August 17, 2025 • 56 mins
The job seems simple—watch the kids, keep the house in order, and wait for the parents to come home. But sometimes, a night of babysitting turns into a nightmare you’ll never forget. In this episode, hear real stories from babysitters who faced strange noises, terrifying phone calls, eerie figures in the dark, and children who weren’t quite what they seemed. These are the nights that still haunt them… and might make you think twice before saying “yes” to your next babysitting gig.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hey, campfire crew, let's get it on. Hey, gang, my
ass is going on vacation, so there's gonna be a
couple of best of volumes to tide you over while
I'm gone. There will be a new two for Tuesday
out there, so look for that next week until I
get back. Everybody, stay safe, take care of one another,
(00:22):
and more scary stuff on the way when I return.
Doppelganger submitted by Eric the sort of great. Hey, thanks
(00:45):
for responding to my email and letting me know you
were going to do this topic. I'm not gushing and
I'm not trying to kiss your ass, but I've emailed
other horror narrators and they've never returned my questions. That
makes you a good guy in my book. Anyway. I
had never heard the term doppelganger until after this incident
happened to me. My aunt and uncle and cousins were
(01:08):
visiting my family for the holidays, and my one cousin
was seven years old. His older sister was sixteen. The
family wanted to go out bowling, but I didn't feel
like it, and my younger cousin, whom I will call Stephen,
was not feeling well. They asked if I would stay
home and watch Stephen while they went out and had fun.
And I figured, well, that gives me a chance to
(01:29):
have a smoke veg out on some sega, and because
Stephen wasn't feeling well, hey, he'd just be asleep. They
thanked me for doing it, and all left for dinner
around five and then were going bowling and wouldn't be
back until close to eleven. No sweat. I got Stephen
into his guest bed, put a garbage can next to
it in case he had to throw up, and made
(01:51):
sure that he was okay and if he needed anything else.
He was just very tired, was running a fever and
wanted to sleep, so after taking some medicine, he drifted off.
I went to my bedroom, which was in the basement.
At the time. We were having some renovations done upstairs,
so I had been relocated there while the workers did
their thing, and if anyone asks, that room and another
(02:14):
room were cordoned off and no one could get into them,
so no one was at risk of getting hurt or
coming and going out of them. I'm just putting that
out there. So I go to my room, crack open
a window, fire up a Marlborough and bust out some
altered beast. I freaking love that game. I was playing
away and I got the idea that maybe a beer
(02:35):
or two would go well with this cigarette, so I
went over to our extra refrigerator we kept in the
basement that held stuff for parties like extra beer and soda,
et cetera. Mind you, I was seventeen at the time
of this, so while my parents allowed me to have
a beer now and again, I really shouldn't have been
doing what I was doing. Oh well, I'll call me
a rebel or whatever. It was just what me and
(02:55):
my friends did, and none of us got in trouble,
so whatever. I was playing away and having a really
good time when I heard some one walking on the
hardwood floors right above me. I paused the game and
went upstairs to see if Stephen was moving around or
if he needed something. But there was no one there.
So I ran upstairs to check on Stephen and he
(03:16):
was laying in his bed totally asleep. I went back
to my room, had another cigarette, and played more of
my game, and then moved on to Rocky. I had
another beer, and right when I had cracked it open,
I heard footsteps above me again. I jumped up, went
upstairs and looked around, and there was Stephen walking through
(03:38):
our dining room to the front of our house to
the family room. I called out to him, Hey, Steve,
are you okay? You need something? You feeling better? He
didn't say anything to me and kept walking, so I
followed him, clearly seeing him from the back wearing the
same clothes that he was wearing when I put him
in bed. He made turned from the dining room to
(04:01):
the family room, so I started walking quicker to catch
up to him. When I got into the family room,
I saw him going down the stairs to our front foyer,
where he opened the door and walked outside. I yelled out, Hey,
what the hell you doing and ran for the door.
It was still open a crack, and when I flung
it open and looked out onto her porch, there was
(04:23):
nobody there. I went out onto the porch and looked
all around my yard and driveway. There was no sign
of Stephen. I was perplexed, to say the least, so
I went back inside, shut the door and ran upstairs again.
Popped into the guest room only to see Stephen still
totally asleep. I should say at this point that I
(04:46):
know what I heard upstairs was there because my dog
was in my room with me, and when I noticed
the sounds and looked over at him, he was already
looking up like he had heard it both times as well.
My dog did not come upstairs with me when I
saw what I thought with Stephen walking through the house,
I don't know why. Just then Stephen woke up and
(05:07):
looked at me, and I asked him if he was
feeling okay and why he was walking around the house.
He said he hadn't been walking around the house and
the only time he had gotten out of bed was
to go to the bathroom a few minutes after I
had left the room in the first place. I just
shook my head and asked him if he was okay.
He said he was still feeling kind of rotten. So
(05:27):
I took his temperature and he still had the fever.
I got him some cold water and told him to
just rest and again call if he needed anything. He
fell back asleep, and that was that. I know. Some
people may say, well, you did have a couple of beers,
but no, I had really only had one and I
don't remember beer ever, making you see people walking around
(05:49):
that are not really there. I, for the life of me,
can't explain what that was all about. My family came
home later, and I didn't mention it to anybody. As
a matter of fact, I never told anybody until just
a few years ago. And this happened over thirty years ago.
When I did say something, that's when the term doppelganger
(06:11):
came up, and I thought, Wow, did I see my
cousin's doppelganger walking around my house? And from what I've
read up on it, doppelgangers are supposed to be fore
warners of death. Stephen certainly did not die. He got
over his little bout of the flu, and there's a
fine man with a family today. Anyway. I just wanted
(06:31):
to share that story. If anyone out there has any
thoughts or comments on this, I would love to hear them.
He wouldn't stop calling. While in my last year at UNI,
I was trying to earn a little extra money and
(06:52):
decided to post ads online for babysitting and dog walking
services in my local area. Most people with ads on
there had a pick sure of themselves, and so did I.
Logic being that parents would want to check out potential
babysitters by appearance too. Most people put contact numbers on
there too, so I also did that, thinking it might
(07:12):
give potential customers more points of contact than just messaging
through the ad site. So within about forty five minutes
of posting this ad, I'm downstairs cooking dinner and I
hear my phone ringing in my bedroom, but I'm tied
up with hot pans on the stove, et cetera. So
I left it annoying that I had missed a potential customer. However,
(07:34):
I hear my phone ringing again and again and again.
I dash up as soon as I can free myself
from cooking and go and pick up the phone. When
I pick up, all I can hear is heavy breathing.
So naturally, after I didn't get a reply, I hung up.
The phone rang again. As soon as I put it down.
(07:56):
I picked it up again, and eventually a guy replied.
He starts off normal, and I figured that perhaps it
had just been a bad line before. He explains that
he has two kids under five, and then asks me
if I think I can handle them, Having experienced with
some pretty shitty behaved kids in the past, I say yes.
(08:19):
He then asks me if I stay overnight when babysitting,
and this pulled up a red flag in my mind
and I firmly said no. After that, he went silent again,
and all I heard is this heavy breathing. I asked
if he was still there, and he suddenly says, are
you a virgin? I hung up the phone kept ringing
(08:43):
and ringing and ringing for another hour non stop. He
had withheld his number, so I couldn't specifically block that number,
But then I found the function to block withheld numbers
on my phone and did it. Deleted my number from
the ad site, and then proceeded to message every other
person on there in my area with a babysitting ad
to warn them. Turns out some of them had similar experiences.
(09:08):
I would never have fallen for the do you stay
over night part, but it made me shudder to think
of teenagers or vulnerable adults falling for it, and what
could have happened to them. If he hadn't withheld his number.
I would have reported him in an instant. I felt
so unsafe and was jumping at shadows for the rest
of that evening. My Time as a nanny is submitted
(09:36):
by Ariel all I'm going to say about where this
happened was it was near Miami. I had dropped out
of college after my sophomore year because I didn't want
to spend any more money on a degree I wasn't
sure I really wanted, and I didn't want to waste
any more time trying to figure out what I really
wanted to do. I thought long and hard about staying
(09:58):
in my job as a waitress slash hostess, and then
heard about becoming a nanny. I looked into it and
thought it was interesting and decided to move forward with
it and applied for a job. There was some training
involved in a lot of background checks, but I was
accepted into the agency and very quickly placed with a family.
(10:19):
I was blown away. This family was loaded beyond my
wildest dreams. Yes, it was about an hour away from home,
but there was no way I couldn't take this job.
I was to watch two kids all day long, even
though the mom was to stay at home mom. It
was two boys, both aged four. They were twins. She
(10:41):
spent most of her days at the gym, coffee shop, shopping,
lunch dates with friends, and was also involved with a
local charity. So she was rarely at home, so much
for being a stay at home mom. The father had
his own business and was extremely busy with that. I
didn't know exactly what it was, and I didn't see
him as much as I saw the mother. He was
(11:02):
away on business trips quite frequently. The times I did
spend with him, though, he was very nice to me.
Their house was insane. I couldn't tell you the exact
square footage, but it had to be at least fifteen
or twenty thousand square feet. There were like twelve bedrooms
and ten bathrooms, two separate den offices, a couple of
(11:23):
different living rooms, a six car garage, a separate garage
for even more cars, and an entire backhouse which was mine.
Even that had two bedrooms, a full kitchen, two bathrooms,
and immediate access to a massive inground pool. Okay, I
know this is a lot of backstory, but it's kind
of important. So my job went. I watched the two
(11:47):
boys every day, and they were not in preschool for
whatever reason, and I was required to do these teaching
modules with them, and I think that's what the mother
thought was adequate before they went to kindergarten the next year.
It was a good job. I liked being with the kids.
As I said, the father was extremely nice to me
and the mother was extremely fair as well. I even
(12:07):
had use of one of their cars. I shit you
not a maserati. I was given excellent time off in
the evenings and on the weekends, and when they went
on holiday trips, I went with them at no charge,
didn't take care of the kids the entire time, and
was always given extra spending money to do whatever I
wanted to for at least two or three days on
these week or two week trips. So far, this sounds
(12:31):
like a fucking paradise right. Well. While I was watching
the kids one day, there was a buzz from the
driveway gate. I was busy with the kids in their
basement playroom, and the maid, a woman named Maria, who
did not speak English very well, apparently buzzed this person
in thinking it was a delivery of some kind. I
(12:51):
thought that was odd because most deliveries went to a
different building for holding until the father or mother got home.
So I'm playing with the kids and I hear a
noise from upstairs and down the hall at the front door,
and Maria starting to yell in Spanish. Very loudly, and
then she screamed. I looked at the kids and told
(13:13):
them to stay put and I would be right back.
I went upstairs and looked down the hallway to see
three guys in black suits standing in front of Maria.
One was talking to her in Spanish and the other
two were behind him, and I couldn't miss the fact
that they were both holding handguns. From my vantage point,
(13:34):
I could see through the back living room slash dining
room atrium windows that there were four other guys in
the backyard, all also in dark suits, all also holding handguns.
