After his mother died, he found her secret in the freezer
riverfronttimes.com
riverfronttimes.com
It's actually a really interesting Case Study in Serial Hidden Pregnancies.
There's a lot of data out there on hidden pregnancies. I've read a number of such stories.
My general impression is that they are typically a one time event for someone really young who comes from a conservative environment, such as a Catholic family. The event seems to frequently spur personal changes that prevent future incidents.
They make a break with the conservative social circle they come from; or they get educated about birth control; and/or they feel burned, stop drinking, stop sleeping around and become more conservative and preachy than anyone else.
What's very unusual here is she continued to successfully hide pregnancies, even after having a fallout with her Catholic family. She didn't become a serial killer either. She gave up at least two children for adoption.
It's a strange case because she basically is a woman who had many lovers over the years. That's much more typically male behavior.
Men fairly often pick up women randomly and may have no idea how many children they fathered on one-night stands. Women usually can't manage to get away with that or, if they do, it's because they are infertile and incapable of becoming pregnant.
This is one of the elements of Mae West's life. She couldn't have children.
My sister had serious fertility problems. I had my first baby unexpectedly at age 22 and never managed to have a real career. My sister ended up with a real career and finally had her only child in her mid thirties after years of intervention.
She read extensively on related topics. She concluded that infertility was a root cause of serious careers for some women, herself included. She once said if things had been different, she could see having four kids. But they weren't.
So what's strange here is this woman wasn't privileged. She didn't have the money to support a large brood. She took a long time to distance herself from her conservative family. She wasn't infertile.
Yet she kept drinking and sleeping around. And she sometimes successfully hid the resulting pregnancies.
Following her death, relatives are still trying to piece together the full story. There remains at least one hidden pregnancy unaccounted for according to the records they've been able to find.
I started playing the audio versions in the car during family vacations and now they are tradition whenever we take a road trip.
The article is much more interesting than just that detail, although it goes to tragic places.
I'd argue this is simply a teaser, as the article certainly delivers on its promise of a 'secret'. If anything, 'secret' is understated.
If this were a newspaper headline, it would've been "Man discovers mummified remains in deceased mother's freezer", because the purpose of the headline is to convey as much information as possible, succinctly. But the "clickbait" article intentionally omits what is in the freezer in the hopes of getting you to click to find out.
Although, I don't think it's fair to put things like "Man photographs Lock Ness monster, and you'll never guess what happens next!" BS in the same category as my nightly news saying "After the break, new CDC warnings you should know before you vape"
The title intentionally replaces the primary subject of the article (baby found in freezer) with withholding and vague language ("her secret") in order to force readers to click through to learn what the primary subject is. They are baiting you into clicking.
This is clickbait.
This article delivers what it promises, which is unveiling the mystery and the context around it in a well written and researched fashion.
I would be very sad if all headlines had to be so reductionistically explicit that there was no room for narrative. For example in this case the presence of the box was hanging over the family for years. Leaving that mystery to the reader does make a tantalizing headline, but also allows for increased identification with the family itself. That will not be true for all readers, but let’s please separate clickbait from anticipation and suspense.
It's not missing at all. The bait is the phrase "her secret in the freezer".
The article may be high quality but the title is clickbait, plain and simple. Do you believe the author chose that title themselves? Or was it the editors who have marketing-set quotas to reach?
Why do you think the top voted comment in this thread is the explanation of what "her secret in the freezer" is? Why do you think the top replying comment to that is the primary HN mod acknowledging it is clickbait?
I'll borrow Wikipedia's definition: "Clickbait is a form of false advertisement which uses hyperlink text or a thumbnail link that is designed to attract attention and entice users to follow that link and read, view, or listen to the linked piece of online content, with a defining characteristic of being deceptive, typically sensationalized or misleading."
What I'm focusing on is what wikipedia calls the 'defining characteristic', which is what separates it from headlines intended to build suspense. In other words, a title is not clickbait if it tries to entice you with tantalizingly withheld information, it is clickbait if it lures you into an article that does not provide the information thusly withheld, or it turns out the information was inaccurately implied by the title. In the same way, a piece of food that entices a fish is only bait if it will not provide a meal but instead put the fish in a situation they did not intend on being in (getting caught).
If you extend clickbait to situations like this article, there isn't really a word left for the ones that are actively misleading. For example there's a newspaper that keeps getting me to click on its stuff in Google News because it tells me an asteroid almost blew up Earth, when in fact the asteroid had an infintesimal chance of doing so. That is clickbait. Having worked in content recommendations quite a bit, I can say it's quite a painful situation.
What would make the above article title clickbait would have been if it turned out he found spoiled milk in the freezer, or some other pedestrian product. Which happens quite a bit in Internet syndicated media.
Does that mean that the fisherman who puts bait on a hook, catches a fish, but then provides the fish with a full meal and lets it free is not baiting the fish?
Anyway, I appreciate your explanation, and it definitely made me think. I would have to agree that feature articles like this one making their titles more enticing is not clickbait, it's just good creative writing.
But if this was a news article I would remain as stubborn in my original opinion!
On feature vs news titles I’m totally with you and your point is very much taken. Yes it is a problem from that perspective when only the title is syndicated without the context of what type of article it is. For example the Washington Post runs a column that is a satirical take on the news, written with a straight face. Google News syndicates it as news with no differentiation, and I kept having surreal “wuh??” moments until I started recognizing the author. I guess we need more metadata besides title and source. Thanks for a good discussion.
I think this kind of story is one of the rare cases where I would have preferred a less revealing title.
Some people enjoy reading stories without knowing the end beforehand.