Everyone loves a good old fashion camp fire story. From phantom hitchhikers to the perils of babysitting, we’ve heard of all of them. They always happen to a friend of a friend or some other anonymous person – but still familiar enough to send a chill down your spine.
Well, legends always have an origin and actions often have consequences. Let’s explore three of the creepiest urban legends, their origins and their real life consequences.
The Babysitter
“Have you checked the children?” A raspy voice whispers from the telephone at the babysitter’s ear.
The babysitter – in most versions, a teenage girl – dismisses the call and hangs up the phone.
It’s just a prank, she thinks. A mean spirited trick by a dark humoured friend, but just as she steps away, the phone rings again.
“Have you checked the children?”
She slams the phone against the receiver. After all, landlines are all the rage. The iPhone is just a glint in Steve Jobs’s eye. Apart from the sleeping children in her care, the babysitter is alone. Her only connection to the outside world, the telephone, which, to her horror, rings again.
Although shaking, she answers again, praying that this time it’s just the parents checking in.
It’s not.
“Have you checked the children?”
This time, she hangs up and calls the police. They calm the babysitter, telling her that if the would-be-prowler calls again, they’ll trace the call and put a stop to any nastiness.
She breaths a sigh of relief, but no sooner than she turns back to the TV, or continues with her homework, the phone rings again.
“Have you checked the children?” The voice laughs this time, and she hangs up, immediately, but as soon as the phone is in its cradle, it rings again.
This time, it’s the police.
“Get out!” They cry, “The call is coming from inside the house!”
There are, of course, variants to this story. Sometimes the babysitter rushes upstairs to find the children brutally murdered. Sometimes the police are too late, and the babysitter is also dead. Sometimes, the phone call is replaced by a creepy statue (sometimes a clown statue) that creeps the babysitter out so much that she calls the parents and asks if she can cover it up, only yo be told that the family have no such statue in their house.
Despite the demise of the land line telephone, the story itself is as timeless as it is terrifying. It taps into the fears of any teenager in a position of responsibility. After all, all sorts of terrible things could – and sadly, have – happened to children in a babysitter’s care. This fear will, of course, resonate among parent as well as any elder child put in a position of responsibility.
The Babysitter urban legend itself dates back to around the 1960s, and unfortunately, there’s a real life murder that’s thought to be the origin of this creepy urban legend, the murder of Janett Christman in March 1950.
Janett was just a few days short of her fourteenth birthday when she was asked to babysit for the Romack family, who were attending a card game. When the family returned around one in the morning, they were met with a horrific site.
Janett Christman had been murdered. She’d received a serious head wound as well as multiple stab wounds from a small, round object and had been strangled with the cord of an electric iron.
The Romack’s three-year-old son was found unharmed, still soundly sleeping in his upstairs bedroom.
Although Janett’s murder is officially unsolved, suspicion has fallen on a friend of the Romack’s, who also attended the card game, but disappeared for an hour or so in between. Allegedly, he went to attend to his sick child, although investigations revealed that he did not return to his own house, where his children and wife remained that night.
A full run down of Janett Christman’s murder can be found here. It also explores a potential connection to another murder – that of Marylou Jenkins, which occurred in 1946, less than a mile away from where Janett was killed. Although this murder is “officialy solved”, questions remain over whether the conviction and execution of Floyd Cochran, a black man who confessed to the murder after a gruelling two days of interrogation without a lawyer, was justified.
Despite its tragic origin, The Babysitter urban legend continues to resonate today and serves as a warning to the many teens who’ve undertaken the same responsibility.
Slenderman
Anyone who was on the internet in the early 20-teens knows who Slenderman is.
Originating in the Something Awful forum, Slenderman first emerged in a photoshop contest, featuring a challenge to create “paranormal images”. When Eric Knudsen joined in and, under the name “Victor Surge”, posted two black and white photos with an easy suited man hiding in the background, he likely didn’t know that he was creating a legend in the making.
Photo captions alluding to missing people, real life places and dates fully immersed the viewer into the world of Slenderman, gave the strange creature a tangible credibility that ran rampant through every corner of the internet.
