OK. Now, everyone outside, outside. Everybody out. Timmy. Timmy. Get away from the adult section. Been placed up high a. No, no. Don't even look at them. Some of those back covers will traumatize you. No. Don't you dare. Timmy. Timmy.

Well, Timmy has just run away with one of the raunchier videos in that collection. Good thing he's never even seen a VHS tape before. He's probably going to try and make TEQ talks with it. Whatever they do. Chaps.

Anyway, apologies for the mess. Like most people, I've fallen on some hard times here at radio rental and I've had no choice but to open up a side business. It's a socially distanced summercamp. Not as easy as it sounds. Let me tell you, at first I was flattered by the response of these young proteges wanting to learn the art of storytelling to be enlightened to the dark corners of the universe. And then I remembered how I really feel about children in this group.

Especially, they are a bunch of nonstarters, a real bunch of zero point zeros. L. O. S. E. R. S Losers, old game boys and gator aid. No attention span, no respect for dammit Timmy. No. Go get Evan to help you clean that up. No, I don't care if you're not talking to him today, then just get whoever. Just do it, please.

Yes. You can have a graham cracker after. Well, anyway, speaking of summercamp, I think I know just the tape for you. This is pretty freaky stuff set in a camp far away from here. I'll just pop it in for you while I go deal with these tiny tyrants and I'll drop all their AI gadgets into the back of the toilet. But that would also make my life harder, wouldn't it? Anyway, enjoy the tape. I was 17, rush at a high school.

There was this Christian camp that I'd gone to every year from like the third grade. You would just go and you take some time to get away from work and life. And the whole idea was just to get away from, like, your phones and the TV and media and had some time to worship and get closer to God. That was the whole idea of it. They hire seasonal workers every year. So there's like staff housing. All the girls stay together, all the guys stay together is way up in the mountains, really an hour from Fresno.

Big, big pine trees. It's like near the redwoods ponds. There's a creek running through the whole camp. We had a bobcat incident, actually. You're not supposed to say Bobcat. You have to call in Bob. I think Ted was bears. He had a walkie and you saw a bear because there were other people with walkies. You didn't want to say, hey, I just saw a bear because that everybody starts freaking out. So I just ran into Ted.

Then we know we have to get the kids very far away from that spot.

We all kind of had time before work actually started to get to know each other and, you know, do the team building exercises and all the hokey stuff. And there was this guy named Kyle, who also worked at the camp. He was in Adventure Rec. They were the lifeguards. And there was some climbing courses and stuff like that. So they would do archery, ballet and all of that kind of stuff, keeping everybody safe and the fun stuff, basically.

He was tall, like probably six, four, really handsome, strong jaw, blue eyes, golden brown, curly hair all around. Good looking dude. Kind of goldenboy. I mean, I was 17. Girls, what kind of open up to him in particular?

He's just kind of had a way you would do things for him and then realized he never asked you to do that. He just kind of navigated it, just kind of pushed it that way. For example, the whole adventure trek thing, sometimes they end up working through lunch. So us in the kitchen would always just save me a plate if they let us know they had to work through lunch. Well, he came through the kitchen one time and he kind of grabbed a rag and, like, wipe something down where I was cleaning.

Oh, now that we're best friends and I help you out all the time, you'll you'll bring me a meal, right? You'll bring me some food for lunch. That's just how he was. Just certain things didn't feel. Right. He'd give you like the big winning pageant smile, but it was never like a real smile. You know, the crinkles by your eyes. It never went to his eyes. Only the mouth. He would try and get you alone.

The minute someone else volunteered to go with, he would just kind of, oh, OK, well, you guys got it. And he would back out, but he would be really insistent on being alone with people. I sort of wrote him off in terms of the weirdness. It's awkward, I'm awkward, too, but I kind of wrote it off at first. He's just. Bad vibes. I mean, everywhere he went, fight started, people hated each other.

