Pod Insights Heart Starts Pounding: Horrors, Hauntings and Mysteries 166. Feral Children: The Wolf Girl of Devils River, The Ukrainian Dog Girl, and The Kellogg Experiment About this episode Go to https://kachava.com and use code HSP for 15% off your first order.
Feral Children used to be the stuff of legends, but their stories are shocking, devastating, and real. Today, we're diving into multiple stories of feral children: the girl who was raised by her dog when her parents forgot about her, the legend of the wolf girl of Devils River, and the human experiment where a scientist tried to raise his son alongside a chimpanzee to unforeseen consequences.
TW: Child Abuse, Animal Abuse, and Mention of Suicide
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Kaelyn Moore? This episode is brought to you by Primally Pure. I feel like every time I run out of a product in my bathroom, I have this moment where I go, okay, do I just order the same thing? Or do I finally make a better swap? And that thinking is exactly what got me into Primally Pure. They're a female founded brand that keeps it really simple. Fewer, better ingredients, and nothing you can't pronounce. I just got an order from Primally Pure and I am obsessed with their lip oil. I also got Eucalyptus and Lavender Body Butter, which has spa vibes for sure. If you want an easy starting point, their Clean Start Bundle is a great place to start. For under $50, you get three everyday essentials. Their best selling aluminum free deodorant, a mini body butter, and the lip oil that I love. It's also a really thoughtful gift if you know someone
0:45 Kaelyn Moore? who's been wanting to clean up their routine. Use code HSP to get 15% off your Primally Pure purchase. That's www.p r i m a l l y p u r e dot com and use code HSP at checkout for 15% off your order. Welcome back to Heart Starts Pounding, a podcast of horrors, hauntings, and mysteries. I'm your host, Kayla Moore. For hundreds of years, there's been legends of children that live in the woods who were entirely raised by animals. Well, what if I told you the legend was actually true? And not only that, but the real stories behind the legend are far more strange and at times devastating than you would ever imagine. And what if I told you that someone once tried to do
1:28 Kaelyn Moore? a very inhuman human experiment to figure out why this was happening? Well, we're going to get into all of that today here at Heart Starts Pounding. The legend, the truth, the experiments. So buckle up because it's going to get dark and historical. Two of my favorite things. But before we dive in, I wanted to take a second to say, thank you, guys. March marks three years of weekly Heart Starts Pounding episodes. It's actually wild to me that it's been three years. I know some of you have been here the entire time. I'm so thankful for each and every one of you and I wanted to do something to say thank you. So we're turning all of March into Listener Appreciation Month. First, we're gonna do free shipping across the entire Heart Starts Pounding store at heartstartspounding.com. And of course, Patreon and Apple subscribers, you have
2:11 Kaelyn Moore? your usual discounts as well. The code will be auto-applied at checkout where available. I wish we could make it work in every country, but we have a couple limitations. Second, I wanted to give some free things away, so we're gonna do something on Instagram called "Where I Listen." I wanna see where you listen to Heart Starts Pounding. Old cemeteries, a haunted hospital, maybe while you crochet on your couch, whatever it is, post a photo on Instagram with the hashtag #WhereIListenHSP, or you can tag me in your story. That's @HeartSartsPounding. I'm gonna feature some of my favorites and send you a code to something free on the Heart Starts Pounding store. Maybe a notebook, maybe a hoodie, maybe a mysterious potion I've concocted. Who knows? Make it weird and creepy, guys. I know you have it in you. And lastly, this month, we're gonna be doing a
2:55 Kaelyn Moore? small business spotlight for some of our listeners. We are a small business here at Heart Starts Pounding ourselves, and we have a lot of listeners out there hustling and doing their own thing. So we put out a call through Patreon a few weeks back, and we're gonna be featuring some of those businesses each week in the episode and on the Heart Starts Pounding Instagram. We've ordered a lot of cool stuff from these businesses that I wanna show off. So this week, I actually wanted to shout out our listeners who own the Wicked Wick Candle Company. I ordered some candles from them, and they sent me a few extra, which was so nice of them. But I have to shout out their After Dark Candle Collection. You guys, they sent me a candle called "Holy Ground" that smells like a cemetery. It's like fresh earth and rain, and when I smell it,
3:38 Kaelyn Moore? I feel like I'm a ghost. I'm obsessed with it. It's awesome. The After Dark Collection also includes a candle called "Lost in the Stacks," which smells like an old Victorian library. Think old books and perfume. There's also a candle called "Seance" that smells like, quote, "A whisper in the dark, a curl of phantom smoke, and the faint sweetness of smoldering vanilla drifting through candlelight. I cannot wait to light this one while I write something spooky at night." Check them out. I'm gonna include a link in the description, and I'm gonna tag them on our Instagram, @HeartSartsPounding. Okay, geez, enough yapping on my part. Let's get into it. And to start Listener Appreciation Month, I wanted to do the most requested episode topic of all time from you guys: feral children.
