Band Member (4:39)

Whoa. Wow.

Chirpy Fitzhammer (4:41)

That's retro.

Band Member (4:42)

Far out.

Chirpy Fitzhammer (4:43)

Okay, feed in the tape. Oh. Enjoy the ride, my friends. I'm gonna go skate on some concrete outside.

Band Member (4:56)

So I was in a band back in the years 97 through, like 2000ish. In this particular band, I played bass guitar. We played a lot of shows to the punk and the hardcore scene. Playing basements and smaller venues were kind of our thing. So we had been in some pretty grungy places, really dirty bars. We were used to the dirt and the grit of it all. And so it really didn't phase us until it did. This would have happened in the late summer of 99. At that time, I was playing in a touring band making our way towards Northeast Ohio. The other band that booked this show booked it as a matinee show. It was a tattoo parlor. We've played record stores, we've played small basements. That was our thing, you know. And so it really didn't faze us at all until we got there. So we went in and saw the venue, loaded our stuff in, and just kind of got the uncomfortable feeling that it just really wasn't going to be the kind of show that we had hoped for. And so we talked to the other bands that we were on the tour with, and we said, hey, would you mind if we played first tonight? Because we're just getting the vibe that this may not be our type of gig. Immediately said, absolutely, you know, feel free. Our songs were always extremely fast. High Energy, our stage presence were jumping all over the place. There's lots of screaming, there's lots of crowd chanting, crowd sing alongs. We had a lot of that, you know, I mean, we were doing well enough as a band to where we could go into places and people would recognize our songs and they would sing them back to us, which was a lot of excitement for us. We got about two or three songs into our set. All of a sudden the crowd instantly changed. What was a bunch of kids just having a good time eventually turned into a bunch of skinheads that started to pour down the steps instantly trying to hurt other people. Everything started to go downhill. We watched these skinheads come down the steps with different kinds of things in their hands. Like for example, those metal trash cans, chairs, baseball bats. And they were literally just throwing them at people, throwing trash cans at kids. And it might have even been their own friends. I don't even know because I don't know these other people that are at the show. But all we knew was that this was not gonna be the type of scenario that we wanted to be in. It was just too violent even for a punk in a hardcore band. That wasn't something that was uncommon when you come to shows, especially with that type of genre. What made it different was that they were trying to hurt people. And so we weren't cool with that. So we actually ended up stopping our set right after that. We didn't make it a big deal. We just said, oh, our time is up and we moved on. We're out. We loaded up our gear to the rv, started driving to the next location. We're thinking and talking to ourselves like, man, that was really wild. And we just said we were going to try to get as far as we could out of that place. And we wanted to get to the next show. We got about halfway there and it was about three in the morning. It was a really warm, humid and muggy night. There was a lot of fog that was out. Your typical like spooky type feeling with a bunch of 20 year olds in the RV that were on tour. We didn't think anything of it. We were also pretty hungry because we hadn't eaten dinner. We found a really small exit that we pulled off on. There was a Cracker Barrel, there was a hotel, and there was a Steak N Shake. The Steak n Shake obviously was open because it was a 24 hour place. We decided that we were just going to park the RV in the Cracker Barrel parking lot. We would be out in the morning before anybody Even woke up so we wouldn't be bothering anybody. We lock up the RV and we all walk right over to the Steak N Shake. We all ate. We were all kind of talking about it again, still about how crazy of an experience it was. Out of the six of us that were on the rv, four of us decided to go back. And we were like, you know what? We're just gonna go back. We're gonna rest. We're gonna take it easy for the rest of the night and call it. So we all go back, we kind of get ourselves settled. We're all kind of finding our ways to be comfortable in this really tight space together. And all of a sudden, the van shakes. The whole RV just shakes really, really hard. I automatically assumed this was probably just the people getting comfortable, trying to make their space. Then it happens a couple minutes later. This time, it shakes twice. I was on the bottom level, and two of my bandmates were on the top level. And they immediately were like, hey, yo, chill, chill. You're shaking the whole rv. That kind of threw me for a loop because I was like, wait a minute. I thought that was them that was shaking the rv. Well, then the van shook a third.

Chirpy Fitzhammer (10:36)

Time.

