The Boogey Man

My Parents often went out on Saturday nights and left us with a baby sitter. I always looked forward to Saturdays when they would go out because it meant we would eat TV Dinners and usually get to stay up late. Back then TV Dinners were a treat, I remember mom putting them in the oven and the smell of chicken or turkey or Salisbury steak while the frozen dinners heated up. No microwaves in those days, it took a good 30 to 45 minutes to heat up a TV Dinner in the oven. We had some favorite baby sitters, there were Vaughn and Keith Behunin who always brought their box of plastic dinosaurs for us to play with. Then there were the two Hackee sisters, one was real nice and pretty the other was a tomboy and sometimes got irritated with us. We liked the pretty one best.

One Saturday evening my parents left and the pretty Hackee sister, I don't remember her name, was our baby sitter. All was well and we were enjoying staying up and watching TV. But eventually it got late and she sent us to bed. A few minutes after we went to bed the telephone rang and she answered it. I remember her getting excited and saying in a load voice who is this? then she hung up. A minute later the phone rang again and again she got very upset and hung up the phone. Then she came into our bedroom crying and carrying my moms biggest knife. We asked her what was wrong, she said there was some scary man calling. We asked her what he said. She said the first call he asked if this was Stevie or Kenny and he talked with a real raspy voice. Then what did he say we asked? Just then the phone rang again, this time she refused to answer it and she started crying even harder. I remember her holding the knife ready to defend us against this boogey man that she was sure was coming to get us. Again the phone rang by now she was beside herself, sure that any minute this strange man would come bursting in and kill us all. I guess I should mention that in our neighborhood recently there had been a strange man sighted walking around late at night and a couple of women who lived alone and one whose husband was a truck driver and was gone much of the time (who lived right next door to us) had found footprints in the flower beds under their bedroom windows, this fact I'm sure added to our babysitter's terror.

Fortunately within a few minutes my parents got home and found us huddled in our bedroom with this near hysterical baby sitter. Between her sobs she explained what had happened. While she was telling my parents who were becoming quite concerned themselves, the phone rang again. My dad answered it and started laughing, he said "well you sure scared the babysitter".

Had the babysitter just given the phone to me or Ken she would have known that there was nothing to be scared of, it was my grandpa. Grandpa Coleman did have a gravely voice and he always liked to tease us. The first phone call he made he thought it was either Ken or I that answered so he said something, I don't remember what, one of us would have recognized it was him, but it scared the babysitter near to death. All of the subsequent phone calls were him calling back to try and calm her down, but she was already too upset and just hung up on him each time and then stopped answering. He became concerned, he didn't want her to be upset but there was nothing he could do over the phone to get her to understand he was not the boogey man, but the more he called to try and calm her down the more upset she got.

I don't remember her ever babysitting us again after that night.