4:28 Kaelyn Moore? It's when your heart starts pounding.
4:33 Kaelyn Moore? One cold evening in 1991, an older couple was laying in bed in a small village in Ukraine when they heard a strange sound. There was a rustling coming from just outside their window and a low, soft growling noise. Something must have gotten into the trash, though this didn't really sound like any animal they recognized. The old woman looked at her husband and told him to go see what it was. He got up, he went to the window, and all of a sudden, he screamed for his wife to come quick. There, sniffing around the trash was a large dog, but next to it was an eight-year-old girl behaving just like the dog. She was crouched on all fours, she was covered in dirt, and she was growling
5:14 Kaelyn Moore? and eating from the trash the same as the dog. Authorities eventually came to investigate the scene, and what they found was, in fact, an eight-year-old girl who appeared to be more dog than human. She ran on all fours easily and naturally, the way you or I might jog. She barked, she growled, she whined to communicate. She had this full vocabulary of dog sounds that she used the way any dog would. She ate by putting her face directly into her food and using her tongue, not her hands. She panted with her tongue out when she was hot. She cleaned herself by licking. She also had an incredibly acute sense of smell and hearing. It was like she could identify people by scent before she even
5:56 Kaelyn Moore? saw them. But authorities had the same question that I had when I first heard about this story. How did this happen? The girl, Oksana Malaya, was born on November 4, 1983, in a small village called Nova Blahuvishenska in the southern part of what was then the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. By all accounts, she was an average baby. Healthy, alert, she met developmental milestones that doctors looked for in the first year of her life, but her parents were very, very, very heavy drinkers, the kind who drank until they forgot they had responsibilities, such as looking after their children. And it seemed like one night, when Oksana was about three years old, they forgot about her entirely.
6:40 Kaelyn Moore? It was winter in Ukraine. That night, it was piercingly cold out. And the little Oksana had been left outside, alone in the dark. At just three years old, her parents forgot to unlock the door so she could come back into the house, and she didn't know what to do. She didn't really know how to get back inside on her own. But she knew where there was warmth. See, behind their house, there was a kennel where the family dog slept, a mutt named Nida. And without really any other option, Oksana crawled inside the kennel. She curled up against the dog's warm body, and Nida kept her warm that night. But after that, her parents didn't really come looking for her. Maybe they just forgot about her. Maybe Oksana figured it was safer to stay with
7:24 Kaelyn Moore? Nida than with her parents. But what happened over the next five years completely shocked the authorities. Oksana lived in the kennel with Nida. She only spent time with her and other dogs that were in the area, and she learned to survive by doing what the dogs did. At first, she would just speak to the dogs as if they were other children, but when they would bark or pant back at her, she would repeat it until she was speaking more "dog" than "human." She ate exactly what they ate, which was mostly scraps that were thrown into the yard, and she drank the way they drank, lapping up water from bowls. And I will say, she did sound like a very convincing dog. Like, here's a clip of her barking that was shown on 60 Minutes Australia.
