed us home. Is it still with us? If it was a ghost, did he like us? Did he want to get to know us? Did he want us to buy his house? All these things were going through my head. It's the only time in my entire life where I felt as if we experienced something. I don't want to say supernatural, but it was unexplainable. I think it's a good thing that we didn't end up getting the house. The amount of work and time and money. But if there was anything that was going to ever make me think that ghosts are real, it was that.

Terry Carnation (40:51)

Jeez Louise. Wow. Grizzly. What a saga. A chain smoking ghost. That's honestly pretty cool. But look, I didn't like how judgy that family was about the mold in the house. I mean, mold isn't that bad for you. Mold. Mold never hurt anyone. And if you are concerned about mold on the carpet, I. I probably wouldn't come back to this little store. That's all I'm saying. Look, I'm alive. You'll be fine. You're fine. You're fine. I mean, without mold, there's no such thing as cheese. You're welcome. So let's play some ads while I light up tar. That's some smooth breakfast of champions.

Rainn Wilson (42:04)

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Unknown Advertiser (43:21)

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Unknown Advertiser (43:50)

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Terry Carnation (44:24)

Okay, okay, okay. I hear you all. I hear you. You have been heard. Bunch of ingrates. It's too much for you, huh? Fine. Then you're going to get exactly what you asked for. Terry's not so Fun House is a fish. Officially closed. Serrado finito.

Unknown Runner (44:42)

Yeah.

Terry Carnation (44:43)

Oh, sorry. Not sorry. If you're gonna complain this much, then the fun is over.

Unknown Storyteller (44:47)

So just, you know. What?

Terry Carnation (44:49)

Just all of you. Hey.

Unknown Storyteller (44:51)

Get out of here.

Terry Carnation (44:51)

That's it. That's right.

Unknown Storyteller (44:52)

We're done.

Terry Carnation (44:53)

Get out of here. Scram. Goodbye. Oh, boo hoo hoo. Thanks for coming. Goodbye. I'm gonna miss you so much. Your costume sucked anyway. Get out. Out. Wow, Kids these days can't handle anything. Apparently, Malachi dressed as a werewolf at the end, and that was way too much for these kitties. And sure, I mean, as I do every year, I pumped him up on pumpkin spice and catnip before his shift, but a potent combo. But I promised scary and I needed to deliver. Oh, Jesus. Malachi. Oh, God.

Unknown Storyteller (45:34)

Oh.

Terry Carnation (45:37)

You see? Not that scary. Oh, geez.

Unknown Storyteller (45:39)

Ow.

Terry Carnation (45:40)

What the hell? No more pumpkin spice for you. Should have learned my lesson last year. But last year's all a big blur, to be honest. Anyway, thank you all for joining us for Halloween, dear customer, and we'll see you again soon on the other side of the holiday. Stay spooky out there. Okay, okay, Malachi, settle down. Easy, boy. Settle down. I'll have to withhold your wages. Okay, okay, fine. I'll give you a raise. That's. That's what I meant all along. Sweet kitty. Sweet, sweet kitty. Oh, boy. Get out while you still can.

Rainn Wilson (46:27)

RadioRental is created by Payne Lindsay and brought to you by Tenderfoot tv. Lead producer is Eric Quintana. Executive producers are Payne Lindsay and Donald Albright. Hosted by Rainn Wilson as his character, Terry Carnation. Written and produced by Meredith Steadman. Additional writing by Mark Laughlin. Supervising producer is Tracy Kaplan. Associate producer is Jaja Muhammad. Editing by Eric Quintana, Mike Rooney, Steven Perez and Meredith Steadman. Sound design by Cooperating Cooper Skinner with additional sound design by Stephen Perez and April Ruha. Mix and master by Cooper Skinner with additional mixing by Stephen Perez and Devin Johnson. Original score by Makeup and Vanity. Set with additional score by Jay Ragsdale. Video editing by Dylan Harrington. Cover artwork by Trevor Eyler 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 Odyssey. If you have a radio rental story that you'd like to share, please email us at yourscarystorymail.com or contact us via the form on our website radiorentalusa.com follow us on Instagram and Twitter Adiorental. You can also follow the illustrious Terry Carnation on social media. Just search aricarnation on behalf of the radio rental store. We'd love it if you'd subscribe, rate and review. Thanks for listening.

Terry Carnation (48:04)

How do you feel when you switch to GEICO and save on your car insurance?

Unknown Advertiser (48:09)

It's like going to work on one.

Terry Carnation (48:10)

Thursday morning and thinking to yourself, just.

Unknown Advertiser (48:13)

One more day until Friday. But then somebody in the elevator says, happy Fri. Yay.

Terry Carnation (48:19)

Then you check your phone quickly and.

Unknown Storyteller (48:20)

Discover today is actually Friday.

Terry Carnation (48:23)

So yes.

Unknown Storyteller (48:24)

Happy Fri. Yay.

Unknown Advertiser (48:25)

Random stranger in the elevator.

Terry Carnation (48:27)

Happy Fri. Yay, indeed. Yep, switching and saving with GEICO feels just like that.

Unknown Advertiser (48:32)

Get more with Geico.