I immediately backed up, closed the door softly, went downstairs
and grabbed the kids. Went to the far end of
their playroom. They had one of those little plastic playhouses there,
(13:58):
and I told them that we were going to have
a tea party inside. We went in, and I was
freaking out, but I didn't want them to freak out
alongside me, so it was very hard to keep all
this in. I had no idea what was going on,
but the sight of those guns was scaring the shit
out of me. Suddenly I heard another scream again from upstairs,
(14:21):
and a lot of shouting from the mother. She had
just come home and walked in on all of this,
and I'm sure she was also freaking out due to
her screams. I heard footsteps racing all throughout the house
very quickly with the continued screaming of Maria and the mother.
I heard the basement door open and footsteps come down
the hallway, and the sound of two men talking while
(14:42):
going room to room looking for something. I was holding
my breath and telling the kids to be as quiet
as they could when the door to the play room
popped open and through the playhouse window I saw two
men coming straight into the room with their guns out
looking around. One obviously caught my eye came straight over
(15:04):
to the playhouse and ripped the door open. Both of
the boys didn't scream, but just looked wide eyed up
at this intense looking man of what I assume was
Spanish or Puerto Rican heritage and hindsight. As fucking scared
as I was, I have to admit he was actually
very handsome. I know, I'm a fucking maniac. He looked
(15:26):
me in the eye and simply said, Nanny. I don't
know a lot of Spanish, but I knew what he
was asking, and I held on to the two boys
and vigorously shook my head up and down and said yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, Nanny, Nanny, nanny.
He sort of smiled, put his gun down, said something
to the other guy, and they both backed out of
(15:46):
the room and closed the door. I heard the footsteps
retreat back upstairs, and lots more shouting and screaming. I
was so scared I had pissed my pants, and the
kids noticed and started giggling. They were four years old
and they had zero idea of what had just happened.
So what had happened, Well, the father was actually a
(16:08):
drug dealer, or some kind of money launder or for
a drug dealer. I don't really know the details. These
gentlemen were there to find him or whatever it was
they were looking for. That's the basic gist of what
I got. But I wasn't told much and I didn't
ask a lot of questions for obvious reasons. When I
knew all of the men had left the house, I
took the kids upstairs to the mother, who was crumpled
(16:30):
up on a living room couch crying into her iPhone.
I sat the kids next to her, looked for Maria,
who was crumpled over into the kitchen and also crying
while she was sitting on the floor. I stood there
for a minute before realizing I had to change my clothes,
so I went back to the house that I stayed in,
changed my clothes, got cleaned up, and I immediately started
(16:51):
putting all of my things into my bags, as there
was no way in hell I was staying there for
one more fucking minute. The mother came up to talk
to me and kept re assuring me that something like
this would never happen again and that everything was okay
and we were safe. I told her that I loved
her kids very much, but there was no way I
could be involved with a family like this, despite the
(17:12):
money and my love for the kids. I got my
things together, called a friend to pick me up, called
the agency and quit on the spot and with no
reason given to them, and then went home to my parents,
Like I said, an hour away. I told them everything
that happened, and they hugged me extra tight and told
me that I did the right thing. Despite repeated calls
(17:35):
from the mother, I did not go back no matter
how much money they offered me, and I believe me,
they offered me a considerable raise. So there's no monsters
or crazy kids or anything like that in my story.
But dear God, I have never been that scared in
my entire life. I went back to my job in
the restaurant, enrolled in community college, and put it all
(17:57):
behind me, not from those people in over three years,
and I'm planning on moving to Denver soon. Thank you
for telling my story. If you do, Damn, I'm getting
chills just thinking about that guy opening that playhouse door
with a gun drawn, staring into my eyes, thinking how
close to death I may have come. The pounding wouldn't stop.
(18:30):
When I was in high school, I spent about a
week babysitting two kids in their house while their parents
were away on business. Although I lived in a fairly
rural area, the family lived within ten minutes of my house,
and I knew the neighborhood pretty well as I had
babysat for the family before. It was late October Halloween weekend,
and as a typical seventeen year old, I was disappointed
(18:52):
I was not out with my friends and instead stuck
inside babysitting. It was just about bedtime for the kids,
so it was pitch black outside and silent. Again, very
rural area, and this makes this encounter that much creepier.
The house I was sitting had a large backyard and
a sort of garage that had been converted to an apartment.
(19:13):
A young man lived in the apartment, but the family
was insistent that he never came to the house and
would not bother me. As I was putting the kids
to bed, a doorbell rang. Since I knew my family
and friends were out for Halloween, I opened the front
door without thinking. It was my best friend, who also
lived nearby, so she knew the house I was staying at.
(19:36):
She had a couple of our guy friends with her
and explained that they were on their way to the
corn mazes and wanted to just stop by and say hi.
Grateful to see them before they went. We hung out
in the kitchen for probably twenty minutes before they went
on their way. By that time, the kids were asleep upstairs,
so I went around the house and locked all the
doors and closed all of the blinds. It was a
(19:57):
pretty modern style home, so an entire side of the
house was just straight windows. After I got the house
ready and I settled down in the living room to
watch TV. Probably around thirty minutes or so past when
I heard a knock at the front door. It was faint,
so I turned off the TV to hear it better.
(20:18):
Hearing the knock again, I could feel the hairs on
my arms stand up. It was pretty late and I
had no idea who would be coming to the house
at this hour. Suddenly, the faint knock turned into a violent,
loud banging. Running on adrenaline, I sprint it upstairs into
the master bedroom. I didn't have a cell phone at
(20:39):
the time, and knowing there was a phone in the room,
I figured it would be safer to be near a
phone and the kids. Now not only is the door
being pounded on, but the doorbell is being rung over
and over again, I mean insistently. I pound my house
number into the phone and my mom picks up. I
panically told her what was going on downstairs. She gave
(21:01):
the phone to my dad and he said he'd be
right there. Relieved, I clutched the phone in my hand
and go out to the landing to check on the kids.
The oldest was standing outside her door, confused and afraid.
I quickly told her it was just my dad coming
to check on us. And to go back into her
room and go back to bed. After she went back
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in her room, I rushed downstairs to make sure the
doors were still locked, running past the wall of windows
to get to the door. Suddenly all of them started
shaking violently. I'm absolutely terrified at this point. I run
to the TV room and look for something I could
use as a weapon. Suddenly, the ringing and pounding just stopped.
(21:44):
I sit there, stunned in absolute silence. Then a single
doorbell ring shatters the silence and makes me practically jump
out of my skin, feeling a rush of relief. Upon
realizing it was my dad, I rushed to open the door.
There was nobody there. I slammed the door shut and
run to grab the phone and I called my house again.
(22:06):
Am I whispered, is Dad here? She tells me he
can't find the car keys and hasn't even left yet.
I felt the blood run out of my face. I'm
crying hysterically at this point, So my mom stays on
the phone with me and tells me when my dad
finally leaves, I see a pair of headlights come tearing
(22:28):
through the dark. The sheer speed of the car told
me it was my dad. I threw open the front
door and ran out. Suddenly, from around the corner, three
shadows came out. My dad, wielding a baseball bat. At
this point, ran towards the shadowy figures, screaming and waving
his arms. The closer they get, I realize it was
(22:49):
my friends. Instead of going to the corn maze, they
decided it would be fun to scare me on Halloween.
I felt a rush of relief and anger. My dad
bitch them out, and although I did not get a
lot of sleep that night, I was happy to know
it was just my friends. I know this story has
kind of a lame ending, but it was honestly the
(23:10):
scariest moment of my life. The new Guy submitted by
Onerous forty five. Okay, so when I was fourteen, I
took a job with a family on a street over
from me, babysitting there two kids who were five and seven.
(23:33):
They were good kids, a boy and a girl, and
I stayed at that job for the next two years
because the pay was good, the kids were low maintenance,
and I really liked the way the family took care
of me. They were friends with my parents too, so
there were a lot of reasons to stay. Like I said,
it was a good job. Nearly every day in the
summer and lots of weekends throughout the year. Plus they
(23:57):
had a pool, so that was a huge bonus. Sometimes
my friends would come over with the parents permission, and
how can you tell a teenage girl that spending a
day in the sun with two well behaved kids and
your b ffs to leave a job like that. The
summer that I turned sixteen, however, things changed, and not
for the better. Unbeknownst to me, the mother and father
(24:21):
had not been getting along for quite some time and
were actually going through a divorce. Long story short, and
I found this out later. Mom had been cheating on
the father. He left the house, and I am sure
it was not an easy time, but it was about
to get weirder and scarier for me. In June, a
new guy, I presumed the man though mom was cheating with,
(24:44):
started to spend a lot of time at the house
and would sometimes show up when I was babysitting looking
for the mom. That was a little red flag, but
without jumping to conclusions, I was wondering why he would
stop over in the middle of the day when he
had to know the mom was at work. After a
couple of times of this in the same week, one
of my friends brought it up as odd. Just as
(25:07):
she was saying this, she looked over my shoulder and
we were sitting out by the pool watching the kids
play with their floaties, and she said, he's here, and
he has a camera. I popped up and there he
was at the gate by the side of the house
taking pictures of us. He realized we saw him and
immediately came over, trying to tell us he was taking
(25:29):
shots of the backyard for a landscaper. He was doing
it as a favor for the mom. As creepy as
it was, it sounded believable, and he took a few
more and then said goodbye and left. When the mom
got home from work that afternoon, I gave her my report,
got my weekly pay, and I kind of brought it
(25:50):
up without making a huge issue about it. She looked
puzzled for a minute, but then said, oh, I did
ask him to take some pictures of the fence. I
felt like it was weird. I mean, he was pointing
to the camera right at us when my friend noticed him.
I didn't go back to babysit until that Monday, and
(26:10):
not much happened over the weekend except a strange account
tried to connect with me on my Twitter and Snapchat.
I didn't recognize them, but my friend called me Sunday
to say the same thing happened to her. She did
accept and said it was some guy from our school,
just trying to connect over the summer. Okay, fine. Monday
(26:31):
came and I got back to my little guys and
all was well. I brought them inside from the pool
to play some games while I made them lunch before
we did our summer reading and took a nap. While
I was making sandwiches, I saw an envelope of photos
on the counter. Two things took me aback. One who
develops photos anymore? And hmm, I wonder if those were
(26:54):
the ones the new guy had taken. Curious, I opened
the already open package and it was the fence and stuff. However,
I looked at the thumbnail strip and there were a
whole bunch of photos of me and my friend. One
of them was of me bending over in my swimsuit.
Well was crawling up there, if you know what I mean.
(27:18):
My stomach was in knots and I put everything back,
and I was going to tell my parents about this
as well as the mom, and I couldn't figure out
who to tell first. I know, I was just a kid.
For the rest of the afternoon, that was all I
could think of, despite taking care of my kiddos. We
were out by the pool when Mom came home, so
I decided to tell her about the photos. I simply
(27:41):
went to the package, but when I went to get
the thumbnail strip, it wasn't in there. I made up
some stupid excuse about a part of the fence I
thought looked like it was falling down, and just got
out of there. Where the hell did that strip go?
I called my friend and told her about it, and
she didn't really know what to tell me. I was
(28:02):
getting weirded out and couldn't tell my parents or the
mom if there was no evidence, so I just sat
on it and tried to get on with the summer.
