What Are "Feral Children," and Do They Really Exist? (with Michael Newton)
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Due to the nature of this episode, listener discretion is advised. This episode includes discussions of kidnapping, violence, and murder. Consider this when deciding how and when you'll listen. In 2013, a woman named Marina Chapman published her memoir, The Girl With No Name, and it caught a lot of backlash.

She'd lived this grand, sort of Odyssey-style life. The perfect truth is stranger than fiction subject for a hit book set in 1950s Columbia, South America. At one point in the book, Marina describes an awful case of food poisoning. She says when she was just a few years old, she ate a bunch of bad fruit. It made her dizzy, so sick, a thought crept into Marina's head. She might die.

That's when Grandpa led her to a pool of muddy water. Marina gulped it down in mouthfuls until it made her vomit. Eventually, the fruit was out of her system. She was all better, and that was that. Oh, but I left out one important detail. Grandpa was a monkey, one of many that Marina claims helped her survive alone in the jungle.

Welcome to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. I'm Carter Roy. You can find us here every Wednesday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram at theconspiracypod. And we would love to hear from you. So if you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts. Today, we're looking at stories of kids who grew up isolated from human contact. They're known as feral children.

And for centuries, they've been mired in mystery. The way society chooses to interact with them has changed over time. But one thing about feral children's stories remains the same. Historically, there are no strangers to doubt, controversy, and conspiracy theories. Stay with us.

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Written accounts of children who grew up alone in the wild date back to at least the 17th century. Long before Marina Chapman, there was Memmie, an 18th century girl who wandered into society from the French wilderness in search of raw meat. Victor, a wild boy captured in southern France three times before being brought to Paris in 1800 to be studied.

Amala and Kamala, sisters raised by wolves in India in 1920, and experts believe there are probably far more undocumented examples. The phenomenon has happened so many times they've been given the collective name feral children. Yeah, feral children is a kind of slightly weird phrase.

That's Michael Newton, a cultural historian and author. He wrote the book Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children, a project he spent about 12 years researching. So first of all, it applies to people who've really grown up in the woods, who got lost in some way or abandoned, who've grown up in the wilderness, in the, you know, kind of in the forests or whatever.

In particular, a term gets applied kind of within that to children who may have been, while living in the woods, brought up by animals. Our story begins in Europe in the 1720s. Think Vivaldi's Four Seasons, Rococo art and architecture, and a satirical adventure story called Gulliver's Travels. In the midst of all this, there was Peter the Wild Boy,

a so-called feral child who may have been raised by bears. In some of the stories about him, he's discovered living with bears. It's hard to know if the bears are a kind of fanciful interpolation into the story or if they really happened. We just don't know. In another version of the tale, Peter survived in the wild by suckling from a mother wolf.

There's no doubt that Peter existed. Michael says it's just impossible to separate the legend from the facts, because there are about seven different versions of his origin story. But there's one kind of core fact there, which is there was this boy discovered living in the woods of Hanover in North Germany.

who is brought in, kind of captured by local villagers and brought to a house of detention for vagrants. Peter was somewhere around 12 to 15 years old. He didn't speak any language, so he couldn't confirm or deny much of anything. Everything about him was more or less a mystery. Who was he?

Where did he come from? How long was he in the wild? Why was he out there? And was he really raised by animals? But for the most part, people didn't care so much about finding any answers. They were more interested in Peter's nature, his wildness, and its implications for modern society. In short order, he went from surviving in the forest to living in St. James Palace, a

That's because the unpopular British King, George I, happened to be vacationing in Hanover soon after Peter was found. And he was brought to George I really as a kind of curiosity, I think. And just as a kind of weird twist of fate, George I liked him. And he didn't quite adopt him, I would say, but he decided he was going to take responsibility for him.

And when the royal family returned to London, Peter went with them. And word spread about the wild boy taken from the woods of Hanover. Peter's story struck a chord. And for a while, he was the hottest gossip in London, though not always for the right reasons. As Michael points out, Peter was treated somewhere between a pet and a court jester.

