Curses! Woman hit with felony charge for Sabrina: The Teenage Witch VHS rental that was 21 years late

Captain Marvel may have wrecked an entire Blockbuster Video — but at least she didn’t commit the truly cardinal sin of forgetting to return her rental tape. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for one seemingly-cursed Oklahoma woman, who, according to Fox 25 News of Oklahoma City, just found out she’s been hexed by a 20-year ghost of video memories past…all for allegedly failing to return a VHS copy of a witchy 1990s sitcom.

Running into a felonious road block after trying to renew her driver’s license in a new state, former Oklahoma resident Caron McBride learned she was the subject of an arrest warrant for forgetting to return a rental copy of Sabrina the Teenage Witch — not the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina Netflix version, mind you, but the old-school ABC show starring Melissa Joan Hart.

Along with the entire VHS industry, the “Movie Palace” rental outlet, where the tape had been reported missing, apparently went out of business sometime in the mid-2000s. But Salem the cat must’ve been silently following McBride around the whole time, because the overdue charge reportedly came up when she recently tried to apply for a driver’s license in Texas — and was told she was wanted by law enforcement.

“I went to change my driver's license, during this COVID thing you had to make an appointment, and so, I sent them an email [and] they sent me an email and they told me... that I had an issue in Oklahoma,” McBride told the station. After contacting the district attorney’s office, McBride was reportedly informed of the cauldron of late-return trouble that’d been brewing for more than two decades.

The DA’s office “told me it was over the VHS tape and I had to make her repeat it because I thought: 'This is insane. This girl is kidding me, right?' She wasn't kidding,” McBride said, confessing to the local outlet that she had no memory of ever renting — or even watching — Sabrina.

“I had lived with a young man, this was over 20 years ago. He had two kids, daughters that were 8, 10 or 11 years old, and I'm thinking he went and got it and didn't take it back or something,” she said. “I have never watched that show in my entire life, just not my cup of tea…Meanwhile, I'm a wanted felon for a VHS tape…I mean, I didn't try to deceive anyone over Samantha [sic] the Teenage Witch. I swear.”

Thankfully, the DA’s office reviewed the case, agreed that there was no remaining victim to represent, and decided to drop McBride’s felony charge, according to Fox-25. And after 21 years of being stalked from the shadows by a 1990s sitcom spellcaster, it appears as if her present-day ordeal is the kind of penalty not even a supernaturally inflated late fee could replace.

Still, we think there’s a lesson here, because this whole story has us itching to get home and rummage through our old boxes of long-forgotten junk. Video stores may be all but extinct, but McBride’s close call with Sabrina has us wondering if there’s an errant copy of The Howling or some other half-remembered rental lying in a dark attic corner…just waiting to grow fangs and spring a legal surprise worse than any horror movie.