Footsteps Above: Babysitters' Midnight Terrors

Midnight Monologue

This episode of 'Midnight Monologue' explores chilling babysitting experiences that blur the line between ordinary household sounds and unex

Key takeaways

• Babysitting stories are uniquely terrifying because they occur in familiar, everyday environments that feel suddenly alien when isolated at night.

Main topics

• Babysitting as a vulnerable role in unfamiliar environments

Notable quotes

"I had locked myself upstairs. With whoever had entered the house, I had a taser."

Conclusion

These stories remind us that fear often lives not in the unknown itself, but in our

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) I could hear the footsteps above me, not creaking, not the little pops and groans you sometimes hear in a newer house when the temperature changes. These were footsteps, heavy ones. They were moving slowly across the bedroom directly above the living room. There was only one problem. The bedroom was supposed to be empty. Both kids were standing upstairs in the hallway staring at the same closed door I was, and whatever was inside that room. was still walking. I told the kids to get into their bedrooms and lock the doors. Then I called 911. By the time the police arrived, the footsteps still hadn't stopped. One of the officers opened the bedroom door. The sound stopped immediately. They searched the room, the closet, under the bed, the windows, everything. There was nobody there. At the time, I told myself there had to be an explanation. A few months later, I saw the little girl. Welcome to the Midnight Monologue. Wherever you are tonight, driving somewhere after dark, working while everyone else is asleep, lying in bed with headphones on, or maybe sitting in a quiet house that suddenly seems to be making a few more noises than it did five minutes ago, I'm glad you're here. Tonight we're talking about babysitters. And there's something uniquely unsettling about these stories. Because when you're babysitting, you're already in somebody else's world. You're sitting in a house that isn't yours. The noises aren't familiar. You don't know which floorboard creaks. You don't know whether the pipes knock when somebody uses the bathroom. You don't know which neighbor sometimes cuts through the backyard. And you're responsible for someone else's children while the people who actually understand that house are somewhere else. Most of the time. Obviously, nothing happens. The kids eventually fall asleep. You sit on the couch. You watch television, you check your phone, and you wait for headlights to sweep across the front window when the parents finally come home. But every once in a while, something happens that the babysitter remembers for the rest of their life. Tonight's stories are based on experiences people have publicly claimed happened to them. Some involve situations that appear completely human. Others are considerably harder to categorize. And before we begin, I want to know something. Where are you listening from tonight? Leave a comment and tell me your city, your state or province, your country. Or just tell me what you're doing while you're listening. Maybe you're on a night shift. Maybe you're driving. Maybe you're listening from another side of the world where it isn't midnight at all. I love seeing how far these stories travel. So get comfortable, turn the lights down if you want, and let's begin. Story 1. The Alarm. I've babysat for a long time. By the time this happened, I was 21 and in college, and watching somebody else's kids wasn't unusual for me. I'd started when I was about 14. At 15, I'd even taken babysitting classes at a youth center and a self-defense course. So I wasn't completely inexperienced, and the family I was working for that night was probably one of the easiest families I babysat for. I watched their two kids about once a month. They paid well. The kids behaved. The house was large, comfortable, and had good internet, which meant once the kids were asleep, I could usually get some homework done. The parents also had a routine. About once a month, they'd leave around five in the afternoon and wouldn't come back until sometime after two in the morning. They always told me I could sleep in the guest room and leave the next morning if I wanted. I rarely did. Usually I'd just stay awake, watch television, and wait for them. The house itself was in a nice neighborhood, not a crowded neighborhood. There weren't houses pressed against each other or people constantly walking past. It was quiet. That was normally one of the things I liked about it. The house also had an alarm system. I knew the code, and there was an app on my phone that allowed me to arm and disarm it. I'd used it before. Nothing about it was unusual. That afternoon started exactly like every other time I'd watched the kids. I had a little tradition with them. We'd go out for pizza at a place with an arcade, partly because the kids loved it. Partly because if