I mean, it's the 18th century, so it's kind of the age of politeness and courtesy and elegance and all those things. And from all the accounts that we have of Peter, it seems they like the fact that

that he broke the rules, that he would go in and he would not be polite. He would grab your food or, you know, he's jumping on the table. And I think there's something they clearly enjoyed for a while, not for very long, but for a little while, they enjoyed the fact that he was subversive, that he's doing all the stuff that you shouldn't do. Peter eventually moved in with the prince and princess who showed him off to their exclusive circle of friends. The beautiful thing for me about Peter is you have this

This person who embodies a kind of wildness, a kind of something asocial, outside of language, and he's suddenly the subject of conversation of, you know, the most eloquent writers of the 18th century. Writers like Jonathan Swift, the author of Gulliver's Travels, and the poet Alexander Pope,

Peter also met John Arbuthnot, a physician, mathematician, and writer who was tasked with teaching Peter to speak. Arbuthnot failed miserably.

But actually, Swift and Arbuthnot and Pope have nothing to say about this child. He soon becomes boring in the way that old news becomes boring. And they get interested in another weird story, the story of this woman called Mary Toft, who reputedly, and obviously not really, gave birth to a little warren of rabbits. And so

suddenly Peter the Wild Boy was old news and people were, you know, who cares about Peter the Wild Boy? There's Mary Toft. And you see that Peter is really, to the writers of the period, he's just a weird story. They don't know what to do with him.

Except for one person. Because one person who very likely met Peter the Wild Boy is another writer from the period. Daniel Defoe, the man who wrote Robinson Crusoe. A novel about being isolated from society. And Defoe writes a book about Peter the Wild Boy.

And he's the only person who is interested in Peter philosophically. Now today we wouldn't suggest somebody was any less human just because they grew up in isolation or because they couldn't talk. But a few hundred years ago, well that's exactly what had people scratching their heads. What did Peter's existence say about society? About what makes us human?

Defoe didn't exactly find an answer, but he did believe growing up in the wild gave Peter a sort of superpower, that he was more spiritual and in tune with nature than we could ever hope to be. But not all feral children are one in the same. For starters, Peter's fame was localized and relatively short-lived.

After the London elites grew tired of him, he moved in with a farmer's family in the countryside. He stayed there for nearly 60 years. But also the term feral children doesn't just apply to kids who grew up isolated in nature. But it also, strangely, applies to children who grew up in a completely opposite way of being locked up in rooms. Children like Kaspar Hauser.

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In 1828, a teenage boy appeared out of the blue on the streets of Nuremberg, Germany, and he would go on to cause an international sensation.

It had been about a hundred years since Peter the Wild Boy's fame came and went, and in that time, movements like the Enlightenment had given way to Romanticism. It was out with order and reason and in with emotion, passion, and imagination. Even while Nuremberg grew into a crowded city,

There was a sense that communing with nature and celebrating the individual were important endeavors, and that perfectly set the stage for the very moment this boy stumbled into town, seemingly from out of nowhere. Everything about him seemed out of place. He had a strange walk, as if he were drunk. His clothes didn't fit. He could only say a few phrases and

And when handed a paper and pen, all he wrote was Kaspar Hauser. People assumed that was his name. Everything is strange about him. He's kind of odd and displaced and distant and kind of distracted. His language is strange. He's just anomalous and weird. It's that kind of sense of mystery about him is in a way one reason why he became so interesting to people.

The mystery started to reveal itself as investigators spoke to Kaspar about his past. From what they gathered, he had spent his life living in a small, dungeon-like cell with only a straw pallet and some toys carved out of wood. The only reason he survived was because someone brought him food and water every day. It was a man who never spoke to Kaspar,

never showed his face, and may have occasionally drugged the boy. Every so often, Kaspar's water would taste funny. He'd enter a deep sleep and wake up with a clean shirt, a haircut, and trimmed fingernails. He lived that way for years, more than a decade, until one day everything changed and the mystery man entered Kaspar's room.

