Pod Insights Noble Blood Kaspar Hauser Came to Town About this episode In 1826, a young man stumbled into town with limited language and a mysterious past: he revealed that he had spent his life in isolation, in a single room with no human interaction. Was he telling the truth? And if he was... was it possible that he might actually be a missing royal prince?
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1:35 Dana Schwartz? Hey, this is Dana Schwartz. Just one quick note of housekeeping if you are listening to this on release day. Today is also the release day of my brand-new book, The Arcane Arts by S.D. Coverley. S.D. Coverley is the pen name I use for me and my friend and co-writer, Dan Fry. It is a magical fantasy book about a grad student and her professor studying illegal forbidden magic and solving a murder mystery while they do it. If that at all interests you, please pick up a 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.
2:19 Dana Schwartz? Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Mankey. Listener discretion advised.
2:29 Dana Schwartz? On May 26, 1826, a cobbler named Georg Leonard Wegmann 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 Wegmann's eye as he walked: a young man, maybe a teenager of 16 or 17, stumbling awkwardly down a nearby hill. The boy was stocky, with an unusual lumbering gait, and blue eyes that seemed to Wegmann almost vacant.
3:13 Dana Schwartz? 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 50s, which Wegmann was. The boy also called out the name of a street, and generously Wegmann 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 cavalryman like my father was." But
3:57 Dana Schwartz? where had this boy come from? A wandering stranger who stumbled out of the forest and into Nuremberg? Eventually Wegmann 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.
4:33 Dana Schwartz? 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.
5:17 Dana Schwartz? Philosophers from the 17th century on had become fascinated by legends and stories of enfant 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, forever childlike? Beyond the salaciousness of his alleged origin,
6:00 Dana Schwartz? 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, "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 14th century, and had excited philosophers and medical men to speculate on the nature of men."
6:45 Dana Schwartz? 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.
7:29 Dana Schwartz? I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is Noble Blood.
7:35 Dana Schwartz? 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.
8:15 Dana Schwartz? The first was purportedly written by his mother, announcing that his name was Casper, he was born on April 30th, 1812, and that his father, now deceased, had been a cavalryman of the 6th Regiment. The second letter was from Casper Hauser's mysterious caretaker, or jailer, the masked man that Casper recalled had brought him bread and water.
8:43 Dana Schwartz? The letter was addressed to Captain Von Wessening, commander of the 6th 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 1812, 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.
9:28 Dana Schwartz? The letter continued, saying that Captain Von Wessening 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.
10:13 Dana Schwartz? 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 sewn and ill-fitting. His boots were too small. The initial "K" was sewn into his jacket and his handkerchief.
10:39 Dana Schwartz? 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 "decent prisoners" instead of the other random vagrants and beggars.
11:22 Dana Schwartz? 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.
12:01 Dana Schwartz? 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 learned the difference between night and day. One day, Casper had been given a sheet of paper and a pencil, and his anonymous captor
12:44 Dana Schwartz? 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.
13:08 Dana Schwartz? 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 Führerbach, 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.
13:50 Dana Schwartz? 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.
14:32 Dana Schwartz? Casper continued to learn 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 19th-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,
15:17 Dana Schwartz? "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."
15:52 Dana Schwartz? 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
16:34 Dana Schwartz? Hauser 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
17:19 Dana Schwartz? 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 Baden, 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
18:03 Dana Schwartz? 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 1818, the Duchy of Baden went to his uncle, Louis I. But maybe things weren't quite as straightforward as they seemed. Charles and Stephanie had had a son, an infant prince born on September 29, 1812.
18:48 Dana Schwartz? 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 Louis'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
19:31 Dana Schwartz? royal family, especially among the German radicals of the 19th century."
19:37 Dana Schwartz? 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.
20:16 Dana Schwartz? 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 1829. 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 "scientific" experiments on Casper,
20:58 Dana Schwartz? 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 1829, more than a year after Casper had first arrived in Nuremberg, Casper and Dahmer had quarrelled 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 floor of the house. According to Casper, a hooded man had attacked him in the outhouse, shouting, "You still
21:43 Dana Schwartz? 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
22:24 Dana Schwartz? notably eccentric, and he himself was a much-dramak-upon Germanophile. Stanhope met Casper Hauser in May 1831, and he became obsessed, the sort of flair 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 presents. He gave Casper a life annuity of 500 guldens and 100 guldens as pocket money, which I'm sure was something of a weight off of the shoulders of the town administrators of Nuremberg,
23:05 Dana Schwartz? who had, up until that point, been paying for Casper Hauser's upkeep. Within no time at all, Stanhope 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 seemed to recognize a few Hungarian phrases, the trip itself did not prove anything, and ultimately it was a failure.
23:43 Dana Schwartz? 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 Ansbach with a schoolmaster and under the patronage of Anselm von Führerbeck, that legal scholar and president of the Bavarian
24:26 Dana Schwartz? Court of Appeals I had mentioned earlier.
24:31 Dana Schwartz? Stanhope wasn't alone in souring on Kaspar Hauser. 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 bent that this somewhat ridiculous figure should be the darling of assorted radicals, devotees of alternative medicine, and practitioners of experimental pedagogy." "The anti-Husserians
25:14 Dana Schwartz? 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 Kaspar 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 Kaspar Hauser was
25:58 Dana Schwartz? 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?
26:27 Dana Schwartz? The schoolmaster that Casper Hauser was living with in Anzbach 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.
27:06 Dana Schwartz? Even so, Johann Meyer and Casper Hauser didn't get along, and on December 9, 1833, 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 14, 1833, Casper Hauser stumbled back into Johann Meyer's house, bleeding 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 Anzbach Court Gardens, had handed him a purse, and then,
27:48 Dana Schwartz? 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.
28:32 Dana Schwartz? 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?
29:16 Dana Schwartz? 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 Casper Hauser, riddle of his time. His birth was unknown, his death mysterious." 1833. But was he actually a missing prince? Even in the 19th century, plenty of people pointed out that it was unlikely. Otto Mittelstadt wrote in 1876 about how impossible it would have been to reasonably
30:01 Dana Schwartz? swap out the royal boden 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 Hauser a hoax? He was well-developed physically and relatively capable cognitively in a way most people
30:42 Dana Schwartz? today would find implausible for someone who had been raised for years in a single room with no human interaction.
30:51 Dana Schwartz? 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
31:31 Dana Schwartz? a mistake and accidentally went too deep with the knife. A 2023 study indicated that Casper Hauser had the mark of having received a cowpox vaccination to prevent smallpox, which was mandatory in Bavaria since 1807. 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 Casper Hauser's blood-stained undergarments
32:10 Dana Schwartz? by the German magazine Der Spiegel in 1996 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. We'll probably never discover the truth behind the strange story of Casper Hauser. "His story acquired an importance which in no way belonged to it," Stan Hope wrote after he was disillusioned. And yet, Casper Hauser has captivated audiences for literal centuries.
32:53 Dana Schwartz? 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 16, whoever had been feeding him had dropped him off to fend for himself.
33:32 Dana Schwartz? And from there, this young man became 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 system's 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
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38:13 Dana Schwartz? I briefly mentioned Anselm Ritter von Fehrbach 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 29th, 1833, Fehrbach died on a journey to Frankfurt. He was only 57 years old,
38:56 Dana Schwartz? 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.
39:41 Dana Schwartz? Noble Blood is a production of iHeartRadio 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 Jaffe, Natasha Lasky, and me, Dana Schwartz. The show is edited and produced by Jesse Funk and Gomes Griffin, with supervising producer Reema Ilkayali, 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.
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