You know, people group up into little friend groups. Everywhere he went, people would open up to him. And the next thing you know, this girl knew that or they would open up to each other. Next thing they know, it's all over the camp. Should that happened in their past or, you know, how they grew up? There's a lot of rough childhoods growing up. And he would like infiltrate these groups group by group by group.

Every time he was anyone, it just completely like decimated friendships. He would introduce himself to the group and they'd be like, oh, yeah, Kyle's been hanging out or Kyle wants to go with us to do this. And Kyle wants to go with us do that. And I was chatting with a bunch of my girlfriends one time. They're like Kyle. He's just so sweet. Like I told him stuff that I've never told anybody. Like, I don't even know if I could tell you guys.

And the next thing you know, it's all around the camp that she'd been assaulted and all this awful stuff had happened to her. I feel like he definitely got off on hurting people and he's kind of watching the mayhem happen. He never asked for anything. He would just kind of twist, twist until it popped. I'm really scared of the dark. I'm terrified. And we had just seen a bobcat.

So I had to walk a mile to upper camp in the dark to go back to my housing. It had been seen up and down this trail that I had to walk. It was like a mile. I grew up not far from that camp. So, you know, all the things as far as big Catholic Bobcat's, you want to make yourself look big, you want to make loud, very human noises. You don't hunch over, you know, all the stuff.

I see it. I'm going to grab a stick and I wanna make myself look huge and scare that thing away. It was night, it was pitch black.

If I am walking through some place dark and I hear any kind of sound, I literally like I lose all function, like I fall on the ground and I was freaking out. I did not want to. I was very tired. And I'm walking through the camp and there's Kyle and two friends of his, they're hanging out outside. Those three hung out quite a bit as we're walking up the hill. Kyle says something. How was work? I said over.

I didn't even stop.

He's like, Let me walk you up. Oh, you know, it's pitch black. The mountain line's been around. He wasn't even supposed to be an upper camp. You had to be like one of the few people to be allowed up there because there were young kids. I was like, no, no, I can do it. No, really, it's OK. Just really trying to get him to stay. I'm like, no, I don't want you to get in trouble.

Now, you should probably stay on here. No, I don't. I don't want to get in trouble either, because our boss is up there and, you know, it's it's just really not a good idea. Why don't you stay down here? And I couldn't make him not come. I couldn't make him not walk with me. There was nothing I could do. He's to my right. And he kept slowing down. I wasn't walking super fast or like I would be hard to keep up with.

But he stayed to my right and a little bit behind, not where I could see him comfortably and look where I was going. It was just like a very gripping fear in the middle of my stomach. You need to get out of the situation. What do you have in your pockets right now? What can you see on the ground right now? Can you book it? What can you do? So we've been walking a little bit and then they caught up with us.

The other friend of his. Ended up getting his truck. Thank God he was a really good guy. And I had a suspicion he kind of felt the same way I did. But it ended up being his two friends taking me up and he was like, I'm going to stay here. And the minute someone else volunteered to go with us, he was like, oh, well, you guys got it. I kind of felt like he knew he was scaring me.

And he enjoyed it all the anticipation and then nothing.

All was well. She's safe. But there's still that lingering feeling.

Or is it just in my head? Ever heard the expression, a wolf in sheep's clothing? It's a scary idea. It implies that someone's true. A malicious nature can be consumed by beauty, charm or just. How do you spot a wolf in disguise? By the end of camp, there's one meal you can't eat. And mine was the fetus just looking at it makes you want to gag. We were all sick and tired of camp food. I said Fresno's about an hour away.

Forty five minutes an hour. That's like the big city. So we were all going to load up in our cars. We had like a half day because the group that was there left early. There wasn't really a set plan other than we're gonna go to this place for dinner after. I think it was around 10:00, 11:00 o'clock. We were supposed to go. So there is a sign out sheet because a lot of people go hiking in Yosemite or those people going home, if they can, for the weekend to go see their family.

