I have just heard the most marvelous, weird story on the news. I don’tt know how I missed earlier reports.
evidently a family in Concord, N.H. has been keeping an 18 inch mummified baby as a sort of pet. Nobody knows who it is or where it came from. They called it “Baby John”, and for many years they gave it cards on holidays, and presents on special occasion. They gave it a dried dead fish as a pet.
Authorities found out about it when the 4 year old daughter mentioned it at day care back in 2006. Authprities have no sense of humor, and, after DNA testing and foresnsic examination, they determined that the baby had been mummified shortly after birth decades ago, but wasn’t related to the family that “owned” him. So they insisted that it be buried.
Well, the unmarked grave has been disturbed, and it turns out that the mummy is missing. Police suspect the original family, and will no doubt be keeping an eye on them.
I hope we’ll hear more as this develops.
Obviously burying it turned it into a zombie, and it’s roaming the streets. The city of Concord needs to start arming itself now to prepare for the inevitable zombie infestation.
This is going to sound bizarre and possibly unbelieveable, but I think I might have “met” Baby John…
This was probably 8 years ago, so the details are fuzzy, but we (some friends and I) were invited to a small party at a friend of a friend’s house, I had never met him before, somewhere in NH (I lived Boston at the time). I remember his house was nice. After we had been there awhile, he said he wanted to show us something - “something” turned out to be a mummified baby, which he said was his great-uncle who’d died in infancy but was kept and passed down in the family. His name was baby John.
We left soon after that, of course - but none of use believed him, we thought he was just some creepy guy with a fake mummy!
ETA: I haven’t thought about this in years, but it was the first thing that occured to me when I read the thread title.
Well, it was almost a century old, and it’s apparently a baby that died shortly after birth, or a miscarriage. I could easily see it nor being handled officially and gotten lost track of in those cases.
This baby’s career reminds me of that of Elmer McCurdy. Only in this case they neglected to pour concrete over the grave to dissuade grave robbers:
Meh. It’s certainly not “normal” but I’ve known peple before who had a skeleton hanging in the den, and two who had skulls which they kept on a desk or writing table.
“Shrunken heads” (usually actually the heads of dead babies) used to be a popular souvenir and I knew several people whose parents had gotten them int he 50’s.
I’m certainly not saying that I like it or would want one. I’m just saying I don’t think it’s so awfully uncommon.
I can see the records for a baby getting lost but who “loses track of” the remains? Don’t you actually have to decide, “Let’s not throw it out or bury it, let’s keep it inside”? It’s one thing when it’s mummified–but when a few days old?!
Maybe the mourning mother (or both parents) hid him?
It’s not uncommon for parents to simply refuse to let go, and if he was born 90 years ago, it would’ve probably been at home, so they may not have recorded his birth officially at all since he didn’t live.
I can sort of see how it could happen - the mourning parents refuse to let him go, keep the body, which eventually mummifies. Then when the parents die, other family members keep him, since at that point he’s always been around, so they’re used to having a mummified baby (a sentence I never thought I’d type).
It’s an interesting, bizarre story. I’d like to know more.
Floyd Collins, famous cave explorer who died caving, and instigating a massive and national “event” in the process…well his body got moved and stolen a few times as well.
It’s the writing him cards and getting him a dead pet that strays outside the norm for me. It didn’t sound as if they were treating* it* as an artifact, but treating him like a family member. The fact that he’s not a realtive of theirs makes it seem a degree or two weirder to me.
Although I’d like to think it wouldn’[t be my response I can understand someone having some type of breakdown that would disconnect it from the reality of a loved one’s death.
I suspect the generaltion that kept him was different then the generation that wrote him cards and got him a pet. The former was emotionally attached to the child, while the latter basically kept it as a sort of joke, or at least to be weird for weirdness sake.
I’m from New Hampshire, and there are places in NH where I’d sort of expect to hear this story. But I have to say, Concord isn’t one of them - that’s the state capital, and (by NH standards) a fairly cosmopolitan place.
There was a story in the Toronto papers a while ago about some poor fellow doing renovations on his house who tore out some old plaster and found - a mummified baby deliberately hidden in his wall.
The mummy dated to the 1920s, I believe, so police work is kinda too late - can’t have done the resale value of his house any good.
LOL! I was trying to think of a diplomatic way to say this, and finally decided to wimp out. At least I’ll be brave enough to back you up a bit though!
The sense of humour in NH is extremely “dry” and especially in the more rural areas, soemthing like this would just be a “cool” sort of differentiating thing to keep around. It’s an extension of the human tendancy which prompts Jr. put a party hat on Uncle Joe’s stuffed Moose head.
Eccentricities are carefully and tenderly cultivated there; and particularly creative ones are actively appreciated and celebrated. I have never found a place more densely sewn with interesting and diverse characters.
Hey, In Maine they were stealing brains! They did find mummified babies and it is a true story. Baby John is a new one? I heard it from a local, mind you, that the woman responsible was found murdered over by the prison one night. She was a nurse that made house calls for unwed mothers. The killer had his way with her and then killed her and left her body on the side of the road. This was in the days before they made burn cream from aborted fetuses. So she wrapped them up and stored them in a closet. Not knowing she was going to be murdered for taking young womans money for her craft they remained in the closet and were discovered years later.
I hope they get away with taking it back (“If” they did) - it’, er, s unusual but I can’t see what legitimate interests are served by the state taking it.