Still careful to never reveal his face, the man taught Kaspar to walk, speak a few phrases, and write his name. After that, he led him outside and forced him to walk miles on end, until he reached Nuremberg. Kaspar's story eventually spread far beyond Germany, and he was given a nickname, the Child of Europe.

He's somebody who's come out from nowhere. People don't know who his mum and dad are. So it's like all Europe are his parents. He's somebody who symbolises something about European civilisation at that moment, who all Europe is responsible for, who's standing for something. One thing about Kaspar Hauser is he turns up really kind of at the height of romanticism.

And people are interested in nature. They're interested in wildness. They're interested in that which is outside of the social. And Kasper Hauser, he stands for all those things.

In some ways, Kaspar's experience mirrors Peter the Wild Boys. They've both been cut off from human connection during very formative years. They both become spectacles because their behavior is so counter to modern society. And they're seen as walking experiments to be intellectually poked and prodded by great writers and thinkers. But in other ways, Kaspar's experience is entirely unique.

He's imprisoned indoors, without the freedom Peter had in the wilderness. Unlike Peter, Kaspar learned to speak and write eloquently. Where Peter's fame didn't last long, Kaspar's was more enduring. He was an international celebrity, and in Kaspar's story, the public became more engrossed in the mystery of where he came from and who he really was.

Which makes it all the more baffling that he was murdered. In October 1829, nearly a year and a half after arriving in Nuremberg, Kaspar was the target of an alleged assassination attempt. He was using the outhouse one day when a man snuck in and hit him over the head. The boy fainted, but he survived this first attack, though he never got a good look at the would-be assassin. After that,

Kaspar's outlook on life in the outside world changed. He grew suspicious of others, stayed on his toes more often. Somebody apparently wanted him dead, but he didn't know why. A short time later, a man named Philip Henry, the Earl of Stanhope, arrived in town looking for Kaspar. He said he wanted to meet the famous feral child. By 1831, a couple years later,

Lord Stanhope had gotten his wish. He'd ingratiated himself into Kaspar's life, establishing himself as the boy's new mentor.

There are various kind of implications or suggestions or possibilities that it's a bit more than a friendship. People at the time were kind of felt that Stanhope's kind of interest in Hauser was romantic or sexual even. And for a while, the two are inseparable. So one thing Stanhope does is he kind of extricates Hauser from everyone who's been looking after him up to this point.

and creates around him a new group of people who are going to look after him. And unfortunately for Hauser, this new group of people who are going to look after him very quickly start to hate him. And these people are suspicious of Hauser. Caspar wasn't exactly in high spirits by the time December 1833 rolled around.

It had been over five and a half years since he walked into the city and became famous. And now he was surrounded by skeptics who weren't buying his story about being raised in captivity. They thought he was a fraud. They said he'd learned to speak and write too quickly. And sometimes he acted differently whenever he realized he was being watched. One winter day, Kaspar slipped away alone.

As he walked through a secluded garden, he met with a man who then allegedly stabbed him in the chest. Kaspar died a few days later. His killer was never identified. One moment, he's the child of Europe everybody feels sworn to protect. The next, he's killed. Why? Well, some people thought the only explanation had to be tied up in Kaspar's true identity.

And they had a theory about who he really was. But actually he's a royal child in exile. It was a hotly debated theory back in the day. Maybe Kaspar was really the Prince of Baden, a former territory in modern Germany. That would mean he'd been abducted and hidden away by someone who wanted to usurp his rightful place on the throne.

And that could explain why he was kept in a dungeon for so long and why somebody still wanted him dead. Because Kaspar had learned to write and had started on his memoir right before the first assassination attempt. - And that's why these people are trying to kill him. They hear he's writing his memoirs, you know, hang on, he might say something we don't want people to know, we better stab him. - The second assassination attempt killed Kaspar

But not right away. He survived just long enough to pass on some information. Kaspar said he'd gone to the gardens to meet with someone who claimed to know his true identity. Presumably, this was the person who stabbed him. According to the secret prince theory, the killer wanted to remove Kaspar as a threat to the throne permanently. It could have just been some nameless assassin for hire,

But there's another person from Kaspar's circle who was implicated: Lord Stanhope. They'd clearly had some kind of falling out. People wondered: was there enough bad blood between them to make Stanhope plot Kaspar's death? But there's never been strong enough evidence to say one way or another. All we know for sure is that Stanhope tried to kill Kaspar's reputation.

