Jamie was thumbing through the newspaper in search of a weekend job for the summer. She was sixteen years old and needed the extra money to help save for textbooks when she started college in the fall. She tossed the newspaper on the floor frustrated with no results. Then one of the newspaper pages flipped over to the last page of the classifieds and there it was in small print, "babysitter needed for the summer." She said, "How did I miss this, maybe, I passed over it because it didn't say weekends only." Jamie called the number, and a middle-aged woman answered, and said, "May I help you?" "Yes, you can. I am interested in a babysitting job, but wasn't sure if this was an everyday thing or just weekends only," asked Jamie. "I'm sorry, but I meant to put weekends only, but I was in a hurry," explained the woman. "If you're looking to babysit every day, I apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you," said the woman. "No, this is exactly what I wanted. When can I start?" asked Jamie. "Well, can you start next weekend around five p.m.?" said the woman. "That sounds perfect! I'll see you then," replied Jamie. Jamie hung up the phone and was excited about having a job. That would ease her mind about how she was going to be able to pay for her textbooks. The week passed by like a rocket, and it was Saturday, and Jamie showed up to her babysitting job right on time. Jamie knocked on the woman’s front door, and the woman opened the door, and said "You must be Jamie, so nice to see you." The woman introduced her children to Jamie and told her she would be back by six p.m. Sunday night. The woman said bye to Jamie, and her kids, then got in her car, and drove to her business trip. Jamie played some games with the children then the phone rang. Jamie picked up the phone and said, "Who's there?" all she heard was heavy breathing, and she hung up the phone and went back to playing games with the children. Jamie checked her watch and said "Oh my! It's eight p.m., how time flies when you're having fun. Well children it's time for bed." Jamie escorted the children upstairs to the bedroom that they shared. She read them a story then a few minutes later the children fell fast asleep. Jamie got out of bed with them and turned the light out, then went downstairs to watch TV before going to sleep. As Jamie was eating popcorn and watching a movie called Halloween it started storming outside. Scary movies scare the willies out of her, but she still liked watching them anyway. Then the phone started ringing, and she picked it up, and said, Hello!" Then an eerie voice said, "Have you checked on the children lately."

On Friday nights many parents want to have a little fun together—without the kids. But “getting a sitter”—especially a dependable one—rarely seems trouble-free. Will the kids be safe with “that girl”? It’s a question that discomfited parents have been asking ever since the emergence of the modern American teenage girl nearly a century ago. In Babysitter, Miriam Forman-Brunell brings critical attention to the ubiquitous, yet long-overlooked babysitter in the popular imagination and American history. Informed by her research on the history of teenage girls’ culture, Forman-Brunell analyzes the babysitter, who has embodied adults’ fundamental apprehensions about girls’ pursuit of autonomy and empowerment. In fact, the grievances go both ways, as girls have been distressed by unsatisfactory working conditions. In her quest to gain a fuller picture of this largely unexamined cultural phenomenon, Forman-Brunell analyzes a wealth of diverse sources, such as The Baby-sitter’s Club book series, horror movies like The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, urban legends, magazines, newspapers, television shows, pornography, and more. Forman-Brunell shows that beyond the mundane, understandable apprehensions stirred by hiring a caretaker to “mind the children” in one’s own home, babysitters became lightning rods for society’s larger fears about gender and generational change. In the end, experts’ efforts to tame teenage girls with training courses, handbooks, and other texts failed to prevent generations from turning their backs on babysitting.

More haunting tales of Ghosts, Aliens, Science Fiction, Western, Zombies, Headless Ghosts, Haunted Graveyards, Urban Legends, Curses and Vampires.

A collection of over ninety frightening urban legends, arranged by theme.

This revised edition of the original reference standard for urban legends provides an updated anthology of common myths and stories, and presents expanded coverage of international legends and tales shared and popularized online. From roasted babies to vanishing hitchhikers to housewives in football helmets, this exhaustive and highly readable encyclopedia provides descriptions of hundreds of individual legends and their variations, examines legend themes, and explains scholarly approaches to the genre. Revised and expanded to include updated versions of the entries from the award-winning first edition, this work provides additional entries on a wide range of new topics that include terrorism, recent political events, and Hurricane Katrina. Entries in Encyclopedia of Urban Legends, Updated and Expanded Edition discuss the presence of urban legends in comic books, literature, film, music, and many other areas of popular culture, as well as the existence of "too good to be true" stories in Argentina, China, Italy, Japan, Mexico, and several other countries. Serving as both an anthology of stories as well as a reference work, this encyclopedia will serve as a valuable resource for students and a source book for journalists, professional folklorists, and others who are researching or interested in urban legends.

From Alien to When a Stranger Calls, many films are based on folklore or employ an urban legend element to propel the narrative. Films, Folklore and Urban Legends explores the convergence of folklore with popular cinema studies and focuses on the study of urban legends and how these narratives are used as inspiration for a number of films. Beginning with a general survey of the existing literature on folklore/film, this book addresses discourses of belief, how urban legends provide the organizing principle of some films, and how certain films "act out" or perform a legend.

A collection of oft-repeated urban legends brings together the best of modern myths, from the stoned baby sitter who mistook a baby for a turkey to the fabulously expensive recipe for chocolate chip cookies.