you let two kids burn energy running around an arcade for a while, bedtime becomes considerably easier. So that's what we did. I was sitting at one of the tables watching the kids play when a couple sat down at the same long table. They looked ordinary. Probably mid-twenties, maybe a little older. There were other adults around, so I didn't think much about them. At some point, the man started talking to me. The conversation wasn't immediately threatening, but something about the questions gradually started bothering me. He seemed particularly interested in the family I babysat for, enough that I began paying attention. There is a strange moment in interactions like that when nothing explicitly bad has happened, but you find yourself quietly taking inventory. Who is this person? Why do they want to know? How much information have I already given away without thinking about it? I didn't have an answer. Eventually, the interaction ended. Nothing dramatic happened. Nobody followed us out of the restaurant as far as I could tell. So I gathered the kids, brought them home. and continued with the night. And after a while, I stopped thinking about the couple. That evening followed the normal routine. We came home. The kids settled down. Eventually they went to bed. And the house became quiet. This is the part of babysitting that people who have done it probably know very well. A house feels different after somebody else's children go to sleep. During the evening there is constant movement, television, talking, doors. Footsteps, water running, requests for snacks, requests for another snack after the previous snack was supposedly the last snack. Then suddenly, everything stops. You're sitting downstairs alone. The lights upstairs are off, and every sound the house makes becomes noticeable. But I'd been there many times. I wasn't frightened. At some point I armed the alarm system. Then I went back to what I was doing. Eventually, my phone notified me that the alarm had been disabled. That got my attention. I looked at the screen. The system was definitely disarmed. At first, I assumed I'd done something wrong. Maybe I hadn't set it properly. Maybe there was a delay. Maybe the app had glitched. Whatever the explanation was, it wasn't something that immediately made me think somebody was trying to get inside. So I armed it again. A little while later... The alarm system disabled itself again. Now I stopped what I was doing. I remember looking at the phone and feeling that first little change in my stomach. Not panic. More like confusion. Because I knew I hadn't touched anything. I armed it again. Then I went upstairs and got the kids. I didn't explain everything. I didn't want to tell them someone might be trying to enter the house because at that point... I didn't actually know that. And there is an important difference between being frightened yourself and realizing that two kids are looking at your face to determine whether they should be frightened. So I tried to stay controlled. I brought them into their parents' bedroom because it was the only bedroom upstairs with a locking door. Inside that bedroom was a walk-in closet. I told the kids to get inside. Stay there. Stay quiet. and only open the door if they heard me telling them it was okay. I locked the bedroom door. Then I used the panic function on the alarm app. At that point, whatever story I'd been telling myself about a software glitch was becoming harder to believe. Several minutes passed. Then I looked at my phone. The alarm had been disabled again. I armed it. It disabled. I armed it again. It disabled again. Someone or something had access to that system. And as I sat upstairs with the kids behind me, something else happened. I heard footsteps on the stairs, two sets, coming up. That was the moment the situation changed completely. Because now there was no app to blame. There was no software problem that could create the sound of people moving through the house beneath me. I was suddenly confronted with a very simple possibility. I had locked myself upstairs. With whoever had entered the house, I had a taser. I pulled it out. I could hear the footsteps getting closer. I was trying to stay quiet, trying to think, trying not to let the kids understand how scared I was. The footsteps reached the hallway. Then they came toward the bedroom. I heard movement outside the door. And then the doorknob turned. I raised the taser. I pulled the trigger just long enough to make the electric crack obvious through the door. Then I announced that the alarm had been triggered and police were coming. For a second, nothing happened. Then I heard a voice, a familiar one. It was the children's father. He told me I was safe. I opened the door. And whatever control I'd been maintaining disappeared almost instantly. I started crying. The kids came out of the closet. Their parents had returned unexpectedly. But they weren't the people who had been disabling the alarm. They explained what had happened. When