That weekend, the mom asked if I could watch the
kids last minute that Saturday night. I was on the fence,
but when she said one hundred dollars for the night,
I couldn't say no. She had a work party she
(28:23):
forgot about and would be back around midnight, five hours
and one hundred bucks. Yeah, not turning that down. In retrospect,
I wish I had. I got to the house, played
with the kids and then got them to bed after
doing the Disney thing, and then went back to the
couch to text my friends and watch TV on in
(28:44):
the background. It was about eleven o'clock when the back
door opened and in came the new guy. He came
over to me asking about a specific jacket that the
mom had asked him to come home from the party
to get for her. Okay, now I've got a big
red flag that just seemed weird. I texted the mom
(29:05):
to ask her if everything was okay and what jacket
did she need, but I got no response. He was
now standing over by the closet, saying it's not there
and maybe it's in her room. I text her again,
no response. He calls out if I know the jacket
he's talking about, and frankly, I do know the one.
(29:28):
But I'm getting kind of nervous about him being there
and me being there alone. I texted my friend as
fast as I could and noticed that everything had gone quiet.
I got up to see what he was doing. For
a minute, I thought maybe he was robbing the place
or something. But I saw the lights on in the
mom's master suite, which was on the first floor, and
(29:50):
when I poked my head in, I could see him
standing in the walk in closet. I went over to
him and said, isn't she coming home at midnight? I mean,
it's getting close to that. Maybe you should just go
get her. He turned around, yanked me into the closet
and shut the door. I started to swing around, but
he put his hand over my mouth and pulled me
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into her clothes and started groping me. I mean he
was grabbing my breasts. He was putting his hand between
my legs and squeezing my butt, and I could smell
the booze on his breath, and I was in total
panic mode. But in the back of my mind, I
remember what my dad told me, and he's an ex
marine and superhuge into fitness. I remembered the lesson he
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told me. Bawled up my fist and smashed it into
his package and he let go of me. I kicked
at the side of his knee as hard as I could,
and he fell down. I ran out of the closet
and flew upstairs, locking myself in the kid's room and
telling them to get into their closet. The poor things
were still asleep and had no idea what was going on.
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And I called the mom on my cellphone and she answered,
but the noise of the park he was so loud.
I just screamed at her to get home. I hung
up and called my mom and she was frantic. My
friend had already called her, and my dad was on
his way over. The kids were now crying and I
was shaking violently and crying, and I heard loud footsteps
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downstairs and my dad calling out for me. I didn't
move or say anything until I heard him race upstairs
and was right outside the door, asking if I was inside.
I got out of the closet, ran to the door,
opened it, and jumped into his arms, freaking out and crying.
My mom came running up too and hugged me, and
then ran to the still crying kids and tried to
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comfort them. The new guy was nowhere to be found.
My dad called the police, and just as they were
pulling up, the mom pulled up in someone else's car,
who had given her a ride home. As fast as
they could, she ran up to us and then slipped
and fell down. She was drunk as a skunk. The
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police asked me all kinds of questions and finally had
to separate the mom because she kept interrupting and quite frankly,
was hysterical. I told them everything that had happened, including
the pictures and the missing thumbnails and all of it.
They caught the guy that night, driving back to his
apartment and got him just before he went inside. The
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police were at the house for quite a while that night,
and my mom stayed the night there to watch over
the kids, as their mom was on the verge of
passing out and would have been little assistance in any emergency.
To this day, I don't know why the police allowed that,
but I guess they knew better or something, or just
trusted us. Dad took me home and stayed with me
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in our living room until I fell asleep exhausted. The
next day, the police came by our house and told
my dad some interesting things. The guy had placed cameras
all over the house and outside and had been watching
me every time I was there. That's how he knew.
I found the pictures back into the house and took
out what he thought was incriminating. He was also the
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same person that contacted me and my friend posing as
a student in our school. What a creep. They wanted
to know if we wanted to press charges, and we
said yes, and we did. Throughout all the ordeal, we
found out that the mom did ask about this jacket
because she was feeling a little cool in the summer air,
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and he just left on his own and never really
told her that he wasn't there. He obviously had other plans.
He was later sentenced to two years for sexual assault
and is now a registered sex offender. All that took
a while, and I thought two years was a little light,
but I don't know. I don't understand the law. As
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for the mom, she tried to come over the next
day this all happened, and while I know none of
this was directly her fault, my parents forbade her from
seeing me. She had a check for three hundred dollars
for me and a letter saying about how sorry she was.
I accepted both. After that, I still watched my little
(34:09):
guys for two weeks, but at my house, and my
mom would pick them up and drop them off until
other arrangements could be made. One evening, our doorbell rang
and it was the two kiddos crying and telling me
they were going away and they wanted to say goodbye.
I hugged them and kissed them over and over and
told them that I loved them and it was going
(34:29):
to be okay. And that was the last I saw
or heard from them. That was five years ago. I
loved those kids so much, but I could never step
in that house again. I got a job at Chick
fil A after that and have never been babysitting since.
(34:53):
What was in the house Submitted by adaptive reasoner. This
happened back in nineteen eighty five, when I was a
junior in high school. I was babysitting for a little
boy in my neighborhood whom I had watched a number
of times before this. He would always get excited for
me over his other sitters because I always made popcorn
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and played his favorite board games. I guess the others
just wanted to watch TV. Anyway. It was a Saturday
night and I remember it was storming pretty well rain.
That was. It was spring, right before summer. As I recall,
it was warm out, but there was the rain. We
were playing candy Land and munching on popcorn when I
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heard a loud thump come from the basement. Let me explain.
This was a fairly new development we lived in, so
the houses had just been built. This wasn't the typical
creepy old house. Their basement was fairly open and had
a ping pong table and some chairs, outside of the
regular stuff people acquired in their basements. He didn't notice
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the sound, so I blew it off and just played
the game. A few minutes later, I heard it again,
this time, he said, and I'll call him Tommy for
this story. What was that? I said, I didn't know,
but I'd go check. I went down the stairs to
the basement after flicking on the lights. There was nothing
(36:16):
down there. All was well. I shrugged and went back upstairs.
It was getting to be around nine to thirty, in
time for him to go to bed, so I took
him upstairs, turned his radio on to the local soft
rock station, and told him to call me if he
needed anything. He was out by ten or so after
he read a comic. I went back downstairs and cleaned
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things up and heard more thumps, this time like three
in a row. Stopped what I was doing and again,
went down in the basement through the door off the kitchen. Nothing.
I stood and waited for about five minutes, and still nada.
I went back upstairs and went to watch TV for
the rest of the night. But around ten forty five
(37:02):
I heard Tommy call out to me. I went up
and asked him what was wrong, and he said there
was something strange in his closet, making noises. I went
into the room and turned down the lights and looked around.
The closet was closed, and I went over to it
and looked inside. Just like the basement, there was nothing
in there. I told him everything was fine and that
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he probably just dreamed he had heard something. I tucked
him back in and went to leave the room, and
right as I got to the door and turned off
the light, a loud thumping came from the closet. Tommy
screamed and jumped out of bed and ran towards me,
and I took his hand and pulled him out of
the room and shut the door. At the end of
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their hallway was a built in linen closet, and as
we stood there looking at each other, the doors to
it slammed open, and towels and bed sheets came flying
out onto the floor, and now I yelled and pulled
Tommy towards the stairs were getting out of there. We
got to the living room and I had him sit
on the couch while I tried to contact his parents,
who were at some kind of dinner dance at a hotel.
(38:10):
I had the front desk person assure me they would
try to track them down for me and have them
call me back. I turned down a funny movie to
try to lighten the mood, and that's when the lights
started flickering and the banging started, both upstairs and downstairs.
The lights all went off. I screamed, and the TV
went from the movie to a bright light that kept
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getting brighter and brighter. So I covered Tommy's eyes and
shut mine as tight as I could. But then just
like that, everything stopped. The lights came on, the TV
was fine, the pounding stopped. I was going crazy trying
to keep together, and finally thought to call my parents,
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but when I tried, I just got a busy signal
me by the hand again and went to the back
door and we could stay out on the porch until
his parents came home. They had an awning and like
I said it was warm enough and the rain wouldn't
have bothered us. But the sliding glass door wouldn't open.
I checked the lock. It was flipping up and down easily,
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but the door wouldn't budge. I went over to the
back door and the knob turned, but that door wouldn't open.
I banged on it out of frustration and started crying,
and then went back to Tommy. We tried the front door,
the door to the garage. None of them would open.
We could not get out of this house. I hugged
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him and told him it was going to be okay.
But then this cracking sound, I mean really loud cracking sound,
came from the basement. We just stood there, silent, listening,
and the pounding started up again, so loud that it
began to shake the floor. Then this deep throated laugh
started to go through the entire house. And by this
time we're both really crying, and I'm yelling for whatever
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it is to go away and leave us alone. Things
were really out of control. All of the lights went
off again and for a minute there was silence. Then
all of the doors in the house, including the bedrooms,
the cupboards, everything slammed open and shut. Not once, but twice,
and we felt this massive wind rush through the living room,
(40:22):
so heavy that it knocked us back onto the couch.
There was one more loud bang, and then the lights
came on. It was dead silent. We sat there for
a long time, just breathing heavily, scared out of our wits.
I remember saying a prayer, telling Tommy we were going
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to be fine, and I got up and checked the
front door. It opened without a problem. I grabbed Tommy
by the hand once again and headed for the back deck.
When the phone rang. It was his parents asking what
was wrong, and they'd been trying to call and the
line was busy. I didn't know what to tell them.
I just burst into tears again and begged them to
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come home. Tommy's dad said they were on their way,
and we went outside to wait for them. Tommy kept
asking me what would happened and what that was, and
I just kept saying, I don't know, honey, I don't know,
but you're safe. I've got you. His parents got home
about twenty minutes later, and of course wanted to know
what the hell had happened. Tommy tried to tell them,
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but was still so scared. He was blubbering, so mom
took him to bed. I told his dad everything that
had happened, but he just looked at me skeptically and
then accused me of watching horror movies and letting my
imagination get away with me. And then he got mad
and asked how the hell I could have let such
a young child watch that kind of trash. I mean,
(41:47):
he really started yelling at me, and I started crying again,
trying to get him to believe me. Just then Tommy's
mom came down and asked about the linen closet, and
while all the stuff was strewed all all over the hallway,
and I said see, They both just looked at me,
and then they heard the thump start from the basement.
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He ran downstairs, followed by us, and the thumping didn't stop.
It was coming from a back wall where there was
now a huge crack started on the wall. Ran down
to the floor. He stood looking at it, and the
thumping got louder and then abruptly stopped. He told us
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to go upstairs. We did, and the mom fumbled for
her purse, paid me my money and told me to
just go home. She wasn't being a bitch. I think
she was trying to protect me. I don't know why
I thought that, and still do, but that's how I feel.