After Kaspar died, Lord Stanhope even published a book about his late friend, where he wrote some harsh claims. Kaspar Hauser was a liar. Kaspar Hauser was deceitful. He's not anything he said he was. He's not interesting. He's not important. He's just some random young German trying to make some cash.

and then, having tried to make some cash, trying to be famous. Not only that, Stanhope claimed that Kaspar wasn't even murdered. That there was no killer in the garden that day wielding a knife because Kaspar stabbed himself in a ploy to turn his haters into supporters. Stanhope assumes Kaspar only meant to wound himself and accidentally went too far.

Lord Stanhope's claims didn't put an end to these secret prince rumors. Just in the past 30 years, Kaspar's DNA was analyzed. While the tests were not airtight, the findings strongly suggest that Kaspar was not related to the royal family of Baden. But a DNA test doesn't solve the mystery. We still don't know who he was. The mystery in the story remains intact.

Maybe Kaspar's story about growing up in a dungeon hinted at something so awful that it needed a fanciful explanation. People couldn't fathom that a human would commit such a crime against a child for no reason. Maybe it was easier to accept that Kaspar was a fairy tale prince brought to life. Kaspar Hauser's epitaph on his headstone refers to him as a riddle, an enigma,

He may be the most famous example of a feral child whose story was called into question, but he certainly wouldn't be the last.

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Restrictions apply. See terms at sportsbook.fanduel.com. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-NEXT-STEP or text NEXTSTEP to 53342. Marina Chapman was a grandmother in her 60s living in West Yorkshire, England, when she published her memoir, The Girl With No Name, the incredible story of a child raised by monkeys. Like with Kaspar Hauser's tale, people have called the details of her book into question.

Here's the story she related. It's around 1954, maybe in Venezuela, but more likely Colombia. Marina remembered sitting outside in the garden, eagerly awaiting her fifth birthday, when she was drugged, kidnapped, and abandoned by two men in the middle of the South American jungle.

Surrounded by animals and plants she'd never seen before, far from civilization, Marina pushed into the jungle in search of food. She found water easily, and that kept her going for a while, but food was a bigger challenge. As she searched, she stumbled across a troop of monkeys, and that's when life in the wild turned around.

Everyday survival was still tough, but she didn't feel so alone anymore. Plus, whether they knew it or not, the monkeys were teaching Marina what to eat and not eat in the jungle. Some fruits were hot items, others seemed to be off-limits. Nuts were a good option, and she learned to mimic how the monkeys used rocks to break nut shells open.

But her new companions didn't give Marina food. She had to fend for herself, or move quickly enough to catch what the monkeys dropped. Marina also figured out how to climb high up in the trees. It seemed safer up there, where the monkeys used branches to create seating areas like nests. At night time though, Marina made her own bed down on the ground.

Her new companion seemed to be tolerating her. The only time they treated her like one of their own was when they groomed her, and it took a long time for the monkeys and the little girl to get that close. In the end, Marina guesses she lived alongside the monkeys for about five years, and by that point, her hair had grown nearly to her knees.

When she was maybe 9 or 10 years old, Marina spotted a young woman in the jungle. That's when she was brought to a city and given a home. But Marina's transition back into human society posed just as many challenges as life in the wild. She was abused and spent time on the streets, all while relearning how to live among other people. When things were really bad, she thought of the jungle.

and regretted leaving. When Marina was about 15, an older woman rescued her and put her on an airplane to Bogota, where a family adopted her. Marina later found work as a nanny and wound up in the UK. She made her way there and built a life she's proud of. After her book came out in 2013, Marina was invited to give interviews on morning shows and public radio.