I initially activated the system, they received a notification. Through their security system, they were able to access the porch cameras, and after the panic alarm was triggered, they checked them. According to the account I later shared, the cameras showed people positioned outside the house. A man on one side, a woman on the other. The parents headed home. The repeated disarming of the security system appeared connected to attempts to gain access to the house. Police were contacted, and I later gave a statement. I told them about the couple I'd encountered earlier that day at the pizza place. But there was no clear evidence proving those were the same people. The security footage apparently wasn't good enough to positively identify anyone. And that's important, because it's tempting, after something frightening happens, to take every unusual event from earlier in the day and connect them into one neat explanation. Maybe the couple from the restaurant had nothing to do with it. Maybe they did. I still don't know. What I do know is that I was responsible for two children in a quiet house, late at night, while someone appeared to be trying to defeat the home's security system. and for several minutes, I thought I could hear them coming upstairs. The kids were okay. I was okay. The parents returned. A police report was made, and eventually I went back to my own apartment. But after something like that, quiet houses stop feeling quite as quiet. Because once you've experienced the moment when a security system refuses to stay armed, you never look at that little notification on your phone the same way again. There are several things that make that story uncomfortable, but one of them is how quickly the environment changes without physically changing at all. The doors are still locked, the furniture hasn't moved, the hallway looks exactly the same, and yet, the moment you believe somebody outside wants to get in, the house stops feeling like protection and starts feeling like a container. Our next babysitter experienced something much shorter. No footsteps came up the stairs. No alarm repeatedly shut itself off. In fact, the stranger never crossed the doorway. But sometimes the most unsettling thing someone can do is make you wonder why they wanted through the door in the first place. And if you're enjoying the Midnight Monologue, follow or subscribe wherever you're listening. And if you know somebody who enjoys staying up too late listening to stories like these, send them this episode. Now let's go to another house. This time there's only a babysitter, a one-year-old child, and a knock at the door. Story two. Guilty. Babysitting was how I made a lot of my money. There was one family I worked for regularly. They had a one-year-old. I'd watch the child enough times that the house didn't feel strange to me anymore. That matters. Because when something happens in a house you've never been inside before, it's easy to wonder whether you're overreacting. But when you know the routine, you notice when something doesn't fit. That day. The child's mother had mentioned that somebody might stop by to pick something up. So when I heard a knock at the door, I didn't immediately become suspicious. I assumed this was the person she'd told me about. I went to the door and opened it slightly. There was a man standing outside, and I knew immediately that he wasn't who I expected. He looked disheveled. He wore a stained white tank top. I didn't recognize him. I froze for just a moment with the door partly open. Then he asked whether the child's father was home. The question immediately bothered me. He wasn't asking for the person who supposedly arranged to pick something up. He wanted to know whether a specific adult man was inside the house. And I was alone with a one-year-old. I had to answer without letting him know that. So I lied. I said the child's father wasn't there, but my older brother was inside with me. I didn't have an older brother there. I just wanted him to believe another adult male was somewhere behind the door. The man moved closer. Then he asked whether he could come inside and check. That word bothered me. Check. Check what? Check whether I was lying. Check whether the father was inside. Check whether there really was an older brother. I told him it wasn't my house and I couldn't let him inside. I offered to take a message. He told me to tell the parents that someone called Guilty wanted them. That was the name he gave me. Guilty. I smiled awkwardly because sometimes when you're uncomfortable, your body chooses politeness even when every instinct is telling you to shut the door. Then I closed it. And I started locking everything. Doors. Windows. Anything that could be locked. I called the parents and explained what had happened. Then I looked outside. The man hadn't simply walked away. He took out his phone, and he photographed the house. Then he left. That was it. He never came through the door. There was no attack. No dramatic