Acid Lore: The Hippy Babysitter and the Baby Roast
Acid Lore: The Hippy Babysitter and the Baby Roast
The Hippy Babysitter (also known as the Baby Roast) is one of the darkest pieces of acid lore to emerge in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Here’s the story I first heard as a schoolboy in the early 1980s, as told by a teacher illustrating the dangers of drugs.
A young couple’s regular babysitter cancels at the last minute, but she recommends a friend to take her place. The couple had never met this friend, but they agreed—they hadn’t had a night out for such a long time and were looking forward to attending the party they’d been invited to.
When the replacement babysitter turns up, the parents are somewhat concerned to see she is wearing hippy clothes and has a rather vacant look in her eye. Nevertheless, they leave for the party, telling the babysitter when to put the baby to bed.
While at the party, the mother feels something is wrong and telephones the babysitter to check on her son. The babysitter reassures her that everything’s fine and that she has put the baby to bed and put the turkey in the oven.
Unnerved, the couple decides to abandon the party and rush home. When they open the front door, the babysitter tells them their son is in his cot sleeping quietly and that she has made them a meal. The parents dash upstairs to the baby’s room only to find the crib contains a turkey.
When they run down to the dining room, they see the table laid out for dinner. In the middle is a platter on which their roasted baby son lay, surrounded by a garnish of potatoes and vegetables.
It turns out that the girl was tripping on LSD. The mother went mad and never recovered.
The teacher assured the class it was true; he was told it by a friend who worked in the emergency services and knew someone who was called to the scene. These appeals to authority (a friend in a hospital or the police) are often attached to urban legends to give the story an air of credibility.
In some versions of this myth, the parents get home in time to save their child. In others, the baby is cooked in the microwave and explodes. Sometimes, it’s not LSD the babysitter is on; it’s angel dust or magic mushrooms…
The Hippy Babysitter reflects parental anxiety about leaving their child with a stranger and the ensuing, perhaps repressed, guilt they feel. In the various versions of this acid lore, the parents have outsourced the care of their child for selfish or frivolous reasons – attending a party, going to the theatre, or eating out.
This theme is central to the earliest versions of the legend, found in many parts of the world, where no drug is involved. Instead, these stories revolve around misunderstanding instructions, foolishness, or insanity. Early versions were recorded on the Micronesian island of Yap, dating back to 1918, and in Papua New Guinea from 1910. In these variations, a mother asks her daughter to make sure her baby brother is hot enough, but the girl takes the instructions too literally and puts him in the oven and roasts him. When the mother finds out what her daughter has done, she beats her badly– breaking her arms and legs and then casts her into the river, where she floats off with flapping limbs madly singing about her heinous deed. In other versions, the guilty child is banished by the parents to forever wander in the wilderness. These renditions of the tale hint at the older sister feeling resentment for her younger brother, and resemble the modern urban legend about the mother who tells her infant son to ‘stop touching it or I’ll cut it off’, only for the threat to be overheard – and carried out – by her young daughter. ‘He touched it again, mummy – so I cut it off!’
In the 1920s, an urban legend, ‘The Harried Babysitter’, emerged. In this story, someone on a bus or in a park overhears two young nannies discussing how they get the children they look after to go to sleep. Simple, says one. She just puts the baby’s head in the gas oven and turns on the gas for a few minutes until it gets sleepy. In some versions of this tale, the mother comes home unexpectedly early to find her baby’s head in the oven and the gas on, only to be told by the nanny that that’s how she always puts the child to sleep.
Getting closer to the modern rendering of the tale, an Argentinian version from the 1940s has the parents go out leaving their baby in the care of a servant. When they come back, they are disturbed to find the servant has put on the mother’s bridal gown. The servant tells them she has cooked a celebratory dinner for them, and when the mother sees her son roasted with all the trimmings, she goes insane and never speaks again. The father, who was a former military man, takes a revolver and shoots the servant before running away never more to be seen. It’s assumed the servant was insane, presaging the drug-induced insanity of the Hippy Babysitter.
Some psychoanalysts suggest that the oven symbolises the womb – the womb is where the baby is ‘baked.’ This is illustrated by expressions like to have a bun in the oven, meaning to be pregnant. By being cooked, it’s as if the child is being sent back to where he came from –-the womb.
The Hippy Babysitter also reflects a recurring element in folklore – children as food and the delicious horror this idea creates. This has a long tradition in folk tales – think of the witch who wanted to fatten and eat Hansel and Gretal or Baba Yaga from Slavic mythology. However, these figures are evil and know what they are doing. This isn’t true of our Hippy Babysitter.
The Hippy Babysitter, then, takes an ancient folkloric theme and uses it to reflect parental fears about who is looking after their children and guilt at leaving them. As concern about psychedelic drug use spread during the 1960s and afterward, it was very easy for this anxiety to migrate to the existing baby in the oven legend. The cautionary tale is so gripping and horrible that it no doubt proved irresistible to anti-drug activists, and this surely helped to spread the legend of the Hippy Babysitter in warning talks given in schools, churches, and youth organisations.
The myth is so pervasive because of its horrific nature and its deep archetypal resonances, but it has adapted to reflect contemporary fears, whether these be cooking with gas, microwave ovens, or, of course, psychedelic drugs.
Sources
Brunvand, J.S. (2000). The Truth Never Stands in the Way of a Good Story (University of Illinois Press).
Smith, P. (1983). The Book of Nasty Legends (Routledge and Kegan Paul).
Check out these other editions of Acid Lore:
Gallery
Recent Articles
