Kaspar Hauser Came to Town

copy of The Arcane Arts. We had a great time writing it. I really think if you like this podcast, I think you'll enjoy it. That said, let's get into the episode. Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky. Listener discretion advised. On May twenty sixth, eighteen twenty six, a cobbler named Georg Leonard Weike was walking through the town of Nuremberg. Even though it was the afternoon, the city was sparse,

almost abandoned. It was a holiday, and many of the town's residents were off in the countryside enjoying the nice spring weather. But something caught Vicman's eye as he walked a young man, maybe a teenager of sixteen or seventeen, stumbling awkwardly down a nearby hill. The boy was stocky, with an unusual lumbering gait and blue eyes that seemed to Vicman almost vacant. The boy shouted a phrase that can be translated to hey lad, a casual greeting that

masters would use to greet their apprentices. Oddly casual for a teenager to use toward an adult man in his fifties, which Bekman was. The boy also called out the name of a shrew, and generously Vicmann agreed to help the strange vagrant boy to his destination. It soon became apparent that this boy only knew a few phrases, which he repeated over and over. One of those phrases was I want to be a cavalry man like my father was. But where had this boy come from? A wandering stranger

who stumbled out of the forest and into Nuremberg. Eventually Vickman brought him to the police station and more of the boy's story would emerge. The boy's name was Casper Hauser, and according to him and the letters he had been carrying on his person, he had lived his entire life up until this point in a solitary cell, raised entirely alone in isolation, A man wearing a mask had given

him water and bread every day. On occasion, the water would be more bitter than normal, and casper Hauser would awaken the next day to find that his hair and nails had been cut and his straw had been changed. That was the extent of his human interaction. He didn't know the difference between night and day. The story was astonishing, and almost immediately casper Hauser became famous around Europe, a strange, savage boy raised in conditions of such enthralling cruelty, under

such mysterious conditions. Philosophers from the seventeenth century on had become fascinated by legends and stories of enph savages or children who were raised by animals. For what those stories might reveal about humanity? What was it that made us human? Was it something inherent inside of man? Or was it something learned? There were also religious implications to these stories. Would a child raised by animals understand or know God? Would he be innocent of all of the sins of man?

For ever? Childlike beyond the salaciousness of his alleged origin. From the moment Casper Hauser stumbled down the hill into Nuremberg, he became a symbol for the big philosophical questions that had been captivating Europe for a century, a living experiment. As Martin Kitchen wrote in his book, Casper Hauser Europe's child quote. Here was a blank screen on which could be projected the fantasies of those with whom he came

into close contact. Here was another of those wild children who people ancient mythology, and who had appeared infrequently in Europe since the fourteenth century, and had excited philosophers and medical men to speculate on the nature of men. But of course, given just how salacious and mysterious this foundling child was, there was also going to be rumors. Why had this boy been hidden away for so long and under such extreme conditions, If not because those in power

had a reason for doing it. It sounds like something out of a fairy tale, that a lost, orphaned child might be something more than he first appears. But the rumors began swirling. Casper Hauser, they said, wasn't just a lost child. He was a lost prince. I'm Danish worts and this is noble blood. It's a fantasy. I think that everybody has probably had at least once, a fantasy popularized by Sigmund Freud, that your parents secretly adopted you,

and that your real parents are wealthy, powerful royal. And so maybe it's inevitable that when a boy stumbled into Nuremberg under mysterious circumstances, the questions would begin swirling about who he really was and where he came from. When Casper Hauser first appeared, his walk unsteady and his language limited,

he carried with him two letters. The first was purportedly written by his mother, announcing that his name was Casper, he was born on April thirtieth, eighteen twelve, and that his father, now deceased, had been a cavalryman of the sixth Regiment. The second letter was from Casper Hauser's mysterious case caretaker or jailer. The masked man that Casper recalled had brought him bread and water. The letter was addressed to Captain Vaughan Wessening, commander of the sixth Cavalry Regiment.

