By Catherine Park

Take a babysitter, a microwave oven and throw in some LSD. What do you get? A classic urban legend that first cropped up back in the 60s.

So here is the story. A couple leaves their child with a teenage babysitter while they go out to a cocktail party. The girl takes LSD and starts hallucinating, the baby starts crying; the girl freaks out. A couple of hours later parents call home to check up on things. “Don’t worry, everything’s cookin’,” answers the babysitter, “the turkey’s in the oven.” ”What turkey?!” They rush home and find out that the babysitter mistook the baby for the turkey and microwaved him.

Variations of this “cooked to death” legend also include “Your roast is done!”, a hippie high on marijuana or sometimes even scotch, and parents smelling the turkey cooking but finding it frozen in a baby crib.

This story appears in several “Urban Legend” listings, but is it really just a myth? On September 27th 1999, Elizabeth Renee Otte was charged with first-degree murder: her one-month-old baby had been found “folded” in the microwave. And on November 26th 2006 another mother, 26-year-old China Arnold, was charged with causing “death by microwave”.

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