You're babysitting for some relatives when the youngest child tells you "The scary girl who lives in the fireplace told me she's going to keep you forever."
Your move, writer.
There's real comedic gold in playing this dead straight — the babysitter nodding along, asking follow-up questions like "did she say forever-forever or just till Tuesday," treating the fireplace girl as a mildly annoying roommate rather than a threat, while the kid grows increasingly earnest and the adult's composure cracks into barely-suppressed laughter.
Or lean into cozy-eerie: the fireplace really does have something in it, but it's lonely rather than sinister, and the whole night becomes a quiet negotiation between babysitter and unseen presence, told through small details — a suddenly warm room, soot handprints, a toy moved an inch to the left.
There's also the tender angle, where "the scary girl" turns out to be the child's way of processing missing someone, and the babysitter has to figure out what's actually being said underneath the ghost story.
Comments