The Renner Street Babysitter Story: A Ghost the Children…

1987

Three days. That's how long she lay face-down in the backyard of a house on Renner Street before a neighbor finally made the call. Long dark hair. Full-length dress. The kind of detail that ends up buried in a county record, digitized badly, mostly forgotten.

Except the children in that house described her. Forty years later. Without ever seeing the photograph.

This story comes from a Reddit thread posted to r/letsnotmeet — a community built on true accounts of encounters people wish they could un-have. The babysitter who posted it had sat for the family on Renner Street six times before the seventh night changed things. She wasn't looking for a ghost story. She didn't find one until after she'd already lived it.

Six Normal Nights

The sitter knew the house. She knew the layout, the kids' routines, the way the pipes groaned when the heat kicked on. Six uneventful nights across what sounds like a normal suburban address. The parents trusted her. The kids liked her. Nothing about the first six visits gave her any reason to think about 1987.

The seventh night started the same way. Parents out, kids to bed, TV low in the living room. Then the older child appeared at the top of the stairs and said there was a woman in the hallway.

The sitter checked. Nothing. She checked again. Still nothing. She settled the child back to bed and wrote it off as the half-dream logic that kids produce at nine o'clock on a school night.

Then the younger one said the same thing.

Not prompted. Not in earshot of the first child's claim. The younger one came downstairs separately and reported a woman in a dress, pacing, then standing still in the doorway of their room.

The sitter pulled up the Ring camera app. The hallway feed for the relevant window showed nothing — no motion alert, no figure, no timestamp flicker that might suggest a glitch. Clean footage of an empty hall. She showed the kids. They looked at the screen and then looked back at the doorway, unconvinced.

The Pot

She got them settled on the couch downstairs — both of them, side by side, watching something low-stakes on television. The plan was to keep them in eyeshot until the parents returned. It was a reasonable plan. It lasted about twenty minutes.

The crash from upstairs was loud enough to bring all three of them to their feet.

She went up alone. The kids stayed on the couch, silent in the way children go silent when they already know something is wrong. At the top of the stairs she found a heavy pot — the kind that lives on a shelf and does not move on its own — overturned on the hallway floor. Soil spread across the hardwood in a wide arc. The shelf it came from was undisturbed. Nothing else was out of place.

Both children were sitting exactly where she'd left them. The Ring camera, checked again, showed nothing.

She called the parents home.

The father's response was immediate and familiar — the heat kicks on, the pipes bang, the pot shifts. He said it the way a person says something they've had to say before. The sitter didn't argue. Her mouth had gone dry in the specific way it does before bad news, and she drove home that night with both hands on the wheel the entire way, which is not something she mentioned to the father.

What She Found After

The record wasn't hard to locate once she had the address and the decade. Renner Street, 1987. A previous owner — a woman — found face-down in the backyard. She had been there for seventy-two hours before anyone knocked on a neighbor's door.

The photograph attached to the record was poor quality. Grainy, overexposed, the kind of image that gets scanned from a physical file decades after the fact. But the written description was clear enough.

Long dark hair. Full-length dress.

The sitter read it and her teeth were already touching each other before she reached the end of the sentence — her own words, which land harder than most horror writing because they're specific in the way only true things tend to be.

The children had not described a ghost in the abstract. They had described a woman. The same woman. The one in the photograph they had no possible way of knowing existed.

Why Renner Street Still Matters

There are a few ways to read this story, and none of them are fully comfortable.

The skeptical reading: children are suggestible, the sitter was already primed by a creaky house, the pot fell from a bad shelf bracket, and the 1987 record is a coincidence of description — long dark hair and a dress being common enough details that any woman in any archival photograph might fit. The Ring camera showed nothing because there was nothing. Confirmation bias filled in the rest.

The other reading: two children, separately, described a specific woman. That woman matches a documented death at the same address. The camera captured nothing, which is either evidence of nothing happening or evidence that whatever happened wasn't the kind of thing cameras catch.

What makes the Renner Street account stick — why it circulates, why it gets reshared, why people who don't believe in this kind of thing forward it anyway — is the detail about the father. He laughed. He'd clearly heard versions of this before. He explained the pot, the pipes, the heat, without being asked about any of it. Which means the sitter was probably not the first person to call him home early. She was just the first one who went looking afterward.

She never told the parents what she found.

The family still lives there, as far as she knows. And the pot, last she heard, is still in the hallway.

If you're drawn to stories that stay with you — the ones that don't resolve cleanly — you'll find more of that world at the Drift shop, where the artifacts from the fire-lit side of things live.

The woman on Renner Street lay face-down for three days before anyone noticed. Whatever the children saw standing in their doorway, it had already been waiting a long time.