There’s something inherently creepy about looking after a stranger’s children.
Or maybe there’s just something inherently creepy about kids. The one thing we know is that the kids in these stories definitely creep us out.
From invisible playmates to 6-year-olds plotting murders, here’s the latest round of terrifying comments that babysitters have collected on the job. Go ahead and turn on all the lights in your house before you read these. We’ll wait.
1. One babysitter shared a story that’s still keeping us up at night.
The sitter was watching a 4-year-old girl. At first everything was normal. The kid sat there playing with her Barbie dolls.
Then she looked up at the sitter. “‘My mummy is scared of me,'” she intoned. The sitter describes the child’s voice as “deadly serious,” which gives this event an even more chilling edge.
If we were asked to babysit at that house, we think we’d pass.
2. There are some things that parents should really warn you about before you take a babysitting gig.
The fact that there’s a ghost living in your house is definitely one of those things. Another one of our online friends recounts a story about babysitting two easygoing little girls.
The girls were “sweet” and “very easy to look after,” this sitter reports. Frequently, though, they would say something that freaked out the babysitter. They would ask the sitter to promise them that “the white man in the house wasn’t going to come and look at them while they were sleeping.”
Anytime you have kids talking about strange adults visiting them in the night, there’s cause for concern. This babysitter did the right thing. She asked the kids’ dad what the kids might be talking about.
“Oh, that’s just the ghost we have in the house,” the dad said. “Don’t worry about him.”
3. When the kids are being too quiet, you know something disturbing is about to happen.
That’s the lesson we take from a babysitter who actually knew the creepy kid she was looking after. The child was her 6-year-old niece. Even at that young age, the little girl had something of a violent history.
She once tried to stab a police officer with a pair of scissors. That’s the kind of child this sitter was dealing with. Still, despite the fact that this sitter knew the kid was a bit off, this was family. So the young adult agreed to babysit the niece.
The little girl was playing in another room when the sitter noticed that things had been a little too quiet in there. The babysitter ran in the room to find the little girl standing over the family dog, holding a freshly sharpened pencil over the animal’s head like an Aztec priest with his human sacrifice.
The babysitter asked the girl what the heck she was doing.
“I’m helping the dog go to heaven so I can get a cat instead,” the little girl said. The babysitter took the pencil and kept a close eye on the niece from then on.
4. Kids perceive the world differently from how adults do.
Maybe they’re more tuned in to the spirit world. That’s the only explanation we can come up with for a story a then-15-year-old named Kay shared. Kay was babysitting her 2-year-old cousin, Shyla, and decided to take her to the park one morning. Kay noticed that her cousin was fixated on some object in the distance.
“Shyla, is someone walking through the path?” Kay asked. The child didn’t answer, except to smile.
“Is someone standing there?” Kay asked.
“No, Kay, someone [is] on the bench,” the little girl replied. Kay did not see anyone on the bench.
Later, Kay and her aunt and uncle decided to ask Shyla about the incident. They wanted to know who exactly the girl saw in the park.
“Grammy!” the child said. Kay’s grandmother had passed away years ago. There was no way for Shyla to know that they called her Grammy. So is that creepy, heartwarming, or both?
5. The internet gave birth to its own collective myth with tales of Slenderman.
Another babysitter tells a story that might add to that mythos, even if the teller of the tale doesn’t mention the internet’s favorite horror character by name.
A 3-year-old child told this babysitter that she didn’t “want to go upstairs alone.”
The babysitter wanted to know why.
“The man in my room might be there,” the child said.
Seeking to comfort her, the babysitter explained that “the man in her room” was probably just her father, who wandered in at night to check on her. The little girl said that couldn’t be the case.
The man in her room, she said, was “tall and skinny,” but her dad was “short and fat.”
Could this have been an appearance of Slenderman? Even if it wasn’t, there’s nothing good that can come out of a situation like this.
6. Meet the creepiest kid we’ve ever heard of.
Another babysitter frequently looked after her own goddaughter. If this were the 18th century, the kid would probably be on trial for witchcraft.
By the time she was 5, this little girl had already racked up a whole collection of unsettling quotes. She frequently talked about “the people under her porch.” She mentioned seeing her brother, even though that brother was, sadly, stillborn.
Somehow, neither of those things freaked out the babysitter the most. The comment that really disturbed this sitter came later. “Your master wishes to see you in the pit,” the goddaughter told the babysitter.
Now, that could just be a quote from some late-night movie the 5-year-old somehow caught. But there’s an even more disturbing detail. The child’s parents, presumably a religious couple, use “the pit” as a euphemism for hell.
So who does that make the “master”? Never mind, we don’t want to know.
7. What if imaginary friends are real?
What if they’re actually emissaries from another world, and only children can see them? That would explain this story, although it sure wouldn’t make us feel any better about it.
Another babysitter reports an odd thing that happened during a recent job. It was about nap time, so the sitter had the child go lie down. A few minutes later, the sitter heard the kid “making a fuss.”
The sitter went in the child’s bedroom to tell him to settle down and get back to his nap. When the sitter entered the room, the kid was sitting on his bed. He didn’t seem to be doing anything but staring at the wall.
The sitter asked the kid to lie down. The kid had a response that will chill you to your core.
“Don’t talk to him while we’re playing,” the child said. There was no one else in the room. Or was there?
8. When it’s not the ghosts who are freaking babysitters out, it’s the kids themselves.
The kid in this story either has an incredible imagination or else he’s a budding serial killer. Shoot, maybe it’s both. At any rate, the sitter who relates this story was just making a sandwich. The kid was hungry.
Something about the sandwich resonated with the kid. He walked in the kitchen. After watching the sitter work for a moment, the kid locked eyes with his caretaker.
“If I killed somebody, would anybody ever know it happened if I just ate the body in a sandwich?” the kid asked.
Unfortunately, the sitter does not report any response. If we were in that situation, though, we probably just would have run screaming out of the house.
These stories, which their originators claim are true, come from this Reddit thread and the website Your Ghost Stories, which is devoted to users’ real-life experiences of the paranormal.