The sign out, she was just stack of papers and a clipboard pencil tied to that ring at the top. You would sign your name where you're going. What time he'll be back. What time you're leaving. So I put my name down. You said I was going to Fresno with the group and the time I'd be back. The whole idea was just, OK, well, we check this out, actually. And it's 11:00 and they're not back.

So that's a problem. We need to start looking at the location they put down where they'd be. If you go hiking in the woods and you fall and you get hurt. You can't make it back. How would we know? So I was the last one off and I come down and everyone's pretty much broken up into their groups. Couple of us didn't have cars, so everybody kind of found somebody to ride with. And I look around and pretty much everybody's full except for Kyle.

And he's like, not case here. Larry saved you spot with me.

And it was just gonna be me and him and his little pickup. And I was like, no. So I start asking a couple of my other friends, like hazing. We have a spot like I'm literally just walking around. He's kind of getting insistent right now. Actually, I'm just kind of tired. I'm just gonna stay here. Not feeling super well. I'm not getting in the car with that guy. I'm not gonna be alone with that guy.

I'm not gonna go. I just said I don't feel very good. I'm kind of tired. I'm just gonna stay here and I'll go back to girl staff housing and I'll just knock out for the night. I'm just I don't want to go. And I never said I don't want to go with you. I wasn't rude about it. I had never said a crossword to him. And all of a sudden he had like a completely different face. He was good looking.

He was until he swish in there. I couldn't believe I'd ever found him attractive. He was so pissed. It went from Goldenboy smile to just gone dead, just malice. And he was saying just about anything and anything I think that he thought would hurt my feelings or make me back down, make me feel bad about refusing to go. I was near tears, honestly. He got me. It worked. I was pretty upset. Eventually, some of the guys are coming over like dad is fine, is fine.

She doesn't have to go. Trying to calm him down and they sort of go around by the pickup. And my friend Robin is comes over and. Are you OK? And I'm like, yeah, yeah. I just not in the mood tonight. I'm just going to stay here. She says, OK, well, we'll see you when we get back. I'll bring you some food or something. And she goes, give me a hug. And I'm like, do not fucking get in the car with that guy.

Do not. She's like, OK, I won't. I turn around and I go back up to the friendship house, to the sign up sheet to cross my name off because I didn't go and I just wanted to go back to girl staff housing and just be alone. I had a scratch off and basically say I didn't go. There's pages and pages and pages. And I think the very top page was from the year before. So they have everybody's all of them for like a year.

So I flipped through the page all the way down to the bottom because mine would have been the last one or the second to last.

See, this friend, this friend, this friend, this friend. And I do it again. I'm like, OK, maybe I put it on a different page by accident. So I flipped through all the pages I could find. What did I do? Like, where did I put my name down in, like the year before somewhere or in a different week? I looked at the next page. It was totally blank. No one used it yet.

It's not there where I was looking at every single name and making sure that was not me and checking every day. And it's not there. He was the last person to be around that sign up sheet until I went back up there after everyone had left. Here is my name. And here is my name. Before the argument. Because he didn't go back up after. I don't think I was coming back to that camp. You have like a true crime podcast.

My mom watched a lot of 48 hours. I mean, you don't have to get very far off the road before no one can really hear you.

I think he would have killed me. I never said it out loud before. As far as I think I could have been dead. I think he probably killed me. I think he's a bad person. Every emotion he had was about a shallow as a puddle. There was no depth. There was no gravity. I just think if I had just given in, like one more time, how many times have you really want to go out, your friends?

Like, not come on. You gave in. What if that time was your life? I think about that sometimes. You know, it's years later, and I've been married for years now, and all that life that happened in between might have just not happened. And it's just so weird to think about, like I might have died. Be mean, be mean. Be rude. You don't have to be nice to them, you know, owe them anything.

You can say, no, I don't want to go. No, I don't want you to do this. No, I don't want you to go with me. You can stop your feet. You can throw a fit. You can be loud when it comes to your safety. Why do you care if someone thought you were kind of a bitch. This one time. Throw it. If you have a bad feeling, just do what ever you need to do to get out of that situation.