I never baby sat there again, and I don't think
(42:51):
I ever talked to that family after that. I do
know they moved away not too long after this happened,
and none of my friends ever babysat there either. Looking back,
I always think was the mother into some kind of
weird satanic or witchcraft stuff that caused something like that
to happen. I don't know nobody else in my neighborhood
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ever complained about anything like that happening. I told my
parents and all my friends about what I had seen
and heard that night, but I'm pretty sure no one
believed me, or believes me now if I were to
tell them again. But that really happened to me. I
don't know what it was, but I've never been through
anything like that ever again. A babysitter story by Joscelyn.
(43:43):
Ever since, my aunt told me ghost stories from the
barn she worked at, and I've been fascinated by the paranormal,
but nothing particularly frightening it ever happened to me. That is,
until I took a certain babysitting job a few blocks
down from me. When I first entered the stuccowed mansion,
thought there was something a bit strange about the place,
but I let it slide. The home itself was lovely
(44:06):
and warm in appearance. The children were delightful, two blond
little girls aged sixteen months and four years old. The
first few weeks were fine, without any major occurrences beyond
the occasional strange behavior of the dog. She would bark
at the air and growl at the walls, and sometimes
she would cower in a corner as though someone or
something were threatening her. I tried to ignore it, though,
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but something in the back of my mind wouldn't let
me be at peace in that house. After about a
month or so, the parents of the girls asked that
while they were away, what I liked to watch the
dog collect their mail and check on the house daily,
and I would be paid in the process. I agreed,
thinking it would be easy money. Little did I know
how much effort it would take. The first visit went
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smoothly and nothing happened, but the second was a bit unnerving.
I returned to the house after walking the dog and
went indoors for a drink. It was a very warm
May day, and I decided to open up the windows
to air out the place. After I swept the floor
and brought in the mail, I sat down to watch
some TV while the dog ran around outside. Suddenly the
(45:13):
TV turned itself off. Perplexed, I got up and turned
it back on. As I sat down, I became aware
that someone was watching me from the backstairs. The backstairs
had always scared the pants off me anyway, so you
can imagine that this was terrifying. As I got up
to leave, I heard a loud thud and banging on
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the stairs, the voice of a small child gingling, and
being the Catholic that I was, I began to scream
the Lord's Prayer and ran out as fast as I could,
leaving the door open and the dog to run amok.
The run home was a blur, and I don't really
remember anything until my mom agreed to walk back with
me to check things out. And at that point I
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don't think she fully believed what I heard was a ghost,
but this would change in time. We found nothing, as
you can expect, and I, with my mother's help, managed
to convince myself that I had imagined the whole thing.
The following day, after a night to sleep on things,
I felt a lot better and was able to go
through my routine without too much to worry. Once again,
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I returned to the house with the dog and went
about the usual run of things. Once again, I let
the dog out and got myself a coke out of
the fridge. I'd read somewhere once that if you expect
a ghost, it won't appear, so I felt a little
more at ease. However, this is not true. Once again
I heard the thuds and laughter, and I was scared
(46:36):
like hell, but I forced myself to walk over to
the back hall. Although it was a bright day, the
hallway was dark and cold. I called out hello. I
thought maybe someone had snuck into the house. My answer
was the sound of footsteps running down towards me. This time,
I tried to stay calm, but I still practically had
a heart attack, letting them the dog and locking things up.
(47:00):
Day the family I worked for returned from their vacation.
I told them it all went great, got my money,
and went home. When they called that evening to ask
if I could sit that Friday night, I agreed, but
asked if I could bring a friend. I wasn't about
to stop working for them, I mean they paid extremely well,
so that Friday I went over with a good friend
of mine, who witnessed all of the activity. That evening,
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after I put the girls to bed, me and my
friend sat down to watch a movie she had brought.
The TV promptly shut off, and I began to get worried.
Maureen as well, that was the girl's name. She was
looking a bit creeped out. I hadn't told her about
the past experiences I had, and I wasn't about to
for fear she would leave me alone in the house.
(47:45):
I began to get that awful being watched feeling again,
and that was followed by the low giggle, this time
a lot more sinister. Maureen burst into tears and called
her mother to pick her up right away. She felt bad,
but she just couldn't stand it in the house any longer.
After she left, I tried to calm down, but I
knew things were at a climax. The rain, which had
(48:08):
been falling steadily for an hour, now got worse, and
the oldest girl asked if I would sleep next to
her because she was getting scared. I asked her of what,
and she said, Mommy says it's just the pipes, but
me and Ali know it's not. I told her not
to worry and tucked her in. I drifted into a
fitful sleep, and I woke up at about eleven or so,
(48:30):
soaked in sweat, with the feeling that there was something coming.
I opened my eyes, sat upright across from me, there
was a mirror, and in the mirror's reflection there was
someone standing next to me. I looked next to the
bed and there was no one there. Yet when I
looked in the mirror, there definitely was Presently, the girl
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woke up and the image disappeared, but the terror was
not over yet. She was having trouble breathing and couldn't talk.
I called her parents and she calmed down, and when
they got home, I told them that she had a fever,
and then I hurried back to my house. The following week,
I agreed to sit for them one more time. I know,
I'm a pig headed girl. I went over around six o'clock.
(49:16):
As you can imagine, after the girls were put to bed,
the TV pulled its warning trick and the activity started
full force again. I could hear over the baby monitor
that Ali was crying, but the monitor was not plugged in,
and when I checked Ali was fast asleep. When I
got downstairs, I could hear footsteps again and furniture being
(49:36):
dragged all over the top floor. I called my mom
and she came right over. She heard the noises and
was scared stiff too. She stayed with me until the
parents got home and informed them that I would no
longer be able to babysit for them. No doubt they
were perplexed, but to this day I refused to go
into their home. Babysitter Trouble submitted by power Plant fifty six.
(50:07):
This happened to me and my brother when I was
about eight and he was six. I'm calling myself Brian
and my brother Jake. It wasn't for another few years
that we were allowed to stay home alone, so like
everyone else in the world, we had babysitters. For one year.
We had this guy that lived up the street who
would watch us and he was awesome. His name was Jim,
and he would let us stay up late and would
(50:27):
crank rock records with us and tell us dirty stories
and jokes right before we went to sleep. I think
he was the first guy to tell us the Cheech
and Chong Dave's not here Mans skit, and Jake and
I would laugh and laugh and always ask him to
tell it more than once. Honestly, that still makes me laugh.
He was like seventeen or eighteen, and we thought he
was the coolest guy in our neighborhood. I think he
(50:48):
went into the military. I can't remember at this point,
but he wasn't our babysitter anymore. We got this really
hot girl for a little while, and she was seriously
the woman I based all my teenage fantasies that I
would have, and just a couple of years she was
great too. Then when I was nine or so, we
got a girl I'll call Kathy. Kathy was kind of
(51:09):
nerdy and younger than our other babysitters, and we liked her,
but she was also nice. I think she was more
like fourteen though. One night she was going to spend
the night at my house as my parents had some
conference out of town and they were going to spend
the night there rather than drive home really late. Kathy
had a friend come over, and I don't think she
was supposed to, but Jake and I didn't say anything.
(51:31):
We were just going to watch TV and eat popcorn
and stuff. This was back when all those shows were
on Saturday nights, like Fantasy Island and Love Boat and
that kind of thing. So anyway, this other teenager i'll
call Tina comes over and they're in the kitchen talking
and we're just watching TV. They come into the room
and Kathy asks if we want to play a game
or something. It was still light out and just getting
(51:52):
to be dark, and Jake, for some reason, wanted to
play hide and seek, so we all went outside. My
neighborhood had a lot of houses, but there was nothing
behind us except fields. We had a shed and an
old barn in back. But my dad didn't like us
playing in the barn as it was kind of run down.
So I tell Jake he has to be at first,
as he wanted to play and the rest of us
would run and hide. I knew he knew the barn
(52:15):
was off limits, and there was this little room off
the back that I could hide in and he never
would look there. It was kind of like a storage
shed that my dad kept tools and stuff. And I
sneaked in and closed the door, which I suppose was
totally unfair. And this is where things got creepy. As
I'm sitting there on a stool, in comes Tina and
she has her finger up to her lips. I didn't
(52:38):
say anything and we were just waiting there in the dark.
This is when she convinced me that we should turn
this into a cops and robbers game, and that we
can get Jake and Kathy if they get near this
back building behind the barn. I say okay, and she
says she'll pretend she's the robber and captures me, and
I go along with it. I mean, I was just
a kid. So she gets some rope and ties my
(52:58):
legs together and then ties my hand behind my back
and has me sit on the floor. She went to
the door and peeked outside and then came back over
to me. As I heard Kathy calling out for us,
this girl got down next to me and covered my
mouth with her hand and says to be quiet and
to wait for them. Again. I'm thinking this is just
a game and go along with it. After a minute,
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she grabbed a roll of black tape and put a
piece over my mouth and goes back to the door.
Now I'm starting to think this is weird, and I
start trying to talk but obviously can't. She came back
over to me and took a plastic bag and put
it over my head, and then walked back to the
door and went out. I mean, I'm not bullshitting, I'm
a little kid tied up on the floor with a
bag over my head. That's making it hard to breathe.
(53:41):
Now I'm freaking out and starting to cry and trying
to breathe and get out of the ropes. Tina comes
back in and takes the bag off, and she's smiling
and laughing and telling me to stop crying. It's just
a game. She untied me, and I'm really crying now,
and she tells me she'll give me two dollars if
I stop and not tell anyone. I get it together
and promise I won't say anything. Shit, it was two dollars, right,
(54:04):
stupid kid logic. So we leave and go back to
the house where Kathy and Jake are and they started
asking where we were hiding, but I didn't say anything.
Later that night, Jake says he's got a pee and
goes upstairs. We were watching something on TV, and I
didn't notice that Tina went up behind him. Kathy asked
if I wanted popcorn, so we went into the kitchen
(54:25):
to make it. We got back to the living room
and Tina was just sitting there watching TV, and we
joined her again. I didn't think about Jake right away,
but then I noticed he wasn't around, and I said, hey,
where'd Jake go? And Tina said he went to bed.
I thought it was odd, but it wasn't for another
half hour or so that I got up to see
if he was in bed. Tina told me to stay
(54:46):
down there and not wake him up, and I thought
about earlier in the night and what had happened. I
ran upstairs and into our room, and he wasn't there.
I looked in our closet and under the beds, and
then into my parents' room. He wasn't there either, and
he wasn't in the bathroom. Then I thought I heard
something in the closet and I opened the door with
Kathy right behind me. Our clothes hamper was in there
(55:08):
with a heavy shelf on the lid, but my brother
was inside the hamper. Tina had tied him up with
my mom's pantyhose and put him in there. Put the
shelf on the lid so he couldn't get out and
just left. Jake was crying and freaking out, and Kathy
did her best to calm him down, and we went
back downstairs to yell at Tina, who obviously did this,
but she wasn't there, and she had left and went home.
(55:33):
I told Kathy what had happened to me earlier, and
she called Tina's house, but I guess no one answered anyway.
Kathy stayed with us the rest of the night and
didn't let us out of her sight, and we told
my parents, and my mom had some choice words for
Tina's parents and also for Kathy for letting that girl
even come around. I don't know what happened to that girl,
who's now a woman, but I'll never forget that night.
(55:56):
I suppose it's not scary to an adult or anyone
listening to this, but it was creepy as a kid.
