by Albert Jack
Who was the foundling boy discovered in
Nuremberg, Germany, and was he really
as backward as he first appeared?
On the morning of May 26, 1828, a boy approximately sixteen years of age and dressed in rags was found wandering the streets of Nuremberg. He appeared unable to speak except to say “horse” and “I want to be a soldier like my father.” (Although that is about as much German as I would like to know myself, it didn't help him explain his unusual circumstances.) In the street he approached a shoemaker called Weissman and handed him the two pieces of paper he carried in his pocket. The first was dated October 1812 and appeared to be a letter from his mother:
This child has been baptized and his name is Kaspar. You must give him his second name yourself. I ask you to take care of him. His father was a cavalry soldier. When he is seventeen, take him to Nuremberg, to the 6th Cavalry Regiment; his father belonged to it. I beg you to keep him until he is seventeen. He was born on 30th April 1812. I am a poor girl; I can't take care of him. His father is dead.
The second letter was undated. It read:
Honored Captain,
I send you a lad who wishes to serve his king in the Army. He was brought to me on 7th October 1812. I am but a poor laborer with children of my own to rear. His mother asked me to bring up the boy, and so I thought I would rear him as my own son. Since then, I have never let him go one step outside the house, so no one knows where he was reared. He himself does not know the name of the place or where it is.
You may question him, Honored Captain, but he will not be able to tell you where I live. I brought him out at night. He cannot find his way back. He has not a penny, for I have nothing myself. If you do not keep him, you must strike him dead or hang him.
The shoemaker took Kaspar to the town magistrate, who passed him into the care of Andreas Hiltel, a jailer at the Vestner Gate Tower, who placed him in his own private living quarters. To Kaspar's obvious delight, many curious people came to visit him. They found a boy appearing to have a mental age of about six, who walked barely better than a toddler and could eat only bread and water. Hiltel observed the lad closely and noticed that despite these deficiencies, he had an excellent memory, which led Hiltel to think Kaspar was of noble origin. (It's never seemed to me that the posher you are the better you are at remembering things, but maybe things were different back then.) Over a period of three months Hiltel patiently taught Kaspar enough words for the boy to communicate what had happened to him.
It appeared that Kaspar, for as long as he could remember, had been kept in a dark two-meter-square cell with nothing but a straw bed and a wooden horse for a toy. Bread and water were placed in the room through a small hatch. Sometimes the water tasted bitter—suggesting it had been drugged—and on these occasions he fell asleep and woke to find his hair and nails had been trimmed and his clothes changed. The first human contact of his life came when a man opened the door of his cell and led him outside. Kaspar said he then fainted and woke up to find himself on the streets of Nuremberg.
Following his time at Vestner Gate, Kaspar was given into the care of schoolteacher Friedrich Daumer, who took a close interest in him and taught him to speak, read, and write. Over the ensuing year, the lad developed into an intelligent and likable young man who appeared to thrive in his new environment.
Then, on October 17, 1829, a hooded man attacked Kaspar in the street and tried to stab him, succeeding only in wounding him in the forehead. Officials quickly moved Kaspar into the care of Baron von Tucher, who found him employment at a local law office. But why had someone tried to kill him?
Because of a faint family resemblance, rumors had begun to circulate that Kaspar was in fact the son and heir of Karl, Grand Duke of Baden, and Stephanie de Beauharnais, daughter of Napoleon Bonaparte. According to these rumors, Duchess Stephanie had given birth at around the time Kaspar would have been born but the baby was quickly taken from her bedchamber. She was later told that her child had died. Because the duke then appeared to have no heir, his successor was to be Leopold I of Baden. This had all been engineered by his mother, the Countess von Hochberg, who had arranged the kidnapping of the duchess's child and the subsequent attempt on Kaspar's life.
Four years later, on December 14, 1833, having been moved to Ansbach, Kaspar was contacted and told he could learn about his ancestry if he went to the Court Gardens. On his way there, Kaspar was attacked again and stabbed in the chest. He survived long enough to stagger home but died only a few days later without being able to identify his assailant.
Kaspar was buried in a small, peaceful graveyard, and his headstone reads: “Here lies Kaspar Hauser, riddle of his time. His birth was un known, his death mysterious.” A monument was later erected to him in Ansbach, which reads, “Hie occultus occulto occisus est” (“Here an unknown was killed by an unknown”). His death gave birth to one of Europe's best-known and most enduring mysteries, one that will probably never be fully solved. (See “The Piano Man,” page 197, for the story of a modern-day Kaspar Hauser.)
If the Loch Ness Monster doesn't exist,
how come there have been so many pictures
and sightings? And is Nessie really Nellie?
