Actor Harry Morgan—Colonel Potter of TV’s popular M*A*S*H—quoted by Steve Gelman in “Operation Transplant,” an article on a proposed sequel to be titled AfterMASH, in TV Guide, November 5, 1983, pp. 19–23. Anne Phipps, a faculty member of the Indiana University School of Nursing in Indianapolis, recorded her own and four colleagues’ variations of the same story in 1980, presenting them in an article in Indiana Folklore, vol. 13, pp. 102–11, as “The Runaway Patient: A Legend in Oral Circulation and the Media.” The media sources were nine newspaper accounts of an actual incident that occurred in a Chicago-area Veterans Administration hospital in May 1975. A detailed summary of the incident appeared in Gary L. Kreps’s 1986 book Organizational Communication Theory and Practice, pp. 18–19, quoting it from a 1976 source.
10
Bringing Up Baby
There are so many genuine dangers threatening children that you wonder why we need horror legends. Real life already gives us plenty to worry about: child abductions and seductions, dangerous toys, faulty car seats and unsafe airbags, heavy traffic, threatening pets or wild animals, contaminated baby foods, drugs, toxic household products, environmental hazards, sex and violence in the media, and on and on and on. You can’t even put your baby to sleep without being concerned whether side, stomach, or back is supposed to be the safest position. All of these threats and more are constantly covered in the news, so what’s left for urban legends to shock us with? Mostly it’s accounts of disastrous failures in the simple, common, everyday acts that we tend to take for granted, chief among them being the routine daily care of children. Who’s doing the care, the legends ask, and how reliable are the caregivers?
While hard news about the genuine dangers to children reaches the public through the media, in lawsuits, or via government bulletins, the legendary accounts circulate by word of mouth and in occasional unverified published reports. Take, for example, the old story of “The Harried Baby-Sitter,” as Jerome Beatty summarized it in a piece in the November 1970 issue of Esquire:
The basic plot is that a lady on a bus hears two young girls chatting in the seat behind her. They are talking about their problems handling kids when baby-sitting. One of the girls tells the other a method she uses of quieting any little kid who cries too much: She lays him down with head in the oven, and opens the gas vent for a while. When he is drowsy, she puts him in the crib and never has a bit of trouble. If he gets too lively again, back into the oven he goes.
Beatty first heard the story around 1950 from his wife, who got it from a woman friend, a practical nurse in New Rochelle, New York, who claimed that she herself had been the woman on the bus. But—true to the rules of legend development—the story showed up twice again in Beatty’s experience from different places, with different details, and with no verification.
Several people have written to me saying they remember hearing “The Harried Baby-Sitter” in the 1940s or ’50s. The legend commonly centered on a conversation between two young girls on a bus or a subway. But “The Harried Baby-Sitter” was told even earlier than that, in the 1920s and ’30s—when gas ovens had to be lit manually. Back then, two nursemaids who worked for wealthy families were said to have been overheard while chatting on a trolley car. A variation of this older story from England is quoted in Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy’s 1972 book The Unnatural History of the Nanny. A man sitting in Hyde Park by the Albert Memorial overhears two nannies chatting about the children they are caring for. One nanny, “a large, red-faced Somerset girl,” described her method of putting the baby in her charge to sleep: “If mine won’t go to sleep, I just hold the gas ring over her dear little face and give her a whiff.”
“The Harried Baby-Sitter” continues to resonate in modern folklore, and is still quoted as a horrible example of the hazards of absentee parenthood. In Rosanna Hertz’s book More Equal Than Others: Women and Men in Dual-Career Marriages, published in 1986, the legend pops up in the chapter “Childcare Arrangements.” Hertz contrasts the child care practices of the past, when “the nanny or governess employed by the wealthy family had on-the-job supervision,” to the situation with “today’s dual-career couples,” who must leave their children with strangers for hours at a time, and who may express their concerns by telling the same old horror story, like this:
I have a friend who had a baby, and one day she forgot something at home. So she went home, and her childcare person had her baby’s head in the oven. And she said, “What are you doing to my baby?” and the childcare person said, “Well, I always do this. He seems to sleep better.”
“Forgetful Dad”
A woman in a two-job one-child household had to get to work early one day, so she asked her husband to drop their infant daughter off at day care on his way to work. It was a very busy time for the man at his job, and he had a major business meeting coming up that day. He was on his cell phone double-checking the details of the meeting most of the way to his office. The baby was sound asleep in her car seat in the back of the car, and her daddy completely forgot about her and drove right past the day care to his usual parking spot at the office. Around noon the mother received a call from the day care service asking why their child was out that day. She called her husband, who then remembered that he had left the baby in the car. He rushed to the parking lot to find the baby dead from heat exhaustion.
“The Hippie Baby-Sitter”
There was this couple who were going out one night, and they couldn’t get their regular baby-sitter, so they called someone they knew and arranged to get a new girl to come and sit their baby. When she showed up they were a little surprised, because she was dressed like a hippie and had a kind of spaced-out look in her eyes. But they gave her instructions about caring for the baby and went out anyway.
