Welcome to another edition of context clues, where we give you excerpts from previous episodes

to make our new topic at hand just a little bit richer. I'm your host, Chelsea Weber Smith,

and this is American Hysteria.

So many of the lasting, classic urban legends that we all know seem to have formed in the 1960s, a time when the leftover American suburban sensibilities clashed with

major political and social upheaval.

Things were changing and they were changing fast.

There were new technologies, an ongoing battle for civil rights, the sexual revolution,

the anti-war movement, and of course the advent of a new counterculture.

The hippies and their various methods of mind expansion.

These strange creatures baffled and angered the older generations with their total disregard for

the status quo, and because of it, they became prime victims and villains in

contemporary folklore. For this installment of context clues, I'm going to give you excerpts

to illuminate our upcoming series, which begins with a new Urban Legends Hotline episode,

where we'll meet an LSD addled babysitter

who mistakes a baby for a raw turkey before baking it in the oven. In addition, we'll explore some

other popular tales that have to do with babysitters as well as LSD. We'll be whipping up some jiffy

pop turning on the TV and getting strange phone calls, while the kids we are babysitting

sleep soundly in the room upstairs, just one wall between them and a lunatic killer calling

from inside the house.

We'll hear the story of a young man who tripped so hard on acid he became convinced that he was an orange permanently.

We'll also trip alongside some idiotic acid head college students who accidentally went blind while staring into the sun,

allegedly. All the while, we'll be investigating how these different urban legends formed,

...