Band Member (10:38)

And this time, the van shakes so incredibly hard, it felt like the RV was going to be tipped over. Now everybody in the RV is freaking out. We all think that it's the other two that are playing a joke on us at this point. Now I'm getting frustrated because I'm really stressed from the whole experience that we just went through. And all I want to do is find a little bit of sleep. I was tired, I was frustrated. I was hot. And so I immediately get up and I walk out of the rv. I open up the door, and I don't see anything. It's probably those two clowns that are trying to pull a joke on us. I literally yell. I'm like, knock it off. And as I look out, I look across the street, and I can still see the two of them at the Steak N Shake. I knew something was really wrong. There was one other car that was parked in the parking lot that was clear on the other side of the Cracker Barrel. And it was a little hard to see because of the fog. So I said, I'm just gonna walk over there and see if there's anybody over there. I was also thinking that it could be one of the other bands that maybe was messing with us that just was trying to play a trick on us or two. Maybe these skinheads followed us and now are trying to get back at us for leaving the show early. I ended up walking over to the car. I was with one of my other bandmates and I got about maybe 20ft and I could tell that this was an old brown beat up car. And I could see that the driver's side seat was down. I could see in the back seat it was full of sharp tools. And immediately what I thought of was these might be those same skinheads that were at the show. They came with some of these types of things to the show. My friend stopped me and he said, I don't know if you want to go any closer. You know what? I'm out of here. Let's go get those two guys. And somebody obviously doesn't want us here. Let's just go. We decided to go ahead and walk over to this Steak n Shake. I'm like, this can't be happening. It had to be these two kids that are messing with us. So I asked them, I said, let me see your feet. And our drummer goes, what are you talking about? I said, I want to see your feet. And so I looked at his feet, expecting to see dirt, expecting to be wet. Nothing. I'm like, you guys need to come back to the rv. We're leaving this place because there's something going on outside. We get back into the RV and we start driving. We're all exhausted and we're talking about it. We're joking. We're never going to come back to Ohio ever again. And we get maybe about five minutes down the road and all of a sudden I see in the back of the RV there's two lights that come flying up behind us. And that was weird because now it's about 3:30 in the morning. As those lights come up closer to us, it was the brown car from the Cracker Barrel parking lot. Next thing I knew, they were tailgating us and like tailgating us hard. And so now we're completely freaking out. We have no idea what to do. We're just a bunch of kids that are on the road. We're now looking for another exit to get off of. We're looking for help. We can't find anything. Eventually we catch up to another truck. As we are driving down the highway, we saw a sign that said, ohio State Patrol, next exit. So we thought, that's our chance. But the problem was we were in the left lane trying to pass the truck and the truck was in the right lane. If you've ever driven an rv, you know that they don't have a whole lot of gas to them. So we were trying to go as fast as we could to get around this truck. Luckily, we were able to speed up around the truck, cut the truck off, so that way the car could not get off with us and immediately exit off onto the exit to get to the Ohio state patrol. When we pulled in, there was one officer that was on duty, and we kind of explained to him, we're not trying to sound like we're crazy, but somebody obviously does not want us around your area. And he kind of just shrugged us off. And then we said, would it just be okay with you if we just stayed here for the night, just park our stuff? And he goes, yeah, it's fine. You guys can just park. You just got to be out here in the morning. Sure, no problem. I remember finally falling to sleep, and it felt like I slept for about 30 minutes before I had a knock on the window. And it was the police officer, the state trooper. And he said, hey, you guys gotta get out of here, but you might want to come and take a look at this before you go open the door. We walk around the back of the rv, around the entire rv, There are handprints. From the top of the rv to the bottom of the rv, hundreds of handprints. As if that wasn't enough, there was handprints of all different sizes. Child handprints, adult handprints, handprints that were a little bit bigger, handprints that were a little bit smaller. It looked like large. Lots of people had their hands on the rv. People might say, well, you've been on tour, of course there's going to be handprints back there. No, because we weren't necessarily keeping all of our equipment back there. There was no reason for anyone to be back there. There was a little bit of, I guess you would call it, trunk space underneath that you could put some luggage and stuff in. But most of our equipment would go either in the rv and we would either sit on it or sleep on it, or if it was small enough, we would just shove it underneath of the rv. But there was no trunk space. There's nothing to open back there. The state trooper literally said to us, I don't know who you guys have been messing with, but they don't want you here. You all need to go. We don't really know what to believe. We don't really know what happened. We just think it'd be best if we never go to Ohio ever again.

Chirpy Fitzhammer (17:38)

Oh, man. That scared the peeps right out of my peeps. I dribbled a little bit. Hey, you know, handprints are freaking scary, man. You know, my grandma had one of those little plaster casts of my baby hands. It's just like baby hands freak me out. Another fun fact. I used to live in an Astro van and we lived at the top of this canyon. It was cool for a minute and then the rains came. The next thing you know we're like white water rafting down the canyon. And then I woke up and I was all wet and my whole family was missing. Now let's just be straight here. They weren't really blood related, but they were still my family. Not sure. Anyways, enough of that. Oh, okay, wait. Let me look at the instructions here. So after the story plays, machine will stop. Eject tape, eject. Alright, cool. No, look. Now it's time for some ads, everyone. I love little ads. It's absolutely fantastic. They're so grounding.

