Tales
of children being adopted and nurtured by wolves, bears, monkeys, and other
animals crop up with remarkable regularity. As the mediæval world
gave way to the modern, the wodewose or wild man of the woods shifted from
an archetype of chaos, insanity and heresy to one of natural harmony and
enlightenment, culminating in Rousseau’s idea of the Noble Savage. But
the wild man was both savage and sublime, an image of desire as well as
punishment. Wild or feral children elicit both heart-rending pity for their
abandonment and wonder for their survival against such terrible odds.
Ancient mythology has many stories of children nurtured by animals,
but the first ‘true’ account of a feral child was recorded by the usually
dependable Roman historian Procopius. A baby boy, abandoned by his mother
during the chaos of the Gothic wars in about AD 250, was found and suckled
by a she-goat. When the survivors returned to their homes, they found the
boy living with his adopted mother and named him Aegisthus. Procopius states
he saw the child himself 1.
Goats don’t figure much in subsequent feral accounts, although a child
said to have been raised by goats for eight years was found in the Peruvian
Andes in 1990 2.
Carl Linnæus, the great biological classifier, introduced a new
species of man, Homo ferens, in 1758, characterising the creature as mutus,
tetrapus and hirsutus (a mute quadruped covered with hair) 3.
The attribution of hairiness was probably influenced by the legend of the
hirsute wodewose, but a number of feral children are thus described, as
we shall see. Linnæus provided anecdotal case histories of varying
reliability: Jean de Liège, a Lithuanian bear-boy, the Hesse wolf-boy,
the Irish sheep-boy, the Bamberg calf-boy, the Kranenburg girl, the two
Pyrenees boys, Wild Peter of Hanover, and the savage girl from Champagne.
These primary cases are briefly described below.
Many academics regarded the whole phenomenon of feral children with
scepticism; they pointed out that most of the children never learnt to
speak, while those that did could recall very little of their wild existence.
Similarly, the circumstances of their discovery were by their nature anecdotal,
taking place far from habitation and often depending on the testimony of
a solitary witness. Dismissing testimony as superstition and folklore became
commonplace in 19th century science, to the detriment of folk wisdom and
forteana.
Robert Kerr, whose translation of Linnæus appeared in 1792, dismissed
Homo ferens as imposture and exaggeration, while the 1811 survey of feral
cases by JF Blumenbach, the father of physical anthropology, was characterised
by Robert Zingg in 1940 as inadequate and unfair 4. In
1830 the Swedish naturalist KA Rudolphi proclaimed that all the feral children
were either fictional or congenital idiots, and this became the orthodox
view, reinforced by Sir Edward Tylor, the father of social anthropology.
According to Claude Levi Strauss in 1949, “most of these children suffered
from some congenital defect, and their abandonment should therefore be
treated as the consequence of the abnormality which almost all display
and not, as often happens, as its cause.” 5
It’s true that some feral children, such as Dina Sanichar of Sekandra
(1867), the Lucknow child (1954) and the first Ugandan monkey-child (1982)
were mentally or physically handicapped. Many others, however, were not;
and neither were they intentionally abandoned, but had escaped from abusive
parents or were lost by accident or in the chaos of war – and surviving
without human help required considerable native intelligence.
Note Levi Strauss’s qualifying phrases “most of” and “almost all”; some
of the case histories refuse to be explained away in this fashion, particularly
those of Victor of Aveyron, Kaspar Hauser and the Midnapore wolf-girls
Kamala and Amala, described in detail by persons of standing – respectively
a doctor, a lawyer and a priest. As with all strange phenomena, it only
requires one case to be demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt to allow the
possibility that many of the others are also true.
The first modern published account of ‘historical’ as opposed to mythological
feral children was a work by the medical writer Phillipus Camerius, published
in Frankfurt in 1609 6. This described the Hesse
wolf child of 1344 (of whom more below) and the Bamberg calf-child. The
latter “had an extraordinary suppleness in his limbs and went on all fours
with great agility. In this posture he would fight the largest dogs with
his teeth, and attack them so intrepidly that he put them to flight. He
was not, however, of a fierce nature.”
Sir Kenelm Digby, later one of the Royal Society’s founders, is the
first to mention Jean de Liège in 1644, having interviewed those
who had seen him a few years earlier 7. As a five-year-old
during the religious wars, Jean took to the woods with fellow villagers.
When the fighting moved elsewhere, the villagers returned home, but the
timorous Jean remained in hiding for 16 years. In the wild, his senses
sharpened; he could scent “wholesome fruits or roots” at a great distance.
When he was finally captured at the age of about 21, he was naked, “all
overgrown with hair”, and incapable of speech. In human society, he learned
to talk, but lost his acute sense of smell.
Nicholaus Tulp, the Dutch doctor portrayed by Rembrandt in The Anatomy
Lesson, described the Irish sheep-boy in 1672. “There was brought to
Amsterdam... a youth of 16 years, who being lost perhaps by his parents
and brought up from his cradle amongst the wild sheep of Ireland, had acquired
a sort of ovine nature. He was rapid in body, nimble of foot, of fierce
countenance, firm flesh, scorched skin, rigid limbs, with retreating and
depressed forehead, but convex and knotty occiput, rude, rash, ignorant
of fear, and destitute of all softness. In other respects sound, and in
good health. Being without human voice he bleated like a sheep, and being
averse to the food and drink we are accustomed to, he chewed grass only
and hay, and that with the same choice as the most particular sheep...
“He had lived on rough mountains and in desert places... delighting
in caves and pathless and inaccessible dens.” Huntsmen had finally netted
him. “His appearance was more that of a wild beast than a man; and though
kept in restraint, and compelled to live among men, most unwillingly, and
only after a long time did he put off his wild character. His throat was
large and broad, his tongue as it were fastened to his palate.” 8
Another sheep-boy was captured near Trikkala in Greece in 1891. He had
been living with his woolly family for four years. 9
The Kranenburg girl was discovered in the woods outside Zwolle in the
Dutch province of Overyssel in 1717. She had been kidnapped at 16 months
from her home in Kranenburg, and was found dressed in sacking and living
on a diet of leaves and grass. There was no evidence that animals had befriended
her. After her capture, she learnt spinning and sign language, but never
mastered speech.
The primary (and uncorroborated) source on the Pyrenees feral boys is
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Human Inequality
in 1754. All he says is that they were discovered in 1719, “running up
and down the mountainside like quadrupeds.” 10
The first really famous feral child was Wild Peter, “a naked, brownish,
black-haired creature” was captured near Helpensen in Hanover on 27 July
1724, when he was about 12. He climbed trees with ease, lived off plants
and seemed incapable of speech. He refused bread, preferring to strip the
bark from green twigs and suck on the sap; but he eventually learnt to
eat fruit and vegetables. He was presented at court in Hanover to George
I, and taken to England, where he was studied by leading men of letters.
