Historys Most Mysterious Children Were They Even Human?

Two mysterious child cases have puzzled the world for centuries. The first involves two green-skinned children who appeared in 12th century England, speaking an unknown language and only eating green beans. The girl, Agnes, later explained they came from an underground village with no sunlight. The second case is of a girl named Pauline Picard who disappeared in 1922 France, only to be found in a town 200 miles away, unable to recognize her family or speak her native language.
A girl named Pauline Picard disappeared and was later found in a different town, but doubts arose about her identity. Tragically, a mutilated body, believed to be the real Pauline, was discovered near her home. Despite investigations and suspects, the case remained unsolved. Similarly, a boy named Bobby Dunbar vanished and was later found, but DNA tests years later suggested he wasn’t the real Bobby, leaving his fate a mystery.
Kaspar Hauser was a mysterious boy who was known for his strange behavior and multiple incidents of injury. He was cared for by a schoolmaster, Frederick Dahmer, and seemed to be doing well until he suffered several injuries, which he claimed were attacks by a hooded man. Some people believed his stories, while others thought he was a fraud seeking attention. His true identity remains a mystery, and his story is one of the most baffling unsolved child mysteries.

These children’s disappearance troubled the world for years. But when they were found, everyone wished they disappeared again. The same young spirits that once brought joy to their families now brought heartbreaks and puzzling questions to communities. Who were these children? What happened to them that turned their existence upside down? Why do these baffling child mysteries forever remain unsolved? We will find out together in this new episode of Secret Origins. Welcome. In the 12th century, England’s news outlets caught fire. One story lay on the lips of every villager, the front page of every newspaper, and on the records of every storyteller.

And this is why. Two children. A young boy and an older girl walked out of the woods in the village of Woolpit, but they were no ordinary children. One look at them, and your first guess would be that they were not from this world. Although the children looked like humans, their clothes did not. Their dressing did not follow the styles and colors known to mankind at the time. When a local farmer approached them to ask where they were from, the children could not comprehend a word the farmer said. And when they spoke, all that came out was gibberish.

But this was not the most startling part about these lost children. What shocked the villagers was the way they looked. Their skin was green in color, a bright green that seemed to glow in the dark. The strange children were brought to the home of an esteemed knight in the town, Sir Richard de Conne. Believed to be the man with the best resources to shelter the children, Sir Richard took them in. It was from his account that many writers and historians drew their stories about the mysterious children. Now, while at the house of Sir Richard, more details about the green children unfolded.

No matter what food they were offered, they could not eat it. For several days, the children starved until one food was brought to them, raw green beans. They ravished this newfound meal with joy, taking in every sprout as though it were their favorite. For months, they thrived on green beans alone. With time, they began to feel at home and even looked healthier. Under the care of Sir Richard, they gradually tried out the regular foods consumed by the villagers. As they did, their green colored skin began to fade away till it was completely gone.

But this display of belonging was short-lived. After a few months, the boy fell seriously ill. Despite interventions from the local healers, none of their remedies worked on him. He passed away shortly after, leaving the strange girl alone with Sir Richard de Conne and his family. By this time, the girl was already learning to speak English. Soon, she could speak intelligently enough to explain from whence they came. And when she did speak about it, the city was thrown into further confusion. The girl, who was later named Agnes by the night, explained that the boy with her was her brother.

Together, they came from a land where there was no sun and the light was like twilight. According to Agnes, they were both tending to their father’s flock when they saw an eerie looking cave. Curious to uncover what was inside the cave, the children moved closer. That was when they heard it. Bell sounds ringing loudly from within the dark cave. To Agnes and her brother, the bell sounds were the strangest and most beautiful thing they ever heard. So they followed it, entered the cave, and felt like they were moving to a new world. When they emerged at the other side of the cavern, they could not find their way back.

Agnes further described her home to the listening Sir Richard. She said they came from an underground village called St. Martin’s Land. In St. Martin’s Land, the inhabitants all looked, dressed, and spoke the same way. There was no daylight in the village and everyone had green skin. Agnes recalled how lush and green her world looked. Although she spoke with light in her eyes and utmost sincerity, her descriptions did not fit anywhere on planet Earth. So people conceived theories to explain where the green children of Woolpit truly came from. The villagers cooked up the idea that the children were fairies.