She was mostly asked light-hitting questions about surviving alone in the jungle and the monkeys, but something else happens too. Marina's book becomes the target of disbelief. Reviewers mostly say it's a great story, yes, but they have a hard time accepting that a girl who should be in elementary school could survive that place for that long.

During in-person interviews with Marina, this disbelief is very lightly touched on. She doesn't get many chances to respond to it directly.

But in articles, writers wonder: did she and her co-writers, which included her daughter and a hired ghostwriter, did they take too many liberties? Or was this a case of misinterpreting fuzzy memories? Anthropologists, for example, had two main sticking points with Marina's book. First, Marina's anecdote about Grandpa Monkey helping her during a food poisoning scare. And second, the monkey's nest she referenced.

Anthropologist Barbara King interviewed Marina's daughter, Vanessa, for NPR. Barbara laid out the logic and reasoning Grandpa would have to possess in order for that event to go down the way Marina says it did. You know, he'd have to comprehend that a human girl was sick, why she was sick, how she could get better, and so on.

Barbara also spoke with an expert on capuchin monkeys. That's the subfamily Marina identified years after the fact from memories, photos, and research. And she said if Grandpa really led Marina to water like that, he was probably trying to drown her, not save her. Let's forget about the monkeys for a second. More generally, critics questioned whether a five-year-old could survive in the wild that long.

Some of them questioned how reliable Marina's memories were. Autobiographies can be hard to prove or disprove. Unless the subject of the book is famous, there's not going to be a lot of documentation to back a story up. They're often based on an author's memories. And by Marina's estimation, she was writing about events she said happened more than 50 years earlier when she was very young.

Well, when it comes to early childhood memories, studies suggest we can't recall anything before we were three or three and a half years old. Our ability to form and recall long-term memories works pretty reliably once we hit the age of seven. Which means age-wise, Marina technically could be remembering everything as it happened.

It's also been suggested that traumatic experiences from Marina's childhood could have altered her memories, causing her to misremember those years. Now, to be clear, Marina never uses the word trauma in her book.

But we do know that trauma can be associated with changes to the brain. On one hand, it can cause us to block out the who, what, or where of distressing events. In rare instances, we might even override these memories with new ones. On the other hand, trauma, or even just intense negative feelings, can sometimes make memories sharper.

Bottom line, there's still so much we don't understand about how memory works. It's possible for any type of memory, formed in any situation at any time, to get distorted. And we don't always know why. Something else might have contributed to people's doubts about Marina's book. It came out after a string of publishing scandals. And these all drummed up a lot of skepticism aimed at memoirs.

In 2006, author James Fry came under fire for his memoir about addiction, A Million Little Pieces. At first, readers were enamored with this story of hope. After Oprah featured it as part of her book club, James had a bestseller on his hands. But all that attention also drew scrutiny.

The website The Smoking Gun spent six weeks digging into James' account, and they uncovered some inconsistencies. And one pretty big lie they could prove. James claimed that during one bout of drinking and drug use, he got into an altercation with a police officer in Ohio. He said he even hit this officer with his car and wound up spending nearly three months in prison.

When the smoking gun tracked down the police department where this all allegedly happened, they got a totally different story. James had never hit any officer with a car, they said. What really happened was he'd been caught with an open container while driving. He was charged with a misdemeanor, got two traffic citations, and spent just a few hours in jail.

The author went on Oprah's show and admitted on national TV that he'd exaggerated or fudged parts of the book. The jail time, the timeline, even a trip to the dentist. He eventually did the right thing, but now the whole world of memoirs had more eyes on it than ever before, for better and worse.

Two years later, in 2008, there were two more scandals involving authors and the life stories they claimed as their own. The book Love and Consequences followed a foster child through South Central LA, and a different book called Misha, a Memoir of the Holocaust,

detailed a young Jewish girl's journey to find her parents after they're separated by the Nazis. It turned out neither of these authors were even who they said they were. These cases weren't about a few exaggerated details. These were full on literary hoaxes. The foster child from Love and Consequences, she actually grew up with her biological parents in a suburban neighborhood.

her own sister came forward with the truth, the story was totally fabricated. As for Misha, her real name was Monique, and she wasn't even Jewish. She hadn't traipsed across Europe on foot looking for her parents, which means she also lied when she claimed that during her journey, she was taken in by a family of wolves.