He spent 68 years in society, but never learnt to say anything except “Peter”
and “King George”, although his hearing and sense of smell were said to
be “particularly acute”. 3, 10, 11
The wild girl of Champagne had probably learned to speak before her
abandonment, for she is a rare example of a wild child learning to talk
coherently – although she could remember little of her feral existence,
which she thought had lasted two years. When coaxed from a tree in Songi
near Chalons in the French district of Champagne in 1731, she was aged
about 10, barefoot, and dressed in rags and skins with a gourd leaf on
her head. In a pouch she carried a cudgel and a knife inscribed with indecipherable
characters. She shrieked and squeaked, and was so dirty (or possibly painted)
that she was mistaken for a black child. Her diet consisted of birds, frogs
and fish, leaves, branches and roots. Given a rabbit, she immediately skinned
and devoured it.
“Her fingers and in particular her thumbs, were extraordinarily large,”
according to a contemporary witness, the famous scientist Charles Marie
de la Condamine. She is said to have used her thumbs to dig out roots and
swing from tree to tree like a monkey. She was a very fast runner and had
phenomenally sharp eyesight. When the Queen of Poland, the mother of the
French queen, passed through Champagne in 1737 to take possession of the
Duchy of Lorraine, she heard about the girl and took her hunting, where
she outran and killed rabbits. 12 She was given the name
Marie-Angélique Memmie Le Blanc, and later eked out an existence
in Paris by making artificial flowers and hawking her memoirs (written
by Madame Hecquet). She died, like most of the feral children, in obscurity.
The two most famous feral cases of the 19th century are Victor of Aveyron,
made famous by Francois Truffaut’s wonderful L’Enfant Sauvage, and
Kaspar Hauser, the subject of Werner Herzog’s haunting film of the same
name. A great deal has been written about both of these, most recently
by Michael Newton in Savage Girls and Wild Boys, so I will concentrate
on lesser-known cases. There are about 80 examples of feral children, and
many will only be referred to in passing. A fairly accurate chronological
table of 53 cases appears in Lucien Malson’s book. 13
Victor, Kaspar and Kamala represent the three main types of feral child:
in isolation, in confinement, and among animals. Children locked up for
years often develop autistic symptoms, leading the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim
in 1959 to lump all three types under the heading of infantile autism.
“While there are no feral children,” he wrote, “there are some very rare
examples of feral mothers, of human beings who become feral to one of their
children.” 14 This denial of genuine feral cases is closely
related to the orthodox anthropological position and requires an unwarranted
dismissal of remarkably consistent evidence and testimony.
Mother wolves
“In all my travels, the only time I ever slept deeply was when I was
with wolves… The days with my wolf family multiplied. I have no idea how
many months I spent with them but I wanted it to last forever – it was
far better than returning to the world of my own kind. Today, though most
memories of my long journey are etched in tones of grey, the time spent
with the wolves… is drenched in colour. Those were the most beautiful days
I had ever experienced.” So wrote Misha Defonseca, a Jewish orphan who,
from the ages of seven to 11, wandered through occupied Europe during World
War II, living on wild berries, raw meat and food stolen from farmhouses,
and occasionally teaming up with wolves. 15
Another child who had learned language before his life with wolves was
Marcos Pantoja, “the wild child of the Sierra Morena”, who was about seven
when he was abandoned in the desolate mountainous forests of southwest
Spain in 1953. He spent the next 12 years without speaking to another human
being. 16
Since the suckling of Romulus and Remus, the wolf has been associated
with the rearing and protection of children in the wild. A seven-year-old
boy was supposedly captured from a wolf lair in the German state of Hesse
in 1344, but the first published account didn’t appear until 1609. 6
He described his capture by wolves at the age of three. They offered him
the pick of the hunting spoils, carpeted a pit with leaves to protect him
from the cold and made him run on all fours until he had attained their
speed and could make the most prodigious leaps. After his capture, he frequently
stated that he would rather associate with wolves than human beings.
Fourteen wolf-children were found in India between 1841 and 1895, seven
of which were described by General WH Sleeman, the nemesis of the Thugs.
17
The first was captured in Hasunpur (near Sultanpur in what is now Uttar
Pradesh), and showed most of the typical wolf child characteristics. His
favourite food was raw meat, and he was unable to speak. “There were evident
signs, on his knees and elbows, of his having gone on all-fours,” wrote
Sleeman; “and when asked to run on all-fours, he used to do so, and went
so fast that no-one could overtake him.” Some wolf children responded to
education. One found in Sultanpur in 1895 allegedly grew up to be a policeman.
18
The most famous wolf-children are the two girls captured in October
1920 from a huge abandoned ant-hill squatted by wolves near Godamuri in
the vicinity of Midnapore, west of Calcutta, by villagers under the direction
of the Rev JAL Singh, an Anglican missionary. The mother wolf was shot.
The girls were named Kamala and Amala (above), and were thought to be aged
about eight and two. According to Singh, the girls had misshapen jaws,
elongated canines, and eyes that shone in the dark with the peculiar blue
glare of cats and dogs. Amala died the following year, but Kamala survived
until 1929, by which time she had given up eating carrion, had learned
to walk upright and spoke about 50 words.
There were further reports of Indian wolf-children in 1927 and 1933.
“Ramu the Wolf Boy” found naked in a third class waiting room in Lucknow
railway station in 1954, aged about 10, was probably mentally retarded.
He had deformed limbs, uttered animal cries and ate raw meat by snatching
at it with his teeth (of which he had two upper sets); but there appears
to be no evidence that he actually lived with wolves. He died in Lucknow
hospital in 1968. 20
In May 1972, a boy aged about four was discovered in the forest of Musafirkhana,
about 20 miles (32km) from Sultanpur, the region where five of the wolf-children
mentioned by Sleeman came from. The boy was playing with wolf cubs. He
had very dark skin, long hooked fingernails, matted hair and calluses on
his palms, elbows and knees. He shared several characteristics with Kamala
and Amala: sharpened teeth, craving for blood, earth-eating, chicken-hunting,
love of darkness and friendship with dogs and jackals. He was named Shamdeo
and taken to the village of Narayanpur. Although weaned off raw meat, he
never talked, but learnt some sign language. In 1978 he was admitted to
Mother Theresa’s Home for the Destitute and Dying in Lucknow, where he
was re-named Pascal and was visited by Bruce Chatwin in 1978. He died in
February 1985. 20
In 1962, according to an unsubstantiated report, geologists found a
boy aged about seven running with a wolf pack in a bleak desert region
of Turkmenistan, central Asia. The men threw a net over the boy, but the
wolves rushed to protect him, tearing at the net. In the end, all the wolves
were killed. It was four years before the boy, named Djuma, was taught
to utter a few words. He told anthropologists how he rode on the back of
his wolf mother when the pack went hunting, and later learned to run on
all fours. He was cared for in the Republican Hospital in Ashkhabad and
it was years before he got used to sleeping in a bed. By the time of a
news report in 1991, he was still crawling on all fours, eating only raw
meat, and biting when he was angry. Dr Rufat Kazirbaev, chief of psychiatric
research in the hospital, doubted if he would ever lose his wolf ways.