Summer camp. What an impressionable moment in one's life. It's funny how we all have the same firsts at summer camp, isn't it? I remember mine vividly. Summer camp is when I had all my firsts. First love, first kiss, first punch in the face, first mortal enemy, first taste of mashed potatoes, first ghost sighting, first time meeting a child my own age. First time sleeping, lying down. And magical to me. What if I told you do not touch those.

Those are Terri's moving machines. I'm warning you, do not put that sandwich in the VHS player. Do not waste a perfectly good sandwich. I'm terribly sorry about that. Why don't we take a quick break while I get this up and running again?

When I feel like I need a mental palate cleanser, my go to refresher is best fiends. Best Fiends is an amazing game with challenging puzzles, but it's also a casual game that anyone can play. It's not just for kids. It's for adults, too. You can spend as much time or as little time as you want. The game. Currently I'm about to pass level 50 on Best Fiends and I'm super proud of it. It's a great break from my work.

Long car rides, airplanes, you name it. To me, it's no question my best fiend is rated five stars. If you haven't played it Best Fiends is a unique and exciting puzzle experience, unlike any other puzzle game out there. Best updates the game every month with new levels and events. So can seriously never get old. So look, if you want a great break for your mind, try best fiends, engage your brain with fun puzzles and collect tons of cute characters and trust me, with over 100 million downloads.

This five star rated mobile puzzle game is a must play. Download best fiends for free on the Apple App Store or on Google Play. That's fiends or friends without the R Best Fiends download today.

There we go. Good as new. And I've even locked the little beasts outside. Don't worry, their little gaming phone devices double as a personal geo locator for each child. I always find them. Most of them just end up wandering into the liquor store across the street. I'll retrieve them with enough time for them to sober up before carpool. Anyway, let's continue with our next story.

When you're a teenager, you do stupid things. You make bad decisions often without even realizing it. In pursuit of fun or new experiences. Might take some risk. But sometimes that risk taking can lead to some dire consequences. It's what you call walking on thin ice. I was a sophomore in high school. We were in West Bloomfield, Michigan. I had a ton of friends. Even though we were all total losers, we were having a sleepover at a friend's house when we decided to take a walk in the middle of the night.

There's this beautiful part of the winter where it's like white and snowy and fluffy.

But then when you actually get into the meat and potatoes of the winter, it becomes this like gray sludge. The roads are covered with salt. We were definitely in that phase of the winter and I think it was probably at least freezing or below freezing, maybe a couple degrees below freezing.

We had boyfriends who were all staying about 10, 15 miles away. We decided on a Saturday night we would try to walk over to their house, was separated by a huge lake. It had to have been at least 10 or 15 miles. It had snowed a lot and we thought, well, it just kept walking and we'll warm up. It'll be great.

Guys, we'll just put our little leather jackets on and our regular shoes. And when you're a teenager, like you don't want to wear an anorak or pirker anything weeks, it's just not cool.

We left the house and we were all in fantastic moods. I had a Walkman. I was listening to Never mind. It was an old disc man. So I had that in the pocket of my little leather bomber jacket. And it just every step I took it would like bounce and scab. We were singing songs, we were super happy. There was five of us, all girls. It took about 15 or 20 minutes before we realized this was going to take a lot longer than we originally anticipated.

My cheeks were starting to freeze, like where we were laughing and joking. But then it would hurt to move your mouth because it was so cold. It was freezing. Our fingers were starting to her. I remember like my toes researching to get wet.

And I think all of us were sort of thinking it in our minds.

But nobody wanted to be the first person to say this was a terrible idea.

We were walking and all of a sudden we heard what sounded like somebody had a muffler hanging and dragging a little bit on the ground.

And it just was just dragging, chugging noise.

And we all kind of turned around and looked and like, you know, what is this? It was a red four door sedan. Muffler was hanging off of it. Something was causing that noise.