confrontation. No police chase. Just a knock. A few questions. A request to come inside. A photograph. And a name that may or may not have been real. Guilty. Maybe there was an innocent explanation. Maybe he really knew the family. Maybe there was history between them that had nothing to do with me. But if you're babysitting alone with a one-year-old and a strange man asks whether the father is home, then asks to come inside to verify your answer. You don't need to solve the mystery before closing the door. Sometimes surviving an uncomfortable situation means accepting that you may never learn what somebody intended. The man at that door never forced his way inside, and that means the babysitter was left with one of the most frustrating kinds of endings. Nothing happened, which sounds reassuring until you realize that nothing happened doesn't necessarily mean nothing was going to. Our next story also begins with something completely ordinary. Pizza. A babysitter and her nephew walk a short distance to pick some up. On the way home, she notices a man behind them. At first, he's far enough away that she tells herself it doesn't mean anything. People walk in the same direction all the time. Then she reaches the apartment entrance, and the man starts running. Story 3. The Walk Home. I was babysitting my nephew. We decided to get pizza from a place not far from the apartment, close enough to walk. There was nothing unusual about the trip there, nothing that made me think the walk back would become something I'd remember. We picked up the pizza and started toward the apartment. At some point, I noticed a man behind us. He wasn't right on top of us. There was enough distance that I didn't immediately assume he was following us. That's one of those situations where your brain almost argues against your instincts. You're walking in a public place. Another person is walking. Obviously, they may simply be headed the same direction. You don't want to become frightened every time someone happens to be behind you. So I kept going, but I kept noticing him. He remained behind us. I became more aware of the distance to the apartment building. More aware of how quickly I was walking. More aware of my nephew beside me. When you're alone, you can make decisions entirely for yourself. When you're responsible for a child, every calculation changes. Running might frighten him. Turning around might provoke the stranger. Stopping doesn't make sense. So you keep moving. We got closer to the building. The entrance came into view. The man was still behind us. I reached the door and started unlocking it. And that is when he ran. Not a jog. Not someone suddenly realizing they were late. According to the account I later gave, he charged toward us. Full speed. There are probably only a few seconds between noticing someone running and understanding that they're running directly at you. But those seconds stretch. Your hands suddenly feel clumsy. Keys feel smaller. Locks feel more complicated. The doorway that seemed perfectly ordinary 30 seconds earlier becomes the only thing that matters. I got it open. We moved inside. I locked the door behind us. The man reached the entrance. He hit the window. He yelled through the door. He wanted us to come back. He said he only wanted to talk. I didn't open it. We went upstairs. The apartment was on the top floor. which at least made me feel like there weren't many ways he could reach us. I called my parents. My dad came to get us. My sister stayed elsewhere that night after work, and nothing else happened. I never found out what the man wanted. Maybe he was intoxicated. Maybe he was mentally unwell. Maybe he had no intention of harming anyone. But when someone follows you home and starts sprinting the moment you begin unlocking your door, You don't owe them the benefit of the doubt. And even though the entire encounter may have lasted less than a minute once the running started, that is more than enough time for an ordinary walk to become something you replay for years. The part I keep returning to isn't him pounding on the glass. It's the moment before that. When he was still walking behind us. When everything still had an innocent explanation. Because there was a point where I noticed him, and then convinced myself I was probably imagining the danger. Until suddenly I wasn't. Those first three stories have something in common. Whatever happened, the danger existed in the same physical world we do. A person outside a house, a security system, a man walking behind you, doors, locks, cameras. Things you can understand even when you never learn the motive. The next story is different. It was originally told by someone who said they were babysitting a baby cousin at their grandmother's house. The experience itself is very simple. So simple, in fact, that if one detail were removed, there wouldn't be a story at all. The babysitter heard a baby crying upstairs. The problem was, the baby was sitting in their lap. Story 4. The Baby