Subsequently, the characters lore was expanded with people adding their own photographs, supposed encounters and stories. As a character, Slenderman was generic enough for each reader, viewer and poster to reflect their own fears. Its story echoed through cultural backgrounds, evoking tales of boogeymen the world over.
In effect, we witnessed the birth of a piece of inter-cultural modern day folklore, that could have only come from the internet.
As is often the way, Slenderman crossed the bridge between fiction and reality, appearing in newspaper articles and radio shows as well as creative works, like video games and film.
Many people started to take the story of Slenderman at face value, elevating him to the status of genuine monstrosity with sincere belief.
Unfortunately, for some, that came with tragic consequences.
In May 2014, a pair of 12-year-old Wisconsin girls stabbed their friend 19 times in an attempt to please Slenderman and become his “proxies”.
In what can only be a stroke of good fortune and sheer determination, their victim survived the brutal attack.
This case is a little more complicated than meets the eye, with the girls’ mental states influences by mental illness. Both attackers have been given hospital sentences ranging from 25 years to 40 years – the maximum sentence in such cases.
This incident sparked a moral panic across the US, and suddenly schools, parents and the wider media was all over Slenderman.
Much like the belief that “heavy metal makes people do bad things,” Slenderman became responsible for actions that would have otherwise been treated as isolated tragedies.
And so, what started as a fun art exercise has grown into a modern day monster. From setting fires, to attacks on parents, to suicides, America blamed Slenderman instead of confronting its real life monsters such as poverty, access to physical and mental healthcare systems and institutionalised racism. It’s easier than to do that than look your own society in the eye, I suppose.
The Hook
A young couple pull into a quiet “lover’s lane” for some late night hanky-panky, when are interrupted by a sudden radio bulletin.
“A serial killer has escaped from the local prison! He can be identified by the hook in place of a hand! Be on the look out and stay indoors! Lock your front door immediately!”
What happens next varies from version to version. In some tales, the couple decide to leave quickly, only to discover the hook hanging from the car door when they get home.
In others, the young man goes to investigate a noise, but never returns. The woman hears a scraping on the roof of the car, and is too scared to escape. She doesn’t leave until the police find her the next morning, with her lover’s body suspended above the car. The scraping noise turns out to be the his feet or fingernails scraping the roof.
Sometimes, the young man investigates a noise, only to return to find his lover brutally murdered with a hook.
This legend has many shapes – some not featuring a hook at all – but the core of the story remains the same, and worst emerged inn the 1950s. The first written account is thought to be a reader letter in the American Dear Abby advice column.
It may be easy to write this trope off as a tale to discourage pre-marital relations, and although that may have something to do with its’ longevity, the story itself seems to echo a series of real life horror, known as the Texakana Moonlight Murders.
Between February and May of 1946, 5 people were murdered and another three injured by a masked assailant known as “The Phantom Killer”.
Much like the story, this unidentified man attacked heterosexual couples parked in lover’s lanes in and around Texarkana, a city one the border between Texas and Arkansas.
The first attack left the couple injured, but alive, and the victims were able to describe their assailant as wearing a white cotton mask, possibly a pillowcase, with cut out eye holes.
The second and third attack resulted in four murders, with the couple found dead either in or just outside their cars, but the last attack – which resulted in one death – took place inn a farm 10 miles north east of Texarkana.
Here, the couple had been shot at through a closed window, leading to the death of the husband, Virgil Starks. Although his wife, Katie survived, she was shot in the head.
Despite the change in method during the last attack, it is still linked to the other murders as it happened in the same time period and pattern as the others – a late night on the weekend, after a period of three weeks, known as a “cool off” period.
Despite several suspects, The Phantom Killer of Texakana has never been found.
As well as the Urban Legend, the spree of murders have inspired TV, film there and literature, the most famous of this being the 1976 film, The Town That Dreaded Sundown. Part of the movies filming took place in Texarkana and featured locals as residence.
The film has been publicly screened in Texarkana’s Spring Lake Park every year since 2003s.
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The Hawthorn Files 