I mean, what would have happened if she had stayed
later and we fell asleep. I didn't want to think
about that. I had nightmares about not being able to
breathe for a long time after that. We don't really
talk about it, but every once in a while, Jake
brings her up to me, and I wonder if that
(56:16):
fucking psycho woman is out there abusing anybody else.
Hey, campfire crew, let's get it on. Hey, gang, my
ass is going on vacation, so there's gonna be a
couple of best of volumes to tide you over while
I'm gone. There will be a new two for Tuesday
out there, so look for that next week until I
get back. Everybody, stay safe, take care of one another,
(00:22):
and more scary stuff on the way when I return.
Doppelganger submitted by Eric the sort of great. Hey, thanks
(00:45):
for responding to my email and letting me know you
were going to do this topic. I'm not gushing and
I'm not trying to kiss your ass, but I've emailed
other horror narrators and they've never returned my questions. That
makes you a good guy in my book. Anyway. I
had never heard the term doppelganger until after this incident
happened to me. My aunt and uncle and cousins were
(01:08):
visiting my family for the holidays, and my one cousin
was seven years old. His older sister was sixteen. The
family wanted to go out bowling, but I didn't feel
like it, and my younger cousin, whom I will call Stephen,
was not feeling well. They asked if I would stay
home and watch Stephen while they went out and had fun.
And I figured, well, that gives me a chance to
(01:29):
have a smoke veg out on some sega, and because
Stephen wasn't feeling well, hey, he'd just be asleep. They
thanked me for doing it, and all left for dinner
around five and then were going bowling and wouldn't be
back until close to eleven. No sweat. I got Stephen
into his guest bed, put a garbage can next to
it in case he had to throw up, and made
(01:51):
sure that he was okay and if he needed anything else.
He was just very tired, was running a fever and
wanted to sleep, so after taking some medicine, he drifted off.
I went to my bedroom, which was in the basement.
At the time. We were having some renovations done upstairs,
so I had been relocated there while the workers did
their thing, and if anyone asks, that room and another
(02:14):
room were cordoned off and no one could get into them,
so no one was at risk of getting hurt or
coming and going out of them. I'm just putting that
out there. So I go to my room, crack open
a window, fire up a Marlborough and bust out some
altered beast. I freaking love that game. I was playing
away and I got the idea that maybe a beer
(02:35):
or two would go well with this cigarette, so I
went over to our extra refrigerator we kept in the
basement that held stuff for parties like extra beer and soda,
et cetera. Mind you, I was seventeen at the time
of this, so while my parents allowed me to have
a beer now and again, I really shouldn't have been
doing what I was doing. Oh well, I'll call me
a rebel or whatever. It was just what me and
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my friends did, and none of us got in trouble,
so whatever. I was playing away and having a really
good time when I heard some one walking on the
hardwood floors right above me. I paused the game and
went upstairs to see if Stephen was moving around or
if he needed something. But there was no one there.
So I ran upstairs to check on Stephen and he
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was laying in his bed totally asleep. I went back
to my room, had another cigarette, and played more of
my game, and then moved on to Rocky. I had
another beer, and right when I had cracked it open,
I heard footsteps above me again. I jumped up, went
upstairs and looked around, and there was Stephen walking through
(03:38):
our dining room to the front of our house to
the family room. I called out to him, Hey, Steve,
are you okay? You need something? You feeling better? He
didn't say anything to me and kept walking, so I
followed him, clearly seeing him from the back wearing the
same clothes that he was wearing when I put him
in bed. He made turned from the dining room to
(04:01):
the family room, so I started walking quicker to catch
up to him. When I got into the family room,
I saw him going down the stairs to our front foyer,
where he opened the door and walked outside. I yelled out, Hey,
what the hell you doing and ran for the door.
It was still open a crack, and when I flung
it open and looked out onto her porch, there was
(04:23):
nobody there. I went out onto the porch and looked
all around my yard and driveway. There was no sign
of Stephen. I was perplexed, to say the least, so
I went back inside, shut the door and ran upstairs again.
Popped into the guest room only to see Stephen still
totally asleep. I should say at this point that I
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know what I heard upstairs was there because my dog
was in my room with me, and when I noticed
the sounds and looked over at him, he was already
looking up like he had heard it both times as well.
My dog did not come upstairs with me when I
saw what I thought with Stephen walking through the house,
I don't know why. Just then Stephen woke up and
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looked at me, and I asked him if he was
feeling okay and why he was walking around the house.
He said he hadn't been walking around the house and
the only time he had gotten out of bed was
to go to the bathroom a few minutes after I
had left the room in the first place. I just
shook my head and asked him if he was okay.
He said he was still feeling kind of rotten. So
(05:27):
I took his temperature and he still had the fever.
I got him some cold water and told him to
just rest and again call if he needed anything. He
fell back asleep, and that was that. I know. Some
people may say, well, you did have a couple of beers,
but no, I had really only had one and I
don't remember beer ever, making you see people walking around
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that are not really there. I, for the life of me,
can't explain what that was all about. My family came
home later, and I didn't mention it to anybody. As
a matter of fact, I never told anybody until just
a few years ago. And this happened over thirty years ago.
When I did say something, that's when the term doppelganger
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came up, and I thought, Wow, did I see my
cousin's doppelganger walking around my house? And from what I've
read up on it, doppelgangers are supposed to be fore
warners of death. Stephen certainly did not die. He got
over his little bout of the flu, and there's a
fine man with a family today. Anyway. I just wanted
(06:31):
to share that story. If anyone out there has any
thoughts or comments on this, I would love to hear them.
He wouldn't stop calling. While in my last year at UNI,
I was trying to earn a little extra money and
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decided to post ads online for babysitting and dog walking
services in my local area. Most people with ads on
there had a pick sure of themselves, and so did I.
Logic being that parents would want to check out potential
babysitters by appearance too. Most people put contact numbers on
there too, so I also did that, thinking it might
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give potential customers more points of contact than just messaging
through the ad site. So within about forty five minutes
of posting this ad, I'm downstairs cooking dinner and I
hear my phone ringing in my bedroom, but I'm tied
up with hot pans on the stove, et cetera. So
I left it annoying that I had missed a potential customer. However,
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I hear my phone ringing again and again and again.
I dash up as soon as I can free myself
from cooking and go and pick up the phone. When
I pick up, all I can hear is heavy breathing.
So naturally, after I didn't get a reply, I hung up.
The phone rang again. As soon as I put it down.
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I picked it up again, and eventually a guy replied.
He starts off normal, and I figured that perhaps it
had just been a bad line before. He explains that
he has two kids under five, and then asks me
if I think I can handle them, Having experienced with
some pretty shitty behaved kids in the past, I say yes.
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He then asks me if I stay overnight when babysitting,
and this pulled up a red flag in my mind
and I firmly said no. After that, he went silent again,
and all I heard is this heavy breathing. I asked
if he was still there, and he suddenly says, are
you a virgin? I hung up the phone kept ringing
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and ringing and ringing for another hour non stop. He
had withheld his number, so I couldn't specifically block that number,
But then I found the function to block withheld numbers
on my phone and did it. Deleted my number from
the ad site, and then proceeded to message every other
person on there in my area with a babysitting ad
to warn them. Turns out some of them had similar experiences.
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I would never have fallen for the do you stay
over night part, but it made me shudder to think
of teenagers or vulnerable adults falling for it, and what
could have happened to them. If he hadn't withheld his number.
I would have reported him in an instant. I felt
so unsafe and was jumping at shadows for the rest
of that evening. My Time as a nanny is submitted
(09:36):
by Ariel all I'm going to say about where this
happened was it was near Miami. I had dropped out
of college after my sophomore year because I didn't want
to spend any more money on a degree I wasn't
sure I really wanted, and I didn't want to waste
any more time trying to figure out what I really
wanted to do. I thought long and hard about staying
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in my job as a waitress slash hostess, and then
heard about becoming a nanny. I looked into it and
thought it was interesting and decided to move forward with
it and applied for a job. There was some training
involved in a lot of background checks, but I was
accepted into the agency and very quickly placed with a family.
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I was blown away. This family was loaded beyond my
wildest dreams. Yes, it was about an hour away from home,
but there was no way I couldn't take this job.
I was to watch two kids all day long, even
though the mom was to stay at home mom. It
was two boys, both aged four. They were twins. She
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spent most of her days at the gym, coffee shop, shopping,
lunch dates with friends, and was also involved with a
local charity. So she was rarely at home, so much
for being a stay at home mom. The father had
his own business and was extremely busy with that. I
didn't know exactly what it was, and I didn't see
him as much as I saw the mother. He was
(11:02):
away on business trips quite frequently. The times I did
spend with him, though, he was very nice to me.
Their house was insane. I couldn't tell you the exact
square footage, but it had to be at least fifteen
or twenty thousand square feet. There were like twelve bedrooms
and ten bathrooms, two separate den offices, a couple of
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different living rooms, a six car garage, a separate garage
for even more cars, and an entire backhouse which was mine.
Even that had two bedrooms, a full kitchen, two bathrooms,
and immediate access to a massive inground pool. Okay, I
know this is a lot of backstory, but it's kind
of important. So my job went. I watched the two
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boys every day, and they were not in preschool for
whatever reason, and I was required to do these teaching
modules with them, and I think that's what the mother
thought was adequate before they went to kindergarten the next year.
It was a good job. I liked being with the kids.
As I said, the father was extremely nice to me
and the mother was extremely fair as well. I even
(12:07):
had use of one of their cars. I shit you
not a maserati. I was given excellent time off in
the evenings and on the weekends, and when they went
on holiday trips, I went with them at no charge,
didn't take care of the kids the entire time, and
was always given extra spending money to do whatever I
wanted to for at least two or three days on
these week or two week trips. So far, this sounds
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like a fucking paradise right. Well. While I was watching
the kids one day, there was a buzz from the
driveway gate. I was busy with the kids in their
basement playroom, and the maid, a woman named Maria, who
did not speak English very well, apparently buzzed this person
in thinking it was a delivery of some kind. I
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thought that was odd because most deliveries went to a
different building for holding until the father or mother got home.
So I'm playing with the kids and I hear a
noise from upstairs and down the hall at the front door,
and Maria starting to yell in Spanish. Very loudly, and
then she screamed. I looked at the kids and told
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them to stay put and I would be right back.
I went upstairs and looked down the hallway to see
three guys in black suits standing in front of Maria.
One was talking to her in Spanish and the other
two were behind him, and I couldn't miss the fact
that they were both holding handguns. From my vantage point,
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I could see through the back living room slash dining
room atrium windows that there were four other guys in
the backyard, all also in dark suits, all also holding handguns.
I immediately backed up, closed the door softly, went downstairs
and grabbed the kids. Went to the far end of
their playroom. They had one of those little plastic playhouses there,
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and I told them that we were going to have
a tea party inside. We went in, and I was
freaking out, but I didn't want them to freak out
alongside me, so it was very hard to keep all
this in. I had no idea what was going on,
but the sight of those guns was scaring the shit
out of me. Suddenly I heard another scream again from upstairs,
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and a lot of shouting from the mother. She had
just come home and walked in on all of this,
and I'm sure she was also freaking out due to
her screams. I heard footsteps racing all throughout the house
very quickly with the continued screaming of Maria and the mother.