Monitor. I was at my grandmother's house watching my baby cousin. The house had several levels. On the main level, there was the kitchen, the living room, bedrooms, and a bathroom. One staircase went up toward the master bedroom. Another went down toward a den, laundry area, and sunroom. From there, another staircase continued down toward the finished basement. It was the kind of house where sound could travel in ways you didn't immediately understand. And I think that's important to say. Because when I tell people what happened, the first explanation is always sound carrying through the house. That's probably the first explanation I would give too. I was sitting in the living room with the baby on my lap. We were playing. Nobody else was home. There was a baby monitor. The other end of it was upstairs near the crib in my grandmother's bedroom. Nothing unusual was happening. Then I heard crying. It came through the monitor. A baby. Crying from upstairs. I could hear it electronically through the monitor. But I could also hear it coming through the house itself. From the direction of the bedroom upstairs. I looked down. The baby was still on my lap. I didn't go investigate. People sometimes imagine they'd react to something strange by becoming curious. They picture themselves walking toward the sound, opening the door, checking the room. Maybe I would have done that if I'd been alone. But I wasn't alone. I was responsible for a baby. And every part of me was telling me not to carry that child toward whatever was making the sound. So I stood up, I held on to the baby, and I left. To get outside, I had to move through the house near the stairs leading toward the bedroom where the crying appeared to be coming from. I could still hear it. I went down toward the den, through the sunroom, and outside. Then I stayed there. I didn't go back upstairs. I didn't search the bedroom. I didn't try to prove anything to myself. I waited outside with the baby until my grandmother came home. And that is essentially the entire story. There was no figure. Nothing followed us. Nobody discovered someone hiding upstairs. The monitor didn't deliver some mysterious message. There was simply a baby crying from an upstairs room, while the only baby in the house was physically in my arms. Could there be an ordinary explanation? Absolutely. Baby monitors can pick up interference. Depending on the technology being used at the time, another monitor or electronic signal could potentially intrude. Sound travels strangely through multilevel houses. Memory also changes with time. Any of those explanations might be right. But there is one part of the account that makes interference feel less satisfying to the person who experienced it. They didn't only remember hearing the crying through the monitor. They remembered hearing it from upstairs. inside the house. Maybe that's exactly what they expected to hear after the monitor activated and the brain filled in the rest. Maybe another sound in the house resembled crying. Or maybe something happened that they still can't explain. Whatever the answer, I think the babysitter made the right choice. You don't need to go upstairs. Sometimes it's perfectly acceptable to let the mystery keep the bedroom. There is a temptation with paranormal stories to make them bigger than they are. Add another sound. Add a shadow. Add a door opening. But sometimes the restraint is what makes the story work. A person holding a baby hears another baby crying upstairs. That's enough. Our next account becomes stranger because the babysitter actually does see something. And at first, she has a completely ordinary explanation for that, too. The child she's watching must have gotten out of bed. She hears small feet running down the hallway toward the bathroom. A few minutes later, she hears them coming back. Then something passes the doorway. She catches only a glimpse of black hair, and she tells the child to go back and flush the toilet. A perfectly ordinary sentence, until she walks into the bedroom and realizes the child never left the bed. Story 5. The Other Child. I was 13 when this happened. I regularly babysat a little girl. I'll call her Emma. I watched her often enough that we had become close. She knew me. I knew her routine. This wasn't a house I'd entered for the first time that night. I wasn't trying to learn where everything was. I had been there before. The front portion of the house was mostly open. Living room and dining room. Kitchen. From where I normally sat, there was an opening that gave me a partial view toward the hallway in the back part of the house. Emma's bedroom was down that hallway. Her parents' room was at the opposite end, with a bathroom connected to it. That night, I put Emma to bed. It was around 10.30 when I settled into the living room. I was channel surfing. Nothing unusual. Eventually, I heard quick footsteps in the hallway. Small feet, running toward the bathroom. I assumed Emma had gotten up to use it. There