And I just remember it being really beat up. It drove by and the sound sort of faded away.

And that was that we just continued to walk. 15 minutes later, we heard the same sound. And I remember thinking, like, that's really strange. Are there two cars that have the same muffler problem? We turned around and this time the car was going so much slower.

We stopped and kind of looked at it as it was approaching. There was no reason for any car to be going that slowly. We had maybe seen two or three cars. There was nobody out. As soon as he kind of pulled up next to us, we could see a man. He had bushy, curly hair, kind of Jerry Garcia. Curly hair. He was slightly overweight and he was driving facing us.

The most chilling stare that just like, hit me right in the gut.

It looked like his eyes were just black pits. There's a lot of electricity hit me. It was almost like he was looking into me.

That's when we noticed that he was also holding a knife.

He was driving, holding the wheel in one hand and he was just holding the knife up to show it to us, just holding it and driving so slowly. I think I had this moment where I'm like, is this real? Am I actually seeing this? I'm in a nightmare and in a bad dream. We looked at each other and were like, what the fuck? What the fuck is this? It's the second time we've seen the car. He's got a knife.

We stopped in that moment. We had a conversation like, oh, maybe he saw a bunch of teenage girls walking on the side of the road and thought, wouldn't it be funny if I just mess with these girls for a minute?

So we laughed about it.

That was really weird. We've got this great story to tell. That was crazy. And we just kept walking.

Then we hear it again, the rattling, chugging, dragging. We just froze. And here he comes again with the same knife and the same stare. He's staring directly at us. This was not a person who is just fucking with a bunch of teenage girls. He's up to something. I was 100 percent sure he meant to do us harm.

And that's when he stopped the car and he got out. When he opened the door, we just started running. We are now running along the lake.

There wasn't a plan. We're booking it and he's chasing us. I'm at the very end. I've got these totally impractical shoes on. I'm freezing cold and numb. And he's close. He's close to us.

And I just remember thinking to myself, do I take a second to turn around and like, look at the sky to see if he's close? And I finally turn around and he's gone. He's not following us anymore.

That's it. The trip's over. Something horrible is going on here. We're really freaked out. We decide we're going to turn around and go back. We realize our options are really limited. We've got a lake on one side and houses on the other. Do we knock on someone's house? Do we turn back and just go the exact same way that we were going? He knows where we are now. And that's when he comes back again. You can hear just the chugging and rattling coming at us again, and it's getting louder and louder.

We're booking it through snow and ice and we're soaking wet. We can hear the guy on the street. He sounded maniacal, screaming.

I see you. I see. Just unhinged. But we can't see him. We can just hear him. We're just running freaking out. We decide that we are going to crawl like army people to the front of one of these houses that has a beautiful giant Douglas fir tree. It's big enough that there is maybe three feet of clearance below the lowest branches. And we're gonna hide and just take a look at the situation. We're hiding underneath this tree.

And I, I can remember every sound, the crackling of snow. We are all panting. Half of us are crying. There's just this sweaty, hot panic.

We're all huddled together under this tree, peeping through to the street, looking for him for a moment. It's just really quiet. And then you hear the rattling, rattle, rattle, chug, chug. And we see him driving slowly and we can see him like scanning his head is swiveling back and forth, looking the whole time. He's holding the knife against the steering wheel. We're all petrified to breathe. What do we do? I couldn't feel my fingers anymore, I couldn't feel my toes anymore.

I was soaking wet. We decide that we are going to make a break for it and run my shoe. Froze to the ground. And when I lifted both of my feet out, it stuck. We're running now. So I've lost a shoe. And as I'm getting to the curb to go onto the ice, I just hear this sickening, like crack noise.

My ankle. Without the sheer rolls onto the curb and I fall face first onto the slushy, wet concrete. And my friend Amy turns around and just physically lifts me off the ground and like shoves me forward. I ran onto the ice with a busted face, a twisted ankle and no shoe.

