The AFU and Urban Legend Archive
Death
Baby Smothering
 hard times




From: jschmitz@qis.net (JoAnne Schmitz)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban
Subject: Smothering Child under Duress (was Re: Chicken lady)
Date: Sun, 05 May 1996 18:07:06 GMT

LWEW93A@prodigy.com (Judy Johnson) wrote:

>grnhead@ix.netcom.com(Kevin Grabow) wrote:

>>I think this is most likely a derivation off the last episode of
>>M*A*S*H. In the episode, Hawkeye (Alan Alda) is having some serious
>>mental conflicts, so he goes to that shrink that pops up from time to
>>time (Sydney). He recalls being on the back of a parked bus, in the war
>>zone, where everyone is being quite trying to avoid detection. Across
>>the isle, is a lady with a chicken that keeps clucking. Everyone on the
>>bus, fearing for their lives, keeps telling her to shut it up. So, she
>>breaks its neck. Only after therapy with Sydney, does Hawkeye realize
>>that she wasn't holding a chicken, she was holding her infant son.

>Except I remember it as the woman smothering the chicken/child, not
>wringing its neck. This same motif was used in a TV movie (methinks it
>was titled "The Wall") on the Warsaw ghetto uprising, as well as in the
>Tom Selleck movie "Quigly Down Under".

>Wasn't this UL discussed on AFU not too long ago, with the general
>concensus being that it was a UL thru-and-thru?

Sorry I missed this discussion. Wasn't this told about babies of Jewish and other hunted people during WWII? It reminds me of the story of the Spartan child and the fox.

Having just started to read _Hard Times_, an oral history of the greate depression [of 1929+ in the USA] by Studs Terkel, (Pantheon Books, 1970) the bells started ringing in my head. Here's a similar story about the march on Washington for veteran's benefits, where many of the petitioners and some of their families hoboed on trains to reach the nation's capital:

"We had to go through these mountain countries. The smoke from the stacks of the engines, and the soot, would be flying back through the tunnels and would be coming into the boxcars. So in order to avoid getting choked, we'd close the boxcars and hold handkerchiefs over our noses. There was quite a discussion about this. What would happen to the little infant? We was afraid it would smother. The mother was holding the baby, but the baby seemed very still. The mother screamed. We didn't know what the scream was about. After we reached Washington, we found out that the baby had died going through the tunnels."

JoAnne "there's also a story on page 38 about the Hoover Dam containing loads of dead farmers who were potential competition for the workers who got the job" Schmitz


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