When I was twelve, my neighborhood friend Barbara asked me to team up with her for a babysitting job at a house on another block. This was actually my first babysitting opportunity and I was looking forward to it. It made me feel grown-up and it seemed like a great way to make some money at my tender age. I didn’t know the family we were babysitting for; they were friends of Barbara’s family. So when we got there, I looked around curiously. Barbara and I both giggled at the television, which was sitting in front of a set of French doors in the living room with large, crumpled up pieces of aluminum foil stuck on each end of the rabbit ears to improve the reception. The baby was already in its crib upstairs, the parents told us, so shouldn’t pose any problems. After they left, we decided to go upstairs and make sure the baby was okay. She was sleeping in her crib, so we crept back out of her room and down the stairs.

 

Imagine our bafflement when we found that the television had been moved to the adjacent wall, plugged into the wall socket, and switched on.

 

“Bobby!” Barbara exclaimed, shaking her head in exasperation. Bobby was her older brother. She was certain that he had sneaked over to the house and moved the TV to scare us. She called home and he answered.

 

“Were you just here?” she demanded. He must have protested on the other end but she wasn’t buying it. Until he pointed out that he wouldn’t have had time to play a prank on us here and then make it home—which was a block away—in time to answer her phone call. She hung up with a troubled look on her face. We searched the house to make sure no one had stolen in while we were upstairs. Then we locked all the doors. We were afraid to touch the television but we eventually decided to turn it off.

 

Feeling uneasy, and thinking that the only place we might feel comfortable in the house was the baby’s room, we went back upstairs. As we neared the room, we heard her laughing and gurgling. That sound cheered us until we heard the next sound: that of a toy being wound up, its tinkling music drifting out into the hall.

 

“Is that baby strong enough to wind up a toy?” I asked Barbara. I didn’t know a lot about babies, but I did know that my own wind-up stuffed animals required a fairly hefty grip in order to turn the key.

 

“I don’t know,” she said. Hesitantly, we tiptoed into the room. The light from the hall fell onto the baby, who was standing up in her crib with a delighted smile on her face, gripping the bars of her bed with both hands. But something was winding up the toy, because we could hear it being wound. And the tinkly music that followed. We mustered up the courage to peer into the crib where the musical teddy bear lay, but saw nothing unusual. We turned on the light, our hearts hammering in our chests, to see if someone was hiding under the crib or somewhere else in the room but found nothing.

 

Finally, after pursuing everything we saw as our duty as responsible babysitters, we dashed down the stairs in a blind panic. Barbara called her brother and begged him to come keep us company, which he finally agreed to do. We sat on the sofa until the parents came home. For some reason, we decided not to tell them about our experiences. Probably because we figured we would sound crazy and that would be the end of our babysitting careers.

 

Except, as it turns out, that was my last babysitting job. Maybe I ended up viewing too many trailers of babysitter horror movies, and with my own personal, unnerving experience, I decided that there were safer ways to earn some spending money.

 

It wasn’t until I was grown that I was able to look at the haunting in a more objective light. The fact is, if it was a ghost, it was certainly a playful one. All it did was considerately move the television for us and plug it in, then play some music to entertain the baby. And the baby clearly liked it.

 

Researchers of the ghost phenomenon speculate that certain people are more likely than others to perceive ghosts. This raises the question as to whether the experience is mainly in the viewer’s head. The fact that physical phenomena are sometimes involved, as in this circumstance, and the fact that sometimes more than one person witnesses the activities, which was the case with Barbara and me, would argue against that hypothesis, IMHO.

 

However, it is true that this was not my only encounter with a ghost.