was no reason to think otherwise. A few minutes went by, then I heard the footsteps again, coming back. I turned toward the opening. I was going to remind her to make sure she'd flushed because I hadn't heard the toilet. And as something passed the doorway, I saw the top of a head. Black hair. Just enough to register that someone small had moved past. I called toward the hallway. No answer. I waited. Still nothing. So I got up and went to check on Emma. I walked into her bedroom. She was in bed, asleep, not pretending, not giggling because she'd fooled me. Asleep. I stood there looking at her. Then I started doing the mental math. Maybe she had somehow returned to bed incredibly quickly. Maybe I hadn't seen what I thought I saw. Maybe the sound came from somewhere else. Because the alternative was ridiculous. There was no second child in the house. And yet I had heard somebody run down that hallway, wait several minutes, then run back. And I had seen black hair pass the doorway. Eventually, Emma woke up. Or I woke her. And while talking to her, something came up that changed the way I thought about what I'd seen. According to the account I later shared publicly, Emma described another little girl. A child she sometimes seemed to know or see. And suddenly my brief glimpse of black hair didn't feel quite as easy to dismiss. There is always another possibility when children are involved. Kids create imaginary friends. They incorporate things adults say. They pick up on our reactions. Memories merge. And when you're 13 yourself, the boundary between being the responsible babysitter and being a frightened kid is thinner than adults sometimes remember. Maybe I heard ordinary house noise. Maybe Emma had gotten up and I simply misremembered the timing. Maybe my brain turned a shadow into hair because I'd already interpreted the sound as a child running. Those are reasonable explanations. But I babysat there enough to know what Emma's footsteps sounded like. And that night, I believed I'd heard them. The problem was that Emma was asleep. So if she wasn't running through the hallway, I don't know who was. The previous story is intimate. A hallway. A sleeping child. A glimpse that lasts maybe a second. Our historical story takes us somewhere much larger. Outside the house. Above the neighboring rooftops. And unlike the apparition stories people usually associate with babysitting, this one has nothing to do with ghosts. It happened in Pennsylvania in 1981. The witness was 17 years old. For privacy... Later retellings have called her Julie. She was babysitting a neighbor's young son in Greensburg. At around quarter to two in the morning, she went toward the front porch. She expected to watch someone leave for work. Instead, she looked across the neighborhood and saw three white lights suspended above the houses. And behind those lights, she believed there was something enormous. Story. 6. The Babysitter and the Triangle. February 14th, 1981. Greensburg, Pennsylvania. I was 17. It was late enough that most of the neighborhood had settled down. I was babysitting a neighbor's son. Around 1.45 in the morning, I went toward the enclosed porch. I knew someone nearby would be leaving for work around that time, and I expected to watch for them. Instead, I noticed lights. Three of them, white. They weren't arranged like the lights on an ordinary aircraft. They formed the points of a triangle. And whatever they were attached to appeared to be hovering only about 50 feet away, roughly at treetop or housetop level. It made no sound. That was the first thing that bothered me. An airplane that close should make noise. A helicopter should have been unmistakable. But this thing appeared suspended above a residential neighborhood without the mechanical sound I expected. As my eyes adjusted, I began to make out something behind the lights. A dark surface, metallic looking, triangular. One light appeared brighter than the others. Near it was what looked like a transparent section. A window. Then I realized there seemed to be more than one. A front pane. windows wrapping partially around the sides. I wasn't looking at lights floating independently in the sky. At least that's not how it appeared to me. I believed I was looking at a solid object. Then the object shifted. It seemed to tilt. And from its underside, a dull white beam or glow extended downward toward the ground. I kept watching. According to later accounts of the case, I remained there for around 15 minutes. Fifteen minutes is a long time when you're staring at something you can't identify. Long enough for the first shock to fade. Long enough to study details. Long enough to ask yourself whether you're seeing what you think you're seeing. And then I noticed movement behind the window. There were figures inside. Two. This is the part of the account where the story moves from an unusual aerial sighting into something much stranger. I would later describe the figures as having disproportionately large heads. Their