Urban Legend

The Babysitter

Here is my new series about modern urban legends. This new series will cover several urban legends, stories like, “The Hook”, for example. Please check this blog regularly if you want to keep updated on these legends. 

The first urban legend I will cover is the well-known story of The Babysitter. Basically, to start out things, let me write down the general gist of this myth, with my notes in parentheses:

“A couple living in a large and isolated house goes out to a dinner party. They hire a babysitter to be in charge of their two children (the number of children fluctuates depending on which version of the story you’re reading). The children had been put to bed and the babysitter was watching television. The phone rang, and she answered. However, all she heard was a man laughing hysterically and saying, “I’m upstairs with the children; you’d better come up.” (What the man says also varies, but it always involves him saying or asking her to come upstairs to check on the children).

The babysitter assumed that it was a prank call, she hung up and turn the TV sound up. A short time later the phone rang again and she heard the hysterical laughter again, and he repeated, “I’m upstairs with the children; you’d better come up.”

By this point, the babysitter has gotten very frightened, so she called the operator and was advised that they would notify the police. The operator also tells the babysitter that should the strange man call again, that she should keep him talking in order to give the police enough time to trace the call.

Minutes later, the phone rang, and the voice said again, “I’m upstairs with the children; you’d better come up.” Even though she tried to keep him talking, he quickly hung up.

Only seconds later the phone rang again, and this time it was the operator, who said, “Get out of the house straight away. The man is on the extension upstairs.” The babysitter put down the phone and just then heard someone coming down the stairs. She fled from the house and ran into the arms of the police. The police burst into the house to find a man wielding a large butcher’s knife. He had entered the house through an upstairs window, murdered both the children and was just about to do the same to the babysitter.”

The story most likely originated in the early 1960s, and deals primarily with the adolescent insecurity with accepting increasing responsibilities and making the transition into adulthood. The teenaged babysitter is not only left alone, but she has children to look over, and fails at her duty catastrophically when it is revealed that the children were killed.

Even though it’s unlikely that any of this happened in real life (the story is very much implausible once you think about it), it’s still a good story and one that really packs in the suspense. This is probably why it was adapted into the 1979 horror movie When A Stranger Calls, and a similar story was told in the 1974 movie Black Christmas.