Every babysitter has a hair-raising story or two — disastrous diapers, rowdy siblings, lengthy temper tantrums. But an unsettling number of babysitters out there have also had some super-creepy, on-the-job encounters that leave them shook for years to come.
Little kids have a special way of finding themselves in spooky situations — from hearing things that go “bump” in the night to seeing dead people like the boy in “The Sixth Sense.” And then it’s up to the babysitter to console their fears and tell them everything is going to be alright. Not always the easiest job in the world — especially when it’s the babysitter who first feels the chill run down their spine.
From haunted moments to kids who ‘see people,” here are some real-life babysitting stories that left sitters a little — or in some cases, extremely — spooked on the job.
Did you hear something? Did you see that?
- “I babysat for these two little girls and more than once they’d say they saw something in the other room, but there wasn’t anything there. They were like 3 and 6, so I feel like they weren’t old enough to trick me, but they were really insistent on having seen a person in the other room.”
— Sadie Bauer, age 17 - “The family I babysit for lives in an older house from the ‘60s. After the kids went to bed, I was chilling on the couch watching ‘Game Of Thrones.’ I had my headphones in and it sounded like someone was calling my name. I took them off and checked on the kids, but they were both sleeping. That happened a couple of times and eventually I stopped checking.”
— Chrysanthe Vidal, age 19 - “I was babysitting these two girls and once I had put them down, they kept calling my name and they’d tell me when I got there that something was wrong. I went in and one girl asked me if I saw the cat in her window; she was saying that the cat’s face was still there, but I saw nothing there.”
— Chloe Cook, age 18 - “I babysat twin girls last summer. I put them to bed upstairs and went to watch TV in the living room across the hall. As I left, looking into the pitch black, I heard a deep voice yelling downstairs. I went downstairs, thinking maybe the parents had come home early, but no one was there. I still don’t know what that was. It definitely sounded like it was coming from inside the house.”
— Dylan Anderson, age 18
OK, that was pretty creepy …
- “Recently I was babysitting brothers, and they were both knocked out asleep. Music started playing in their room at around 1 a.m. from their mini record player. But when I looked, there wasn’t even a record on the player thing. They slept through all of it.”
— Cecelia Sigalove, age 18 - “When my little brother was around 6, my mom went out to a birthday dinner. When I went back to go check on him, he was standing in the middle of his room talking to his open closet. I asked what he was doing and he said he was talking to his friend.”
— Mackenzie Crall, age 17 - “I was babysitting my cousin, who was 3 years old at the time, when he suddenly started singing “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” — but with a few lyric changes. It went something like, ‘The itsy bitsy spider climbed up the waterspout and pushed mama off! Then the sun came out and ate mama’s body.’”
— Sofia Abramsky-Sze, age 16
Seriously spooky, get me out of here!
- “I babysat this 3-year-old and every time I babysat him he’d ask me to check the closet ‘where the screaming comes from,’ which was at the end of the hallway, at the back of the house, and was ALWAYS locked. I literally stopped babysitting him because I couldn’t stand it. I babysat him like five times and then I was out.”
— Anonymous, age 19 - “In 2013, I was babysitting twins, and I heated up soup for dinner and put them into identical bowls and served it. Less than a minute later, one of the twin’s soup was cold and the other was still hot. That was weird.”
— Cecelia Sigalove, age 18 - “I was babysitting my neighbor, and right before I put them to bed, the youngest, who was about 3, asked me if I had made sure the door was locked. I reassured her that I had, but she seemed really scared, and it seemed a little odd that a 3-year-old would worry about that. So I asked her why she was scared, and she said, ‘because that’s how the scary people from my dreams get inside.’”
— Emma Basco, age 17 - “When we were kids, my little brother never used to want to be in his room at night. He would be fine in there during the day and OK with the rest of the house even once in got dark. But for like a year, we just about shared a bedroom because he was too scared to sleep alone. When I would ask him about it, he would say there was a little boy in there who would talk to him sometimes and keep him up. He said the boy liked his toys and always wanted to play with him. Once we were in high school, our parents told us his room used to be a boy’s room who died in the bathtub. They didn’t ever tell us because they didn’t want to freak us out. ”
— Zoe Miller, age 18