21
In 1970, Elmira Godayatova, six, tried to follow her mother through
a wood in Azerbaijan to her grandmother’s house in the village of Milgam.
Mrs Godayatova told Elmira to go home – but she never got there. Relatives,
friends and police searched in vain. Twenty-three days later, a forest
ranger found the little girl sitting under a tree. A local newspaper reported:
“She ate berries and grass, drank water from springs, and played with ‘doggies
and puppies’. Apparently the girl found a family of wolves, and wolves
are known never to attack near their home.” Elmira was taken to hospital
to recover. 22
Wolves saved another Azerbaijani girl in 1978. Mekhriban Ibragimov,
three, lost in a snow-filled ravine, was found after 16 hours, sheltering
in a cave with a wolf and three cubs. She said the mother wolf licked her
face 23.
Shepherds found a naked boy aged about five in 1971, cowering in a cave
in the Abruzzi Mountains of central Italy. Doctors believed he had been
abandoned as a baby and brought up by mountain goats or wolves. He was
named Rocco. Various families tried without success to ‘domesticate’ him,
after which he was placed in a psychiatric hospital near Milan. He had
not learned to talk and was still eating with his hands. He walked on all
fours and liked to be stroked – but retreated snarling into corners when
frightened. 24
Texas wolf child
According to legend, in the early part of the 19th century, a wolf girl
roamed the banks of the Devil’s River near Del Rio in what is even now
the sparsely-populated wilderness of south-west Texas. The girl’s mother
died in childbirth, and her father, John Dent, was killed in a thunderstorm
while riding for help. “The child was never found, and the presumption
was that she had been eaten by wolves near the Dents’ isolated cabin”,
wrote the aptly named Barry Lopez in his book Of Wolves and Men.
Lopez said a boy living at San Felipe Springs in 1845 reported seeing
several wolves and “a creature, with long hair covering its features, that
looked like a naked girl” attacking a herd of goats. Others made similar
reports the following year. Apache Indians told several times of finding
a child’s footprints among those of wolves in that country.
A hunt commenced and on the third day the girl was cornered in a canyon.
A wolf with her was driven off and finally shot when it attacked the party.
The girl was bound and taken to the nearest ranch, where she was untied
and locked in a room. That evening, a large number of wolves, apparently
attracted by the girl’s loud, mournful and incessant howling, came around
the ranch. The domestic stock panicked, and in the confusion the girl escaped.
According to Lopez, the girl was not seen again for seven years. In
1852, a surveying crew exploring a new route to El Paso saw her on a sand
bar on the Rio Grande, far above its confluence with Devil’s River. “She
was with two pups. After that, she was never seen again.”25
Care bears
According to the Athenian historian Apollodorus (168-88 BC), the Greek
heroine Atalanta was abandoned by her father Iasus at birth because he
desired a son; but she was suckled by a she-bear (the symbol of Artemis),
till hunters found her and brought her up among themselves.
News reports do suggest that, given the right conditions, bears will
take care of human infants. In 1971, five-year-old Goranka Cuculic got
lost in the forest near her home village of Vranje in Yugoslavia. Three
days later she was found by a farmer and related how she had met a bear
and two cubs. The bear licked her face, and she played with the cubs and
snuggled up to them at night in a cave [26]. In October
2001, a 16-month-old toddler went missing in Iran and was found in a bears’
den three days later, safe and well. It was thought that the baby had been
breast-fed by a mother bear. 27
There are accounts of children raised by bears in Denmark and the mountains
of Savoy in the early 17th century. In 1669 hunters in a Lithuanian forest
saw two little boys among a group of bears. They captured one and took
him to Warsaw where he was named Joseph and presented to the king of Poland,
who later passed him to the Vice Chamberlain of Posnan. Several times,
Joseph escaped to the woods where he would suck the sap of trees and gather
wild honey and crab apples. Once a wild bear, notorious for having killed
two men, was seen to approach him and lick his face. Other Lithuanian bear-children
were captured in 1661 and 1694. It was suggested that they had become separated
from their families following raids by marauding Tartars. 28
In 1767 hunters from Fraumark in lower Hungary came upon a bear’s den
high in the mountains, where they found a girl of about 18, tall and brown-skinned.
Her behaviour was “very crude” and when taken to an asylum she refused
to eat anything but raw meat, roots and tree bark. 29
Sir James Frazer mentions a girl who was said to have been nursed by
a bear. Coolies from the tea gardens found her in a forest in Jalpaigori
in 1892, sitting beside a huge bear den. Aged two or three, she walked
on all fours and bit and scratched, but was gradually taught to walk upright
and wear clothes, although she never learned to speak. 30
A 14-year-old wild girl was caught in the jungle near Naini Lal, Uttar
Pradesh, in July 1914. Named Goongi (‘dumb’), she ran with great agility
on her hands and feet and was covered all over with a thick growth of hair.
She refused a bed and cooked food, and slept under a bundle of straw. The
hunter Jim Corbett speculated that she had been brought up by bears, pointing
out that her climbing ability, eating habits and diet were similar to bears,
and that the deep scratches on the upper part of her body could well have
been caused by being carried by bears. 31
In 1937 George Maranz described a visit to a Turkish lunatic asylum
in Bursa, Turkey, where he met a girl who had allegedly lived with bears
for many years. Hunters in a mountainous forest near Adana had shot a she-bear
and then been attacked by a powerful little “wood spirit”. Finally overcome,
this turned out to be a human child, though utterly bear-like in her voice,
habits and physique. She refused all cooked food and slept on a mattress
in a dark corner of her room. Investigations showed that a two-year-old
child had disappeared from a nearby village 14 years earlier, and it was
presumed that a bear had adopted her. 32
Monkey Boys
Tissa from Sri Lanka
(left) Pemawathie, 42, a female woodcutter, captured a naked, longhaired
boy ambling about on all fours with a troupe of monkeys in the jungle near
her home village of Tissamaharama, southern Sri Lanka, in early 1973. She
named him Tissa after the village. As his habits were more animal than
human, she handed him over to the police, who placed him in a private welfare
centre 10 miles (16km) outside Colombo, run by Miss LP Morawake. Apparently,
two other “animal boys” had been tamed there, one of whom drank milk straight
from a cow’s udder. Three months after his admission, Tissa was still learning
to walk upright and was not yet talking, although he could eat food from
a plate with his hand. Most telling perhaps was that he had learned to
smile. 33
Burundi monkey boy
This child was said to have been found in Burundi in 1973 by either
missionaries or hunters, playing in a group of monkeys. He was aged about
six, and had the manners and behaviour of a monkey. American anthropologist
Diane Skelly said he was covered in a fine layer of hair, which disappeared
once he took to wearing clothes. After studying the boy intensively, Dr
Harlan Lane (author of The Wild Boy of Aveyron) and Dr Richard Pillard,
said he had suffered a “disastrous illness” at the age of two, resulting
in organic retardation. They could account for every year of his life and
he was never in the wild. 34
Robert of Uganda
In 1982, during the chaos of civil war, a boy aged three was left for
dead in the Luwero triangle of Uganda. Three years later, soldiers came
upon a group of Vervet monkeys. All scattered apart from one female protecting
a small bundle which turned out to be a human child. At the Naguru orphanage
in Kampala he was named Robert. He was deaf and dumb. By the age of eight,
he had been toilet-trained and learned to walk and sleep in a bed. 35
John of Uganda
One day in 1991, a Ugandan villager called Milly Sebba went further
than usual in search of firewood and came upon a little boy with a pack
of monkeys. She summoned help and the boy was cornered up a tree. He was
brought back to Milly’s village and fed hot food, which made him very ill
for three days. He had many wounds and scales, and a lot of hair. His knees
were almost white from walking on them. His nails were very long and curled
round and he wasn’t house-trained. The villagers removed tapeworms from
his behind, some of them reportedly 4ft (122cm) long.