Perhaps they came from a fairy land whose entrance and exit gates were the woods. Since fairies are said to have such entry and exit points, this theory was perfect for the villagers at the time. However, modern theorists are making further guesses. Some say the children came from an entirely different universe with an unusual climate. This would explain the unfathomable language, the strange clothing, and their rejection of the normal food consumed by most humans. A more recent theory making the rounds is the alien thesis. Because of the recent research findings on extraterrestrial life, researchers wonder if Agnes and her brother were aliens who stumbled on our planet by mistake.

That would also explain their green skin and initial bizarre behavior. Since the green children of Woolpit mystery happened a very long time ago, many people now consider it to be folklore. We would have two, except that there are accounts from writers who interviewed the children’s caretaker, Sir Richard De Kowne, and other eyewitnesses. One of these writers was Ralph of Cogershall. His account was deemed most trusted by researchers because of his physical proximity to the source. However, Ralph told the story in a flowery manner. He inserted exaggerations where he could, adding to the mystery of the surreal story rather than demystifying it.

Another writer, William of Newberg, wrote about the life of Agnes and her brother in journalist style, sticking to the facts he got from trustworthy sources. But William’s account was placed right under Ralph’s, as he resided far north from Woolpit, a distance considered too far to have secured accurate details about the event. Despite the varying storytelling formats used by both writers, their records were similar. It was reported that Agnes stayed with Sir Richard for many years before marrying a royal official named Richard Barr. But the question about their origin remains. Modern scientists attributed their green skin to a condition called chlorosis.

This is a type of iron deficiency that they believe could have plagued the children after wandering in the woods without good food. This explanation made more sense when historians suggested that the children were Flemish refugees from the then ongoing battle of Fornham. What if they were orphaned from the war and fled to Woolpit to save their lives? This would have become the widely accepted theory, except that it was debunked by another historian. If the children were Flemish refugees and they did speak Dutch, surely an educated man like Sir Richard de Calny would have recognized it.

On and on it goes, speculations and endless theories to explain who the children were, where they came from, and what their mission was. But to date, the mysterious green children of Woolpit remain unsolved. In April 1922, the city of Brittany, France witnessed a disturbing event. Two-year-old Pauline Picard suddenly disappeared from her home without a trace, throwing her family into a frustrated frenzy. But when she was eventually found, her people had more regrets than joy. This is the mysterious story of Pauline Picard. In the small village of Goa Saludu, Pauline played on the Picard family farm.

Like any normal toddler, she wandered off in her playfulness. But when her mother searched for her, she was nowhere to be found. The Picard family set off a diligent search for their daughter. Over 150 able-bodied people went on a full-time job looking for Pauline. But the more they combed the farm and its surrounding environment, the more futile their search. The grieving family soon concluded that their daughter may have been devoured by the wild beasts of the forest. Even worse, perhaps, Pauline had either starved to death or passed away from harsh weather conditions. Gradually, the search became more passive than active.

The memory of the child lingered on the minds of her family members, who hoped that one day they could see their lost daughter again. But they did not hope for long. One month later, the police visited the home of the Picard family with a familiar photograph. It was a picture of a young girl who was found wandering by herself in a town called Sherburg. But there was one problem. Sherburg was over 200 miles away from where the Picard family resided. However, Pauline’s parents were overjoyed to see the photograph. Pauline had been found, or so they thought.

They hopped on the next train to Sherburg to retrieve their once-lost daughter. But when the Picards met the girl at Sherburg, something was amiss. The youngster did look like Pauline, but there were other glaring discrepancies. The child did not speak or understand Breton, which was the language the Picard spoke at home. And no matter how much they tried to jog her memory, the child did not seem to remember them. This newly found Pauline had Pauline Picard’s face, but showed no resemblance in personality or cognizance. The child had been malnourished and traumatized for weeks. It was normal for her to exhibit such strange behaviors.

This was what the Picards concluded before taking the young girl home. But over the next few weeks, the Picard family was restless. They could not find a suitable explanation for Pauline winding up so far away from home after one month. Her detachment and lack of familiarity with her parents and siblings also contributed to the confusion. Was this Pauline Picard? Or had they, in their search for their daughter, brought home an unintended imposter? What if the real Pauline was still out in the woods and in grave danger?. Soon enough, the Picard family got their answer.

A few weeks after the new Pauline was retrieved from Cherbourg, a farmer was cycling past the Picard’s farm when he found a horrifying sight. Barely one mile away from the farm lay the mutilated naked body of a little girl. The hands and feet were missing. But this was not all. There were more disturbing sights to uncover. Beside the mutilated body was a set of clothes neatly folded. They were later confirmed by the Picards to be the same clothes Pauline wore the day she went missing. As an awful icing on the cake, the severed head of a man lay just beside the mutilated body and neatly folded clothes.