8:15 Kaelyn Moore? Oksana is one of the best documented cases of feral children that we have, and scientists were actually able to learn a lot about early childhood development from her. For instance, what happens to a child's brain when they're no longer learning from other humans? Well, there's a concept in psychology that's called the critical period. It's this window of time, usually in early childhood, when the brain is primed to learn certain things, things like language, social bonding, emotional regulation. The brain is essentially waiting for specific inputs, ready to build the neural architecture it needs to process them. But if those inputs don't come during the Critical period, that window starts to close. Hence why it's called critical. The brain stops waiting for those inputs and instead it just prunes away the unused neural
8:59 Kaelyn Moore? pathways and moves on. For language, the critical period is roughly birth to puberty with the most crucial years being the first five, which is exactly when Oksana stopped talking to other people and started only communicating with dogs. But because Oksana had some language exposure in the first three years of her life, when she was living with her family, she was actually able to relearn language after she was rescued. But five years of living with dogs instead of people still rewired her brain in very profound ways. After Oksana was rescued from the situation and placed in an institution, rehabilitation took years. She had to relearn how to walk upright on two feet again.
9:42 Kaelyn Moore? She had to relearn how to use utensils, how to speak. By her early twenties, Oksana could speak fluently. She learned to walk again, she could dress herself, and she could function in ways that seemed impossible when she was first found. But there were definitely limits to the way she could function, hard limits that all the therapy in the world was not fixing for her. In 2006, a British child psychologist named Lynn Frye conducted a detailed assessment of Oksana, and what she found really alarmed her. Even though Oksana was 23 years old at the time, her drawing skills and hand-eye coordination was that of a five or six-year-old child. Her overall mental capacity was equivalent to a six-year-old's. She could count, but she couldn't really add numbers together. She couldn't read fluently.
10:27 Kaelyn Moore? She couldn't correctly spell her own name. There were definitely parts of her development that felt like they were frozen in time from when she first moved into the dog kennel. And her speech, while she was technically fluent again, had a quality that Frye described as odd. It was flat. It lacked the natural cadence of a human conversation. Frye came to the conclusion that Oksana did not have the social or cognitive abilities to live independently. She said that the critical window had closed. And today, as far as we know. Oksana is 41 years old. She still lives at that same care facility near Odessa where she was placed as a child. She works on the farm there. She milks cows and cares for animals. She receives a government pension.
11:12 Kaelyn Moore? And though she'll never live on her own, she seems to have a somewhat fulfilling life. But the trauma of her childhood still follows her. In an interview, a journalist asked her about her life now, and Oksana answered, quote, "When I feel lonely, I find myself doing anything. I crawl on all fours. This is how lonely I feel." And that statement really stuck with me when I first read it, because what if some of the psychologists overlooked a part of Oksana's story? What if when they were looking into what made her a dog, they forgot about the part of her that made her human? Psychologists were really quick to use Oksana as a test subject. She was a perfect specimen in some
11:54 Kaelyn Moore? ways. You can't really do experiments where you have animals raise humans, because obviously that's very unethical. Not that that has stopped a lot of experiments from happening in the past, which we have talked about a lot on this show. So you just have to wait for a feral child to be discovered, which is why some scientists were so excited when they found Oksana. But at the core of this story, I'd see this little girl who was rejected by the two people who were supposed to love her the most, and instead, she was fully accepted by Nida, her dog. So when she feels lonely, she repeats the behaviors that made her feel loved and accepted. And reading about Oksana's story really got me thinking about these types of kids, the ones we describe as feral children. And it turns out that
12:39 Kaelyn Moore? as sad and as horrible as her story is, she's not the only one that's gone through this. Throughout history, there have been many accounts of feral children, but not all of them were rescued like Oksana was. And that brings me to the next story I want to tell you about, the wolf girl of Devil's River.
