God Took Them

[snopes]

Comment: I was searching in a site which has some urban legends, and there
was a story which I haven't seen here:

When a little girl's cat had kittens they disappeared after a couple of
days, when she asked her mother what happened to them and her mother
said "God took them." Months later the cat again had a litter of kittens. Her
mother sent her out to run some errands, but before she left she wanted to
play with the kittens again. She heard her father coming carrying a bucket
and hid from him. She watched while her father put the kittens in a sack
and drowned them in the bucket. Later the girl again asked her mother what
happened to the kittens. Her mother said "God took them." Several days
later the mother asked the girl to watch her brother in the bath tub while
she answered the phone. The mother screamed when she came into the
bathroom after a few minutes. The girl told her "God took him."

[TB Tabby]

Sounds pretty apocryphal to me...and eerily similar to glurge.

[KaiTheInvader]

Originally Posted by TB Tabby

Sounds pretty apocryphal to me...and eerily similar to glurge.

glurge, or "The Ring"....

[Pseudo_Croat]

My biggest question is: Would this kid be tried as an adult after drowning her brother?

- Pseudo "the law took her" Croat

this is a short story written by dean koontz in his book of short stories called strange highways. i dont know if this was around before but he holds copywrite on it i think. (its a good book by the way, two full novellas and a bunch of short stories both the humorous and macabre are well represented.)

Edited because dean zoontz isnt a real person

[Wet Blanket]

Originally Posted by Pseudo_Croat

My biggest question is: Would this kid be tried as an adult after drowning her brother?

- Pseudo "the law took her" Croat

That would depend largely on the age and understanding of this "little girl," don't you think? When she was three my MIL nearly choked her infant brother by treating him to some cookies, but no one has ever suggested that she meant to harm him.

[emperor_genghis_khan]

Here all children who commit murder are tried as adults. But of course the case of a very small child would probably be resolved without a criminal sentence.

[Bryan With a 'Y']

This looks like a variation on"Mother's Little Helper" from the ULRP.

[PallasAthena]

It sounds like MySpace glurge (splurge?) to me. All it's missing is the "if you love kids, re-post this. If you hate kids, re-post it anyway" command at the end.

[Barbara]

It looks to me like a version of http://www.snopes.com/horrors/parental/helper.asp

[matches]

But do they drown kittens as a matter of course?

I mean, I've heard of the notoin of drowning kittens, but is this a common practice in this day and age?

Wouldn't it be more practical to take the kittens to the pound, spay their cat, or simply have "god take" the cat?

Oh, and yes the child would be tried as an adult, she is obviously a sociopath with full knowledge of the severity of her crime. Hence the taunting "God took him" to her mother as her gotcha for drowning her kittens.

She probably wouldn't get the chair however, and if her lawyer plead not guilty by reason of insanity, they might be able to cop her down to life in a state psychiatric facility.

Also, obviously the father would face a stiff fine and possible jail time for animal cruelty, which again is why I am not a big beliver in kitten drowning stories.

[Nana M]

Sounds like a serious case of parental neglect to me. Who leaves a child in charge of a baby in the bathtub?

[Artemis]

Yeah, it seems weird that they didn't spay the cat.

Also, would a kid really make the same connection between drowning the kittens and her brother? I mean, it's not like someone told her that her brother was going to be with god--why did she take it upon herself to do the drowning? Plus, aren't kids very literal...a bucket isn't really like a bathtub. (Granted, no one's claiming that it did happen--it just really doesn't seem to make sense when you tear it apart.)

[bjohn13]

Okay, so my question is...how did the girl's dad get in and out of the bathroom quick enough to drown her little brother without the mom seeing?

Why do I get the feeling this flew completely over my head?

[Cactus Wren]

I saw a (much) milder version in a cartoon panel a good forty years ago. Image: a row of small kids and baby carriages outside a supermarket. Woman has just come out, arms full of bundles, to see her small son pointing into a carriage. Caption: "I changed the baby, Mommy. This one is dry!"

[Jonny T]

Originally Posted by bjohn13

Okay, so my question is...how did the girl's dad get in and out of the bathroom quick enough to drown her little brother without the mom seeing?

Why do I get the feeling this flew completely over my head?

the dad didn't drown her little brother. the girl did.

[bjohn13]

Originally Posted by Jonny T

the dad didn't drown her little brother. the girl did.

Okay, this makes sense, and I guess this should also make the reason why I doubt this story seem pretty obvious.

I have the feeling that most young children are going to correlate the phrase "God took them" with their fathers doing the deed, rather than an abstract concept like the water being used to do the deed being God. Most of the young children I speak with imagine God as a person as a pretty concrete belief, and I know that when I was a kid, if such a ploy had been used on me after I saw my dad drown the kittens, I would have become deathly afraid of my dad thinking that he was God.

Now, back to the story, just because the little girl said, "God took him" doesn't mean that the little girl drowned her little brother. There could have been an accident (which is why it is stupid to leave the child under the supervision of another child in the first place, as other posters have pointed out), and the little girl may have correlated drowning with God's way of taking people based on her previous experience.

However, I still think that the dad rushed into the bathroom, drowned the little boy, and then escaped with no one seeing except the little girl. The little girl, confused by these actions, explained it in the only way that made sense based on what she had seen with the kittens.

b "kids are smarter than this" john13

[Jonny T]

or alternatively, the story is a load of crap....

[A Guy Named Goo]

I also recognized this as the plot of a Dean Koontz short story. I believe the story was actually called "Kittens" in the book, not "God Took Them", and I can't recall if there was more to the story than just this. It strikes me as something he probably heard elsewhere and didn't make up, though. The book was Strange Highways, if anyone wants to look it up.

[Artemis]

Originally Posted by bjohn13

Okay, this makes sense, and I guess this should also make the reason why I doubt this story seem pretty obvious.

I have the feeling that most young children are going to correlate the phrase "God took them" with their fathers doing the deed, rather than an abstract concept like the water being used to do the deed being God. Most of the young children I speak with imagine God as a person as a pretty concrete belief, and I know that when I was a kid, if such a ploy had been used on me after I saw my dad drown the kittens, I would have become deathly afraid of my dad thinking that he was God.

That's the same problem I have with it. Why is she taking it upon herself to drown the little boy? No one has said that he needs to be "taken by God." So she's just decided to drown him because she's seen it happen?