Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: The Call is Coming... FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE

Episode Date: October 8, 2025

Did you know that the "the call is coming from inside the house" urban legend may be based on a very grisly murder case from the 1950s?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Hey, it's Ed Helms host of Snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw-ups. On our new season, we're bringing you a new snafu every single episode. 32 lost nuclear weapons. Wait, stop? What? Yeah, it's going to be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of fabulous guests. Paul Shearer, Angela and Jenna, Nick Kroll, Jordan, Klepper.

Listen to season four of Snafoo with Ed Helm. on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 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? This 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, oh, 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, you know, was passed around, this urban legend, like, 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 little legends that it was like 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. That's right. But yeah, so 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 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 in teeth? No, drip-trop maniac was some version of a thing where there's like a German Shepherd that sleeps under the bed that, you know, 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 Shepherd would lick their hand. And so I'm sure you see what's coming. 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 person, there was a dude under the bed licking the person's hand.

Oh, crazy. That was a good one. Yeah. I'd not heard. Maniac. Nice. Terrifying. You want to take a break

so I can kind of recollect myself after that terrifying story? You're never going to hang your hand off the side of the bed again, are you? Oh, I don't already. Okay. Yeah, we'll be right back. Hey, it's Ed Helms, and welcome back to Snafoo, my podcast about history's greatest screw-ups.

On our new season, we're bringing you a new snafu every single episode. 32 lost nuclear weapons. Wait, stop? What? Ernie Shackleton sounds like a solid 70s basketball player. Who still wore knee pads? Yes. It's going to be a whole lot of history, a whole whole.

lot of funny and a whole lot of guests. The great Paul Shear made me feel good. I'm like, oh, wow. Angela and Jenna, I am so psyched. You're here. What was that like for you to soft launch into the show? Sorry, Jenna, I'll be asking the questions today. I forgot whose podcast we were doing.

Nick Kroll. I hope this story is good enough to get you to toss that sandwich. So let's see how it goes. Listen to Season 4 of Snap-Fu with Ed Helms on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jay Shetty, host of the On Purpose podcast. I had the incredible opportunity to sit down with the one, the only, Cardi B. My marriage, I felt the love dying. I was crying every day.

I felt in the deepest depression that I had ever had. How do you think you're misunderstood? I'm not this evil, mean person that people think that I am. I'm too compassionate. I have sympathy for that fuck my man. Put so much heart and soul into your work. What's the hardest part for you to take that criticism? This shit was not given to me.

I worked my ass off for me. Even when I was a stripper, I'm gonna be the best pole dancer in here. When was the moment you felt I did it? I still, to this day, don't feel comfortable. I fight every day to keep this level of success. this level of success because people want to take it from you so bad listen to on purpose with j shetty on the iHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts Yeah, I got over that at some point.

I used to be like that, like, 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. Oh, sure. 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. Yeah, yeah. 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, oh,

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 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 and i at the dollar theater the alps theater in athens georgia uh my 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. Turn 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 framed pictures on your wall in college? Oh, you know, like one. 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 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.

Oh, God. 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. I was like, roar.

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. That feels so bad for you. That is not, certainly not something attached to their kids. 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. Yeah, 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 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 her 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. This 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 can 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 was 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 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 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 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 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. Mr. 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 call is coming in 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 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 1973 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.

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. Oh, really? If you're looking for a 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 of the house, right?

That's right. I think it means short stuff is out. First, RAP, Janet Christman. For sure. Now short stuff with that. Stuff you should know is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts to My Heart Radio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.