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14:02 Kaelyn Moore? In 1845, in what's now Del Rio, Texas, a young boy is out in the field watching his family's goats. He knows to watch the animals closely because there's wolves in the woods. And sure enough, as he gazes towards the tree line, he sees them, a pack, maybe five or six strong, running through the bush towards his herd. But there was something wrong about this scene, something that brings to mind the awful legends he's heard his whole life. Because running alongside them, keeping pace, moving on all fours, is something that's not a wolf at all. It looks like a little girl. She's naked, she's covered in dirt, she has long matted hair streaming behind her like a dark flag.
14:47 Kaelyn Moore? She moves with the pack like she belongs to it. Her hands and feet are hitting the ground in the same rhythm as their paws. And when they reach the goats, she doesn't hang back. She doesn't hesitate at all. She attacks with the wolves, tearing at the animals with her hands and teeth, snarling and ripping their flesh like she's done this 100 times. The boy doesn't move at all during this. He's completely frozen. Instead, he watches until they disappear into the brush, dragging their kill with them. And when he runs back to town and tries to tell people what he saw, most of them laugh at him. A naked girl running with wolves? Sure, kid. But a few of the older folk exchanged these worried looks
15:30 Kaelyn Moore? because they all grew up hearing a really devastating legend of the area. But they always thought that it was just that, a legend. And now they weren't so sure. The legend goes that back in May of 1835, a young couple named John and Molly Dent were living in an isolated cabin near the Devil's River in southwest Texas, right next to a place called Espantoza Lake. And the land itself had quite the reputation. Espantoza means frightful or frightening in Spanish, and the stories about that lake went back decades. A mysterious fog that rolled in without warning, sightings of strange creatures in the water, rumors of spectral headless riders who appeared on the shores.
16:15 Kaelyn Moore? The indigenous people of the region totally avoided it, and the Mexican settlers crossed themselves when they passed nearby. It was not a place you wanted to be alone. But this couple, John and Molly, were very much alone. The area was totally isolated, except for the two of them. No one else would get near it. When, all of a sudden, one night during a violent thunderstorm, Mary went into labor. And John could tell something was not right during Mary's labor. Their closest neighbors were these goat ranchers who lived miles away. So John decided that he needed to ride out and find help. But unfortunately, he never made it back. He was struck by lightning and killed during the journey.
16:59 Kaelyn Moore? The next day, goat ranchers found Molly's body out in the brush near their home. She must have gone searching for John. But what they didn't find near her body was her baby. The ranchers could see that all around her body, though, were these wolf tracks. So they kind of assumed the obvious, that wolves must have come to the scene and taken the baby, carried it off into the night after searching for food in the storm. So they buried Molly near the cabin, and they said a prayer for her. And that's where the story might have ended, filed away as just another frontier tragedy.
17:34 Kaelyn Moore? Except years later, many people in the area would claim to see a young girl running with a pack of wolves. In 1846, a full year after that first boy's sighting, a Mexican woman living near San Felipe Springs came forward with her own story of seeing a young girl running with a pack of wolves. And then Apache trackers in the area reported finding a child's footprints mixed with wolf tracks in the sandy soil along Devil's River. Sometimes the footprints were accompanied by handprints pressed into the ground beside them, like whoever made them had been running on all fours. By this point, the legend had a name, the Wolf Girl of Devil's River.
18:15 Kaelyn Moore? And someone decided that it was time to do something about it. A group of local men decided to organize a hunt. They wanted to capture the girl, bring her back to civilization, and save her from the wild. This hunt lasted for days. They tried to track her all throughout the brush, following wolf prints towards the lake, but didn't see any sight of her. That is, until the third day. She was running with the wolves, naked and wild, her hair streaming behind her like it always did. And the men chased after her. They cornered her near the river's edge. And according to the tale, what happened next was complete chaos. The girl was screaming in sounds that weren't words. She was howling like a wolf. The wolves started howling back at her.
19:00 Kaelyn Moore? All the horses panicked, but the men couldn't catch her. The wolves came to her aid, and in the confusion, she slipped away. After that, there were just a few scattered reports of seeing her. A few more sightings over the years, but she was never caught. Unlike Oksana, she was never brought back to tell her story. And with nearly 200 years passed since then, people have started questioning if these stories were anything more than just legends. But decades after her last sighting, there would be another feral children case that would take the world by storm and would even be taught in textbooks for decades. And unlike the Wolf Girl, these two girls are very real.
