Most scary babysitter stories start with a phone call. Mine started with a seven-year-old in a dinosaur costume who came back from the sidewalk and asked me why the old man upstairs kept waving at her friends. Anyone who collects home alone scary stories knows the worst part is finding out you were never alone.
This was Halloween night, 2018, in Kettering, Ohio. I was nineteen and taking classes at Sinclair. I babysat for a couple named Dan and Trish Kowalczyk three or four nights a month. They had one kid, Nora. She was easy. She liked dinosaurs and she went to bed when you told her to.
That year Dan and Trish had a party at his boss’s house, so they asked me to take Nora around the block at six and then hand out candy until nine. They’d pay me double. I said yes before Trish finished asking.
When I got there, Dan was on a stepladder in the front yard hanging a plastic spider on the gutter. He told me the decorations were half done. “The skeleton’s still in the garage,” he said. “I never got around to putting him up. Don’t let Nora tell you otherwise.”
Trish gave me the usual list. Pizza money on the counter. Bedtime at eight thirty, nine because it was Halloween. Then she said one more thing on her way out the door.
“Don’t bother with the guest room upstairs. The window sticks and it’s freezing in there. I just keep the door shut.”
I didn’t think anything of it. Every house has a room like that.
The Old Man in the Upstairs Window
Nora and I did the block from six to about seven fifteen. She got a full pillowcase. I got a sore back from carrying it. Then we came home, I dumped the candy on the kitchen table so she could sort it, and I sat on the front steps with the bowl.
The street was busy. Lots of little kids with parents, then the bigger kids in groups. It was cold enough that you could see your breath.
Around seven forty, a group of three boys came up the walk. One of them was dressed as a hot dog. He took a Kit Kat, then pointed up past my head and waved.
“Your grandpa’s funny,” he said.
I turned around. The house had two windows facing the street on the second floor. Nora’s room on the left, with a dinosaur nightlight. And the guest room on the right. The guest room window was dark.
“That’s a decoration,” I said. The hot dog kid shrugged and they left.
I figured Dan had put the skeleton up after all. Or I figured the kid saw the plastic spider and got confused. Kids say stuff like that on Halloween. That’s half of what Halloween is.
About twenty minutes later, a girl in a witch hat and her mom came up. The girl waved at the window too. When I asked her who she was waving at, she said, “The man. He waved first.”
Her mom laughed and said, “Somebody’s having fun up there.”
I looked up again. Dark window. Nothing in it that I could see. The streetlight hit the glass at an angle, and all I saw was the reflection of the tree in the yard.
I went inside to check on Nora. She was on the kitchen floor, putting her candy into piles by color. I asked her if her dad had put the skeleton in the guest room.
She looked at me like I was stupid. “He’s in the garage,” she said. “He’s always in the garage.”
I opened the door from the kitchen to the garage just to make sure. The skeleton was there. Six feet tall, plastic, propped against the lawnmower with a Halloween price tag still on its foot.
I told myself it was the reflection. The tree branches moving in the wind, the streetlight. Kids see faces in everything.
Then Nora asked to go back out and give candy to her friend Maddie, who lived two doors down. I said okay as long as I could see her from the porch. She ran down the sidewalk with a handful of Smarties and stood at Maddie’s door.
When she came back, she came back slow. She stood on the bottom step and looked up at the house.
“Why does he keep doing that?” she said.
“Doing what?”
She put one finger over her lips. Shh. Like that.
“The man in the window,” she said. “He did it at Maddie’s sister too.”
The Mistake in All the Scary Babysitter Stories
It was 8:22. I know because I took my phone out to text Trish, and then I didn’t text her, because what was I going to say? Your kid thinks there’s a man in your guest room. I was nineteen. I didn’t want to be the babysitter who ruined their party over a reflection.
So I did the thing you’re never supposed to do. I took Nora inside, sat her in front of the TV with a bag of candy corn, and I went upstairs to look.
The upstairs hallway was carpeted and dark. Nora’s nightlight was on in her room, and it threw a little green light across the hall. The guest room door was at the end. It was shut, like Trish said.
About halfway down the hall, I smelled it.
Cigarettes. Not fresh smoke. The stale kind that gets into a coat. And under that, mothballs. Like the inside of an old closet.
Dan and Trish didn’t smoke. I’d been in that house twenty times and it always smelled like laundry soap and whatever Trish was baking.
I stopped. I stood there for what felt like a long time, but was probably ten seconds. There was no sound from the guest room. No TV, no footsteps. Just the smell.
And then, very quietly, the floor creaked on the other side of the door. One board. Like somebody shifting their weight from one foot to the other.
I didn’t open it. I want to be honest about that. I didn’t call out. I didn’t say hello. I backed down that hallway the way you’d back away from a dog, went downstairs, picked Nora up off the couch with her candy corn still in her hand, and walked out the front door without shutting it.
Nora said, “Are we going to Maddie’s?”
I said yes.
The Guest Room Nobody Was Supposed to Use
Maddie’s mom let us in and I called 911 from her kitchen. Then I called Trish. She and Dan got home before the police did. Dan wanted to go in himself, and the dispatcher told him not to, and he listened, which I still think about.
Two officers went through the house. It took them maybe fifteen minutes. When they came out, one of them asked Dan to come look at something.
Nobody was in the guest room. But the window that stuck was open about eight inches, wide enough for cold air to come in. The roof of the garage ran right under it.
There was a folding chair in front of the window. Not one of theirs. A metal one, the kind churches use. It was turned to face the street.
On the floor next to it was a coffee can with cigarette butts in it. A lot of cigarette butts. The officer said it wasn’t one night’s worth.
And on a nail inside the guest room closet, hanging right at eye level, was a house key on a red plastic ring.
Trish started crying when she saw it. It was their spare. She’d lost it in July. She thought it fell out of her purse at the pool. They’d never changed the locks because they figured nobody would know what house it went to.
The police said whoever it was probably got in through the front door with the key and left across the garage roof when he heard me on the stairs. They found scuff marks on the gutter. Dan’s plastic spider was lying in the side yard.
They never found out who it was. Dan and Trish moved the next spring. Nora is in high school now, and from what I hear, she doesn’t remember any of it except that she got to sleep at Maddie’s.
The officer who walked me to my car that night said something I’ve never forgotten. He said a guy who sits in a dark window and waves at kids on Halloween is a guy who wants to be seen. He just wants to be seen by people nobody will believe.
He was right. Every kid on that street saw him. The only one who didn’t was me.
I don’t babysit anymore. But every Halloween, when a little kid stops on a sidewalk and waves up at a dark window, I always look to see who waves back.
Looking for more scary stories to tell at night? Read the home intruder story about a candy bowl someone kept refilling from inside the house, the new house horror story about a garage opener with one remote too many, or a small town Halloween story about the pumpkins one Vermont town lights every October.
Do you have scary babysitter stories of your own?
Has a kid ever told you about someone in the house that you couldn’t see? Share your scary babysitter stories, or any Halloween stories for adults that still keep you checking the upstairs windows, in the comments below.
How scary was it?
More Home Intruder Stories
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My Robot Vacuum Kept Cleaning Around Something in My Empty Apartment
There Was One Device on Our Rental’s Wi-Fi That Wasn’t Ours
The Note in My Rental’s House Binder Was Written by the Man Upstairs
My Dog Wouldn’t Go in the Laundry Room, and the Dryer Was Always Warm
Somebody Kept Refilling My Halloween Candy Bowl From Inside My House