4.4 • 3.1K Ratings
🗓️ 30 June 2025
⏱️ 93 minutes
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0:00.0 | Serial killers, college, phone calls, jobs, no, just stay home, never leave. |
0:09.4 | Then you won't get murdered by a stranger. |
0:11.4 | Even though you're in your house and you will get murdered by a stranger if you have a phone. |
0:15.3 | Well, yeah, that's true. |
0:28.4 | Even the most folklorically out of touch American has probably heard the urban legend called The Babysitter and the Man Upstairs. |
0:31.1 | You know, the one that created the famous idiom, The Call is Coming from inside the house. That's because, at least in my |
0:41.3 | view, it is urban legend number one, the classic of all classics, and certainly my favorite |
0:49.0 | when I was a kid. The urban legend that is Sarah Marshall of the podcasts you're wrong about and you are good |
0:57.3 | joins me today as I share my scholarly presentation that I will pedantically refer to as new |
1:05.5 | perspectives on the babysitter and the man upstairs. I'll share some new ideas about where this tale comes from, |
1:13.7 | focused on the decades-long epidemic of obscene phone calls |
1:18.1 | women were suffering through in the 1960s, |
1:21.7 | as the way that the telephone worked was rapidly changing. |
1:26.3 | Sarah and I will also discuss a sensational true crime story that could |
1:31.2 | have offered up a grain of truth to the tale, and how, in my opinion, this urban legend was the |
1:38.8 | most important driving force behind the creation of the entire slasher film genre. |
1:46.7 | I'm your host, Chelsea Weber-Smith, and this is American Hysteria. |
1:57.8 | Okay, dear listeners, we are coming in super hot today with what I think is probably the most famous American urban legend of all time. |
2:07.7 | And I'm very excited to welcome Sarah Marshall, the person, the only person that I could really truly get into this topic with. |
2:21.0 | So, Sarah, thank you. That means so much to me. My gosh, because we both used to read snopes.com for fun in 2003, I bet. Of course. Yeah. Yes, |
2:30.1 | of course. Where else are you going to find out information in the age of the war on terror? |
2:36.4 | So I think to start, basically what I'm going to do today is show you my hypothesis about kind of |
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