It read quote, I am a poor laborer with ten children of my own. I have enough to do just to keep them alive. His mother asked me to bring up the boy. I raised him as a Christian, and since eighteen twelve I have never let him go a step away from the house. So no one knows where he has been brought up, and he himself does not know the name of my house nor of the place. You might ask him, but he can't tell you. Ah, So anyone trying to figure out where Casper had come

from would be hitting a dead end. There. The letter continued, saying that Captain van Wessoning could take the boy into his regiment or quote hang him by the chimney, the sort of cruelty one might expect from a man who kept a child imprisoned in a cell his entire life. When the people of Nuremberg asked Casper more questions, trying to get any more information from him, he only repeated, I want to be a cavalryman as my father was.

Or don't know. He could also say horse. Casper was delivered to von Wessening's stable, but the captain was understandably confused and put off. A servant offered Casper beer and meat, but he refused. He did, however, accept water and bread He was brought to the police station, where they determined that Casper was able to write his own name and had basic familiarity with Christian prayers. His clothing was awkwardly

sown and ill fitting. His boots were too small. The initial K was sewn into his jacket and his handkerchief. Among his personal effects were a rosary, a worn out key, a prayer book, a few religious tracts, and, most odd of all, allegedly a folded envelope of paper containing a

bit of gold dust. But Casper had no papers, and given that he couldn't reply meaningfully to any questions, it was assumed he was a vagrant and he was sent to prison, although it was specified that given his strange circumstances, he would be locked up with quote decent prisoners instead of the other random vagrants and beggars. Casper Hauser spent two months in prison in the castle in Nuremberg, during which time he became a tourist attraction, with visitors stopping

by in order to see the intriguing foundling. Raised in isolation, Casper seemed to be making remarkable progress with regards to his physical condition, where he had been awkwardly lumbering. When he first appeared seemingly barely able to walk, he had been able to climb more than ninety steps up to his cell without a problem. Gradually, more details about Casper's life would come to light, although notably Casper had no ill will toward his captor nor anger about how he

was raised. Apparently, every morning when he woke up, he would find a loaf of black bread and a pitcher of water. He had only two wooden horse toys and one wooden dog toy to play with, and a wooden lidded container that he used as a commode. His door was bolted on the outside, and wood was piled against the room's small windows, so that he never saw sunlight,

never learn the difference between night and day. One day, Casper had been given a sheet of paper and a pencil, and his anonymous captor reached into the dungeon room to teach Casper how to write his own name. He also taught him how to walk a few steps, and taught him the simple phrases to repeat that he had said when he had first arrived in Nuremberg. And then Casper Hauser, approximately sixteen years old, was released into the wilds of

human civilization. The people of Nuremberg could barely believe how cruel and strange this boy's saga had been. The president of the Bavarian Court of Appeals, a man named Anselm von Feuerbach, took a particular interest in investigating the case, and the city of Nuremberg itself formally adopted Casper Hauser, with donations raised to pay for his care and schooling. Casper was placed in the household of a man named

Friedrich Dahmer, a schoolmaster and philosopher. Dahmer, understandably fascinated by Casper, began to treat him like a science experiment. Casper Hauser's physical condition continued to improve. He allegedly grew two inches in a single month, and according to Dahmer, his senses were astonishingly acute. He had an animal like ability to see in the dark, to make out impossibly faint sounds, and to taste if his water had been diluted with

even one drop of something else. Despite attempts to feed him a more varied diet, Casper only wanted bread and water, and only after a few months was he able to eat small amounts of meat occasionally he would suffer extreme convulsions. Casper continued to learn rom remarkably fast. Soon he was able to write and speak, identifying jokes even and Dahmer discovered he had a talent for drawing. Dahmer was also interested in using Casper for homeopathic experiments and experiments with

animal magnetism, a popular idea in nineteenth century Germany. He was given homeopathic tinctures, some of which made him sick, and he was frequently waved over with magnets and fed magnetized water, although personally I'm not sure exactly what they were trying to accomplish with that. As Kitchen wrote, quote, he was used as a guinea pig by cranks and

amateurs who gained nothing from their experiments. He was so frightened of these experiments that it was impossible to tell whether the often violent reactions were caused by the homeopathic

medicines or by sheer terror. When he was ill, the medicines he was given made him feel worse, and it seemed to him that the medical profession devoted its efforts towards torturing their unfortunate subjects and making the healthy sick, all the while the mystery of his origin and his true identity continued to be the center of conversations around

Nuremberg and all across Europe. Casper Hauser, the abused, imprisoned child who escaped his mysterious confinement with an innocent, almost animal like naivete, and who now among humanity, was making enormous strides of progress. I mean, how could the writers resist? Was he really just a random foundling? It seemed unlikely.

