The Babysitter and the Man Upstairs

The phone rings.

This is not unusual. The phone rings sometimes. The babysitter picks it up.

No one answers.

Not quite. There is something. Breathing, maybe. Or the ambient noise of a room, the particular acoustic signature of a space, the way you can sometimes hear that someone is there even if they say nothing. And then the line goes dead.

The babysitter puts the phone down. Telemarketer. Wrong number. Someone who dialed incorrectly and was too embarrassed to speak. This happens.

She turns back to the television.

The phone rings again.

Same thing. The same breath of presence on the line. And then a voice this time, quick and low, saying something she can almost catch, and then the click of disconnection.

She stares at the phone.

I want to tell you that the babysitter at this point does the sensible thing. That she calls the operator, traces the call, or contacts the police, or at minimum locks the front door, which she has just remembered is unlocked.

She does not do the sensible thing. She does the thing people do, which is to decide it is probably nothing and wait for it to happen again.

It happens again.

The third call is longer. The voice this time is clearer. It is a man's voice, which is a specific kind of wrong because there is no man in this house tonight, and the man on the phone is not asking if she needs anything or checking on the children.

He is asking if she has checked the children.

He says it in the tone of a question, but it is not really a question.

The babysitter checks the children.

The children are fine. She can see them breathing. She pulls the doors almost-closed, the way they were before, and walks back downstairs with the specific careful lightness of someone who does not want to acknowledge that they are scared.

The phone rings again.

She picks it up.

The man on the other end says: 'Why did you go upstairs?'

This is the moment that changes things. Because he knew she went upstairs. Because there is no way to know that unless you were watching. And the babysitter looks at the front door, which she has now locked. She looks at the windows, which face a dark suburban street. She looks at the staircase.

The staircase goes up.

She does not look up the staircase for very long.

She picks up the phone again and calls the operator. In 1960s and 1970s America, the operator could manually trace a call, but it took time. You had to keep the caller on the line. You had to call back and get the trace started and then wait.

So when the phone rings again, she picks it up.

The man says things. He says them calmly. This is the detail that shows up in almost every version of this story: the voice is calm. Not threatening in the way of television villains. Calm in the way of someone who has already decided what is going to happen and finds the present moment unremarkable.

She keeps him talking. She does not know what she is doing, exactly, she is just keeping him talking, because the operator is working on something and there is a feeling, faint but present, that the right thing to do is to stay on the phone.

The operator calls back on a different line.

The operator says something.

The something is not good.

The operator says: the call is coming from inside the house.

There it is. The sentence. The one that has lived in the American cultural brain since at least the 1960s, the sentence that got repeated at slumber parties and around campfires and at lunch tables for decades until it became one of the most famous horror sentences ever constructed in plain English.

The call is coming from inside the house.

I need you to think about what this means, practically. There is an extension phone. Upstairs. In the house. Someone has been in the house this whole time, using the upstairs phone, calling down to the babysitter on the ground floor, watching her through the ceiling from above.

The stairs are carpeted. You would not hear anyone on those stairs if they were being careful.

The operator says: get out. Leave immediately. Do not go upstairs.

The babysitter leaves. She goes out the front door and goes to a neighbor's house and calls the police, and the police arrive, and they go upstairs.

What they find upstairs varies by version. In some tellings, the man is still there, caught. In others, he is gone, and what he has done to the children is not shown. In still others, the children are unhurt and sleeping and the man has vanished, and this is somehow worse: no explanation, no body, no answer to the question of what he wanted.

The story does not have an ending, exactly. It has a moment: the moment the phone rings and the voice says 'have you checked the children?' and the babysitter, knowing now what she knows, picks up the phone anyway.

Because what else do you do.

You pick up the phone.

What makes this story last is not the scare. Horror stories fade. The specific texture of a scare, the sharp intake of breath at a particular moment, that wears off.

What lasts is the setup.

The house is safe. The children are asleep. Everything is perfectly fine. And somewhere in the background, so routine as to be invisible, the phone keeps ringing.

The terror is in the ordinary. In the couch and the television and the lasagna and the beige telephone. In the fact that something terrible can be happening in the room directly above you and you will not know until the phone rings, and it will ring in the voice of a man who sounds calm.

Every element of this story is mundane. Suburb. Babysitter. Children. Phone. The horror is that it uses the furniture of safety to build something that isn't safe at all.

The other thing that makes it last: it asks you to imagine being alone in a house. Really think about it. The sounds that houses make. The upstairs, which you have to climb to. The phone, which is how you connect to help, being also how danger announces itself.

Alone in a house at night is not a scary premise. Alone in a house at night with a phone that keeps ringing and a voice you can't quite place: that is a different thing.

The story has been told so many times that it has separated from any specific event or location. It belongs to everyone now. It belongs to every suburb, every house with carpeted stairs, every teenager who has been alone with children who are sleeping upstairs.

Every version ends the same way.

The call is coming from inside the house.

Before the urban legend, there was a real girl.

Janett Christman was thirteen years old. It was March 18, 1950, in Columbia, Missouri. She was babysitting a three-year-old named Gregory Romack at the Romack family home on Rollins Street.

Sometime that evening, she called the operator. She said there was a man trying to break in. The operator called the police. The police were slow. By the time anyone arrived, Janett Christman was dead.

She had been strangled. She had fought back. The three-year-old was unharmed in his crib. A man named Robert Mueller was charged and went to trial. The jury could not agree. He was never convicted. The case was never solved.

The parallels are obvious. Young girl, alone, babysitting, a threat she tried to report, police who arrived too late. Whether the urban legend was directly inspired by Janett Christman or whether it grew from the same cultural anxieties that made her case feel universal: unclear. Folklorists have traced versions of the story from the 1960s onward, spreading through word of mouth, campfire, telephone.

Janett Christman's name was largely forgotten. The story that may have grown from her situation became famous without her.

The urban legend got a blockbuster film in 1979, 'When a Stranger Calls,' which added the phrase to the cultural canon. The film was made without any documented connection to Janett Christman. The story had moved on, as stories do, into the general atmosphere.

Janett was thirteen. She tried to get help. She called the right people. The phone worked perfectly.

It just didn't work fast enough.