I heard the basement door open and footsteps come down
the hallway, and the sound of two men talking while
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going room to room looking for something. I was holding
my breath and telling the kids to be as quiet
as they could when the door to the play room
popped open and through the playhouse window I saw two
men coming straight into the room with their guns out
looking around. One obviously caught my eye came straight over
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to the playhouse and ripped the door open. Both of
the boys didn't scream, but just looked wide eyed up
at this intense looking man of what I assume was
Spanish or Puerto Rican heritage and hindsight. As fucking scared
as I was, I have to admit he was actually
very handsome. I know, I'm a fucking maniac. He looked
(15:26):
me in the eye and simply said, Nanny. I don't
know a lot of Spanish, but I knew what he
was asking, and I held on to the two boys
and vigorously shook my head up and down and said yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, Nanny, Nanny, nanny.
He sort of smiled, put his gun down, said something
to the other guy, and they both backed out of
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the room and closed the door. I heard the footsteps
retreat back upstairs, and lots more shouting and screaming. I
was so scared I had pissed my pants, and the
kids noticed and started giggling. They were four years old
and they had zero idea of what had just happened.
So what had happened, Well, the father was actually a
(16:08):
drug dealer, or some kind of money launder or for
a drug dealer. I don't really know the details. These
gentlemen were there to find him or whatever it was
they were looking for. That's the basic gist of what
I got. But I wasn't told much and I didn't
ask a lot of questions for obvious reasons. When I
knew all of the men had left the house, I
took the kids upstairs to the mother, who was crumpled
(16:30):
up on a living room couch crying into her iPhone.
I sat the kids next to her, looked for Maria,
who was crumpled over into the kitchen and also crying
while she was sitting on the floor. I stood there
for a minute before realizing I had to change my clothes,
so I went back to the house that I stayed in,
changed my clothes, got cleaned up, and I immediately started
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putting all of my things into my bags, as there
was no way in hell I was staying there for
one more fucking minute. The mother came up to talk
to me and kept re assuring me that something like
this would never happen again and that everything was okay
and we were safe. I told her that I loved
her kids very much, but there was no way I
could be involved with a family like this, despite the
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money and my love for the kids. I got my
things together, called a friend to pick me up, called
the agency and quit on the spot and with no
reason given to them, and then went home to my parents,
Like I said, an hour away. I told them everything
that happened, and they hugged me extra tight and told
me that I did the right thing. Despite repeated calls
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from the mother, I did not go back no matter
how much money they offered me, and I believe me,
they offered me a considerable raise. So there's no monsters
or crazy kids or anything like that in my story.
But dear God, I have never been that scared in
my entire life. I went back to my job in
the restaurant, enrolled in community college, and put it all
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behind me, not from those people in over three years,
and I'm planning on moving to Denver soon. Thank you
for telling my story. If you do, Damn, I'm getting
chills just thinking about that guy opening that playhouse door
with a gun drawn, staring into my eyes, thinking how
close to death I may have come. The pounding wouldn't stop.
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When I was in high school, I spent about a
week babysitting two kids in their house while their parents
were away on business. Although I lived in a fairly
rural area, the family lived within ten minutes of my house,
and I knew the neighborhood pretty well as I had
babysat for the family before. It was late October Halloween weekend,
and as a typical seventeen year old, I was disappointed
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I was not out with my friends and instead stuck
inside babysitting. It was just about bedtime for the kids,
so it was pitch black outside and silent. Again, very
rural area, and this makes this encounter that much creepier.
The house I was sitting had a large backyard and
a sort of garage that had been converted to an apartment.
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A young man lived in the apartment, but the family
was insistent that he never came to the house and
would not bother me. As I was putting the kids
to bed, a doorbell rang. Since I knew my family
and friends were out for Halloween, I opened the front
door without thinking. It was my best friend, who also
lived nearby, so she knew the house I was staying at.
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She had a couple of our guy friends with her
and explained that they were on their way to the
corn mazes and wanted to just stop by and say hi.
Grateful to see them before they went. We hung out
in the kitchen for probably twenty minutes before they went
on their way. By that time, the kids were asleep upstairs,
so I went around the house and locked all the
doors and closed all of the blinds. It was a
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pretty modern style home, so an entire side of the
house was just straight windows. After I got the house
ready and I settled down in the living room to
watch TV. Probably around thirty minutes or so past when
I heard a knock at the front door. It was faint,
so I turned off the TV to hear it better.
(20:18):
Hearing the knock again, I could feel the hairs on
my arms stand up. It was pretty late and I
had no idea who would be coming to the house
at this hour. Suddenly, the faint knock turned into a violent,
loud banging. Running on adrenaline, I sprint it upstairs into
the master bedroom. I didn't have a cell phone at
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the time, and knowing there was a phone in the room,
I figured it would be safer to be near a
phone and the kids. Now not only is the door
being pounded on, but the doorbell is being rung over
and over again, I mean insistently. I pound my house
number into the phone and my mom picks up. I
panically told her what was going on downstairs. She gave
(21:01):
the phone to my dad and he said he'd be
right there. Relieved, I clutched the phone in my hand
and go out to the landing to check on the kids.
The oldest was standing outside her door, confused and afraid.
I quickly told her it was just my dad coming
to check on us. And to go back into her
room and go back to bed. After she went back
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in her room, I rushed downstairs to make sure the
doors were still locked, running past the wall of windows
to get to the door. Suddenly all of them started
shaking violently. I'm absolutely terrified at this point. I run
to the TV room and look for something I could
use as a weapon. Suddenly, the ringing and pounding just stopped.
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I sit there, stunned in absolute silence. Then a single
doorbell ring shatters the silence and makes me practically jump
out of my skin, feeling a rush of relief. Upon
realizing it was my dad, I rushed to open the door.
There was nobody there. I slammed the door shut and
run to grab the phone and I called my house again.
(22:06):
Am I whispered, is Dad here? She tells me he
can't find the car keys and hasn't even left yet.
I felt the blood run out of my face. I'm
crying hysterically at this point, So my mom stays on
the phone with me and tells me when my dad
finally leaves, I see a pair of headlights come tearing
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through the dark. The sheer speed of the car told
me it was my dad. I threw open the front
door and ran out. Suddenly, from around the corner, three
shadows came out. My dad, wielding a baseball bat. At
this point, ran towards the shadowy figures, screaming and waving
his arms. The closer they get, I realize it was
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my friends. Instead of going to the corn maze, they
decided it would be fun to scare me on Halloween.
I felt a rush of relief and anger. My dad
bitch them out, and although I did not get a
lot of sleep that night, I was happy to know
it was just my friends. I know this story has
kind of a lame ending, but it was honestly the
(23:10):
scariest moment of my life. The new Guy submitted by
Onerous forty five. Okay, so when I was fourteen, I
took a job with a family on a street over
from me, babysitting there two kids who were five and seven.
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They were good kids, a boy and a girl, and
I stayed at that job for the next two years
because the pay was good, the kids were low maintenance,
and I really liked the way the family took care
of me. They were friends with my parents too, so
there were a lot of reasons to stay. Like I said,
it was a good job. Nearly every day in the
summer and lots of weekends throughout the year. Plus they
(23:57):
had a pool, so that was a huge bonus. Sometimes
my friends would come over with the parents permission, and
how can you tell a teenage girl that spending a
day in the sun with two well behaved kids and
your b ffs to leave a job like that. The
summer that I turned sixteen, however, things changed, and not
for the better. Unbeknownst to me, the mother and father
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had not been getting along for quite some time and
were actually going through a divorce. Long story short, and
I found this out later. Mom had been cheating on
the father. He left the house, and I am sure
it was not an easy time, but it was about
to get weirder and scarier for me. In June, a
new guy, I presumed the man though mom was cheating with,
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started to spend a lot of time at the house
and would sometimes show up when I was babysitting looking
for the mom. That was a little red flag, but
without jumping to conclusions, I was wondering why he would
stop over in the middle of the day when he
had to know the mom was at work. After a
couple of times of this in the same week, one
of my friends brought it up as odd. Just as
(25:07):
she was saying this, she looked over my shoulder and
we were sitting out by the pool watching the kids
play with their floaties, and she said, he's here, and
he has a camera. I popped up and there he
was at the gate by the side of the house
taking pictures of us. He realized we saw him and
immediately came over, trying to tell us he was taking
(25:29):
shots of the backyard for a landscaper. He was doing
it as a favor for the mom. As creepy as
it was, it sounded believable, and he took a few
more and then said goodbye and left. When the mom
got home from work that afternoon, I gave her my report,
got my weekly pay, and I kind of brought it
(25:50):
up without making a huge issue about it. She looked
puzzled for a minute, but then said, oh, I did
ask him to take some pictures of the fence. I
felt like it was weird. I mean, he was pointing
to the camera right at us when my friend noticed him.
I didn't go back to babysit until that Monday, and
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not much happened over the weekend except a strange account
tried to connect with me on my Twitter and Snapchat.
I didn't recognize them, but my friend called me Sunday
to say the same thing happened to her. She did
accept and said it was some guy from our school,
just trying to connect over the summer. Okay, fine. Monday
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came and I got back to my little guys and
all was well. I brought them inside from the pool
to play some games while I made them lunch before
we did our summer reading and took a nap. While
I was making sandwiches, I saw an envelope of photos
on the counter. Two things took me aback. One who
develops photos anymore? And hmm, I wonder if those were
(26:54):
the ones the new guy had taken. Curious, I opened
the already open package and it was the fence and stuff. However,
I looked at the thumbnail strip and there were a
whole bunch of photos of me and my friend. One
of them was of me bending over in my swimsuit.
Well was crawling up there, if you know what I mean.
(27:18):
My stomach was in knots and I put everything back,
and I was going to tell my parents about this
as well as the mom, and I couldn't figure out
who to tell first. I know, I was just a kid.
For the rest of the afternoon, that was all I
could think of, despite taking care of my kiddos. We
were out by the pool when Mom came home, so
I decided to tell her about the photos. I simply
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went to the package, but when I went to get
the thumbnail strip, it wasn't in there. I made up
some stupid excuse about a part of the fence I
thought looked like it was falling down, and just got
out of there. Where the hell did that strip go?
I called my friend and told her about it, and
she didn't really know what to tell me. I was
(28:02):
getting weirded out and couldn't tell my parents or the
mom if there was no evidence, so I just sat
on it and tried to get on with the summer.
That weekend, the mom asked if I could watch the
kids last minute that Saturday night. I was on the fence,
but when she said one hundred dollars for the night,
I couldn't say no. She had a work party she
(28:23):
forgot about and would be back around midnight, five hours
and one hundred bucks. Yeah, not turning that down. In retrospect,
I wish I had. I got to the house, played
with the kids and then got them to bed after
doing the Disney thing, and then went back to the
couch to text my friends and watch TV on in
(28:44):
the background. It was about eleven o'clock when the back
door opened and in came the new guy. He came
over to me asking about a specific jacket that the
mom had asked him to come home from the party
to get for her. Okay, now I've got a big
red flag that just seemed weird. I texted the mom
(29:05):
to ask her if everything was okay and what jacket
did she need, but I got no response. He was
now standing over by the closet, saying it's not there
and maybe it's in her room. I text her again,
no response. He calls out if I know the jacket
he's talking about, and frankly, I do know the one.