Why had there been such an effort to keep him hidden if not for the fact that Casper house Us was secretly someone important, Consider the fact that he had been confined and imprisoned, but otherwise kept in remarkably good health and in hygienic conditions. No masked man had been identified, and there were no leads as to where Casper Hauser had actually come from, despite large rewards from police for

any information. Surely people whispered that was a sign that this was the work of rich and powerful people, able to cover their tracks so completely that they would never be caught. And despite the fact that he had barely been able to write his name, Casper Hauser was by this point fluent and quick to learn. There seemed to be something innately extraordinary about him. This was no ordinary boy.

People believed. It seemed obvious that he was someone special, someone noble, someone royal even, But why had he been imprisoned and hidden away? And by who? And if he

wasn't merely Casper Hauser, then who was he. Charles, the Grand Duke of Boden hadn't been happy about the fact that he had to marry Stephanie de Bornay, but Napoleon's France was becoming more powerful, and Stephanie was Napoleon's de facto adopted daughter, a relative of Napoleon's wife Josephine, and so the Grand Duke married her, and despite the fact that the two didn't really get along, they managed to

have five children. Unfortunately for them, none of their surviving children were male heirs, and so after Charles the Grand Duke died in eighteen eighteen, the Duchy of Baden went to his uncle Louis the First. But maybe things weren't quite as straightforward as they seemed. Charles and Stephanie had had a son, an infant prince, born on September twenty ninth, eighteen twelve, but the baby boy died after only a

few weeks, but had he. When casper Hauser appeared on the European scene, rumors began to spread that the current Duke Louise's mother had schemed to put her son on the throne by stealing away the rightful prince and replacing him in his bassinet with a sickly commoner. Was casper

Hauser the missing prince? With those rumors, In the words of Kitchen, casper Hauser quote wasn't just a symbol for primitive beauty and the purity of man's animal nature, but of the perfidity of the royal family, especially among the

German radical of the nineteenth century. To those who had already hated the nobility that they saw as corrupt and indulgent, it seemed perfectly in line with their cruelty that they might steal away a baby and torture him in isolation for a decade so that their own son might inherit a throne. Supporting casper Hauser as a missing prince became a way to attack and delegitimize the current regime. There

were other theories about who casper Hauser was. If he was a noble, maybe he was the son of a Hungarian countess or an English royal, but something about his appearance and the peculiarity of his case led many to believe that something nefarious was going on, especially after the attack on Casper Hauser's life. In October of eighteen twenty nine, while living with the teacher Dahmer, Casper Hauser and his

guardian had gotten into some small disagreements. Casper was indulging in the dishonesties of a child skipping school and not telling the truth about it. Dahmer was also getting a little frustrated with his quote unquote scientific experiments on Casper, seeing that the more Casper adjusted to civilized society, the more he seemed to be losing whatever mystical quality he

had had in the first place. One day in October of eighteen twenty nine, more than a year after Casper had first arrived in Nuremberg, Casper and Dahmer had quarreled after Casper had been caught playing hooky. The next day, Dahmer returned home to a startling scene. Casper had a large gash on his forehead. It had dripped blood all the way from the outhouse through the first first floor

of the house. According to Casper, a hooded man had attacked him in the outhouse, shouting, you still have to die before you leave the city of Nuremberg, And though Casper wasn't able to see the man's face, he knew it was the man who had kept him captive all of those years, the mysterious man who had brought him bread and water and taught him how to write his own name. The incident garnered sympathy among Casper's supporters and

renewed public interest in his case. One person who found himself fascinated by this strange story out of Germany was a British nobleman named Lord Stanhope. Stanhope was the nephew of Prime Minister William Pitt, but his immediate family was notably eccentric, and he himself was a much remark upon germanophile. Stanhope met Casperhauser in May eighteen thirty one, and he became obsessed the sort of flare of quick intimacy that

sometimes happens among new friends. Stanhope declared that there was no doubt in his mind that Casper Hauser was in fact of noble birth, and he began to shower him with expensive presence. He gave Casper a life annuity of five hundred goldens and one hundred goldens as pocket money, which I'm sure was something of a weight off of the shoulders of the town administrators of Nuremberg, who had up until that point been paying for Casper Hauser's upkeep.