A villager identified the boy as John Sesebunya, last seen in 1988 at
the age of two or three when his father murdered his mother and disappeared.
After John was discovered, his father was traced, but was not interested
in caring for the wild boy. A few weeks later the father was found hanged,
a victim of civil unrest. After his mother was murdered John had fled to
the jungle, apparently terrified he would be next.
For the next three years or so, he lived wild. He vaguely remembers
monkeys coming up to him, after a few days, and offering him roots and
nuts, sweet potatoes and kasava. The five monkeys, two of them young, were
wary at first, but befriended him within about two weeks and taught him,
he says, to travel with them, to search for food and to climb trees. “I
didn’t sleep very well,” he remembers, “head down and bottom in the air...
or I would climb a tree.” Some sources say John’s guardians were Vervet
monkeys (Cercopithecus æthiops); others say they were black-and-white
Colobus monkeys (Colobus guereza).
The boy was adopted by Paul and Molly Wasswa, who run the Kamuzinda
Christian Orphanage in Masaka, 100 miles (160km) from Kampala. He has been
studied by a host of experts, who are convinced that he is a genuine feral
child. When left with a group of monkeys he avoided eye contact and approached
them from the side with open palms, in classic simian fashion. He has a
strange lopsided gait and pulls his lips right back when he smiles. He
tends to greet people with a powerful hug, in the way that monkeys greet
each other. He has, however, learned to wink – something a monkey would
never do.
He is now about 16 years old with a fine singing voice, and on 6 October
1999 came to Britain as part of the 20-strong Pearl of Africa Children’s
Choir, run by Mr Wasswa’s organisation A.F.R.I.C.A. (Association for Relief
and Instruction of Children in Africa). 36
Bello of Nigeria
In 1996, a boy aged about two was found by hunters, living with a family
of chimpanzees in the Falgore forest, 90 miles (145km) south of Kano in
Nigeria. He was taken to the Tudun Maliki Torrey children’s home in Kano,
where the staff named him Bello. He is thought to be the son of nomadic
Fulani people who travel through the region. Mentally and physically disabled,
with a misshapen forehead, sloping right shoulder and protruding chest,
he was probably abandoned by his parents because of his disabilities. Such
abandonments of disabled children are common among the Fulani, a pastoralist
people who travel great distances across the West African Sahel region.
In most instances the children die, but this child appears to have been
adopted by the chimps.
“We do not know exactly how long he would have been with the chimps,”
said Abba Isa Muhammad, the home’s child welfare officer. “Based on the
traits he exhibits, we estimate that he was adopted when he was no more
than six months old and nursed by a nursing chimp.”
Bello is now (April 2002) aged about eight, but has the size and weight
of a four-year-old. When he was first brought in, he walked in a chimpanzee-like
fashion, moving on his hind legs but dragging his arms on the ground. At
first he was very restless, smashing and throwing things and leaping about
at night from bed to bed in the dormitory, but today he is much calmer.
He still leaps, chimpanzee-like, and claps his hands over his head repeatedly,
cupping his hands, and does not speak but makes chimpanzee-like noises.
37
Gazelle Boys
Spanish Sahara
Jean-Claude Auger, 38 an anthropologist from the Basque
country, was travelling alone across the Spanish Sahara (Rio de Oro) in
1960 when he met some Nemadi nomads, who told him about a wild child a
day’s journey away. The next day, he followed the nomads’ directions. On
the horizon he saw a naked child "galloping in gigantic bounds among a
long cavalcade of white gazelles".
Auger found a small oasis of thorn bushes and date palms and waited
for the herd. Three days later, his patience was rewarded, but it took
several more days of sitting and playing his galoubet (Berber flute)
to win the animals’ confidence. Eventually, the child approached him, showing
“his lively, dark, almond-shaped eyes and a pleasant, open expression...
he appears to be about 10 years old; his ankles are disproportionately
thick and obviously powerful, his muscles firm and shivering; a scar, where
a piece of flesh must have been torn from the arm, and some deep gashes
mingled with light scratches (thorn bushes or marks of old struggles?)
form a strange tattoo.”
The boy walked on all fours, but occasionally assumed an upright gait,
suggesting to Auger that he was abandoned or lost at about seven or eight
months, having already learnt to stand. He habitually twitched his muscles,
scalp, nose and ears, much like the rest of the herd, in response to the
slightest noise. Even in deepest sleep he seemed constantly alert, raising
his head at unusual noises, however faint, and sniffing around him like
the gazelles.
Auger describes how he gradually learnt to decipher the significance
of every gazelle gesture and movement, which the boy shared with the herd.
There was a complex code of stamping to indicate distance of food sources;
and social interaction through exchanges of licking and sniffing, with
the boy emitting a kind of mute cry from the back of his throat with his
mouth closed. He had one word: kal (khah), meaning stone or rock. One senior
female seemed to act as his adoptive mother. He would eat desert roots
with his teeth, pucking his nostrils like the gazelles. He appeared to
be herbivorous apart from the occasional agama lizard or worm when plant
life was lacking. His teeth edges were level like those of a herbivorous
animal.
Two years after his stay with the herd, Auger returned with a Spanish
army captain and his aid-de-camp, who kept their distance to avoid frightening
the herd off. Curiosity eventually overcame them and they chased the boy
in a jeep to see how fast he could run. This frightened him off altogether,
though he reached a speed of 32-34mph (52-54km/h), with continuous leaps
of about 13ft (4m). Olympic sprinters can reach only 25mph (40km/h) in
short bursts.
