Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and we are coming to you from inside your house.
That's right. No, we're not trigger warning on this one.
By the way, there's some pretty violent content, including speak of sexual assault at some point.
Yeah, this takes a real hard left all of a sudden.
It really does.
And we're talking about the sort of trope of the call is coming from inside the house. And as a trope, we want to thank TV tropes, dot Com, Tropedia and a really good article from Chrissy Stockton on Thought Catalog.
Plus also Sean van Horn on Collider and the good folks on the Straight Dope message Board.
That's right, and principal Seymour Skinner.
That's right. So the call is coming from inside the house. Is also often called the babysitter and the man upstairs. Yeah,
and just the quick sketch of it. This is an urban legend that probably back to the sixties and essentially says that there is a usually a young teen tween girl alone at home, or more often that she is alone babysitting some kids who are younger than her, and she keeps getting calls from some mysterious stranger who asks her have you checked on the kids who are osensibly asleep upstairs, and she just then you know, hangs up.
She thinks it's a prank call. And as time goes on, these calls get more and more sinister.
Yeah, definitely more sinister because the you know, it's been in quite a few movies. We're going to talk about in different iterations, but the babysitter would usually like, I don't know, put them off or not believe it or whatever.
Say you know, is this Johnny?
Is this my boyfriend?
Then hang up.
Then the caller calls back, The caller calls back again. It's usually a few times, and eventually the babysitter is going to call the police. They're gonna say, oh man, we're going to put a trace on the call. She's gonna say, you don't have to call me. I'm thirteen years old, and they say, well, that's just how we say things. And then the stranger calls the police trace the call and then call back and say you've got to get out of there. The call is coming from inside the house.
I know.
It's genuinely scary to think about, obviously, and then once she is out, the cops show up and the prowler has murdered those kids upstairs already.
Yep. And one of the things that makes it so creepy too, is that when this, you know, was passed around, this urban legend like that, you couldn't really call your own phone number. Yeah, and if you had two lines in the house, maybe only the richest of your friends had two lines in their house. There's a whole urban legend surrounding how you could call your own line if you did certain things. That's neither here nor there, it
turns out. But the fact that it's coming from inside the house means that it's the last place you'd expect somebody to be calling from, which made it even scarier for the viewer who had no idea or the listener, I guess, for the urban legend who had no idea what was coming.
Yeah, and you know what, I remember hearing these stories like around the campfire kind of thing, and it terrified me. And it never dawned on me that that was a near impossibility.
Yeah, did you have that the little legends that it was like you could you could do something, you know, like tap thing tap, like the receiver or whatever to call your own line or was it just like you just can't do that.
I don't remember hearing any of those, but I do know they existed because you sent them to me, right.
But yeah, So that the fact that it was coming from inside the house when you were it's really not supposed to have been able to happen, just made it that much scarier. And it makes it a little harder to understand or grasp in the age of cell phones, where you can call somebody from inside the house, like it's entirely possible to call was coming from inside the house.
Yeah, And and it's uh, it goes along with some of the great scary legends of the day, like the hook. The Vanishing Hitchhiker was another one I remember. Drip Drop Maniac. Do you remember that one?
No? Did he say we cause holes and teeth?
No? Drip Drop Maniac was some version of a thing where there's a like a German shepherd that that sleeps under the bed that you know the kid was scared, and the reason and and the way they would not be scared is they would put their hand down and the German shepherd would lick their hand and.
So I'm sure you see what's coming.
Uh. It turns out the German shepherd they hear drip, drip, drip, and the German shepherd is like killed and dripping blood on the floor, and the and the person there was a dude under the bed licking the person's hand.
Oh crazy, that was a good one.
Yeah, maniac. Yeah, terrifying.
Uh you want to take a break so I can kind of recollect myself after that terrifying story.
You're never gonna hang your head hand off the side of the bed again, are you?
Oh I don't already.
Okay, Yeah, we'll be right back. I'm still laughing, by the way, that are you?
You got to be under the sheets and stuff still, Yeah, I got over that at some point. I used to be like that, like well into even my thirties. I think I was probably in my thirties or forties when I was finally like, you know what, I'm a hot sleeper. I'm just gonna brave whatever's out there and sleep on top of the sheet. You.
Yeah, I've gotten better in my older But if I'm watching like a particularly a good ghost.
Movie, horror movie, oh sure, yes, at.
Night and you me and MoMA have already gone to bed. When I have to turn out all the lights, I will basically run down the hall to the bedroom like yeah, yeah, and try not to and I just can't not.
No, I'm with you.
If it's something like that and I'm truly scared by a movie and I'm up late by myself, the getting back to the bed scene is truly ridiculous for a fifty four year old man.
I'm also one of those people who if you jump out and scare them, I go up like both feet off of the ground, yeah, and make like ooh sound kind of thing, like you can really get me if you.
Yeah. I used to scare people like that on occasion, and I finally learned that, like, that's just not cool to do.
Oh, I think it's great after like about thirty seconds. Afterward, I think it's hilarious and wonderful. But it takes me a second.
Oh, oh gosh, do we have time? Yes, very quickly.
In college, after we saw the movie Misery, my roommates and I at the Dollar Theater the Alps Theater in Athens, Georgia.
Oh yeah.
We had ridden separately and my one roommate and I Chris raced home and he was a real sick twist and he was like, let's scare Eddie. You know Eddie because Eddie was right behind us. And Chris went home and unscrewed all the light bulbs in the main room and we hid in the closet and Eddie.
Eddie came in turned on the lights. No lights came on, and he was like.
Yeah, you guys are pretty funny, and smartly turned on the television to provide some light. And you know how when you're like hiding in a closet and it's just barely cracked, you see people kind of looking in at you, but they're not focused on you because I can't see you.
