Real Crime/Paranormal/Conspiracy Theories Book III

Urban Legend: The Hippy Babysitter

The Baby-Roast, also known asThe Hippy Babysitter and The Cooked Baby, is an urbanlegend in which a baby is roasted alive at home, usually during theabsence of a parent. The Straight Dope, a newspaper column devoted toexposing myths, reported that it "is one of the classic urbanlegends", however, there have been real life instanceswhere babies have been roasted, though being under the influence ofdrugs was never established as one of the causes.

Legend

In some versions, the baby isaccidentally cooked when miscommunication occurs. For example, "putthe turkey in the oven and the baby in the bed" is wronglyheard as "put the baby in the oven and the turkey in thebed". Other variants set out that the doer of the deed wasdrug or alcohol-induced or an insane individual. In the end, theroasted baby is sometimes served as food to be consumed by theparents.

The person who roasts the baby isusually a babysitter or the baby's sibling.

Documented occurrences

In real life, there have beendocumented occurrences of babies being roasted, though by familymembers instead of strange babysitters. When Virginian ElizabethRenee Otte roasted her baby in 1999, the incident was cited ascausing the legend to become true. In November 2006, a second case ofreal-life baby-roasting was reported.

In May 2012, a British citizen wasarrested by Thai police after being found in possession of sixcorpses of roasted infants, some wrapped in gold leaf, reportedly inconformity with a "black magic ritual".

On November 16, 2015, a one-year oldbaby, J'Zyra Thompson, died after her three-year-old sibling put herin the oven and cooked her alive. Their mother, Racqual Thompson,left her four kids at home, which included a five-year-old and atwo-year-old, when she went to pick up a pizza. When they returnedhome, Thompson found J'Zyra's body cooked in the oven. Thompson andher boyfriend of ten months, 21-year-old Cornell Malone, were chargedwith endangering a child. Thompson was then sentenced to 12 years inprison for abandoning a child under 15 years old.

In March 2016, a 35-year-old mother inTexas showed up naked at her neighbor's door with her partiallyburned and naked 2-year-old daughter. When police arrived, sheconfessed that she had put the girl in the oven along with a cat shehad recently shot dead, while making sexual advances toward anofficer and singing praise to God. According to an affidavit from theTexas Department of Family and Protective Services, she seemedunconcerned with her daughter while in hospital and jail, where shewas charged with injury to a child with serious bodily injury andtested positive for alcohol, marijuana and methamphetamine. The girlwas put in foster care.

In popular culture

In the 1979 blaxploitation filmAvenging Disco Godfather, a PCP addict claims to have honey-roastedher baby for her family's Easter dinner, ostensibly so the baby'scrying wouldn't spoil the occasion.

In August 2009, a joke advertisementshowcasing a "body part roaster" "speciallydesigned to roast infants and other human morsels" surfacedon the website of retailer Sears.com.

The song 'Babysitter on Acid' bythe all-female punk rock band, Lunachicks is a retelling of the UrbanLegend. The teenage babysitter, under the influence of drugs, roaststhe baby in the oven and tells the mother over the phone that "Wannaknow how the baby is? / Don't worry, she's almost done". Thesong was released on their 1990 album Babysitters On Acid.