His pursuers failed to keep up across the rough terrain, and eventually
the herd disappeared as the jeep sustained a puncture. In 1966 an unsuccessful
attempt was made to catch the boy in a net suspended from a helicopter;
unlike most of the feral children of whom we have records, the gazelle
boy was never removed from his wild companions. Auger took no photographs
of the boy, being more concerned with protecting him from human interference
than providing evidence to convince the sceptics of his existence. Perhaps
the whole thing is a fairy story…
Middle East
According to the fortean zoologist Ivan Sanderson, the story of an earlier
gazelle-boy “turned out to be a plant by a bored newsman in Cairo during
World War II”; but he gives no further details. 39 The
version I have traced is a report from Baghdad in August 1946 by a certain
M Abdul Karim, and the story bears re-telling. A wild boy had been caught
in the desert straddling Transjordan, Syria and Iraq. Amir Lawrence al
Sha’alan, chief of the Ruweili tribe, was out hunting in this inhospitable
region, whose only inhabitants were the staff at the British-run stations
of the Iraq Petroleum Company.
“I was astonished to see what looked like a boy running amid a herd
of gazelles we were chasing,” said the Amir. “I called to the occupants
of the other cars to stop shooting. We were still far away, but could see
that the boy was running as fast as the gazelles. We chased the herd in
our cars for 50 miles (80km), during which time he kept up with them, bounding
along with a half-human, half-animal gait. Suddenly we saw the boy stumble
and fall. When we came up to him we found that his leg had been injured
by a large stone. He looked up at us with fear starting from his luminous
eyes and shrank from our touch, emitting cries like a wounded gazelle.”
The Amir tried to feed and clothe him, but he kept escaping, so he took
him to Dr Musa Jalbout at one of the Petroleum Company stations, who later
passed him into the care of four Baghdad doctors. Dr Jalbout said he acted,
ate and cried like any gazelle, and had no doubt that he had lived all
his life among the gazelles, being suckled by them and cropping the sparse
desert herbage along with the herd. He was thought to be aged about 15.
Apparently speechless, he was covered in fine hair and ate only grass
– although a week before Karim’s report he had had his first meal of bread
and meat. He could allegedly run at 50 mph (80km/h), twice the Olympic
record. He was 5ft 6in (1.7m) tall, “so thin that the bones could be counted
easily beneath the flesh, yet stronger physically than a normal full-grown
man.” An unnamed “Syrian expert of desert lore in Damascus” is quoted as
saying that Bedouin women giving birth in the desert often abandon their
babies to the mercy of nature. Most died, but in very rare cases the child
was adopted by animals. 40
Big Cat guardians
A leopard-child was reported by EC Stuart Baker in the Journal of
the Bombay Natural History Society (July 1920). Since he was in administrative
charge of the North Cachar Hills at the time when he investigated the case,
he was in an excellent position to obtain a true account of the facts.
The boy was stolen from his parents by a leopardess in the North Cachar
Hills near Assam in about 1912, and three years later recovered and identified.
“At the time the child ran on all fours almost as fast as an adult man
could run, whilst in dodging in and out of bushes and other obstacles he
was much cleverer and quicker. His knees… had hard callosities on them
and his toes were retained upright almost at right angles to his instep.
The palms of his hands and pads of his toes and thumbs were also covered
with very tough horny skin. When first caught, he bit and fought with everyone…
and any wretched village fowl which came within his reach was seized, torn
to pieces and eaten with extraordinary rapidity.”
According to an unsubstantiated report, a wild girl aged about two was
found in a forest south of Jansi in north central India in May 1986. She
was slumped over a fatally injured female panther. 41
The Kuano River
boy
The village of Baragdava stands on the small river Kuano in the Basti
district of Uttar Pradesh in northern India, near the border with Nepal.
One afternoon in February 1973, the local priest was walking across the
nearby dam across the Kuano when he caught sight of a naked boy loping
towards the water. He appeared to walk out on the water to mid-stream.
Suddenly he dived in and emerged a minute later with a large fish which
he ate, before floating downstream. The priest told the villagers of his
sighting, and when he described the lad and estimated that he was about
15, an old woman called Somni said he was her son Ramchandra who had been
carried away by the river when he was a year old.
Another villager saw him a few days later, and for a while there was
considerable local interest, and people flocked to the river to see him;
but he was not to be found. Then in May 1979, Somni spotted him lying in
a field. She crept up on him and recognised a birthmark on his back. He
awoke and fled. A strict watch was mounted, he was caught and taken to
the village.
He was virtually hairless and his ebony-black skin had a greenish tinge.
He managed to escape back to the river, but his experience of human society
made him less reclusive, and he would come and eat bowls of spinach in
water put out for him. Hundreds of villagers, policemen, officials of the
irrigation department, and hard-boiled journalists saw him walk, run, or
recline on the surface of the water, and stay submerged for longer than
ordinary humans could manage. Among the witnesses was Nazir Malik, who
wrote up the story for the Allahabad magazine, Probe India.
The boy’s insteps and toes were very hard and walked with a clumsy,
loping gait, often holding one hand to his forehead. He was unable to speak
(or hear, according to some witnesses). He ate fish, frogs and other marine
creatures, raw meat, leafy vegetables, gourds and red chillies. He reached
for food directly with his mouth. In summer months when Kuano dried to
a trickle, he was ill at ease; but when the river rose in floods, he was
gleeful and enjoyed diving in the swift current. It was a mystery how he
avoided the jaws of the many crocodiles.
Somni had a strange tale of how Ramchandra was conceived. On a stormy
evening during the monsoon season, she was returning from mending a fence
around the family field, as her husband was laid low with fever. She was
40 years old, a mother of three. Her way was blocked by an enormous being
who seemed more like a spirit than a man. He threw her to the ground and
raped her in the pouring rain. As suddenly as he appeared, he vanished.
It was believed locally that a long time ago a holy man dug a well in
the area. He climbed down to invoke the goddess of water, but was drowned
as the well quickly filled. Some of the villagers believed it was the spirit
of this man that possessed Somni and then took the child into his watery
care.
In 1985, Hubert Adamson, an estate agent in Hampstead with a keen interest
in feral children, visited Baragdava to find out more about the river boy.
From the head man he learned that the boy was dead. One evening in 1982,
at the age of about 24, he had approached a chai shop in the village of
Sanrigar, some 300 yards from the river. A woman, possibly taking fright
at his appearance or rejecting a clumsy sexual advance, threw boiling water
over him. Dazed and in pain, he ran back to the river, never to emerge
again. His body, badly blistered and mutilated by fish bites, was later
found in the river. The police considered bringing charges against the
woman, but these were later dropped. 42
The Delphos child
In July 1974, four people reported seeing a young child, 10 or 12 years
old, with blond, matted hair, dressed in tattered red clothing, running
through vines and brush in a wooded area north-west of Delphos in Kansas.