These scandals all spotlighted the difficulty of fact-checking memoirs just a few years before Marina's book was released. Marina and her daughter Vanessa, who worked with her on the book, maintained that the story is all true, and they responded to some of the specific doubts.

Vanessa tells NPR, "Every detail is presented as Marina recalls it, with the exception of the monkey nests." She explains that detail got lost in translation. They also admit, "Marina doesn't have a clear timeline in her head from those early years. The events from the book aren't necessarily in the right order. They had to create the most logical timeline they could, along with their ghostwriter, to create a clear story."

And Vanessa believes everything about her mother proves her story is true. Marina was adventurous, climbing trees, playing with the kids in the mud, even catching their pet rabbit with her bare hands. Now, there are details in Marina's book that can be backed up. Like, for instance, Marina's adopted family in Bogota. Some of them were still around when the authors were writing the book.

There's also a photo of the woman who paid Marina's way to the big city. And in 1954, when Marina estimates she was abducted, Colombia was in the middle of La Violencia, a period marked by a violent civil war. So kidnappings, for example, were not uncommon there during Marina's childhood. Then there's the fact that Capuchins do use rocks as tools to open nutshells.

Marina recalls hiding and watching the monkeys as they did this so she could go get nuts for herself. And Vanessa says her mom told her that story at bedtime years ago.

Now, it's a widely accepted fact that capuchins use rocks as tools and have for hundreds of years. As for author Michael Newton, he isn't interested in questioning Marina's claims. I think it's the nature of the story and all these stories that they provoke doubt. The people hear about it and they think, well, that can't be true. And yet, who knows? I certainly would not want to be the person who speculates either way.

And maybe some of the backlash directed at Marina Chapman's book was just a case of bad timing. Clearly, kids have figured out how to survive alone against the forces of nature for centuries, maybe even millennia. Since I finished writing the book, I remained interested in wild children and feral children's stories.

And there's one every three or four years. Every three or four years, a similar story comes out and they get to page 22 of the New York Times or Washington Post or, you know, the Daily Telegraph or whatever. And that's it. They've stopped resonating with us, partly because they've either become just depressing. They're just stories about abuse. And we have enough of those. So we don't want to hear any more. It's kind of too disturbing and dark.

Or it's just weird. It's a weird story. It's like a clickbait story. All of those feral children's stories, old and recent, seem to suggest survival stories like Marina's happen all the time. It's just our interest in them that seems to be fading. They don't capture our imagination in the same way, and we're quicker to doubt. And I think that although we're kind of in a post-romantic moment where these stories, I think, are less resonant for us,

There's still something there for us and there always will be as long as there are people. For Marina's part, she doesn't seem bothered by the skeptics. While she used to regret leaving the jungle, she'll tell you now, living away from people made her a better person.

Thank you for listening to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. We're here with a new episode every Wednesday, and be sure to check us out on Instagram at The Conspiracy Pod. We'd like to give a special thanks to Michael Newton for being our guest on today's episode. His interview and his book, Savage Girls and Wild Boys, A History of Feral Children, were invaluable to our research.

Do you have a personal relationship to the stories we tell? Send a short audio recording telling your story to conspiracystories at spotify.com. Until next time, remember, the truth isn't always the best story, and the official story isn't always the truth. This episode was written and produced by Mickey Taylor, edited by Connor Sampson, fact-checked by Laurie Siegel, and sound designed by Alex Button.

Special thanks to Lauren Silverman, Maggie Admire, and Chelsea Wood. Our head of programming is Julian Boirot. Our head of production is Nick Johnson. Spencer Howard is our post-production supervisor. And I'm your host, Carter Roy.

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