(29:28):
But I'm getting kind of nervous about him being there
and me being there alone. I texted my friend as
fast as I could and noticed that everything had gone quiet.
I got up to see what he was doing. For
a minute, I thought maybe he was robbing the place
or something. But I saw the lights on in the
mom's master suite, which was on the first floor, and
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when I poked my head in, I could see him
standing in the walk in closet. I went over to
him and said, isn't she coming home at midnight? I mean,
it's getting close to that. Maybe you should just go
get her. He turned around, yanked me into the closet
and shut the door. I started to swing around, but
he put his hand over my mouth and pulled me
(30:12):
into her clothes and started groping me. I mean he
was grabbing my breasts. He was putting his hand between
my legs and squeezing my butt, and I could smell
the booze on his breath, and I was in total
panic mode. But in the back of my mind, I
remember what my dad told me, and he's an ex
marine and superhuge into fitness. I remembered the lesson he
(30:33):
told me. Bawled up my fist and smashed it into
his package and he let go of me. I kicked
at the side of his knee as hard as I could,
and he fell down. I ran out of the closet
and flew upstairs, locking myself in the kid's room and
telling them to get into their closet. The poor things
were still asleep and had no idea what was going on.
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And I called the mom on my cellphone and she answered,
but the noise of the park he was so loud.
I just screamed at her to get home. I hung
up and called my mom and she was frantic. My
friend had already called her, and my dad was on
his way over. The kids were now crying and I
was shaking violently and crying, and I heard loud footsteps
(31:17):
downstairs and my dad calling out for me. I didn't
move or say anything until I heard him race upstairs
and was right outside the door, asking if I was inside.
I got out of the closet, ran to the door,
opened it, and jumped into his arms, freaking out and crying.
My mom came running up too and hugged me, and
then ran to the still crying kids and tried to
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comfort them. The new guy was nowhere to be found.
My dad called the police, and just as they were
pulling up, the mom pulled up in someone else's car,
who had given her a ride home. As fast as
they could, she ran up to us and then slipped
and fell down. She was drunk as a skunk. The
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police asked me all kinds of questions and finally had
to separate the mom because she kept interrupting and quite frankly,
was hysterical. I told them everything that had happened, including
the pictures and the missing thumbnails and all of it.
They caught the guy that night, driving back to his
apartment and got him just before he went inside. The
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police were at the house for quite a while that night,
and my mom stayed the night there to watch over
the kids, as their mom was on the verge of
passing out and would have been little assistance in any emergency.
To this day, I don't know why the police allowed that,
but I guess they knew better or something, or just
trusted us. Dad took me home and stayed with me
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in our living room until I fell asleep exhausted. The
next day, the police came by our house and told
my dad some interesting things. The guy had placed cameras
all over the house and outside and had been watching
me every time I was there. That's how he knew.
I found the pictures back into the house and took
out what he thought was incriminating. He was also the
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same person that contacted me and my friend posing as
a student in our school. What a creep. They wanted
to know if we wanted to press charges, and we
said yes, and we did. Throughout all the ordeal, we
found out that the mom did ask about this jacket
because she was feeling a little cool in the summer air,
(33:27):
and he just left on his own and never really
told her that he wasn't there. He obviously had other plans.
He was later sentenced to two years for sexual assault
and is now a registered sex offender. All that took
a while, and I thought two years was a little light,
but I don't know. I don't understand the law. As
(33:48):
for the mom, she tried to come over the next
day this all happened, and while I know none of
this was directly her fault, my parents forbade her from
seeing me. She had a check for three hundred dollars
for me and a letter saying about how sorry she was.
I accepted both. After that, I still watched my little
(34:09):
guys for two weeks, but at my house, and my
mom would pick them up and drop them off until
other arrangements could be made. One evening, our doorbell rang
and it was the two kiddos crying and telling me
they were going away and they wanted to say goodbye.
I hugged them and kissed them over and over and
told them that I loved them and it was going
(34:29):
to be okay. And that was the last I saw
or heard from them. That was five years ago. I
loved those kids so much, but I could never step
in that house again. I got a job at Chick
fil A after that and have never been babysitting since.
(34:53):
What was in the house Submitted by adaptive reasoner. This
happened back in nineteen eighty five, when I was a
junior in high school. I was babysitting for a little
boy in my neighborhood whom I had watched a number
of times before this. He would always get excited for
me over his other sitters because I always made popcorn
(35:13):
and played his favorite board games. I guess the others
just wanted to watch TV. Anyway. It was a Saturday
night and I remember it was storming pretty well rain.
That was. It was spring, right before summer. As I recall,
it was warm out, but there was the rain. We
were playing candy Land and munching on popcorn when I
(35:34):
heard a loud thump come from the basement. Let me explain.
This was a fairly new development we lived in, so
the houses had just been built. This wasn't the typical
creepy old house. Their basement was fairly open and had
a ping pong table and some chairs, outside of the
regular stuff people acquired in their basements. He didn't notice
(35:55):
the sound, so I blew it off and just played
the game. A few minutes later, I heard it again,
this time, he said, and I'll call him Tommy for
this story. What was that? I said, I didn't know,
but I'd go check. I went down the stairs to
the basement after flicking on the lights. There was nothing
(36:16):
down there. All was well. I shrugged and went back upstairs.
It was getting to be around nine to thirty, in
time for him to go to bed, so I took
him upstairs, turned his radio on to the local soft
rock station, and told him to call me if he
needed anything. He was out by ten or so after
he read a comic. I went back downstairs and cleaned
(36:39):
things up and heard more thumps, this time like three
in a row. Stopped what I was doing and again,
went down in the basement through the door off the kitchen. Nothing.
I stood and waited for about five minutes, and still nada.
I went back upstairs and went to watch TV for
the rest of the night. But around ten forty five
(37:02):
I heard Tommy call out to me. I went up
and asked him what was wrong, and he said there
was something strange in his closet, making noises. I went
into the room and turned down the lights and looked around.
The closet was closed, and I went over to it
and looked inside. Just like the basement, there was nothing
in there. I told him everything was fine and that
(37:25):
he probably just dreamed he had heard something. I tucked
him back in and went to leave the room, and
right as I got to the door and turned off
the light, a loud thumping came from the closet. Tommy
screamed and jumped out of bed and ran towards me,
and I took his hand and pulled him out of
the room and shut the door. At the end of
(37:46):
their hallway was a built in linen closet, and as
we stood there looking at each other, the doors to
it slammed open, and towels and bed sheets came flying
out onto the floor, and now I yelled and pulled
Tommy towards the stairs were getting out of there. We
got to the living room and I had him sit
on the couch while I tried to contact his parents,
who were at some kind of dinner dance at a hotel.
(38:10):
I had the front desk person assure me they would
try to track them down for me and have them
call me back. I turned down a funny movie to
try to lighten the mood, and that's when the lights
started flickering and the banging started, both upstairs and downstairs.
The lights all went off. I screamed, and the TV
went from the movie to a bright light that kept
(38:32):
getting brighter and brighter. So I covered Tommy's eyes and
shut mine as tight as I could. But then just
like that, everything stopped. The lights came on, the TV
was fine, the pounding stopped. I was going crazy trying
to keep together, and finally thought to call my parents,
(38:54):
but when I tried, I just got a busy signal
me by the hand again and went to the back
door and we could stay out on the porch until
his parents came home. They had an awning and like
I said it was warm enough and the rain wouldn't
have bothered us. But the sliding glass door wouldn't open.
I checked the lock. It was flipping up and down easily,
(39:17):
but the door wouldn't budge. I went over to the
back door and the knob turned, but that door wouldn't open.
I banged on it out of frustration and started crying,
and then went back to Tommy. We tried the front door,
the door to the garage. None of them would open.
We could not get out of this house. I hugged
(39:38):
him and told him it was going to be okay.
But then this cracking sound, I mean really loud cracking sound,
came from the basement. We just stood there, silent, listening,
and the pounding started up again, so loud that it
began to shake the floor. Then this deep throated laugh
started to go through the entire house. And by this
time we're both really crying, and I'm yelling for whatever
(40:01):
it is to go away and leave us alone. Things
were really out of control. All of the lights went
off again and for a minute there was silence. Then
all of the doors in the house, including the bedrooms,
the cupboards, everything slammed open and shut. Not once, but twice,
and we felt this massive wind rush through the living room,
(40:22):
so heavy that it knocked us back onto the couch.
There was one more loud bang, and then the lights
came on. It was dead silent. We sat there for
a long time, just breathing heavily, scared out of our wits.
I remember saying a prayer, telling Tommy we were going
(40:43):
to be fine, and I got up and checked the
front door. It opened without a problem. I grabbed Tommy
by the hand once again and headed for the back deck.
When the phone rang. It was his parents asking what
was wrong, and they'd been trying to call and the
line was busy. I didn't know what to tell them.
I just burst into tears again and begged them to
(41:04):
come home. Tommy's dad said they were on their way,
and we went outside to wait for them. Tommy kept
asking me what would happened and what that was, and
I just kept saying, I don't know, honey, I don't know,
but you're safe. I've got you. His parents got home
about twenty minutes later, and of course wanted to know
what the hell had happened. Tommy tried to tell them,
(41:27):
but was still so scared. He was blubbering, so mom
took him to bed. I told his dad everything that
had happened, but he just looked at me skeptically and
then accused me of watching horror movies and letting my
imagination get away with me. And then he got mad
and asked how the hell I could have let such
a young child watch that kind of trash. I mean,
(41:47):
he really started yelling at me, and I started crying again,
trying to get him to believe me. Just then Tommy's
mom came down and asked about the linen closet, and
while all the stuff was strewed all all over the hallway,
and I said see, They both just looked at me,
and then they heard the thump start from the basement.
(42:11):
He ran downstairs, followed by us, and the thumping didn't stop.
It was coming from a back wall where there was
now a huge crack started on the wall. Ran down
to the floor. He stood looking at it, and the
thumping got louder and then abruptly stopped. He told us
(42:31):
to go upstairs. We did, and the mom fumbled for
her purse, paid me my money and told me to
just go home. She wasn't being a bitch. I think
she was trying to protect me. I don't know why
I thought that, and still do, but that's how I feel.
I never baby sat there again, and I don't think
(42:51):
I ever talked to that family after that. I do
know they moved away not too long after this happened,
and none of my friends ever babysat there either. Looking back,
I always think was the mother into some kind of
weird satanic or witchcraft stuff that caused something like that
to happen. I don't know nobody else in my neighborhood
(43:13):
ever complained about anything like that happening. I told my
parents and all my friends about what I had seen
and heard that night, but I'm pretty sure no one
believed me, or believes me now if I were to
tell them again. But that really happened to me. I
don't know what it was, but I've never been through
anything like that ever again. A babysitter story by Joscelyn.