But it was unrecognizable as the face was already eaten by foxes. Once again, Goas Al-Ludu was thrown into chaos with more questions than answers. Was the body really Pauline Picard’s? Whose severed head lay beside the body? And more importantly, if this was Pauline Picard, who was the little girl brought in from Cherbourg? The police soon arrived. For the next three torturous days, the corpses were heavily guarded as an autopsy was carried out. Unfortunately, medical examiners at the time could not establish what was the certain cause of death. Three options were considered. Violence and murder from an attacker, wild animals, or a sordid death from weather elements.

But which one was true? Newspapers sold massive numbers with the headline, two girls, one slain resemble lost child. Although the police and the picards concluded that the decomposing body was Pauline Picard, the discrepancies kept rising. How the body was found in an area that was thoroughly searched when the toddler went missing was unexplainable. This meant that whoever brought the body wanted it to be discovered. So, a search for suspects began. At first, the villagers pointed at a man named Christoph Keromon. Christoph was a farmer who occasionally worked for the picards. But there was a twist.

He had been imprisoned for rape five years before the Pauline Picard incident. On the 6th of April, 1922, the same day Pauline went missing, Keromon visited the farm and paid close attention to Pauline Picard before leaving around noon. But the fondness was not new. Keromon would always cuddle the little girl and even promised to find her a good home in another town. It was said that the two had been alone together when the child disappeared. So, when the mutilated body was found, the police arrested Keromon. However, he was later released after his alibi had been checked out.

The second suspect was a man named Eve Marta. Before the body was found, Martin had visited the Picard farm, acting uneasy and asking if the girl from Cherbourg was Pauline. After a while, he cried out, God is fair, I am guilty, before laughing hysterically and running out from the Picard home. The next day, he was admitted to an asylum. This rendered whatever testimony he might have had useless. The townspeople deduced that Martin’s breakdown may have been due to guilt from Pauline’s death. However, the news carried that Eve Marta had suffered a brain injury before his bizarre confession.

The Picard family tried to heal from the trauma of losing their child in such a gruesome manner. They buried the decomposing body with the day of death, slated as the 6th of April 1922, the day she disappeared. As they lay her on the earth, they hoped to bury their grief alongside. It was clear that this case would remain unsolved. As for the foundling, the Picard’s returned her to Cherbourg after deciding that she was not the real Pauline. It became clear that she seemed younger than their daughter. She was renamed Marie Louise Pauline and was entrusted into the care of the Franciscan sisters of Notre Dame Duvet, where she died from the measles epidemic in 1924.

If Pauline Picard’s case shook you to your bones, then brace yourself. This similar story would leave you feeling more perplexed. In 1912, a boy named Bobby Dunbar disappeared during a family fishing trip. After eight months, investigators found the child and returned him to the Dunbars. Many decades later, evidence surfaced to prove that the boy found in Mississippi was not Bobby Dunbar. So what happened to the real Bobby and who was the foundling who lived his entire life as the missing child of the Dunbars? When Bobby Dunbar was only four years old, the Dunbars embarked on a family fishing trip to Swasey Lake in St.

Landry Parish, Louisiana. On August 23rd, while on the trip, Bobby disappeared. Like in Pauline Picard’s case, Bobby’s parents invested every possible resource in looking for their child. The frantic search spanned for months. Eight months later, good news surfaced. A boy who looked like Bobby Dunbar was spotted with a man named William Cantwell Walters. The Dunbars were overjoyed. Their son had been found. But there was a problem. Although the authorities had seized Walters in wait for the Dunbar’s arrival, Walters insisted that the child was not Bobby Dunbar, but Charles Bruce Anderson. According to Walters, Bruce was the son of a family help named Julia Anderson, and she had willingly granted him custody of the child.

Julia Anderson showed up to back William Walters’ testimony and confirmed that the boy was truly her son. However, Anderson confessed that she only let him take her son on a two-day trip to see a relative. But Walters had been traveling around with her son for almost a year without her consent. The Dunbars were having none of this charade. They traveled down to see their lost son at once. One newspaper account said that once the child saw Leslie Dunbar, he screamed, mother, and embraced her. Another revealed that Leslie Dunbar said she was unsure whether the boy was her son.

Some accounts insisted that the found boy even recognized Alonzo Dunbar, the younger son of the Dunbars, while some denied this. The matter was taken to trial for fair play for Julia Anderson, two mothers looking for their lost son. Who did the child really belong to? Anderson was given her chance to identify her son. Five different boys were shown to her, but she could not accurately pick which one was Bruce Anderson. The news spread like wildfire. How can a mother not recognize her child at first glance? Anderson pleaded for a second chance.