19:43 Kaelyn Moore? There's a lot of documentation about them, though their story also has the feel of a legend. In October of 1920, an Anglican missionary named Joseph Singh was traveling through the jungle in Bengal in eastern India when villagers told him about ghosts that they had seen near a giant termite mound. Spirits, they called them. They would emerge from the mound at twilight, the villagers said, and they moved nothing like human beings. Now Singh described himself as a practical man. He didn't really believe in ghosts, but he was curious enough to investigate. So he decided to stake out the mound. Night after night, he watched from a distance, waiting to see what would emerge. And then,
20:23 Kaelyn Moore? on the third night, he saw something. First came a wolf, then another, then a third and a fourth. The whole pack emerged from a hole at the base of the mound. And next, crawling out behind them on all fours, came two small figures. They were girls, naked and filthy, their hair matted into these thick clumps. Now Singh claimed that their eyes reflected the light like animal eyes, as if their biology had changed them to be more like wolves. These girls moved with the pack. They even disappeared into the jungle to hunt with them. Singh was completely astonished. He had never seen anything like this before. He decided he had to learn more. And so he went and he shot the mother wolf so that
21:07 Kaelyn Moore? he could enter the den where all of the other wolves lived. And when he got inside, he saw two little human girls huddled together with the wolf pups in a tight ball of fur and limbs. He named them Amala and Kamala, and he took them with him. Now, from the first two stories, we learned that children tend to live with animals because of some sort of trauma that happens between them and their human caregivers. Whether the caregivers die or are neglectful, being raised by dogs or wolves is a survival mechanism. But that never really occurred to Singh. He just saw an interesting research opportunity, and he yanked the girls out of the den after killing their mother.
21:48 Kaelyn Moore? Now, Amala was tiny. She was maybe 18 months old at the time, Singh estimated. Kamala was much older, perhaps eight years old, old enough that she had clearly spent years living this way. And according to Singh's diary, which is how we have any of this information, they were only human in the way that they looked. He described them as walking on all fours. Their knees and palms were calloused from constant use. The girls refused to wear clothes. They would tear them off whenever Singh's wife tried to dress them. And they also ate red meat, crouching over it and tearing at it with her teeth, growling if anyone came too close. They showed no interest in being human beings whatsoever, Singh said.
22:30 Kaelyn Moore? But Singh was determined to show the world that he alone could civilize them. He took them to an orphanage and began the slow, painstaking process of trying to teach them how to be human again. Things like walking upright, eating cooked food, teaching them that humans could be trusted. Unfortunately, though, he would never see it all the way through. Amala died within a year. From his diary, we can guess that she had a kidney infection, maybe dysentery. Singh wrote that Kamala seemed to mourn her. She refused to eat for days, and she searched the orphanage for her sister. That's one thing that transcends being human. Other species still grieve their loved ones. But Kamala lived for nearly a decade after that.
23:12 Kaelyn Moore? Eventually, she started walking upright, though it was more of a shuffle. Her gait was always unsteady. She also learned about 30 words. She could make simple requests. And she learned how to wear clothes without tearing them off. However, Singh insisted that she never learned to be fully human. She did die in 1929 at around age 17 of kidney failure and tuberculosis. But one thing I would ask Singh. What does he mean when he says "fully human"? If you only know 30 words, does that make you not human? If you can't walk without a limp, does that make you not human? I get the sense that Singh was a researcher on his high horse who thought that if you couldn't exist in a very typical fashion, you were less than human.
23:56 Kaelyn Moore? So I wanted to dig a bit more into his research because it was clear that there were flaws in the way he was studying these two girls. And it turns out, I'm not the only one who thought that, obviously. When Singh published his diary in 1942, it became this massive sensation. The story was even taught in psychology classes for decades. It appeared in all of these textbooks. It was held up as evidence for the importance of socialization in human development. And almost All of it was a lie, or at least some very important parts were. See, even at the time, there were doubts about this research. Local villagers completely contradicted Singh's account of what happened.