He's running on the side of the lake as we are running on to the lake. He's screaming at us the whole time. I see you. I see you. And we are just booking it across the ice. All of a sudden, we heard this giant snapping noise. It sounded like a huge rubber band snapping. And it echoed across the entire lake. Immediately following it, there was multiple snaps. That's when we looked down and we could see this sort of black web.

This black spider web growing on ice as we're running. When we realize the ice is cracking. We turn back to the shore. We have to get off this ice. I'm not even afraid of the guy with the knife anymore. I'm afraid I'm going to die in this frozen lake. The man now has been completely forgotten. And that's when my foot falls through the ice. My right foot with just the sock on just falls right through a hole in the ice.

And I'm up to my knee with icy water.

I'm like, this is it. They're going to find me frozen underneath this ice. I just managed to pull my leg out of the ice and keep running.

And I see ahead of me that three of the girls have now pulled themselves up off of the ice. And I just launch myself in the air off of the ice in this pile of wet, shivering, crying girls.

We just laid there in that puddle just sort of like in shock. It had started snowing and it was like big, beautiful, quiet flakes that were like falling down. And it was so quiet. Probably been several minutes before any of us thought. Where is the man? We looked around and he was gone. No car, no man, no shouting. We were completely alone. We all just got up and started walking home. When we got back to the house, we all took hot showers and nobody said anything.

We just sat on the floor and Meghan's room wrapped up in blankets and just none of us slept. There is an unspoken agreement that we would just weren't ever going to talk about it. We didn't tell the guys why we didn't make it. We just said we changed our minds. And looking back, it's hard to imagine, like to game it out in your mind and think like, well, what would he have done? But it was more of a gut feeling.

Looking into his eyes.

If he got a hold of us, he was going to hurt us. I actually told my son this story in the hopes that if he does sneak out at some point, I get a or teenagers. You want to have fun.

You want to have adventures, but be smarter than I was because it could have ended really badly in the high stakes world of crime and justice.

Understanding the legal system isn't optional. It's critical. Hi, I'm Philip Holloway, host of the podcast Schwan from Tenderfoot TV and I Heart Radio. We've got an all new season and this time we're tackling the problems directly. We'll look at faulty forensic science, false confessions and mandatory minimum prison sentences.

California has the largest prison system in the United States. United States is the largest prison system in the world.

In some cases, capital murder cases just preventing a death sentence and getting life without parole was a win.

When people just want justice so bad that they're willing to accept everything at face value, when they need to really look deeper and really stand up when they hear about an injustice that's happening. Season two of Schwan is underway and it's available now. Listen on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

Creepy. No. Well, that is all for today, my fellow fear enthusiasts. You can follow our little shop at at radio rental on Instagram and at Radio Rental USA on Twitter. You can also online stalk me personally by following that Terry Carnation on both the Twitters and the Instagram's. What a joy for both of us. See you next time in Radio Rentoul to tell me a little brat. Allianz.

Radio rental is created by Payne Lindsay and brought to you by tenderfoot TV in Atlanta, executive producers Payne, Lindsay and Donald Albrecht, hosted by Rainn Wilson as his character. Terry Carnation, produced by Payne Lindsay. Mike Rooney and me. Meredith Steadman. Written by Meredith Steadman with additional writing by Mark Loflin Sound. Designed by Cooper Skinner. Original score by Makeup and Vanity Set. Additional production by Christina, Dana and Mason Lindsay. Cover Art by Trevor Iler and Rob Sharida.

Voice Acting by Ryan Jones, Casey Willis and the Tender Foot TV. Shout out to Tiny Doors HGL for the creation of our Real-Life Miniature Radio Rental Store. You can check that out and more on her Instagram at Tiny Doors HBO special thanks to Grace Royer and Oren Rosenbaum at UTSA, as well as support from the Naude Group Station 16 Back Media and Marketing and the team at Cadenced 13. If you have a radio rental story that you'd like to share, please email us at your scary story at Shemale Dot Com or contact us via the forum on our Web site.

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