The Abandoned Storage Unit

Jerry tells Rob about the weirdest thing he's ever found in an abandoned storage unit.

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Hi, I'm Rob. Tale number fifteen. The abandoned storage unit. I was helping my dad move some things to his storage unit. We rented a truck, went and got the stuff from his office, and went to a storage unit that he already had. But the key to the unit did not work. We had bought the lock from the actual storage place. So we went to the front office and explained the situation. And they said, Oh, no worries, we can cut the lock and get you a new one. But it'll be like an hour before we can do it because I can't leave the office and there's no one else here but me right now. So you're welcome to sit down and wait. My dad and I sat down and started to wait. We made small talk with the guy in the office. His name was Jerry, and I'm pretty sure I remember him mostly talking about like football or something like that. And as time went on and on and an hour passed, I was getting really bored, and I'm not usually very chatty with people I don't know, but I asked him, Hey Jerry, what's the weirdest thing you've ever found in one of these storage units? And he thought about it, and he said, There's some disagreement about that. If you were to ask my brother, and Jerry's brother co-owned this storage facility with him, my brother would tell you it's the one full of dirt. Someone rented a unit from us, they had it for a couple years, they left, they didn't pay. When we went to clean it out, it just had a huge pile of dirt, like six feet tall. And we thought it was suspicious, and we're supposed to call the police if we see weird things, so we called the police and they said it was just a pile of dirt. So that's what my brother would say. If you ask me what the weirdest thing is, and he stood up and he said, Well, let me show you what I think the weirdest thing is. And me and Jerry and my dad, we left the office, and Jerry locked it, breaking the rule of leaving the office unattended, which was the whole reason we had been waiting in the first place, but nobody said anything. So as he's taking us to a storage unit to show us, he's talking, he's telling us a story. He said that when him and his brother bought the place, like twenty years ago, there were already several people paying for storage units, and so they were just kind of grandfathered in. And the people before Jerry and his brother did not take good records. One of the people who was already renting a unit when they bought the place, her name was Anne. They never asked her her last name, they never had any paperwork on her. She was just someone that was already a customer and continued to be a customer, and she was a really good customer. She paid on time, she paid in cash. So 20 years ago is when they first met her. And then about a year ago, Anne stopped showing up. She stopped paying. And she was much older, so Jerry was like, you know, it's very possible that she died. But he saw no announcements in any newspapers or anything. Usually he would only wait like a month or something like that before he would go in and clean out the storage unit, sell what he could, throw away what he could. But since she was like the most loyal customer, he gave it more time. And so again, he's telling this as we're walking to the storage unit. We get to a unit. It's a pretty big one. It's about the size, I would say, of like a shipping container. He gets out his keys and he opens the door and says, This is Anne's storage unit. And it's just filled to the brim with books, with stacks of books. Like you can't walk in there. It's so full of books. Stacked almost to the ceiling. I'm guessing stacked as high as she could reach. And I'm like, wow, that's a lot of books. And Jerry says, Go look at the books. And my dad and I, we go look at the books, and it's all phone books. Every single one of them that we could see anyway. They were all phone books, white pages. So the listings were of individual people, not of businesses. And each phone book was different. Just from the ones we looked at, they had some from towns in California, towns in Ohio, and this whole unit was full of these phone books. And I was like, this is weird. Have you guys looked through the phone books? And they said, no, they hadn't touched the phone books. And actually, when I picked one up, he asked me to put it down, so I didn't get to look in any of the phone books. And I asked him, What are you gonna do? And he said, I don't know. He's like, I really still want to find Anne or find her family and figure out what's going on with these phone books. And so he closes it, we eventually get into my dad's unit, we move the stuff in we need to move, we take out the stuff we need to take out, and we leave. That night I'm back at my place reading. The book I was reading was about Abuskirostami, and he was talking about the movie Close Up and his inspiration for that movie, and how he read a magazine article about the events that would inspire the movie. And when he read the article, he immediately knew he had to make that movie, and he just got to work making the movie. At that point in my life, I was really into filmmaking and learning about it and reading about it, and I was always on the lookout for something that maybe I could make a movie about. And I was like, these phone books are really interesting. Is this the story that I need to turn into a movie? And I was like, yeah, I think it is. So I got in touch with Jerry. I sent him an email because it was the middle of the night, and then I got to thinking about how could I turn this into a movie? And I was thinking a documentary about exploring the storage unit and also trying to figure out what happened to Anne. Jerry called me the next day, he was really into it, which kind of surprised me. I had a camera, I had equipment, but I wanted to do this one right. And there was a guy that at some point said he might be