Children had seen the girl eating from cat and dog dishes.
One of the witnesses, Mrs Joe Stout, saw the child early in the morning
of 22 July in a shed on a vacant lot covered with a thicket of trees and
saplings. She came face-to-face with the child sitting on a picnic table
no more than six feet away. “She – we’re not sure if it is a boy or a girl,
except that she had on a red dress – made a gurgling sound and when I started
to step closer, she jumped down off the picnic table and went through a
small hole in the wall. She’s definitely human. She’s not deformed, but
she runs on all fours”, said Mrs Stout.
During a late night search of the area on the same day, Mr Stout was
scratched on the shoulder and a teenage neighbour, Kevin Marsh, was scratched
on the throat from behind. Neither got more than a glimpse of their small
attacker. Leonard Simpson, sheriff of Ottawa County, organised a posse
to search the neighbourhood, but nothing was found. 43
Dog Boys
Kunu Masela, six, was seen for three years scavenging for food round
the Kenyan town of Machakos with a dog. Mrs Grace Kubuu asked him where
he lived. “With Poppy” was all he would say. One evening she followed them
out into the bush and saw the dog dragging together some banana leaves
to make a bed for them.
The local press ran the story, after which his mother came forward.
Mrs Rukia Ali Murefu, 29, a coffee plantation worker who had moved to Nairobi,
said that her husband had left her when Kunu was born in 1977, and she
had struggled for three years to care for him. She was very poor, and eventually
abandoned him in the bush. “I knew Kunu would be cared for by God – and
I was right,” she said. “Poppy my mother. Poppy give me milk,” Kunu told
a reporter. In 1983, he was in a government juvenile home and the dog was
being cared for by a market trader. 44
On 16 June 2001, an 11-year-old boy called Alex Rivas was rescued from
the sea as he tried to escape from the police. For many months, he had
been living with a pack of about 15 stray dogs in a cave near the southern
Chilean port of Talcahuano, scavenging out of dustbins and drinking milk
from the teat of a bitch that had recently given birth. Filthy and with
his teeth rotting from dog milk and drugs, he was known to local people
as “Dog Boy” and would snarl at any human who tried to approach him. He
was described as extremely violent, malnourished, hyperactive and inarticulate.
He had broken front teeth, a scarred cheek, and was suffering from hypothermia.
After being abandoned by his 16-year-old mother when he was only five
months old, he had a disrupted childhood before being put into a children’s
home in Chillancito, near Concepcion, in 1998. He constantly ran away,
only to be caught. He finally joined the dog pack and managed to evade
capture. In November 2001, he again escaped from the Chillancito children’s
home and FT has seen no further reports. 45
Children nurtured by dogs have also turned up in the Philippines (1982),
Germany (1988), Oklahoma (1989), England (1992), Hungary (1994), Romania
(1994), and Italy (1994). Ivan Mishukov, six, was rescued from a pack of
dogs with whom he had had been living for two years in Retova, west of
Moscow. 46
A feral child was caught in the Brasov region of Transylvania, Romania,
in early February 2002. When shepherd Manolescu Ioan’s car broke down,
he was forced to walk home across country from his pastures in the shadow
of the Fagaras Mountains. At 6am he came upon a naked, wild-eyed child
living in a cardboard box and covered with a plastic sheet. He was eating
from the carcass of a dead dog. Manolescu reported his find to the police,
who later captured the boy.
It was believed he had lived alone in the forest for years, but doctors
thought that he must have had some protection; perhaps he had been looked
after by some of the many wild dogs in the region. He was the size of a
normal four-year-old, but his missing front milk teeth pointed to an age
of seven. He had rickets, anæmia, the distended belly of the half-starved,
and frostbite on his feet and legs. His face and head were scarred and
scabbed. He ate whatever he was given, but didn’t recognise fruit. He was
not toilet-trained. Hospital personnel in Fargas called him Mowgli, after
the character in Kipling’s Jungle Book.
The chief nurse of the children’s ward said: "He only knows two words
– ‘Mama’ and ‘food’ – and is very happy in his bedroom at the hospital
as long as there is food there. He has dark hair and dark eyes and once
his hair was washed and cut and he was given a bath he looked really presentable,
but he tends to walk like a chimp rather than upright and tries to sleep
under his bed rather than on it. But if he has some food in his hand he
is the nicest little chap."
About a week after his capture, he was identified as Traian Caldarar,
lost three years ago at the age of four. After being re-educated at an
orphanage in Brasov, he was reunited in April with his mother Lina Caldarar,
23, in the remote village of Vistea de Jos, less than seven miles (11km)
from where he was found in February. “I loved my son, but I had a violent
husband who beat me,” she said. Traian Ciurar, 24, the boy’s father, is
married to Ms Caldarar under gypsy law. When she fled back to her family
to escape her husband’s cruelty, he prevented her from taking her son.
She believes he ran away for the same reason. “I was distraught but there
was nothing I could do,” she said. “I hoped he had perhaps been adopted
by another family.”
Traian appears to be on the mend, but he is still not house-trained.
“Someone needs to keep an eye on him at all times because it’s easy for
him to get hurt,” said his mother. “He still can’t identify the dangers
in the street. Like an untrained puppy, he’ll just run across the road,
regardless of whether there are cars coming.” 47
Raised by birds
Sidi Mohamed, the ostrich-boy, told the following amazing story in 1945.
At the age of five or six he wandered off from his North African family,
found an ostrich nest with chicks hatching, befriended the parent birds
and lived with them for 10 years, learning to live off grass and to match
their speed in running. At night, he was sheltered by the two ostriches
which each extended a wing over him. Finally he was caught by mounted ostrich
hunters and restored to his parents.
A Sydney woman was fined £1 in November 1903 for leaving her child
to be reared in a chicken run, with the consequence that the little one
could do nothing but imitate the fowls in every way, even to roosting at
night.
Since birth, Isabel Quaresma, 10, lived in a chicken coop in Tabua,
Portugal. She was thrown pieces of bread and shared the chicken feed. Her
mother was a mentally deficient rural worker. In 1980, she was taken by
a district hospital worker and put in a Lisbon clinic. She was unable to
walk and was not house-trained. She gestured and made sounds like a chicken
and ate with her hands. Her body was severely stunted with a tiny head,
probably due to malnutrition. One eye was clouded with a cataract, possibly
the result of a hen scratch.
In the 1990s, a two-year-old Filipino known as Jesse Boy was discovered
locked in a henhouse where his stepfather confined him for seven months
after badly beating him. He crowed like a rooster, clucked like a hen and
picked up food as if his mouth were a beak. He also flapped his arms like
wings as if trying to fly.