eyes looked unusual. Their ears seemed almost gill-like. The face didn't look right to me. One appeared seated. The other stood near what looked like a control panel. I believed I could see the interior clearly enough to make out features on the panel itself. Light surfaces. Dark controls. Rows of objects resembling knobs or switches. I could see the standing figure's neck, its shoulders, its arms, and at some point, I realized it appeared to be looking back at me. There is a difference between seeing something strange in the sky and feeling as though whatever is inside it can see you too. That changed the experience. Yet I didn't immediately run. One of the strangest details attributed to my account is that I felt almost compelled to continue watching. Not physically restrained. More like unable to pull myself away. Eventually, I forced myself back into the house. I went into the living room. I was already shaken. Then the television began making a buzzing sound. The picture disappeared. A light in the room went out. At that point, whatever fascination had kept me watching was gone. I was frightened. I called my parents. I wanted them to come get me. and I wanted them to take the child too. By the time my father arrived, the object was gone. The homeowners later returned. There was no spacecraft sitting in the yard, no physical trace that established what I'd seen. One light bulb in the living room had burned out. That was essentially it. I eventually reported the sighting. Police reportedly directed the case toward UFO investigators, and over time... The encounter made its way into UFO literature. The basic details remained extraordinary. A 17-year-old babysitter. A silent triangular object hovering extremely close to Holmes. Three white lights. A beam. Windows. And two humanoid figures visible inside. But there are reasons to remain cautious. This was fundamentally a single witness case. The witness's identity was protected. There was no photograph, no physical evidence proving an unusual craft had been present. Some later researchers have noted uncertainty concerning timing, and at least one later catalog evaluation considered the reliability low, noting possibilities including confusion with a conventional aircraft, such as a helicopter, and the inability to exclude a hoax. Those criticisms matter. Because a good mystery doesn't require us to pretend uncertainty doesn't exist. Could a 17-year-old, awake at nearly 2 in the morning, have misidentified something ordinary under unusual viewing conditions? Yes. Could memory and later retellings have sharpened details? Absolutely. Could the story have grown as it moved through UFO literature? That's possible, too. But the basic report has persisted for decades. And I keep coming back to the setting. Not a desert. Not a lonely highway. not an isolated military base. A babysitter inside a residential neighborhood in Pennsylvania, a young child asleep nearby, and outside, something she believed was hovering close enough that she could see through the windows, whether what she saw was extraordinary, or whether the explanation was far more ordinary than it appeared. Julie apparently carried the experience with her. And that's one of the strange things about unexplained encounters. Sometimes the person most affected isn't asking you to believe them. They're simply telling you that for a few minutes one night, the world didn't look the way they thought it was supposed to. There is one story left tonight, and out of everything I found while putting this episode together, this is the one I kept returning to, partly because it doesn't involve one isolated moment. The person who told it said things developed over months. Small noises, objects misplaced, lights behaving strangely, things that could be dismissed, then footsteps, then a 911 call. then police officers searching an empty room where something had apparently been walking. And even that wasn't enough to convince the babysitter that the house was haunted. She continued looking for ordinary explanations, until one day, something came down the stairs. Final story. The house with the red-dressed girl. I was 18 or 19 when this happened. I babysat for a family friend and her husband. They had two kids. I'll call the girl Kay and the boy Jay. I watched them often. Enough that I didn't really think of them simply as kids I babysat anymore. We were close, almost like younger siblings. The family moved frequently, practically every year. And around 2015, they moved into a house that seemed, at least from the outside, like a good deal. The house wasn't ancient. That's worth emphasizing. When people hear haunted house, they imagine rotting wood, Victorian staircases, century-old wallpaper, a basement nobody wants to enter. This wasn't that. It had been built only a few years earlier. Two stories, three bedrooms, multiple bathrooms. Nice neighborhood, the kind of place where you'd expect a young family to live comfortably. The strange part was