24:37 Kaelyn Moore? A newspaper article from 1926 reported that a tribal farmer had actually led Singh to a hut where he found the girls in a cage. They were not living in a wolf den. The dramatic rescue where Singh said he saved the girls by killing the mother wolf, that was all fabricated. Scientists pointed out problems with Singh's other claims, too. Human eyes don't produce eye shine, so the light reflecting off of the girls' eyes at night was physically impossible. But Singh was a missionary in the area. Some people considered him a respectable, upstanding man in the community. And also, he had photographs of the girls. So people really wanted to believe him. And for the longest time, no one really questioned his findings.
25:20 Kaelyn Moore? It actually wasn't until 2007 that the full truth of what happened came out. And that's because a French surgeon named Serge Arol had spent years investigating historical cases of feral children. He dug through all sorts of archives. And what he found about Amala and Kamala, once he dug in a little bit more, was pretty damning. Singh's original diary, the one that he claimed to have written day by day as he cared for the girls, was fake. Handwriting analysis and paper dating proved that it had been written after 1935, which was six years after Kamala died. It seemed like he fabricated the entire thing after the fact. The photographs were also staged. The famous image that showed the girls walking on all fours, crouched over raw meat, moving
26:05 Kaelyn Moore? like animals. Those pictures were taken in 1937, which was years after both of the girls had passed away. They showed two other children from the orphanage, posed and directed by Singh to recreate scenes from his invented diary. The orphanage doctor, the actual medical professional who had examined Kamala, stated that she had none of the wolf-like traits that Singh described. She didn't have unusual teeth. She didn't have glowing eyes. She didn't have fixed joints that prevented her from walking upright. And multiple witnesses reported something even worse, and that's that Singh had forced Kamala to perform like a wolf for visitors. She was not doing that on her own accord.
26:47 Kaelyn Moore? And letters that were eventually found from Singh revealed his motivation. Someone had written to him about the financial value of having a story like this and had sent him money. The whole thing was for money. Arolls said that it was, quote, "the most scandalous swindle concerning feral children." However, none of that means that Amala and Kamala weren't real people and that their story didn't need to be heard. But who were they really? Now, unfortunately, they were probably disabled children who had been abandoned by their family after not being able to be cared for in a small, remote village. Some modern researchers have suggested that they may have had Rett syndrome, which is a neurodevelopmental condition that affects mostly girls,
27:32 Kaelyn Moore? and it causes a loss of hand skills, difficulty walking, and limited speech. Some have also suggested that they may have been autistic or had some other condition that made them seem "other" to the people around them at the time. And in a time and a place without any diagnosis or support, children like this were often cast out. So, let's be real, we've covered enough asylum episodes on the show to know that that was still happening well into the 1970s. But the story of Amala and Kamala mimics the other ones that we've talked about today in the sense that they were abandoned by their caregivers. But what happens when the story is flipped? When you still have caregivers, but they're the reason you're becoming more feral?
28:14 Kaelyn Moore? See, earlier I mentioned that it's really hard to study the feral children phenomenon because who is going to volunteer to have their children go be raised in the woods by wild animals? I see some of you raising your hands, and put those hands down. There is a famous study, though, from the 1930s, where two parents did agree to this, or a kind of version of this, because they wanted to see what would happen if their son was raised alongside a chimpanzee. And the outcome was shocking, to say the least.