He was rescued by a childcare agency in the town of Manito after a tip-off.
After some unspecified time of therapy, he gave up his early morning crowing
and ate at table, but in 1999 he could still only speak in monosyllables.
He also continued to flap his arms when playing with other disadvantaged
children. 48
Pig Children
In the 1830s, there were two accounts of children suckled by pigs –
in Salzburg, Germany, and in Overdyke, Holland. Sergei Mironovich Kirov,
a member of the Soviet politburo and Stalin’s best friend, was allegedly
suckled by a sow. 49
In 1984, the Chinese Xinhua News Agency reported the tale of a peasant
girl in Liaoning province who had been suckled by sows and slept in their
sty at nights. Wang Xianfeng was left as an infant with the family’s pigs
because her deaf-mute father and mentally retarded mother were unable to
care for her and no one else lived near them. The girl lived exclusively
on sows’ milk until she was almost five. Then she graduated to pig swill.
She was always first at the trough when it was filled in the mornings.
In 1983, psychologists discovered Wang, then nine, had the intelligence
of a three-year-old. The report did not say when or how the girl was found.
Experts from the China Medical Science University and the Anshan Institute
of Psychometry took the child in hand, and by 1987 the 13-year-old could
read 600 Chinese characters, count from one to 100, sing children’s songs
and do some housework. Experiments were still under way to “see whether
the girl can finally achieve normal intelligence” announced Xinhua. 50
Lost in the desert
Three-year-old Michael Raadt and his cousin Thabiso Paint, aged two,
wandered off on 10 December 2001 while playing at the Luckhoff farm in
South Africa’s rural Free State, where their parents worked. Thabiso was
found naked and scratched near the fast-flowing Orange River three days
later. Apart from another track of tiny footprints, there was no sign of
Michael. Police used dogs and helicopters in a fruitless weeklong search,
after which everyone thought he had drowned.
Three weeks later, at 4pm on New Year’s Eve, Johan Lombaard was out
on his motorbike checking irrigation equipment on his farm when he found
Michael 19 miles (30km) from home. He was covered in mud, wearing only
a T-short and lying on his side near a lake. “I walked closer to see whether
he was still alive,” said Mr Lombaard. “I could see he was breathing and
told him he had to wait there, I was going to fetch the bakkie [van]. He
just blinked his eyes. If the tough little tyke had walked around in the
searing hot sun for another day or two, he wouldn’t have made it.”
The province had been experiencing sweltering summer days with temperatures
up to 100F (38C) and there had been torrential thundershowers at night.
Although it is mostly farmland, the Luckhoff terrain is vast and isolated,
thorny and rocky, with snakes and predators including leopards. At the
Pelonomi Hospital in Bloemfontein, Michael was found to be covered in scabs,
dehydrated and suffering from mild pneumonia. He had lost a lot of weight.
When his mother, Tina Raadt, asked him how he survived, he said he had
eaten “flowers” and hidden under bushes at night. The “flowers” were probably
berries and pods. The police were mystified how he had survived such tough
conditions alone for so long. 51
Last Indian case
Sudam Pradhana from the village of Bargania in Orissa, India, never
went to the local school and enjoyed tending cows and working in the fields.
In April 1990, when he was 13, he travelled to the dense Labingi forests
in the Angul district, 19 miles (30km) from his village, with his elder
cousin Abhay who was looking for a large log to make into a plough. Abhay
told Sudam to rest near a makeshift loghouse while he went in search of
water. When he returned, Sudam had gone. For several days, Sudam’s parents
and their neighbours searched for him without success. His father Gautam
Pradhan never reported his disappearance as he kept hoping he would turn
up sooner or later – and he did.
On 4 May 2001, Gayachand Muduli and Deb Muduli from the neighbouring
village of Gadtaras, collecting firewood in the forest, encountered a wild
creature with long hair and unkempt winding fingernails sheepishly gawking
at them while sucking mangoes under a tree. “He was wearing torn trousers
and carrying an empty plastic bag. Mango pulp was smeared all over his
chin,” said Gayachand. “He made no attempt to run away on seeing us.”
They took him back to Garatarasa where he was identified as Sudam because
of scars on his skull and feet. “He now behaves like an animal and covers
his body with leaves,” said a villager. He greeted questions with blank
stares and struggled to utter a word or two in Oriya. He has big, white
marks on his skin as if he has been in combat with wildlife. “My son has
returned home after 11 years due to the blessing of God,” said his father
Gautam Pradhan.
Ganesh Pradhan, the police chief at Bantala, suggested Sudam might have
spent the last 11 years in the company of the honey-collecting nomadic
Mallar tribe which lives deep in the jungle. “It is also possible that
he went across the forest to the villagers of Cuttack or Phulbani district
on the other side,” he said. “After having wandered for long he might have
found his way back into the forest.” 52
Feral characteristics
Besides the (probably) apocryphal Syrian gazelle-boy, many wild children
were extraordinarily fast quadrupedal runners – almost ‘superhuman’. We
might recall that Atalanta, the bear-suckled heroine of Greek myth, was
the most swift-footed of mortals. When first captured, Memmie Le Blanc
moved with “a sort of flying gallop” and could out-run game; and the Saharan
gazelle-boy was clocked at 7mph (11km/h) faster than the best Olympic sprinter.
A number of ferals were hirsute, including Jean de Liège (17th
cent), the second Lithuanian bear-child (1669), the Kranenburg girl (1717),
the wild boy of Kronstadt (fl.1784), the second Hasunpur wolf-child (1843),
the Shajampur child (1898), and the Naini Lal bear-child (1914). A young
man caught in woods near Riga, Latvia, in November 1936 was allegedly “covered
in long thick hair”. 55
Feral senses were often more acute than those of socialised humans.
Kaspar Hauser and many of the Indian wolf-children, including the Midnapore
girls, could see well in the dark. Jean de Liège could recognise
his warden by smell from a distance; Kamala could smell meat from one end
of the orphanage garden – a compound of three and a half acres – to the
other; and many wild children sniffed at objects in the way that cats and
dogs do. Victor of Aveyron, the first Sultanpur child (1847), Kamala and
Amala had an unusually sharp sense of hearing.
Many wild children had a keen ear for music. Peter was delighted by
music, and would clap and sing. Memmie was a perfect mimic of songbirds
such as the nightingale. The Overdyke boy named each bird by imitating
its cry. A naked youth aged about 15, caught in woods near Uzitza, Yugoslavia,
in 1934, could mimic animals and birds as well as run amazingly fast. [56]
The Turkish bear-girl responded to music, sometimes bursting into wild,
unintelligible songs. John Sesebunya sings in a choir.
Another curious phenomenon is the wild children’s insensitivity to extremes
of temperature, a characteristic shared with desert nomad and gypsy children.