Within no time at all, stan Hope and Hauser were calling each other by their first names, so close that some speculated that the relationship was sexual in nature. Stanhope got it into his mind that Casper Hauser's true mother was a Hungarian countess, and so he took Casper on a trip to Hungary to see if anything might jog his memory. Though Hauser's seemed to recognize a few Hungarian phrases, the trip itself did not prove anything, and ultimately it

was a failure. And in failure, the eccentric, impatient Stanhope found that Hauser now left a bad taste in his mouth. With the same speed that had characterized the beginning of their friendship, now Stanhope turned against Casper Hauser. This wholesome, wide eyed, innocent was now clingy and annoying, and though Stanhope had promised that he would take Hauser with him

back to England. He changed his mind and instead deposited the young man in Unsbach with a schoolmaster and under the patronage of Anselm von Furbeck, that legal scholar and president of the Bavarian Court of Appeals I had mentioned earlier. Stanhope wasn't alone in souring on Casper house Er. There were plenty of people who saw him as a sideshow, distraction, or else an abject fraud to quote Kitchen again quote.

Many resented his fame, found his character unattractive, commented bitterly on his arrogance, his mendacity, and his absurd pretensions to gentility. It was grotesque to people of a conservative event that this somewhat ridiculous figure should be the darling of assorted radicals, devotees of alternative medicine, and practitioners of experimental pedagogy. The anti Hussarians saw the whole fuss as further evidence of the absurdity of radical pretensions and as an underhand attack

on the established order end quote. But was it possible he wasn't just pretentious and absurd. Was it possible he was a complete fraud? Had he stabbed himself shallowly in the outhouse in order to garner sympathy. Was it possible Casper Hauser had never been imprisoned at all, never raised in his strange isolation. After all, there was no proof

of it, No criminal had been caught. It seemed that Casper Hauser was simple minded and innocent to some degree, but he also had a mean edge, and he could be vain and prone to small, self aggrandizing lies, although even his sins could be explained away by his most ardent supporters. See see how even a short time among the so called civilized society corrupts the pure and innocent among us. The schoolmaster that Casper Hauser was living with

in Ansbach was named Johann Meyer. Meyer seemed uninterested and unwilling to indulge Hauser's behavior when he acted out, and he found the young man a job at a local law office, doing menial work as a copyist. As a side note, it is extraordinary to imagine, just from a psychological development perspective, that if Casper Hauser did in fact live his entire life in isolation, that five years after re entering society he would be capable of working a

standard administrative job. But he was even so Johann Meyer and Casper Hauser didn't get along, and on December ninth, eighteen thirty three, they had a fight. Less than a week later, Casper Hauser would have his final adventure, the last mysterious piece of the puzzle in his mysterious life. On December fourteenth, eighteen thirty three, Casper Hauser stumbled back into Johann Meyer's house, leading from a slash across his chest. While he gasped for air, he managed to explain what

had happened to him. A stranger had found him in the end back court gardens, had handed him a purse, and then, when Casper accepted it, had stabbed him. As Casper bled in Meyer's house, he tried to explain that they needed to find the purse. He had dropped it somewhere in the gardens, but Casper was going pale. He managed to mutter a few more phrases that were impossible to make out, and then he fainted. Six days later, Casper Hauser died. He had been murdered. His exit from