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29:32 Kaelyn Moore? built on a reputation for quality and reliability. So when it's time for your next Toyota, you could trade in for more. From a great deal today to a great value tomorrow, a Toyota is right for you. Shop toyota.com for deals and details, or stop by your local Toyota dealer today. Toyota, let's go places. This story starts with a psychologist named Winthrop Niles Kellogg. In 1927, while he was still a graduate student at Columbia, Kellogg picked up a paper one day, and he saw an article about the wolf children of India, Amala and Kamala. He was absolutely fascinated by this case, but he disagreed with the psychological interpretation of the girls he was reading about. See, the article argued that feral children
30:16 Kaelyn Moore? were most likely intellectually disabled from birth. That's why their parents had abandoned them in the first place, and that's why they couldn't be rehabilitated later. They said that the wildness wasn't learned, but being intellectually disabled made them wild already. It's a horrible and incorrect conclusion, but so was a lot of pop psychology and psychotherapy back then. Here's looking at Euphroid. Kellogg thought that conclusion was backwards. He believed those children acted like animals because their environment had demanded it. They learned to be wild because being wild was how you survived in the wilderness. Given a different environment, they would have learned to be human, which meant, he reasoned, the opposite should also be true.
31:00 Kaelyn Moore? And that's when he got an idea. He couldn't take a human baby and raise it with wolves. That would be unethical, even in the 1920s when the bar was pretty low. But he could do the reverse. He could take an infant ape and raise it as human. Give it the same clothes, the same food, the same affection, the same education as a human child. Treat it not as a pet, but as another member of the family. And to really test this theory, he would use his own family. He would raise his own child, 10-month-old Donald, and a seven-month-old chimpanzee named Gua, side by side like siblings. When Kellogg told his colleagues about this idea, a lot of them objected.
31:42 Kaelyn Moore? They didn't think it was ethical for him to use his own child in an experiment. Regardless, he did start this experiment in June of 1931. And for the next nine months, Gua and Donald were raised as twins. They slept in the same nursery, in matching cribs. They sat in high chairs at the dinner table together. They even wore the same diapers and rompers and were fed from the same bottles. But for those nine months, 12 hours a day, seven days a week, Kellogg and his wife Luella ran experiments on both children. Dozens of standardized tests that measured everything they could think of. Quote, "Blood pressure, memory, body size, scribbling, reflexes, depth perception, vocalization, locomotion, reactions to tickling,
32:26 Kaelyn Moore? strength, manual dexterity, problem solving, fears, equilibrium, play behavior, climbing, obedience, grasping, language comprehension, attention span, and others." And a lot of these experiments they would run to test those things were exactly what you would think they would be. Unethical and honestly, kind of confusing. They did things like measure the sounds that their skulls made when tapped. And Kellogg described the sound of Gua's skull, quote, "Like the crack of a mallet upon a wooden croquet or bowling ball." That kind of gives me the impression that he was hitting them pretty hard. The parents also would spin Donald around in a high chair until he cried to "study his equilibrium." And they even tested the pair's startle reflexes
33:11 Kaelyn Moore? by firing a gun behind them and filming their reactions. Spoiler alert, neither of them really liked that. But this was 1931. The ethics of using your own infant as a test subject wasn't quite as well established as it is today. And the early results of this experiment did seem to support Kellogg's hypothesis. Gwa was really becoming more and more human-like every day. She learned to respond to a few simple verbal commands in English. She also mastered things like drinking from a cup and eating with a spoon. She could open doors. And Kellogg was thrilled to see that he was right. It is your environment that affects your behavior, not your innate sense.
33:52 Kaelyn Moore? But then, something very unexpected started happening. While Gwa's behavior was becoming more, quote, "human," Donald's was changing too. By the time he was 14 months old, Donald had developed what Kellogg called a, quote, "food bark." It was this really specific vocalization that Gwa used when she wanted to eat. It was not a human sound. It was a chimp sound, this kind of rapid grunting that Gwa made whenever food would appear. At first, Donald seemed to just be imitating her. But then he started using it on his own, completely unprompted, whenever he was hungry.
34:33 Kaelyn Moore? Kellogg watched as, over the next nine months, Donald started becoming more like a chimp. He grunted and he panted like a chimp when he was excited. He would go and bite people. He also crawled on all fours, even though he was fully capable of walking. And when Gwa figured out how to spy under doors by pressing her face to the floor, Donald started doing it too. And then, his language development completely stalled. At 19 months old, an age where most children are starting to combine words into simple phrases, Donald's vocabulary consisted of exactly three words, and one of them was "Gwa."