The first documented sighting of a monster inhabiting Loch Ness was by St. Columba in A.D. 565. According to this account, the Christian missionary was traveling through the Highlands when he came across a group of Picts holding a funeral by the loch. They explained that they were burying a fellow tribesman who had been out on the loch in his boat when he had been attacked by a monster. Columba immediately ordered young Lugne Mocumin, one of his own followers, to swim across the loch to retrieve the dead man's boat. Detecting lunch was on its way again, the great beast reared up out of the water, at which Columba held up his cross and roared: “Thou shalt go no further, nor touch the man; go back with all speed!” And with that, the terrified monster apparently turned tail and “fled more quickly than if it had been pulled back with ropes, though it had just got so near to Lugne, as he swam, that there was not more than the length of a spear-staff between the man and the beast.” The group of Picts, very impressed by all this, converted to Christianity on the spot. However, as evidence of a monster living in the loch for the last fifteen hundred years, this account seems about as reliable as the story of the tooth fairy. Not least because St. Columba also claimed, a tad implausibly, to have had various other successful run-ins with Scottish monsters, once even slaying a wild boar just with his voice. Nevertheless, many were convinced by the Loch Ness tale.
Then there was silence on the monster front until some strange sightings were reported in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But the Loch Ness Monster, as we have come to know and love it, wasn't really “born” until much later—not until 1933, in fact, when (prosaically enough) the A82 trunk road had finally been completed along the western shore of Loch Ness, connecting the western town of Fort William with the busy port of Inverness on the North Sea. Providing easy access for tourists and industry alike, the road also offered a route past the picturesque loch for the first time.
Nearby Inverness had a long-standing and hugely popular tradition of hosting an annual circus. In 1933, Bertram Mills took his circus to Inverness along the new A82 for the first time, where his road crew would have stopped along the banks of Loch Ness to rest and feed the animals. Coincidentally that was when the sightings of the Loch Ness Monster began. Bertram Mills, ever the entrepreneur, quickly used the local story to his advantage by offering PS20,000 (nearly PS2 million today) to anybody who could prove that they had seen the great beast. It was a sum Mills seemed suspiciously unable to afford to pay out. But the public flocked to the area nevertheless, sightings soared, and more people than ever before attended his shows in case the monster might make an appearance.
But how could Mills have been so sure nobody could legitimately claim the reward? My theory is that he must have seen the famous photo of a plesiosaur-like creature taken in 1933 near Invermoris
ton by a Scottish surgeon and had known that it was no monster. At the time, skeptics claimed the photograph was a fake: the creature it showed was thought to have been an otter or maybe vegetation floating on the surface of the loch. It was even said to be an elaborate hoax created using a toy submarine. But Bertram Mills had seen an elephant swim before and must have realized the photograph taken was most likely of one of his animals bathing in the loch. The financial benefits of staying silent about this were obvious, however.
Soon afterward, on April 14, 1933, a Mr. and Mrs. Mackay claimed that they had seen a “large … whale-like beast” idling in the loch and that it had then dived under, causing “a great disturbance” in the water. They had immediately reported the sighting to a local gamekeeper, Alex Campbell. Campbell, conveniently enough, also turned out to be an amateur reporter for The Inverness Courier. His embellished account of the sighting, entitled “Strange Spectacle on Loch Ness,” appeared on May 2, 1933, and brought him instant fame. The world's monster hunters, not to mention the media, then descended on this remote area of the Scottish Highlands, previously known only for its fishing.
The dial of Loch Ness Monster excitement was then cranked up even further by the Daily Mail, when they sent in a professional team of monster hunters headed by the wonderfully named big-game hunter Marmaduke Wetherell. The Mail ran a daily piece on his efforts to lure the monster from its lair and to bag the beast. And within just two days, the headlines announced he had found unusual footprints on the shoreline. A cast was sent to the British Museum for identification and the Scots were reveling in the global attention their country was receiving. But the following week they were hanging their heads in shame when the cast proved to be the imprint of a stuffed hippopotamus foot, probably an umbrella stand from some local hostelry or tavern. Weatherall denied any mischief making, and it was never proved whether it had been hunter or hoaxer who had laid the false tracks.
The two most compelling photographs of the “monster” are world famous. One depicts a creature with a long grayish neck that tapers into an eerie thin head rising out of the water, followed by two humps. Roy Chapman Andrews, the American explorer and director of the American Museum of Natural History upon whom Indiana Jones was based, went on record in 1935 arguing that he had seen the original picture and that it had been “retouched” by newspaper artists before being published. He firmly stated the original picture was of the dorsal fin of a killer whale.
Most other experts disagree. As do I: to my mind, it is clearly the trunk of an elephant, with the first hump being the head and the second its back, almost certainly one of Bertram Mills's, taken as the circus elephants swam in the loch. Hugh Gray was the photographer: “I immediately got my camera ready and snapped the object which was then two to three feet above the surface of the water. I did not see any head, for what I took to be the front parts were under the water, but there was considerable movement from what seemed to be the tail.” This photograph has been declared genuine by photographic experts and shows no signs of tampering, unlike so many of the others. And that is because, in my view, it is a genuine photograph—of a genuine elephant. No retouching required.