Ad Voiceover (18:45)

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Chirpy Fitzhammer (22:15)

Huh huh huh? Oh, sorry guys. It's just doing a little meditating. I had to re regulate after that last tape. You guys meditate. Send me your DMs and let me know. Anyways. Oh, Malachi. What's up dude? Good to see you man. Hey, you know if you said your name the way it was spelled it, you'd be Malachi. Like the tea. Like a chai tea. He did not like that joke. But that's cool. I'm not gonna be everyone's cup of tea. Wait a second. Chai tea. I'm not everyone's cup of tea. Haha. Wow, we're really doing it. Anyways, let's do another tape, shall we? Here we go. Oh man, this one's gonna freak your brains out of your nuts. Hold onto your butts. Or someone else's butt. Hold on to something.

Band Member (23:19)

It was around 2003. I was 20 years old, about to turn 21. I was in a band called Cold Read. Me and a bunch of friends, we lived in Massachusetts, just trying to make a name for ourselves. I was in the band with my girlfriend at the time. Her name was Tracy. I remember talking and like, kind of just dreaming about the future, like how cool it would be to be on tour or to be on a record label to play big shows with big bands and, you know, stuff like that. A few days later, heading to her house out of nowhere, there was a sign on a school bus that said for sale. I just ran right up to it and sure enough, there was a phone number on it. I called it right away as soon as I got home. Within a few days or so, I basically just bought my first car, which was a bus. The best part about this was it could be registered as a camper. Basically all the seats had been taken out of it. And what wasn't out of it, I just gutted the whole thing out. Once I, like kind of got a feel for it. I remember sitting with the band and being like, guys, we're going on tour. We're doing this. We went to Arizona, we played the shows. Our next show was in Vegas. We had two days to kill. So we decided to check out the Grand Canyon. We got to the Grand Canyon. I remember getting off the bus and looking at this thing for the first time. It didn't look real, like it looked like Bob Ross painted it or something. We were just walking around and taking it all in. And then I just had this brilliant idea of, hey, let's walk down this entire thing. Let's just go to the river at the bottom. Half the guys in the band were like, dude, fuck that.

Ad Voiceover (25:23)

Yeah, whatever.

Band Member (25:24)

Come on, it would be fun. So me and Tracy and two other guys decided to do it. The sign's posted all over the place saying, don't walk in. One day, death can occur. It's serious. Like, you don't want to do that. But as stupid, you know, 20 year olds, we were like, yeah, let's just do it. We didn't prepare, we had no water, we had no food. It was just, hey, let's just go do this. We started walking down, joking along the way. All the while just ignoring any warning signs posted. Not only about not doing it in a day, but also about wild animals that come out at night. Littered the whole way down with all these signs. We finally got to the bottom. By the time we got down there, the sun was starting to set. It's when we sat down I started to realize like this might not have been a good idea. We realized now we have to walk back another 12 hours. But it's all uphill. We don't have any food, we don't have any water and it's getting dark. We just had to go like we couldn't sit around any longer. And as soon as we started, it's like someone just hit a light switch. It was pitch black down there. There. The temperature just dropped. As we're walking up, I remember we were just hearing all these sounds, man. There would be bats flying by our heads. You could hear. I don't know what type of animal this. It might have been a mountain lion for all I know. Just things howling in the distance. But we just had to keep moving here. Just a bunch of kids at the bottom of the Grand Grand Canyon in the middle of the night with no food, no water, no weapons, no phones, nothing. We were just a bunch of idiots. It was around probably 3am I'd say. We were about halfway up out of nowhere in the pitch black. We walk right into this random dude. He just appeared out of nowhere and he was just standing there and he's just hanging down there just all by himself. He's a shorter guy. He has this old fisherman hat looking thing on. He had these big glasses on and just a big smile on his face. No hiking boots, no jacket. And as soon as we said, hey, how's it going man? He was just like, hey, how are ya? And immediately just started talking about old school airplanes as if we were friends with him. He did have a strange accent. I just know it wasn't from anywhere I was from. He wasn't dressed warmly, he just was dressed nice. He looked like someone not of this time frame. He looked like he was from the 30s or like the 40s even. That's what was so weird about it. He just didn't look like a regular guy that would be down there. But we asked him more like, dude, what are you doing down here alone at 3am? Like he wouldn't recognize the fact that we just asked him why are you down here alone? All he would talk about was planes, Technology of planes. They got all these new planes coming out in the skies. It's almost like this dude was from the 30s or something, talking about jet engines, almost as if they were just about to be invented. Like it was this new thing. I can remember kind of looking at Tracy like, what is this guy talking about? And why is he down here? You could tell he was passionate about airplanes. That's all he wanted to talk about. He knew all about it. He knew the ins and outs. He was talking about these new engines that they were putting in planes, how big they were getting, and he was talking about how many people these planes could hold now. I think he was like, yeah, it's like up to 30 people. It just seems so weird because it's like planes hold hundreds of people, don't they? For him to just be down there, just completely comfortable. He didn't look cold. He didn't look hungry or thirsty. He wasn't in fear. He didn't even ask us if we needed help or what we were doing. Like, why is there a group of teenagers down here at 3am do you just want to talk about his airplanes? He was super friendly. So we were like, you want to come back up with us? Are you lost? We're heading up. You want to walk with us? No, I'm going to stay right here. And I remember looking at everyone like. And I looked at him, the guy, and I was like, okay, if you want to. We kind of just laughed it off. This guy's nuts. Like, why would you want to stay halfway down the Grand Canyon at 3am all alone? We headed back up. As the hours went by, it was almost sunrise, and we were so tired, so hungry. I remember being so thirsty. All four of us, by the time we got to the top, were literally. We were crawling on the dirt. We continued the tour. We ended up going to California, lived there for a couple months, headed back to Massachusetts. Years later, I wasn't sure what to do. Music kind of just ended. I had this idea to open my own restaurant. That's what I wanted to do. In 2013, Tracy passed away. She was my everything, My best friend, first girlfriend, everything. And I was with her for, like, 12 years. I was trying to find different pictures of her that I could maybe hang up in the back or somehow incorporate her into the logo. As I was going through these old pictures, I came across the ones from the very first tour we ever went on. Back in the early 2000s when we went down the Grand Canyon. I started to remember the story of the guy we saw at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. It just Kind of triggered something in me to be like, I should have looked that up. So I started to. Sure enough, an insane amount of people have died at the Grand Canyon and a lot of them happen to be pilots. And I remember thinking, was who we saw at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, was that one of the pilots? Was that a ghost? What was this guy doing down there all alone? He wouldn't answer our questions. He had no explanation. All he wanted to do was talk about airplanes. So was it a ghost we saw or was it just some crazy guy down there? Why else would someone be down there and only want to talk about airplanes and not ask for help? Not ask us if we needed help? It made no sense. My gut tells me I know what I saw. I know deep down that this was a spirit or this was a ghost reliving this cycle over and over.