(43:43):
Ever since, my aunt told me ghost stories from the
barn she worked at, and I've been fascinated by the paranormal,
but nothing particularly frightening it ever happened to me. That is,
until I took a certain babysitting job a few blocks
down from me. When I first entered the stuccowed mansion,
thought there was something a bit strange about the place,
but I let it slide. The home itself was lovely
(44:06):
and warm in appearance. The children were delightful, two blond
little girls aged sixteen months and four years old. The
first few weeks were fine, without any major occurrences beyond
the occasional strange behavior of the dog. She would bark
at the air and growl at the walls, and sometimes
she would cower in a corner as though someone or
something were threatening her. I tried to ignore it, though,
(44:29):
but something in the back of my mind wouldn't let
me be at peace in that house. After about a
month or so, the parents of the girls asked that
while they were away, what I liked to watch the
dog collect their mail and check on the house daily,
and I would be paid in the process. I agreed,
thinking it would be easy money. Little did I know
how much effort it would take. The first visit went
(44:51):
smoothly and nothing happened, but the second was a bit unnerving.
I returned to the house after walking the dog and
went indoors for a drink. It was a very warm
May day, and I decided to open up the windows
to air out the place. After I swept the floor
and brought in the mail, I sat down to watch
some TV while the dog ran around outside. Suddenly the
(45:13):
TV turned itself off. Perplexed, I got up and turned
it back on. As I sat down, I became aware
that someone was watching me from the backstairs. The backstairs
had always scared the pants off me anyway, so you
can imagine that this was terrifying. As I got up
to leave, I heard a loud thud and banging on
(45:34):
the stairs, the voice of a small child gingling, and
being the Catholic that I was, I began to scream
the Lord's Prayer and ran out as fast as I could,
leaving the door open and the dog to run amok.
The run home was a blur, and I don't really
remember anything until my mom agreed to walk back with
me to check things out. And at that point I
(45:55):
don't think she fully believed what I heard was a ghost,
but this would change in time. We found nothing, as
you can expect, and I, with my mother's help, managed
to convince myself that I had imagined the whole thing.
The following day, after a night to sleep on things,
I felt a lot better and was able to go
through my routine without too much to worry. Once again,
(46:16):
I returned to the house with the dog and went
about the usual run of things. Once again, I let
the dog out and got myself a coke out of
the fridge. I'd read somewhere once that if you expect
a ghost, it won't appear, so I felt a little
more at ease. However, this is not true. Once again
I heard the thuds and laughter, and I was scared
(46:36):
like hell, but I forced myself to walk over to
the back hall. Although it was a bright day, the
hallway was dark and cold. I called out hello. I
thought maybe someone had snuck into the house. My answer
was the sound of footsteps running down towards me. This time,
I tried to stay calm, but I still practically had
a heart attack, letting them the dog and locking things up.
(47:00):
Day the family I worked for returned from their vacation.
I told them it all went great, got my money,
and went home. When they called that evening to ask
if I could sit that Friday night, I agreed, but
asked if I could bring a friend. I wasn't about
to stop working for them, I mean they paid extremely well,
so that Friday I went over with a good friend
of mine, who witnessed all of the activity. That evening,
(47:24):
after I put the girls to bed, me and my
friend sat down to watch a movie she had brought.
The TV promptly shut off, and I began to get worried.
Maureen as well, that was the girl's name. She was
looking a bit creeped out. I hadn't told her about
the past experiences I had, and I wasn't about to
for fear she would leave me alone in the house.
(47:45):
I began to get that awful being watched feeling again,
and that was followed by the low giggle, this time
a lot more sinister. Maureen burst into tears and called
her mother to pick her up right away. She felt bad,
but she just couldn't stand it in the house any longer.
After she left, I tried to calm down, but I
knew things were at a climax. The rain, which had
(48:08):
been falling steadily for an hour, now got worse, and
the oldest girl asked if I would sleep next to
her because she was getting scared. I asked her of what,
and she said, Mommy says it's just the pipes, but
me and Ali know it's not. I told her not
to worry and tucked her in. I drifted into a
fitful sleep, and I woke up at about eleven or so,
(48:30):
soaked in sweat, with the feeling that there was something coming.
I opened my eyes, sat upright across from me, there
was a mirror, and in the mirror's reflection there was
someone standing next to me. I looked next to the
bed and there was no one there. Yet when I
looked in the mirror, there definitely was Presently, the girl
(48:52):
woke up and the image disappeared, but the terror was
not over yet. She was having trouble breathing and couldn't talk.
I called her parents and she calmed down, and when
they got home, I told them that she had a fever,
and then I hurried back to my house. The following week,
I agreed to sit for them one more time. I know,
I'm a pig headed girl. I went over around six o'clock.
(49:16):
As you can imagine, after the girls were put to bed,
the TV pulled its warning trick and the activity started
full force again. I could hear over the baby monitor
that Ali was crying, but the monitor was not plugged in,
and when I checked Ali was fast asleep. When I
got downstairs, I could hear footsteps again and furniture being
(49:36):
dragged all over the top floor. I called my mom
and she came right over. She heard the noises and
was scared stiff too. She stayed with me until the
parents got home and informed them that I would no
longer be able to babysit for them. No doubt they
were perplexed, but to this day I refused to go
into their home. Babysitter Trouble submitted by power Plant fifty six.
(50:07):
This happened to me and my brother when I was
about eight and he was six. I'm calling myself Brian
and my brother Jake. It wasn't for another few years
that we were allowed to stay home alone, so like
everyone else in the world, we had babysitters. For one year.
We had this guy that lived up the street who
would watch us and he was awesome. His name was Jim,
and he would let us stay up late and would
(50:27):
crank rock records with us and tell us dirty stories
and jokes right before we went to sleep. I think
he was the first guy to tell us the Cheech
and Chong Dave's not here Mans skit, and Jake and
I would laugh and laugh and always ask him to
tell it more than once. Honestly, that still makes me laugh.
He was like seventeen or eighteen, and we thought he
was the coolest guy in our neighborhood. I think he
(50:48):
went into the military. I can't remember at this point,
but he wasn't our babysitter anymore. We got this really
hot girl for a little while, and she was seriously
the woman I based all my teenage fantasies that I
would have, and just a couple of years she was
great too. Then when I was nine or so, we
got a girl I'll call Kathy. Kathy was kind of
(51:09):
nerdy and younger than our other babysitters, and we liked her,
but she was also nice. I think she was more
like fourteen though. One night she was going to spend
the night at my house as my parents had some
conference out of town and they were going to spend
the night there rather than drive home really late. Kathy
had a friend come over, and I don't think she
was supposed to, but Jake and I didn't say anything.
(51:31):
We were just going to watch TV and eat popcorn
and stuff. This was back when all those shows were
on Saturday nights, like Fantasy Island and Love Boat and
that kind of thing. So anyway, this other teenager i'll
call Tina comes over and they're in the kitchen talking
and we're just watching TV. They come into the room
and Kathy asks if we want to play a game
or something. It was still light out and just getting
(51:52):
to be dark, and Jake, for some reason, wanted to
play hide and seek, so we all went outside. My
neighborhood had a lot of houses, but there was nothing
behind us except fields. We had a shed and an
old barn in back. But my dad didn't like us
playing in the barn as it was kind of run down.
So I tell Jake he has to be at first,
as he wanted to play and the rest of us
would run and hide. I knew he knew the barn
(52:15):
was off limits, and there was this little room off
the back that I could hide in and he never
would look there. It was kind of like a storage
shed that my dad kept tools and stuff. And I
sneaked in and closed the door, which I suppose was
totally unfair. And this is where things got creepy. As
I'm sitting there on a stool, in comes Tina and
she has her finger up to her lips. I didn't
(52:38):
say anything and we were just waiting there in the dark.
This is when she convinced me that we should turn
this into a cops and robbers game, and that we
can get Jake and Kathy if they get near this
back building behind the barn. I say okay, and she
says she'll pretend she's the robber and captures me, and
I go along with it. I mean, I was just
a kid. So she gets some rope and ties my
(52:58):
legs together and then ties my hand behind my back
and has me sit on the floor. She went to
the door and peeked outside and then came back over
to me. As I heard Kathy calling out for us,
this girl got down next to me and covered my
mouth with her hand and says to be quiet and
to wait for them. Again. I'm thinking this is just
a game and go along with it. After a minute,
(53:18):
she grabbed a roll of black tape and put a
piece over my mouth and goes back to the door.
Now I'm starting to think this is weird, and I
start trying to talk but obviously can't. She came back
over to me and took a plastic bag and put
it over my head, and then walked back to the
door and went out. I mean, I'm not bullshitting, I'm
a little kid tied up on the floor with a
bag over my head. That's making it hard to breathe.
(53:41):
Now I'm freaking out and starting to cry and trying
to breathe and get out of the ropes. Tina comes
back in and takes the bag off, and she's smiling
and laughing and telling me to stop crying. It's just
a game. She untied me, and I'm really crying now,
and she tells me she'll give me two dollars if
I stop and not tell anyone. I get it together
and promise I won't say anything. Shit, it was two dollars, right,
(54:04):
stupid kid logic. So we leave and go back to
the house where Kathy and Jake are and they started
asking where we were hiding, but I didn't say anything.
Later that night, Jake says he's got a pee and
goes upstairs. We were watching something on TV, and I
didn't notice that Tina went up behind him. Kathy asked
if I wanted popcorn, so we went into the kitchen
(54:25):
to make it. We got back to the living room
and Tina was just sitting there watching TV, and we
joined her again. I didn't think about Jake right away,
but then I noticed he wasn't around, and I said, hey,
where'd Jake go? And Tina said he went to bed.
I thought it was odd, but it wasn't for another
half hour or so that I got up to see
if he was in bed. Tina told me to stay
(54:46):
down there and not wake him up, and I thought
about earlier in the night and what had happened. I
ran upstairs and into our room, and he wasn't there.
I looked in our closet and under the beds, and
then into my parents' room. He wasn't there either, and
he wasn't in the bathroom. Then I thought I heard
something in the closet and I opened the door with
Kathy right behind me. Our clothes hamper was in there
(55:08):
with a heavy shelf on the lid, but my brother
was inside the hamper. Tina had tied him up with
my mom's pantyhose and put him in there. Put the
shelf on the lid so he couldn't get out and
just left. Jake was crying and freaking out, and Kathy
did her best to calm him down, and we went
back downstairs to yell at Tina, who obviously did this,
but she wasn't there, and she had left and went home.
(55:33):
I told Kathy what had happened to me earlier, and
she called Tina's house, but I guess no one answered anyway.
Kathy stayed with us the rest of the night and
didn't let us out of her sight, and we told
my parents, and my mom had some choice words for
Tina's parents and also for Kathy for letting that girl
even come around. I don't know what happened to that girl,
who's now a woman, but I'll never forget that night.
(55:56):
I suppose it's not scary to an adult or anyone
listening to this, but it was creepy as a kid.
I mean, what would have happened if she had stayed
later and we fell asleep. I didn't want to think
about that. I had nightmares about not being able to
breathe for a long time after that. We don't really
talk about it, but every once in a while, Jake
brings her up to me, and I wonder if that
(56:16):
fucking psycho woman is out there abusing anybody else.
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