35:14 Kaelyn Moore? But what's so interesting about all of this is that while Donald started imitating Gua, she never imitated Donald. His innate humanity was a lot more malleable than her innate chimpanity. Chimp-ness? You get what I'm saying. The Kellogg's had set out to humanize an ape, and instead, they were watching their son become more ape-like. In March of 1932, nine months into what was supposed to be a five-year experiment, the Kellogg's made an abrupt decision. The experiment was over. Now, their official explanation was really vague. They said that they had proven what they set out to prove. Gua behaved like a human child, except when the structure of her brain and body prevented her. The
35:58 Kaelyn Moore? research was complete. But everyone who knew the family understood the real reason they were stopping the experiment. Multiple accounts suggested that Luella pushed to end the experiment because she was freaked out by what was happening to Donald. Gua was eventually sent back to the primate research facility where she had been born. I imagine when she got there, she taught all the other chimps how to use forks and wear pants. And Donald eventually went on to graduate from Harvard Medical School. He became a psychiatrist in Bethesda, Maryland. He got married. He had, by all external measures, a pretty successful and average life. He never spoke publicly about being raised with a chimpanzee, though. There's no interviews with adult Donald. There's
36:40 Kaelyn Moore? no memoirs that he left behind, no accounts of what he remembered from those nine months, if he remembered anything at all. In 1972, both of his parents died within a few months of each other, and in January of 1973, Donald Kellogg tragically took his own life. He was just 42 years old. And I want to be careful here because there's not really any evidence that the experiment specifically caused Donald's death 40 years after the fact, but it also meant that we would never know what the long-term effects of an experiment like this were. The Kellogg Experiment asks a question that the other cases of feral children also asks, and it's a question that I hear a lot these days: what makes us human?
37:23 Kaelyn Moore? Analysis of these cases tries to prove how animal children will become if they're left without a caretaker, but I think the opposite might be true. I think the ability to adapt to their environment for survival is something that makes them even more human. On the surface, Oksana appeared to have adapted to life as a dog, but she was a little girl dealing with trauma and abandonment. She was able to, at just three years old, survive on her own. And it's the same with Donald. His parents were subjecting him to a very unethical experiment. The hours were grueling and unending, all during the critical time for his development. And so, he started to learn from his one companion, his sister, during it all. But what do you think? Is our humanity so weak that we start becoming
38:08 Kaelyn Moore? feral when exposed to wild animals? Or is our ability to adapt part of our humanity? I know, it's a heady question this week, but I am curious what you guys think. You can comment wherever you listen to this show. And if you are craving even more spooky stories, you can check out our most recent bonus episode on Patreon and Apple Podcast subscriptions. February, we covered spooky folklore from the Gothic South and Appalachia, specifically folklore that traveled from West Africa over on slave ships. It's very scary. I also learned a lot, and I think you'll love it. And you can listen with a free trial on both platforms. How about that? I'm gonna be here next week with a very fun and scary collab episode for you all, so please join me next week. And until then, stay curious.
38:57 Kaelyn Moore? Hearts, Heart Pounding is written and produced by me, Kayla Moore. Hearts, Heart Pounding is also produced by Matt Brown. Our associate producer is Juno Hobbs. Sound design and mix by Red Rum Creative. Special thanks to Travis Dunlap, Grayson Jernigan, and the team at WME. Have a heart pounding story or a case request? Check out heartsarts pounding com.
39:15 Kaelyn Moore? Do you want more Darkly Curious stories in your life? Sign up for our Patreon for free and get access to a rotating shelf of bonus content, our weekly Rogue Detecting Society newsletter, and the HSP Book Club. Paid members also get monthly bonus episodes and archive access, which I think is more than 40 episodes at this point. You also get a cool jinx sticker after your first three months. And you can check it all out with a free seven day trial. Link in the bio or go to patreon.com backslash heartstartspounding. But whatever you do, stay curious.
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