interested in financing a movie of mine, but I'd never presented anything to him because I didn't have any ideas that I was that in love with. But this one I really thought could be something. So I emailed him and we set up a meeting at the storage facility, and he seems really excited. He doesn't really know the story, but he's like excited by my excitement. And we all meet up there, and the potential investor is like, okay, show me what you got. And I walk up to the storage unit and I open it and I'm like, look at this. And I'm like super excited. And he was like, Okay, so you want to make a movie about a storage unit full of phone books? That seems kind of weird to me. And then I was like, Yeah, I mean, there's this mystery element to it that I think is really interesting and could be a really interesting movie, and he's totally not sold. And then he asks me how much I might need, and I'm like, I think I could do it for $10,000. I think Jerry is both excited by the idea that $10,000 might get spent, but also sort of disappointed because usually when people hear a movie's gonna get made, they're thinking millions of dollars. So Jerry is figuring out I'm much more small time than maybe he had initially thought. The investor ends up agreeing to give me $2,000, probably just because he's a nice guy. Jerry gives me full access to the storage unit, and I get to work. But I don't have anything to go on. It's just a storage unit full of phone books. I put some ads in the paper, I put some ads on like Craigslist, I call local churches, I send out flyers to local businesses, I really try to get the word out, trying to figure out who this Anne is. Nobody ever gets back to me. And within a month or two, I've spent most of the $2,000. Jerry was really frustrated with me because I wasn't making any progress. He eventually told me I could not access the storage unit unless I started paying for the rent, and I only had enough money left to pay for one month, so I gave that to him, and for that month I just started going through all the phone books, hoping that maybe one of them would have some clue. The oldest phone book in the unit was from 1989. There were phone books from all fifty states. Some of them were small towns, some of them were bigger cities. They were all white pages, as mentioned, no yellow pages. There were lots of like little notes written on the inside covers of some of them. Most of them were just phone numbers. I remember in one of the phone books, there was a note that said, Johnny, I'm so in love with you, but I don't know how to tell you. And then they had crossed it out. That one really sparked my imagination and obviously it stuck with me. But other than that, I didn't find that big thing I was looking for. Or maybe I did, because I found two books that had something interesting in them. It's tough to know if it means anything, because there were thousands of phone books. But in these two phone books, people who had the last name Johnson, their names were crossed out. So every person with the last name Johnson, they had a black line through their name. And I found that in a phone book from California, and I found that in a phone book from Texas, and I don't remember the towns, but it was in two phone books. And so it's not hard to put together a story of what could have been happening. She was looking for someone with the last name Johnson. We have no idea who or why. She would call a Johnson from the phone book, figure out if it's who she was looking for, and if it wasn't, she'd cross out their name. Her goal was to keep working through all these phone books, and then maybe she died before she ever found who she was looking for. Of course, we could be more optimistic. Maybe when she dialed the number to one of those Johnsons, the person she was looking for picked up, and she didn't need her storage unit full of phone books anymore. So that could have been what's happening. But again, it was two phone books out of thousands. There are, of course, a lot of other possibilities as to how those two phone books ended up in her storage unit. Maybe she got those from the same place or the same person. I don't know. But that's the only evidence I found that hinted at like some bigger story about all of these phone books. There are some other obvious conclusions you could try and make. Jerry's theory was that if she's not dead, she's a hoarder, and she stopped coming because she filled up the unit and just went and rented another unit somewhere else, and was now filling it up. And that's really the problem with this story. There's this weird thing, the storage unit full of phone books, but there's nothing else really. So there's enough information to spark your imagination, but no information to point you in any direction as to what might be going on, so there's an infinite number of possibilities as to what might be happening. And it's fun to think about, but it's also kind of frustrating. Mostly fun for me. As you may have figured out by now, this was not the story I was destined to make an amazing movie about. I shot about five minutes of footage for this movie, and it's gone at this point. Jerry and his brother did eventually clean out the storage unit and throw all the phone books away. They did not do it like callously. I think it bothered them, but that's the business they're in. They gave me the opportunity, you know, to keep paying for the storage unit, and they also asked me if I wanted to take the phone books. I just didn't have anywhere to put that many phone books, that's why they were in a storage unit. So they were sent to the dump, lost forever. And so the mystery remains. Another question we will never know the answer to. The cover art is by Marcella Johnson. She also came up with the title. The end credits music is by Poddington Bear. You can find us on Instagram, Facebook, and at Robtellstales.com. This podcast would have not been possible without Ben, Marcella, and Melanie. Thank you. And thanks for listening.