The Babysitter and the Man Upstairs
The Babysitter and the Man Upstairs ( dt. Sinnbildl. "The babysitter and the man upstairs") is a modern legend from the USA . It is about a babysitter who is called several times during the night by an unknown man.
content
A teenager takes care of two children whose parents have gone out. She puts the children to bed upstairs and sits down in the living room to watch TV. The phone rings and a strange man asks the babysitter to come upstairs. She thinks the call is a joke and hangs up without following the prompt. Shortly afterwards the man calls again and says it would be better if she checked on the children. Now she gets scared, hangs up immediately and calls the police . This in turn asks the babysitter to hold the stranger on hold when he calls the next time so that his whereabouts can be determined. When the man calls again a few minutes later, she tries to involve him in a conversation, but this time the man hangs up. Only seconds later the police report: They should leave the house as soon as possible. The girl runs out and is greeted in the driveway by the arriving police. There, the officers explain to her that the calls came from a second telephone in the same house. It turns out that the children were already dead and the man was now targeting the babysitter as well.
backgrounds
The legend originated in the 1960s at the latest and is told in several variants today. The number of children fluctuates and the behavior of the man is also described differently: sometimes the man does not speak at all, but laughs or just breathes obscenely. In different accounts, the woman first calls the emergency number , which she then passes on to the police. In some variants, the girl sees the murderer, but can escape and only then notifies the police. In a more drastic variant, the story ends with the fact that the caller was actually the older brother of the two children and is now waiting for the babysitter in the children's room with a kitchen knife.
Folklorists suspect that the legend goes back to the historical fact that in the 1960s and 1970s more and more young women became independent and babysitting positions became increasingly popular. Young women now dared to work alone in strange households, which made them desirable victims of violent crimes. The core element of the legend is (among other things) that the victim is always alone in the house and fails in his most important task, namely taking care of the children. Therefore, the legend may also reflect the typical fear of failure of young mothers-to-be. The caller's position on the upper floor may also represent the traditional role of the dominant man over the woman (downstairs).
reception
The legend was taken up in several feature films. The film The Horror Comes at Ten (1979) is based on the legend, in Jessy - The Stairway to Death (1974) a murderer hides in the attic of a student union and calls after every murder. And in Düstere Legenden (1998) the legend is the subject of a college seminar. Allusions to the legend can be found in a number of films such as The Night of Adventure (1987), Innocent Babysitter (1995), The Call (2003) and Unknown Caller (2006). In Otto - The New Film (1987), however, the saga is taken up with humor, in which the caller and alleged murderer turns out to be a phone prank by the child himself (with a disguised voice).
literature
- Jan Harold Brunvand: Encyclopedia of Urban Legends, Volume 1 (= Encyclopedia of Urban Legends, Updated and Expanded Edition ). ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara 2012, ISBN 1598847201 , pp. 46-48.
- Robert B. Durham: Modern Folklore . Lulu.com, Raleigh (North Carolina) 2015, ISBN 9781312909694 , pp. 410-411.
- Miriam Forman-Brunell: Babysitter: An American History . NYU Press, New York 2011, ISBN 0814728952 , p. 133.