But the best-known photograph is the one taken by surgeon Robert Kenneth Wilson on April 19, 1934. Indeed, it must be one of the most instantly recognizable pictures ever taken. From a distance of two hundred yards, what has come to be known as the “surgeon's photo graph” shows a gray “trunk” of around four feet protruding from the water with a hump directly behind it and clear disturbance in the water around. Once developed and declared genuine, the picture was bought and published by the Daily Mail and the Loch Ness Monster industry was properly born.
Curiously enough, when asked what he thought he had seen, Wilson claimed to have been too busy setting up his camera to take proper note, but thought there was certainly something strange in the loch. The next question then should have been: “Why didn't you wait around for a while to see if it returned?” If he had, he might well have seen the elephant surfacing, as it would have had to sooner or later. Then again, perhaps he did, but greed rather than valor influenced the better part of his discretion.
As recently as March 2006, Neil Clark, the curator of paleontology at the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow, has stated (thus confirming something I have believed for many years): “It is quite possible that people not used to seeing a swimming elephant—the vast bulk of the animal is submerged, with only a thick trunk and a couple of humps visible—thought they saw a monster.” Dr. Clark also notes that most sightings came around the time of Bertram Mills's reward offer for evidence of the monster. He himself believes that most of the other sightings can probably be explained away by floating logs or unusual waves. But just as it seemed the eminent professor was about to finally blow the Loch Ness Monster out of the water, so to speak, he was asked by the BBC whether he believed there was a large creature living in the loch. To which he responded: “I believe there is something alive in Loch Ness.” And he's not wrong, is he? There must be “something” alive in the loch; in fact there are lots of living things swimming around in it. But at least he didn't go on to say it was a fifteen-hundred-year-old sea monster, which it would have to be, as that is the premise upon which this whole story has been constructed.
But to be fair to Dr. Clark, the Loch Ness Monster is big business for Scotland. Consult ants have estimated it to be worth in the region of PS50 million per annum and rising. More than five hundred thousand tourists travel to the area every year in the hope of sighting the beast, despite Bertram Mills's reward expiring with him. Some claim the industry has even created twenty-five hundred new jobs. And the monster-spotting tour comes in at PS15 a head. Dr. Clark would not be popular in his home country if he finally dispelled the myth many love and even more rely upon.
Since the elephant-heavy 1930s there have been dozens of sightings of objects of varying shapes and sizes. Even if paddling pachyderms are no longer the likeliest explanation, other theories are plausible. Loch Ness is actually a sea lake, fed from the Moray Firth in the North Sea via the River Ness. Furthermore, the Moray Firth is one of the areas of British seawater most frequented by porpoises, dolphins, and whales. Indeed, seals and dolphins have been filmed in the loch many times. If the mind wants to see a monster, three partly submerged dolphins swimming in a row could easily provide the illusion of a thirty-foot, three-humped creature in the gathering gloom— especially after a few drams of the local malt. I myself have encountered a few three-humped monsters after a lively evening out before now.
The BBC has used sonar and satellite imagery to scan every inch of the loch and found “no trace of any large animal living there.” But, as has always been the case with myths, legends, and fables, while it is possible to prove the positive by producing irrefutable evidence, it is never possible to prove the opposite argument.
We could dam Loch Ness and drain it. We would then be able to take everybody still perpetuating the myth down into this vast new dry valley and show them every nook, cave, and rock cluster, but still the hard-core believers would reply: “Ah, but Nessie may well be out in the North Sea at the moment just limbering up for another appearance.” But of course that is not the reason at all. Everyone from Columba (who told that miraculous story, embroidered or otherwise, which led to his canonization) onward has profited from retelling the tall tale of Loch Ness. The only surprise is that so many people have, and still do, strongly believe there is an unidentified prehistoric monster living in a Scottish loch. Some argue that it is a historical fact; I know it's just a hysterical one. I'm here to inform you, kids—there is no such thing as the Loch Ness Monster. Just don't tell anyone it was me who told you.
Did the famous ex-Beatle really die
in a car crash back in 1966?
On October 12, 1969, Tom Zarski rang “Uncle” Russ Gibb's radio show on WKNR-FM in Dearborn, Michigan, and announced that Paul McCartney had been killed in an accident in November 1966 and the Beatles had drafted in a look-al
ike to keep the band fully functioning. He backed up his argument with several pieces of credible circumstantial evidence, including the decision by the band in 1967 to stop playing live in order to concentrate on their studio recordings and film work.
Russ Gibb was so intrigued by the story that he then spent two hours on air mulling over the clues and playing Beatles records. When one caller urged him to play “Revolution 9” (from the White Album) backward, Gibb was amazed to find he could distinctly make out the words “Turn me on, dead man” through his headphones. Even though Zarski had pointed out that he didn't actually believe Paul McCartney was dead, he was just interested in the theory, by the end of the program networks across the United States were discussing the mysterious death of one of the world's most famous rock stars and the events surrounding his demise. Hundreds of news journalists promptly flew to London and interviewed as many of the con spiracy theorists as they could find, and from the reports that followed the only certainty is that many of them were experimenting with LSD, as none of it made much sense at all.