Short Stuff: The Call is Coming... FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE

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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 tvtropes.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 dates back to the 60s.

And it 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 ostensibly 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 going to say, ma'am, we're going to put a trace on the call.

She's going to say, you don't have to call me, ma'am.

I'm 13 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 was passed around, this urban legend,

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 some 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 i don't remember hearing any of those but i do know they existed uh because you sent them to me that's right

but um 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 the call was coming from inside the house.

Yeah, and it's uh, it goes along with some of the great um scary legends of the day, like the hook, uh, the vanishing hitchhiker was another one.

Um, I remember drip drop maniac.

Do you remember that one?

No, did he say, um, we cause holes in teeth?

No,

No, the drip drop maniac was some version of a thing where there's a like a German shepherd that sleeps under the bed that

the kid was scared and the reason and the way they would not be scared is they would put their hand down and the German shep shepherd would lick their hand.

And so I'm sure you see what's coming.

It turns out the German Shepherd, they hear a drip, drip, drip and the German shepherd is like killed and dripping blood on the floor and the person, there was a dude under the bed licking the person's hand.

Oh, crazy!

That was a good one.

Yeah,

nice, 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 hand off the side of the bed again, are you?

Oh, I don't already.

Okay, yeah, we'll be right back.

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I'm still laughing, by the way.

You got to be under the sheets and stuff still?

Yeah, I got over that at some point.

I used to be like that

well into

even my 30s.

I think I was probably in my 30s or 40s when I was finally like, you know what?

I'm a hot sleeper.

I'm just going to brave whatever's out there and sleep on top of the sheets.

Good for you, man.

Yeah.

I've gotten better in my older age, but if I'm watching like

particularly a good ghost movie, horror movie

at night, and you, me, and Momo 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,

I 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 54-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 and make like a sound kind of thing.

Like you can really get me if you

get me.

I used to scare people like that on occasion, and I finally learned that that's just not cool to do.

Oh, I think it's great.

After, like about 30 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 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 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 they 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

um i was just sitting there in my room i was probably like 14 or something i was just reading in bed and i noticed that the closet door was cracked just 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 had been

and i

just immediately jumped up and started running for the door.

Like I didn't know 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, rarror.

And I just basically flipped on my back like a turtle and started screaming.

Oh, man.

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 he

definitely shortened my life.

Poor guy.

I feel so bad for you.

That is not certainly not something a dad should do to theirs.

Yeah, exactly.

All right.

So we're back and we're going to tell 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 want to tune out.

In the 1950s, in fact, March of 1950, there was a young 13-year-old named Janet Chrisman, hired to babysit a three-year-old for the Romax, Mr.

Gregory Romack and his wife.

I, you know, just like with our live show, I couldn't find his wife's name because they didn't print stuff like that back then.

But

she decided to babysit rather than go to a school party.

At 7.30, she got to their house.

It is in Columbia, Missouri.

And before they left for the night, Mr.

Romack said, hey, by the way, see this shotgun?

I've got this shotgun, and it's loaded, and here's how you shoot it.

Yeah.

13-year-old girl in Missouri.

Yeah, I guess, I mean, 1950 is going to 1950.

1950, Missouri, I could see that being pretty standard procedure.

Yeah.

He also very wisely said, do not open this door until you at least turn 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, it 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

to pay for a dress, like a responsible little 13-year-old.

So she shouldn't have even been there.

I think at some point around 10.30, 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 1950 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 30 minutes later, but no no one answered.

And I guess they didn't sweat it because they didn't show up until 1:30 in the morning.

They weren't like, we should rush home.

They opened the front door to find a pretty nasty, grisly 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 porchlight 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 Mueller's children before.

And he had actually asked her to babysit that night, and she said, I can't.

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 that, 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 him.

One, he apparently had groped Mrs.

Romack just a few days before the murder.

Mrs.

Romack was like, I'm not really down with that guy.

Sure.

He also had told Mr.

Romack that he liked Janet.

And later on, after the murder, he had told Mr.

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 2006.

We'll 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 from the House or at the very least inspired When a Stranger Calls was probably the most famous use of The Call is Coming from Inside the House from 1979.

Also Black Christmas, a great, great horror movie.

Halloween in 1978, and I'll even throw Scream 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.

It was a 1973 movie called The Severed Arm, but it wasn't like a plot driver.

It was just one of the ways a 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 riff tracks you can see.

So if you're looking for riff tracks to start with, start with that one.

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, R.I.P.

Janet Christman.

For sure.

Now, short stuff.

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