German society was as mysterious as his entrance. Policemen trawled the court gardens and found what they assumed to be the purse from Hauser's story with a penciled note written in backwards mirror writing. When translated, it read in German, 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 where I come. And then there's a blank space. I come from from blank space, the Bavarian border, blank space on the river,

blank space. I will even tell you the name m l O. Who had written this note? And what did it mean? Was Casper Hauser secretly a noble that needed to be done away with before the truth about his origin was revealed? Was the man that murdered him the same man who had kept him prisoner? Surely his violent murder proved that he was someone that those in power were trying to quiet. There was no real consensus at the time. The alleged murderer was never found and no

more details came to light. His headstone read here lies Casperuser. Riddle of his time, His birth was unknown, his death mysterious eighteen thirty three. But was he actually a missing prince? Even in the nineteenth century, plenty of people pointed out that it was unlikely. Otto Middelstad wrote in eighteen seventy six about how impossible it would have been to reasonably

swap out the Royal Baden baby. He wrote, quote, the baby's father, grandmother, and aunt, with the ten Court physicians, the nurses and others would have seen a swap in death, and it is too absurd to suppose, on no authority that they were all parties to the plot end quote. There were enough inconsistencies in Hauser's story to wonder even

if he had ever been captive at all. In the manner he described was Casper Hausers he was well developed physically and relatively capable cognitively in a way most people today would find implausible for someone who had been raised for years in a single room with no human interaction.

As for his mysterious injuries, his stabbings by a mysterious man who was never caught, did Hauser actually do them to himself for sympathy, for attention, to bring people around to his side, to make himself feel important, for people

to pay attention to his story again? Today, some historians believe that Casper Hauser's death was actually a tragic accident that he invented the story of the masked man and the purse in the garden, and that he had written and folded the mirror code letter and then stabbed himself, but made a mistake and accidentally went to deep with

the knife. A twenty twenty three study indicated that Casper Hauser had the mark of having received a cowpox vaccination to prevent smallpox, which was mandatory in Bavaria since eighteen o seven. A mark from a vaccination indicated that he had in fact grown up not in isolation but in

contact with other people. A much publicized DNA test of the mitochondrial DNA from Casperhauser's bloodstained undergarments by the German magazine Der Spiegel in nineteen ninety six proved once and for all that Casper Hauser was not, in fact a member of the Royal House of Baden, although of course those who still believe that he was a prince find ways to claim that the test was either mistaken or corrupted, will probably never discover the truth behind the strange story

of Casper Hauser. Quote. His story acquired an importance which in no way belonged to it. Stanhope wrote after he was disillusioned, and yet Casper Hauser has captivated audiences for literal centuries. You might be familiar with the Werner Herzog film about him. The most likely version of the story, if you had to ask me, is something somewhere in the middle. Maybe Casper Hauser was a boy from the

countryside who was treated very poorly, even abused. Maybe he was the illegitimate son of a woman whose family hid him in shame. Maybe he was born with some disabilities that would have been treated with care and sympathy today. When he was sixteen, whoever had been feeding him had dropped him off to fend for himself. And from there this young man became came both victim and benefactor to the desires of a rapacious public, who saw in him whatever they wanted to see. He was a perfect innocent

He was a science experiment. He was a philosophical riddle for gossiping about after dinner. He was a manipulative liar. He was an example of the systems depravity. He was a murder mystery. He was a prince. In the end, maybe he was just a person. That's the story of Casper Hauser. But keep listening. After a brief sponsor break to hear about another murder that led to even more questions in this mysterious case. I briefly mentioned Anselm Rider

von Fuerbach in this episode. He was a German administrator and legal scholar who was particularly interested in the Casper Hauser case. From a legal perspective, he was a reformer of the Bavarian penal code, and he was a staunch defender early on of Hauser. He wrote a book about Hauser in which he used him to argue the point that the isolation and abuse he endured was tantamount to

a quote crime against the human soul. On May twenty ninth, eighteen thirty three, Furbach died on a journey to Frankfurt. He was only fifty seven years old, and the circumstances of his death made it ripe for gossip and theories. After all, he was a prominent and public advocate for Casper Hauser. Maybe someone had poisoned him. There is no proof that he was poisoned, and a little ironically, he had actually come to the conclusion before his death that

Casper Hauser was in fact a scheming fraud. But his death still became fodder for those connecting the dots in a vast conspiracy. Casper Hauser himself was killed only later that year. Noble Blood is a production of iHeart Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manke. Noble Blood is hosted by me Dana Schwartz. Writers for Noble Blood are Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zwick, Paul Jaffey, Natasha Laski, and me

Dana Schwartz. The show is edited and produced by Jesse Funk and Nomes Griffin, with supervising producerrima Ill Kali and executive producers Aaron Manke, Trevor Young, and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.