Chirpy Fitzhammer (34:01)

Ding, dong, bing, bong. I'm freaked out. Is anyone else? Man, that was so insane. How crazy was that pilot ghost? Right? You know what I'd want to ask him? I'd want to ask him who he thinks is going to win the World Series in five years. Because it's interesting to me, the idea of asking a ghost from the past something about the future. Anyways, time for a quick ad break. Hold on to your undies.

Rainn Wilson (34:33)

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Chirpy Fitzhammer (36:46)

Holy cow, guys. What a bunch of great products available for purchase. I know myself if I am in fact gonna hop online and buy every single one of those items using my stepmother's credit card. Cause we don't get along. Oh, hey, Malachi. What's up, dude? Hold on. I knew there was something on there when you start meowing like a wild banshee. Let's consult the scroll. Oh, look at that. It's your feeding time. Let me get some of your mush meats together here. Throw them in a bowl with some hot water. You love your minced mush meats when they're hot and ready. And I get it, buddy. I love a good roast beef sandwich with some potato chips and mayonnaise and some mustard. Maybe some srirach, I don't know. Anyways, guys, enough about food. Thanks for stopping by. I'm Chirpy Fitz Hammer and this is Radio Rental. I'll see you next time. Oh, my God. That's so good, dudes. Oh, what's this? Oh, it's a jigsaw puzzle of exotic birds. This is gonna take me hours.

Rainn Wilson (38:02)

Radio Rental is created by Payne Lindsay and brought to you by Tenderfoot. TV showrunner is Meredith Steadman, lead producer. Our producer is Eric Quintana. Executive producers are Payne Lindsay and Donald Albright. Our main host is Rainn Wilson as his character Terry Carnation written by Meredith Stedman. Additional writing by Mark Loughlin. Original score by Makeup and Vanity Set with additional score by Jay Ragsdale. Editing by Eric Quintana, Stephen Perez, Meredith Stedman, Tristan Bankston and Sean Nurney. Sound design, mix and master by Stephen Perez and Cooper Skinner. Additional editing by April Ruha and Dayton Cole. Our production manager is Jordan Foxworthy. Our social media manager is Caroline Orajemma Video editing by Dylan Harrington Cover artwork by Trevor Iler and Rob Sheridan Radio Rental merchandise by Byron McCoy to shop radio rental merch, visit shop Tenderfoot TV special thanks to Oren Rosenbaum and the team at UTA, as well as the Nord Group and the team at Odysee. If you have a radio rental story that you'd like to share, please email us at yourscarystorygmail.com or contact us via the form on our website radiorentalusa.com follow us on Instagram at radiorental. On behalf of the Radio Rent Rental Store, we'd love it if you'd subscribe. Rate and review as always, thanks for listening.