That was Eddie.
He was coming closer and closer, and we jumped out of the closet and got him pretty good.
I think he knocked a frame picture off the wall and broke it.
You had frame pictures on your wall in college? Oh, you know that's impressive. Yeah. Have I ever told you my being scared from the closet story?
No.
I was just sitting there in my room. I was probably like fourteen or something. I was just reading in bed, and I noticed that the closet door was crackediced a little bit, which was unusual. I didn't usually do that. And I even made like a little joke to myself, like, oh, it's probably something in the closet, right, And I looked over a minute or two later, and the door was open further than it happened, and I just immediately jumped up and started running for the door, like I didn't
go to look. I didn't say like, oh, that's weird. I immediately jumped up right, I would totally survive a horror movie. And my dad came barreling out of the closet like rah, and I just basically flipped on my back like a turtle and started screaming. Even after he was like standing over me like are you okay? I was just looking at him. I couldn't stop screaming. My mom had time to make it upstairs and into my
room and say what'd you do to him? And I'm looking at them like talking, screaming, still on my back like he got me that good, Like, oh God, definitely shortened my life.
Poor guy. I feel so bad for you.
That is not certainly not something adached to to their Yeah, exactly, all right, So we're back and we're going to tell that the possibly what inspired this real story. I got this particular version from Chrissy Stockton that I mentioned from Thought Catalog, but I looked it up and it was in plenty of other places.
So this is where it turns pretty dark.
Yeah, it goes very dark.
So if you have kids listening, they may want to tune out. In the nineteen fifties, in fact, March of nineteen fifty, there was a young thirteen year old named Janet Chrisman hired a babysit a three year old for the Romax mister Gregory Romack and his wife, I, you know, just like with her live show. I couldn't find his wife's name because they didn't print stuff like that back then. But she decided babysit rather than go to a school party.
At seven thirty, she got to their house. This is in Columbia, Missouri, and before they left for the night, mister Romac said, hey, by the way, see the shotgun. I've got this shotgun and it's loaded and here's how you shoot it.
Yeah, thirteen year old girl in Missouri.
Yeah, I guess I mean nineteen fifty is going to nineteen.
Fifty nineteen fifty Missouri. I could see that being pretty standard procedure. Yeah. He also very wisely said do not open this door until you at least turned on the porch light to see who it is knocking on the door, right right, So you would think that little Janet was probably going to be just fine. I mean, there was probably going to be an uneventful night anyway, but she had also been equipped with a shotgun by the people
she was babysitting for. The thing that gets me is that she had chosen to babysit rather than go to a school party because she had recently bought a dress on installment and needed the money She's to pay for a dress. It's like a responsible little thirteen year old. Yeah, so shouldn't have even been there. I think at some point around ten thirty, the police in her town got a call from a girl just shouting come quick, and
then the line suddenly was cut off. The police didn't have anything like tracing calls or anything like that at the time. This is nineteen fifty in Missouri, and they had no idea who it was. But it turned out it was Janet.
Sadly, that's right.
The Romax called the house about thirty minutes later, but no one answered, And I guess they didn't sweat it because they didn't show up until one point thirty in the morning. They weren't like we should rush home. They opened the front door to find a pretty nasty, grizzly murder scene. Janet was dead there in a pool of blood. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled to death, and
it appears that she had struggled with her attacker. There was no shotgunning, obviously, but that porch light was on, which makes it even sadder.
Yeah. Yes, And the reason why that porch light seems to be important is that the Romax and Janet's family believed that a man that was known to her was the person who murdered her. A guy named Robert Mueller. Yeah, he was a friend of Ed Romax, and he also knew Janet because Janet had babysat for Robert Muller's children before, and he had actually asked her to babysit that night and she said I can't. I'm I'm babysitting for the Romax already. And he was an odd duck to say
the least, and enough of a creep. Essentially from how the Romax and Janet's family put it, that he was always suspected by them.
Yeah, for sure.
The other detail I didn't mention was that the phone had been ripped from the wall, so that would explain when she shouted come quick and the line went dead. It seems, as you know, that was when the phone was ripped away from the wall, possibly by Robert Mueller. Although nobody was ever tied to her death officially, no one was ever arrested as far as I know.
No, but there were some reasons why they suspected, and one he apparently had groped missus Romack just a few days before the murder. Mister Romack was like, I'm not really down with that guy.
Sure.
He also had told mister Romac that he liked Janet, and later on after the murder, he had told mister Romack that he could have murdered Janet and then just forgotten about it. So it was some weird stuff and like they Yeah, he died in two thousand and six. Will never know. Yeah, Janet's murder has never been solved and probably never will at this point.
No, but supposedly that is the story that inspired the calls coming in from the house, or at the very least inspired. When a Stranger Calls was probably the most famous use of the calls coming from inside the house from nineteen seventy nine, also Black Christmas, a great great horror movie, Halloween in nineteen seventy eight, and I'll even throw scream and had a sort of version of this with Drew Barrymore, but not exactly coming from inside the house.
No.
I saw the first instance of it on film though, was a nineteen seventy three movie called The Severed Arm. But it wasn't like a plot driver. It was just one of the ways the person was murdered. The call was coming from inside, like I think the studio they were working in.
Yeah, and now cell phones have kind of screwed this whole thing up.
For sure. For sure. One other thing, real quick though, When a Stranger Calls Back, the sequel to When a Stranger Calls is one of the finest rift tracks you can see. So you're looking for riff tracks to start with, start with, I'll check it out. That's it, I guess for the trope of the call coming from inside the house, right, that's right.
I think it means short Stuff is out.
First rip Janet Christman for sure. Now short Stuff is that.
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