When she undressed Bobby, she confirmed from the moles and scars on his body that he was her son. But it was too late. Her initial lack of conviction weighed against the purported reaction of the child towards Leslie Dunbar. From that moment, the boy became Bobby Dunbar, and he was happily taken home to Louisiana, where he lived with the Dunbar identity till death. Since Julia Anderson was unmarried, merely a field help, and lacked resources, she could not pursue the case any further. She went home to North Carolina and let sleeping dogs lie. But sleeping dogs would not lie forever.

In the year 2000, decades after Bobby Dunbar passed away, his granddaughter, Margaret Cutwright Dunbar, would dig up the past. With her research came shocking revelations that threatened to tear the Dunbar family apart. Margaret combed newspapers and interviewed the last of Julia Anderson’s children. Eventually, a DNA test was carried out on Bobby’s son, Bob Dunbar Jr. The result showed that he was not related by blood to his supposed cousin, who was the son of Alonzo Dunbar. Once again, media networks went into a frenzy. If the boy who lived as Bobby Dunbar was a lie, where was the real Bobby Dunbar? What if Julia Anderson had been cheated off her child? There were questions but no answers.

And to date, the mystery of Bobby Dunbar remains unsolved. In 1828, a teenage boy appeared in Nuremberg, Germany, barely able to speak or walk. All that could be used to identify his origin were two letters, which he held tightly with his head downcast. The strange youth was taken to the house of Captain von Versenig, a learned man to whom one of the letters was addressed. The anonymous author wrote that he has always had custody of the boy since he was an infant, teaching him to read and write, but never letting him leave the house.

The second letter was purportedly written by the boy’s mother to his caretaker. In this letter, she stated his name to be Kaspar and his date of birth to be the 30th of April, 1812. Although both letters were confusing, the authors agreed on one thing. Kaspar wanted to be a cavalryman like his father, and whoever found him had to grant this wish or kill him. But of course, the letters were too suspicious to be believed. The 16-year-old boy was taken to the police station where he first wrote his full name, Kaspar Hauser, and admitted to being confined by a captor all his life.

Hauser kept exhibiting contrasting signs of timidity and intelligence. Sometimes he would speak gibberish and display a limited vocabulary. At other times, he showed an excellent memory and proved to be a quick learner. Physically, he looked and acted sickly. But while at the station, officers noticed that he could climb over 90 steps to his room by himself. Hauser added to the confusion by refusing every meal aside from bread and water. This led to buzzing theories about the true identity of the boy and the reason for his absurd behavior. Eventually, Hauser was kept in the care of a schoolmaster and speculative philosopher called Frederick Dahmer, where he flourished and learned a variety of subjects.

Everything seemed to be going fine with the bewildering teen. But in October 1829, this changed. On the 17th of the same month, Kaspar was found bleeding from a cut wound to his head. He claimed to have been attacked by a hooded man who bore a resemblance to the man who first brought him to Nuremberg. But Hauser’s story seemed implausible. Skeptic suggested that Hauser was a fraud who hurt himself to gain attention. In 1830, barely six months after the first incident, Hauser was found bleeding from a surface head wound in his room. This time, he claimed to have shot himself by mistake while trying to get a book from the top shelf where a pistol lay.

On the 9th of December 1933, there was yet another attack, and this time it was the final one. Hauser claimed to have been lured to Annsbach Court Garden, where a stranger stabbed his chest after handing him a purse. The purse contained a penciled note which read, Hauser will be able to tell you quite precisely how I look and from where I am. To save Hauser the effort, I want to tell you myself from where I come. I come from the Bavarian border, on the river. I will even tell you the name, MLO.

Hauser died three days later from the wound, muttering gibberish similar to what he spoke on the first day he was found. This is the strangest story of all, as Caspar Hauser’s true identity could not be guessed. Some thought he was a prince and others thought he was a fraud, who needed to make a name at the time. But who was Caspar Hauser really? These are the stories of the most baffling child mysteries that remain unsolved. The green children of Woolpit, the mistaken Pauline Picard, Bobby Dunbar who lived his whole life as a lie, and the infamous Caspar Hauser, whose identity eludes historians to this day.

Where did these mysterious children all come from? Would it have been better for their families if they were never found? We also lack the answers. If you enjoyed this video, please drop a like and subscribe to the channel to be the first to get more of our videos. Keep your minds open and until we meet again. [tr:trw].