When a Stranger Calls (Warning: Contains Spoilers)

It all began back in the 8th grade when a couple of my friends and I decided to have a "scary movie night" in which we rented the four scariest looking movies in BlockBuster and stayed up until 3 in the morning watching them all. I don't really remember the first three, as they honestly weren't that frightening, but as we all were beginning to get tired I can vividly remember the last one we watched: When a Stranger Calls. The plot was typical for a scary movie; the babysitter watches some kids one a night and some scary murderer tries to kill them all. But it wasn't necessarily the movie that made my experience so traumatizing, it was what happened to me on the following night.

To understand why I was so terrified, one must first know the gist of the movie. While babysitting two young kids of a ridiculously wealthy family that lives in the middle of no where, the family's house phone rings non-stop the entire night, and each time the babysitter picks up the phone all she hears is a man breathing. As the night progresses she notices odd occurrences, such as the silhouette of a man at the gate house down the road, the conspicuous absence of the live-in housekeeper, and the odd behavior of the family cat. There are random bangs on the windows, weird coincidences in bathrooms, and then, suddenly, the man comes out of hiding to kill the babysitter and the two kids, so they go and hide, the man finds them, and there's this huge dramatic fight resulting in the babysitter stabbing the man with a fire poker. That, plus a lot of suspense, is the movie in a nut shell.

So after me and the other eight kids that were watching it are finished screaming and scaring each other, we go to bed all huddled up in the family room with a weapon near-by to protect us. The next day is some what normal, we all get picked up and go home to do whatever it is we usually do on Sundays. It is then that I learn I am to babysit that night. Now, one can imagine my initial panic at the suggestion, but after all my parents had offered me up and I couldn't say no so I spent the remainder of the day preparing myself before finally getting picked up by employers. The beginning of the night goes well, the two boys and I play board games, watch TV, eat dinner, and all the while I try to shake off my obvious anxiety. But when they finally go to bed, things start to get interesting. Every five seconds I seem to hear a creak in the floors, a tap on the wall, a knock on the door, and start to get really nervous. So I go and sit by the family dog. After about a minute I hear this long, loud, bang on the windows and I completely lose it. I run upstairs, wake up the kids, get the dog, and lock ourselves in their parents bathroom under the pretext that we're playing "hide from the monsters that live under your bed." Yet, the banging doesn't stop, and it only seems to get worse. By this time the kids have both fallen asleep in the bathroom so I call my parents and beg them to tell me what to do, but they put it off that "it's nothing" and I shouldn't worry. So I wait a while and, as the banging seems to die down in frequency, the loudness of it only increases. As my heart starts beating out of my chest I hear a door open downstairs and I decide to gather the courage to send the dog down to see what it is. As I open the door to let her lose, I realize that it's the parents who just walked in. So I walk downstairs to greet them, and as I do I overhear them discussing the amazing fireworks they saw across the street.