Later in the evening the mother called home to see how things were going, and this hippie girl said, “Oh just fine. I just put the turkey in the oven.” Well, they didn’t have a turkey, and they didn’t know what she was talking about, so they decided to go back home right away.
By Ivan Brunetti
When they went into their house they smelled something cooking, and rushed to the kitchen and looked in the oven. The baby-sitter had put the baby in the oven and roasted it! She had been taking LSD and was completely freaked out.
Lyons, Indiana
April 16, 1990
Dear Professor: Here’s a new story that I think must surely be an urban legend. A high-school student of mine, a senior, says that he heard from a friend who heard it during a state policeman’s talk on drugs. He insists it is true, otherwise why would a policeman be telling it?
On Thanksgiving, a man returned home expecting to find his wife, his infant daughter and a wonderful turkey dinner with all the trimmings. Instead, his wife was in the living room acting strangely. She was evidently under the influence of drugs.
When the man went to look for his daughter, he found a turkey in the crib. After a frantic search, he found the baby in the oven where the turkey should have been.
This must be a legend that has arisen since the advent of widespread drug use.
The first version is typical of how this legend emerged in the United States in the late 1960s. Sometimes the mother asks the baby-sitter to put the baby to bed and put the turkey in the oven; the drug-dazed hippie reverses these instructions. The 1990 letter is from teacher Jack Johnson; he was right about the legend having its roots in the culture of American illegal drug use, but that was some 20-plus years earlier. Versions of the story in which the mother, rather than a baby-sitter, cooks the baby are known worldwide, and one version was told on June 19, 1989, on PBS’s MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour by an antidrug lecturer. I discussed the cooked-baby and cooked-pet urban legends in considerable historical and comparative detail in an essay appended to the third edition of my textbook The Study of American Folklore. This essay, revised and updated, appears in my 1999 book The Truth Never Stands in the Way of a Good Story.
“The Baby-Sitter and the Man Upstairs”
This is a story about a baby-sitter and a terrifying experience that she had. There was a young girl about high school age who went to baby-sit one evening. She arrived at the house early in the evening so that she had to cook dinner for the children, play with them a little bit, and then later on, about 7:30, she put them to bed. So she went downstairs and was just sitting around reading and watching television and the telephone rang. And she went to answer it and there was this male voice on the other end saying “At 10:30 I’m going to kill the children and then I’m going to come after you.” And the girl thought it was a crank call and she was a little scared but she just put it off as a joke that someone was playing on her and she hung up. About half an hour later the phone rang again. And the same male voice said, “At 10:30 I’m going to come in and I’m going to kill the children and then I’m coming after you.”
At this point the girl was getting a little more scared because she thought the man might be, you know, a maniac and might actually come and do something. But she decided that she would still go on and just sit around and wait. And she thought about going upstairs and looking in on the children because she hadn’t been up there for awhile but she decided against it, just…she didn’t think anything was wrong. And the third time, about half an hour later, the telephone rang. And this male voice said, “It’s getting closer to the time and I’m going to come after the children and I’m going to get you too.”
And at this point the girl got very upset and she decided that she would call the police. And she called the operator and told her the story of what had happened and the operator said, “All right, you know, we’ll take care of it if he calls back again just keep him on the line and we’ll put a tracer on it.”
And the girl sat around; she was very nervous but decided that it was the best thing that she could do. Pretty soon the phone rang again. She ran to answer it. And it was the man. She tried to talk to him a little bit more and tried to get some information out of him but all that he would say was, “I’m going to come in at 10:30 and I’m going to kill the children and then I’m coming after you.” And the girl hung up the phone and was just terrified but could do nothing but just sit and wait. And the phone rang again. And she answered it and the operator was on the other end and she said, “Get out of the house immediately; don’t go upstairs; don’t do anything; just you leave the house. When you get out there, there will be policemen outside and they’ll take care of it.”
By permission of Dave Coverly and Creators Syndicate
The girl was just really petrified and she thought she should check the children or something but decided that if the operator told her to get out she should get out. So she went outside and when she got out there she was talking to the policemen and they told her that when they traced the call it was made on the extension from the upstairs line and that the whole time the man was talking to her he had been in the house and that he had already murdered both the children who were found torn to bits in the bedroom. Had she waited any longer she would have gotten it too.
Told in 1973 at Indiana University by a female student who had repeated the story many times previously; it was published in Sylvia Grider’s article “Dormitory Legend-Telling in Progress: Fall 1971–Winter 1973,” Indiana Folklore, vol. 6 (1973), pp. 1–32. This telling is unusually polished and detailed, but it lacks the refrain usually repeated by the killer, “Have you checked the children?” Another version was published in a verbatim transcript of a tape recording made in 1984 at Leicester University, England, in which three students took part. See Gillian Bennett, “Playful Chaos: Anatomy of a Storytelling Session,” in The Questing Beast: Perspectives on Contemporary Legend, vol. 4 (1989), pp. 193–212. “The Baby-Sitter and the Man Upstairs,” in common with “The Killer in the Back Seat” and “The Choking Doberman,” tells of a dangerous intruder hiding right on the premises, and with the latter story it shares the “telephone warning” motif. The 1979 horror film When a Stranger Calls opened with a chilling dramatization of this legend.
