Who is kaspar hauser

I am uneasy because I have spent a fair amount of time walking in the German forests and, while they are extensive, they are also a sort of Piccadilly Circus of spry old hikers in special gear, mushroom pickers, scarlet-faced hunters and helpful park rangers of a kind unlikely to leave him in peace.

There is also an anxiety about how to survive in the heavy snow that routinely covers the most obvious area, the Giant Mountains, and there would be no food: the teenager would be quite quickly battling with the last wild boar for the last conker. We will know more soon: Did he bury his father? Why does he speak English? But perhaps he will, like Hauser, never really give up his secret.

Kaspar Hauser: the original 'Forest Boy'. As with the earlier wounds, people believed the wound may have been self-inflicted, and that Hauser had punctured deeper than he had intended.

He may have also written the strange note himself—it was folded in a peculiar triangular shape Hauser was known to use, and the writing itself contained spelling and grammatical errors he commonly made in his own writing.

The real prince, son of Charles, Grand Duke of Baden and Stephanie de Beauharnais, supposedly died in when he was not quite three weeks old. The theory was that the Countess of Hochberg had the boy hidden away so her own sons could ascend to the throne instead.

In , a Hauser blood sample was compared to samples from Baden family descendants. This is hardly a thing of the past; even today people sometimes fake assaults, abductions, and even their own deaths. Some people who have a disease called Munchausen's Syndrome intentionally injure themselves for sympathy and attention.

Nor is it unheard of for people to sometimes fake having grown up abandoned or even raised by animals; in , a mysterious teenager calling himself Ray showed up at a police station in Germany, claiming to have lived alone in a forest for at least five years. The boy, who was in good health and spoke English and German, claimed not to know his identity or where he came from.

After nearly a year of investigation the police discovered that "Ray" was actually a year-old Dutchman who got bored with his office job and decided to pull a massive hoax by claiming to be a semi-feral wild child. Kaspar Hauser claimed he was attacked on three different occasions; once in October while he was alone in a cellar when an assailant no one else saw and that he could not describe inflicted a superficial cut to his forehead; once while he was alone in a room when an unseen assailant no one else saw and that he could not describe shot him though he later admitted he shot himself ; and finally in December while he was alone in public gardens when an assailant no one else saw and that he could not describe stabbed him in the stomach.

Hauser's death is widely seen as suspicious, and his claim of being attacked is contradicted by several piece of damning evidence, including what was — and wasn't — found at the scene of the attack.

At Hauser's direction, after the attack a small purse was found with a note that he claimed his attacker gave to him that, amazingly, mentioned his assailant's hometown. Why an assassin would intentionally give his victim a handwritten note that would later be discovered and partially identify him strains credulity. Even more damning for Hauser's tale is what wasn't found in the gardens where he said he was attacked: a second set of footprints in the snow.

It is widely believed that Hauser stabbed himself probably for attention and had simply injured himself more grievously than he had intended.

Since it's clear that Hauser told lies about both the beginning and ending of his life, there seems little reason to credit anything he said about his life as truth. The best evidence is that much of the mystery about Kaspar Hauser was manufactured by Hauser himself, either as a hoax or because he suffered from a mental illness. We may never know his motives, but we do know that being famous was very important to him, as he eagerly sought and enjoyed his international notoriety.

Whether con artist or genuine mystery, in the end Hauser won; his true nature and identity is still debated and discussed today, nearly two centuries after his birth.