This is something that happened to me irl.
I was around thirteen, too young to get a job and too old to be completely dependent on my parents. And of course with the ripe old age of growing into your body and finding new interests in grown-up things, I wanted to buy some expensive stuff.
I had this big goal of getting this nice microphone for streaming and new tech for better gameplay, and with that goal my parents told me I would have to pay for it myself.
Fast forward a bit after scheming, I posted on Nextdoor that I was available to babysit and that I had had lots of experience and ability with young kids.
The next night after posting it, I got a text from a mom. I’ll call her Mrs. Chaley. She had two kids, a five year old girl and a three-ish old boy. She and her husband worked from home a lot, and when the dad wasn’t available to keep the kids at bay from distracting the mom from her work, they hired a babysitter. A.K.A., me.
I agreed to arranging a time where I babysit for two hours to meet the kids and get a feel for taking care of them within the next few days.
After the time had passed, I get the address, arrive at the house, and there I see the girl in the window, staring at me as I walk up to the door. My mom goes with me to make sure that I don’t get kidnapped from the moment I walk through the door, so she gets introduced to Mrs. Chaley and we meet the kids.
I’ll call the girl Betty and the boy Bill, for privacy purposes.
“Betty has been waiting for a long time for you,” The mom explains, smiling. Betty smiles back up at her, hiding behind her leg. “She’s been super excited.”
I smile. “That’s awesome.” And then to reassure the mom, I add, “I’m sure we’ll be great friends.”
After some prompting from their mom, the two children show me around the house and Betty starts opening up. She rambles on and on about dinosaurs, as made obvious by the dino pajamas she wears, and about how they’re really cool and about how she’d love to see real dinosaurs someday.
Bill doesn’t say anything, as the mom explained he hasn’t quite grown into himself and has been too shy to start talking, but he follows along and nods with Betty.
After Betty stops talking about dinosaurs, she doesn’t say much else. I chalk it up to not having anything else to say, and don’t think about it. Bill doesn’t say anything.
I prepare the kids lunch and we go upstairs to Betty’s room to play dress up with the two. It turns out that their mother had made all of the costumes that the two loved wearing so much, and was a very handy woman. I admired her handiwork, as I know the painstaking-ness of sewing myself and the hours it takes to make something.
Again, Betty doesn’t say much, which I thought was odd. If it were me or my siblings we would be babbling on about each outfit and creating whole roleplays with the outfits and completely immersed in our imaginations, which to compare to Betty’s quietness was rather odd. Once more, I don’t think much of it.
The two hours end, with the mom paying me and thanking me for my work. I wave goodbye to the kids and smile at them, and as I walk away from the house I can feel Betty’s eyes on me.
It’s probably just her watching me leave until I’m out of sight. I figure. That’s what she did when I first got there anyways.
Some time passes and I get asked to babysit again, to which I agree. It’s another two hours, and this time the mother is away on a skiing trip and the dad is home. I hadn’t met him before and with other babysitting experiences with men who work from home, it was uncomfortable for me to know that somewhere in the house a man could be watching me and that if I messed up he would probably see it.
I meet the dad, whom I’ll call James.
He is a man who I would describe as the emo anime boy at the ball that the prim and proper princess inevitably falls in love with. Slightly shifty, somewhat of a scowl, and a dislike for people. He wasn’t mean to me in any sort of way, but I didn’t like him and how annoyed he looked at me.
I play with the children up in Betty’s room, dress up once more, feed them lunch, and then for the last 45 minutes or so, we play in the play room. The house is built so that when you walk through the front door, straight ahead leads to the living room and kitchen, and to your left is an open space and then the stairs. That open space is the play room, where Betty and Bill keep most of their toys.
We are playing cars with their various Hotwheel race cars and floor mat and eventually try to build a marble track out of these frustrating plastic pieces that never stay together.
Halfway through the 45 minutes, I start to joke around with Betty. When I’m around younger kids, I try to show them I can be fun by engaging in their minds and imaginations and making them laugh. That often lets me grow closer to them so that I get hired more because they like me. I digress.
Betty ends up laughing somewhat loudly (Bill still doesn’t say anything), and the dad appears at the top of the stairs with an expression I can’t quite place.
“Who’s laughing?” He asks. It’s almost joking, mostly not. He’s leaning over the rail, eyebrows furrowed together and his mouth set in a thin line. He looks annoyed, and a hint of question is lingering in his voice. I find it odd that the man doesn’t know his own child’s laugh and has to physically leave his workspace to ask who’s laughing. It’s almost as if he’s annoyed at Betty.
Betty looks up at him and smiles, saying, “It’s just me, daddy.”
I quickly add on that I’m sorry we were loud and the dad walks away, an indecipherable mix between annoyed, satisfied, and disgusted at being disrupted. It’s best explained as if he had a black cloud hanging over his head that everyone kept pointing out and each time someone did he would become more and more irritable.
We clean up, I make sure the lunch plates aren’t on the table, and that Betty’s room is cleaner than it was before. James pays me, and I leave. Betty doesn’t watch me this time.
Once more, I get asked to babysit, this time with both of the parents home and the mother doing some home renovation and needing the kids to be kept away from where she was working. I agree.
I get there, we play dress up, nothing is out of the ordinary. James doesn’t leave his workroom, the kids are fine, and the mother is very sweet and offers me some lunch along with the kids.
“I don’t mind,” I say, wanting to be polite. “I’m not really that hungry.”
The mom nods. “Alright, but you can have some if you’d like.”
I end up finishing what the kids didn’t eat, want not waste not, right?, and we continue playing upstairs. After the allotted time is up, I approach the front door and the mom hands me the money and her face and demeanor looks worried.
“The kids, they were nice to you, right?” She asks, her voice quieting as she hands me my money. Betty and Bill are behind her, clinging to her legs as usual and staring up at her.
“Yeah, of course!” I exclaim. It was the truth, as the kids were fine and easy enough to get along with.
The mom looks somewhat relieved, although she still seems worried. She pats the children’s head and extracts herself from their hold and tells them that she needs to get back to her work. Betty whines, but ultimately stops her hold and Bill follows. Mrs. Chaley walks away and as I’m turning to close the door I look back at the children, and see Betty waving at me with a strange smile and Bill staring once more with his mouth open as if he was to say something.
Before the door latches shut, I hear, “Goodbye friend. Come back soon.”
The voice; it was the deepest thing I have had ever heard. It was scratchy yet ringingly clear, and had a tinge of almost mocking laughter to it. I heard what could be described as stress and utter panic shoved into that voice and wicked glee mixed in with the spin-chillingly deep words.
I felt goosebumps raise on my arms and my warning bells yelling at me to get clear of the danger, and as soon as I’m away from the sight of the front window I bolt back home. For context, my house is a decent walk away, but I run back to my house. Completely, utterly, run back to home faster than I would’ve thought my legs were capable of doing, strange chills running up and down my back.
My mom notices I’m red and sweaty and remarks on it, but I shrug it off and just say I wanted to run instead of take longer to walk.
To end this, I’ll state that I’ve never gone back to that house and haven’t been texted by Mrs. Chaley ever since. I still have our text messages and a little note I wrote to help me remember Betty’s likes and dislikes, but other than that I haven’t really talked about this and frankly, don’t really want to. But I thought random people on the internet might enjoy it more, so I’m putting it out here.
I’m not sure if this classifies as horror as compared to the other stories on this subreddit, but it sure had been creepy for me at the time.
Thanks for reading.