“Baby’s Stuck at Home Alone”
A Norwegian couple, who had not had a proper holiday for years, decided to treat themselves to a long winter holiday in the sun. At last the great day dawned; everything was packed and loaded into the car—as soon as Nanny arrived they could away. But today of all days, Nanny was late. At the last minute she phoned and told them that her car had broken down. The man said that if they came to collect her now they would miss their flight; was it too far to walk? Nanny said it wasn’t, they could leave and she’d be there in a quarter of an hour. So the wife strapped their young son into his highchair, told him Nanny wouldn’t be long, and set off for their island in the sun. During the long, hot weeks away they missed the news that the girl had been hit by a lorry and killed on her way to their house. When at last they returned, sun-bronzed and rejuvenated, they found their starved son still strapped into his chair where they had left him.
From Rodney Dale’s 1984 book It’s True…It Happened to a Friend, p. 89. Dale is probably retelling a press account of a story circulating in Norway and Sweden in the early 1970s. As a newspaper in Bergen, Norway, reported the rumors in 1972, in several different Nordic cities, the couple had left without waiting for their baby-sitter or grandmother to arrive, and the caregiver became terminally ill or was hit by a car. Unfortunately, none of these missing caregivers had mentioned the long-term job to anyone else, so the baby was abandoned and helpless. Three American readers from California, Texas, and Mississippi have sent me variations of this legend. Also in 1990 a woman from Elkhart, Indiana, wrote to report a version in which a dog slipped into the house, bumping the door, which closed and locked. The letter concluded, “The rest of the gruesome story involves the dog eating the baby…and so on.”
“The Inept Mother”
In Leicester a favourite was the account of how a mother had told her young daughter that her younger brother was going in to hospital to “have his end snipped off” (circumcised), so the daughter, to be helpful castrated him with a pair of scissors. The mother, trying to take the boy to hospital, backed out of the garage in such a hurry as to run over the daughter and kill her. This was recounted to Jekyll as fact, with a wealth of supporting detail, in 1964.
I heard this in the mid-1950s; that’s as close as I can remember. I was a grammar school kid living just north of Philadelphia.
Some little four-year-old girl’s mother had come home from the hospital with a new baby brother for her. Shortly afterward, when the mother was changing the baby’s diaper, the little girl asked what that thing was that the baby had and she didn’t.
The mother put her off with the fateful remark, “Oh, that’s just something that the doctor forgot to cut off.”
Later, hearing the infant’s screams, the woman ran into the nursery to find her daughter with the best scissors, all bloody. She, of course, had cut off the baby’s penis. The mother swept up the baby, raced to the car, hit the ignition and jammed it into gear. The tragedy doubled because the poor mother had forgotten all about the little girl, who was trailing along hurt and confused. She happened to be right behind the back wheel of the car when her frantic mother jammed it into reverse. The daughter was crushed—killed outright. The baby died on the way to the hospital.
The English version is from the “Doctor Jekyll” column in World Medicine, July 10, 1982, under the subheading “Medical Myths.” I am indebted to Dr. T. Healey of Barnsley, South Yorkshire, for sending me this and many other items of English medical rumor and legend. The American version was sent to me in 1985 by Jerome Shea of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Often the tragedy is tripled when the mother has a baby in the tub while two toddlers play; after the daughter severs the son’s penis, the mother backs the car over the girl, loses her injured son en route to the hospital, and returns home to find the forgotten baby drowned in the tub. In yet another English variant of the story, a harried mum crossing to Ireland via ferry with a baby and a toddler threatens to put the baby out t
he porthole if he continues to cry. When the mother leaves the cabin briefly, the baby resumes crying and his older sister enacts the mother’s threat. These stories teach an age-old lesson, as evidenced by the Aesop fable that begins “‘Be quiet now,’ said an old Nurse to a child sitting on her lap. ‘If you make that noise again I will throw you to the wolf.’” The fable has a happy ending, which is more than you can say for one of the grimmest of the original Grimm fairy tales, one that has been seldom printed since the first edition of 1812. It’s called “How Children Played Butcher with Each Other.” The story describes the accidental sudden deaths by stabbing and drowning of three children, followed by the deaths of both parents. Janet L. Langlois analyzed this whole complex of horror legends in the chapter titled “Mother’s Doubletalk” in the 1993 book Feminist Messages, edited by Joan Newlon Radnor. Yet another variation on this dismal theme is the story told during both world wars of a mother bathing her babies who runs to answer the doorbell, where a government messenger waits to inform her that her husband has been killed in action. The mother trips on the stairs, breaks her neck, and dies instantly; her two children drown in the bathtub before the messenger manages to enter the home to check on its occupants.
Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends Page 22