This was seen in the Irish sheep-boy, Victor, the Kronstadt boy, the first
Sultanpur child, the Midnapore girls, and the Saharan gazelle-boy. The
latter was seen to grab a handful of hot embers and hold them for some
time without apparent pain, while Victor took potatoes out of a pot of
boiling water. At least eight ferals angrily tore off any clothing they
were dressed in.
Hardly any of them learnt to laugh or smile and their libidos seemed
stunted. Kaspar confused dreams with reality and spoke of himself in the
third person. Neither Victor nor Kaspar could recognise their reflections
in a mirror; the Turkish bear-girl would sit for hours in her room gazing
at herself in a mirror. Auger observed the gazelle-boy looking at his reflection
in a pool of water as if it were a stranger.
Paul Sieveking
This article originally appeared in Fortean
Times No.161 (Aug 2002),
PO Box 2409, London NW5 4NP, UK.
NOTES:
* [1] Procopius: De
Bello Gothico, II, xvii.
* [2] FT59:20.
* [3] Carl Linnæus:
Systema naturae (10th edition, 1758).
* [4] Robert M Zingg:
“Feral Man and Extreme Cases of Isolation” (The American Journal of Psychology,
v.LIII, No.4, Oct 1940.)
* [5] Claude Levi-Stauss:
Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949), p.50.
* [6] Phillipus Camerius:
Operae horarum subcisivarum, sive, meditationes historicae auctiores (Frankfurt
1609).
* [7] Sir Kenelm Digby:
Two treatises: in one of which, the nature of bodies; in the other, the
nature of man’s soul, is looked into, Paris 1644.
* [8] Nicholaus Tulp:
Observationes Medicae (1672).
* [9] B Ornstin: “Wilden
Menchen in Trikkala”, Z. Ethnol. Organ der Berlin Gesellschaft fur Anthropologie
23, 1891, pp.817-818.
* [10] Jean-Jacques
Rousseau: Discours sur l’Origine de l’Inégalité parmi les
Hommes (Paris 1754, pp.94-96.).
* [11] James Burnett:
Antient Metaphysics: or, the Science of Universals, vol.3, 1784, pp.59-68,
368-78.
* [12] Anon: The
History of a Savage Girl, Caught Wild in the Woods of Champagne (London
1760).
* [13] Lucien Malson:
Les Enfants Sauvages (1964), translated as Wolf Children (London 1972).
* [14] Bruno Bettelheim:
“Feral Children and Autistic Children” in American Journal of Sociology,
Mar 1959.
* [15] Misha Defonseca:
Misha: a Mémoire of the Holocaust Years (Mount Ivy Press, Boston
1997). FT117:22.
* [16] The story
of Marcos Pantosa is told in Marcos: Wild Child of the Sierra Morena by
Gabriel Janer Manila (Souvenir 1982).
* [17] Sir William
Henry Sleeman: A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, 1849-50 (London 1858).
* [18] H Ross: The
Field, 9 Nov 1895. [li]
* [19] The story
of Amala and Kamala, based on Rev Singh’s 150-page journal, is told in
detail by Charles Maclean in Wolf Children (Penguin 1977). Kamala, incidentally,
is the name of a medicinal plant used by Hindus against tapeworm.
* [20] FT44:4.
* [21] D.Mirror,
17 April; National Enquirer, 23 April 1991.
* [22] Daily Mirror,
4 July 1970.
* [23] FT25:8.
* [24] D.Mirror,
15 Aug 1973.
* [25] Barry Lopez:
Of Wolves and Men (1978); [AP] 27 April 1986.
* [26] FT3:4.
* [27] FT155:8.
* [28] The History
of Poland (1698) by the Irish doctor Bernard Connor, who actually met one
of the bear-children.
* [29] Pierre-Joseph
Bonaterre: Notice Historique sur le savage de l’Aveyron et sur quelques
autres individus qu’on a trouvés dans les forêts à
différent époques (Paris 1800).
* [30] Sir James
Frazer ed: Fasti of Ovid (London 1929), quoting North Indian Notes and
Queries, Mar 1893.
* [31] Times of India,
4 April 1979; Jim Corbett’s India, stories selected by RE Hawkins (OUP
1979).
* [32] Report by
George Maranz in American Weekly, 5 Sept 1937; Sunday Dispatch, 31 July
1938.
* [33] Sunday Mirror,
26 June 1973; INFO Journal, No.11, Summer 1973.
* [34] Harlan Lane
' Richard Pillard: The Wild Boy of Burundi (New York 1978);.FT25:9.
* [35] FT49:12.
* [36] FT130:18-19.
* [37] [AFP] 15 April
2002.
* [38] Jean-Claude
Auger describes his experience ‘Un Enfant-Gazelle au Sahara Occidental’
in Notes Africaines No.98 (April 1963, pp.58-61) and in L’Enfant Sauvage
du Grand Désert (1971) under the pseudonym Jean-Claude Armen. This
appeared in English as Gazelle Boy (Universe Books, NY, and Bodley Head,
1974).
* [39] Pursuit, No.
3, April 1970, p.31.
* [40] Sunday Express,
25 Aug 1946; Robert Eisler: Man Into Wolf (1951).
* [41] Report by
Otis Daniels in Weekly World News, 8 July 1986; FT49:12.
* [42] Probe India
(Allahabad), Feb 1980. FT31:40, 47:74.
* [43] Kansas City
Times, 29 July; Wichita Morning Eagle, 31 July 1974.
* [44] FT45:45.
* [45] FT150:9.
* [46] FT45:45, 80:8,
117:22.
* [47] Ananova, 13
Feb; Scotsman, 14+22 Feb; Sun, 21 Feb; Metro, 22 Feb; Sunday Telegraph,
14 April 2002.
* [48] Notes Africaines,
26 April 1945; Un-named paper, 4 Nov 1903; Guardian, 12 June 1980; D.Mail,
16 Feb; Sunday Herald Sun (Melbourne), 21 Feb 1999.
* [49] Robert Eisler:
Man Into Wolf (London 1951). [50] FT45:46, 49:12.
* [51] Independent,
4 Jan; (Toronto) National Post, 9 Jan 2002.
* [52] Times of India,
18 May; The Pioneer, 27 May 2001.
* [53] Edward Burnett
Tylor: “Wild Men and Beast Children” in The Anthropological Review, v.1
(London 1863).
* [54] American Weekly,
27 Oct 1935.
* [55] [R] 17 Nov
1936.
* [56] [R] 16 Sept
1934.
Earlier feral children
reports in Fortean Times: FT1:14, 3:4, 4:14, 7:14, 24:23, 25:8, 26:5, 27:49,
32:10, 32:40, 33:18, 36:49, 42:9, 43:63, 44:4-5, 45:44-47, 47:19, 47:74,
49:12, 59:20, 85:53, 93:11, 117:22, 127:18-19, 130:18.
