Kaspar Hauser: The Boy from the Dark Room

0:00 [gentle music] On a holiday afternoon in Nuremberg, in the spring of 1828, a shoemaker named Weichmann noticed a boy standing in the square. He was perhaps 16. He swayed on his feet as if he had never learned to stand. His boots were too small and worn through, and his clothes looked like they had belonged to someone else. In his hand, he held a letter. When the shoemaker spoke to him, the boy answered with the same sentence again and again, as if it were the only one he had. This is Midnight Signals. It was the 26th of May, Whit Monday, and much of the town was out of doors. The boy was standing near the Unschlitt Square in the Old Town, looking at nothing.

0:44 The letter in his hand was addressed to the captain of the 4th Squadron of the 6th Cavalry Regiment, stationed in the city. The shoemaker, not knowing what else to do, took the boy to the captain's house. The captain was not at home. His servants let the boy wait in the stable, and the boy lay down in the straw and fell asleep at once, as though he had been walking for days. When he woke, the servants tried to question him. He answered with the sentence, "I want to be a horseman, like my father was." And when they asked him anything else, he said only that he did not know, or he said the word for horse. When the captain returned and opened the letter, he found that it explained almost nothing: "I send you a boy who wants to serve his king faithfully. He was left with me on the 7th of October 1812. I am a poor laborer with 10 children of my own. I have never let him take a single step outside my house.

1:42 I have taught him to read and to write, and the Christian faith. If you do not want to keep him, you may kill him or hang him in the chimney." The letter was unsigned. Its place of origin was given only as the Bavarian border, a place it did not name. Folded inside it was a second, shorter note, apparently from the boy's mother. It said his name was Kaspar, that he had been born on the 30th of April 1812, and that his father had been a cavalryman of the 6th Regiment and was now dead. Later, people who examined the two notes concluded that they were written in the same hand and with the same ink. The note from the mother, if that is what it was, had not been written by any mother at all.

2:24 The captain handed the boy over to the police. At the police station, they gave him a pen and paper. He took the pen, and slowly, in a careful hand, he wrote two words: Kaspar Hauser. They did not know what else to do with him, so they locked him up. He was placed in a room in a tower of Nuremberg's castle called Lugginsland in the care of a jailer named Andreas Hiltel. Hiltel watched him closely. He was looking for signs of a fraud, a vagabond who had found a clever way to be fed. What he saw instead troubled him. The boy would eat only bread and drink only water. When he was given meat, he was sick.

3:08 A drop of beer made him ill. A candle flame fascinated him, and he reached out to touch it and burned his fingers and cried. He seemed not to know what a mirror was. He sat on the floor for hours with his legs stretched straight in front of him, playing with the toy horses that the jailer's children brought him. He would sit and push them back and forth and decorate them with ribbons and offer them his bread. His feet were soft and blistered, like the feet of someone who had never walked any distance at all. The jailer's children became his teachers. They taught him words, and he learned them with startling speed. Within weeks, he could speak in simple sentences. And as he learned to speak, he began to tell a story.

3:52 He said that for as long as he could remember, he had lived in a small, dark room. It was so low that he could not stand. He sat on the floor on a pile of straw, and he slept there. He never saw the sky. He never saw another face. When he woke, there would be bread and water beside him. Sometimes, the water tasted bitter, and after drinking it, he fell into a deep sleep. When he woke again, his straw had been changed, his clothes had been changed, and his nails had been cut. He had two wooden horses, and he played with them, and that was all he had. Then, shortly before he came to Nuremberg, a man had come into the room. Kaspar never saw his face. The man had stood behind him and guided his hand, teaching him to write his name.

4:41 He had taught him the sentence about the cavalryman. And then, one day, the man had carried him out of the room and led him on foot through the countryside for a long time, until they came to the edge of the city. There, the man had put the letter into his hand and gone. It was an extraordinary story. Almost immediately, people began to argue about whether it was true. The mayor of Nuremberg, Jakob Binder, took a great interest in the boy. He spent hours interviewing him, and in July, he published a public notice describing Kaspar's story in detail, appealing to anyone with information to come forward. The notice was reprinted across Germany.

5:23 It made Kaspar Hauser famous. Visitors came to the tower to see him. Doctors examined him. Philosophers and journalists came to watch the boy who had grown up without a world. He became a kind of living experiment. What happens to a human being who is raised in total darkness, alone? What is a person without other people? The city found him a guardian. He was placed in the house of a school teacher named Georg Friedrich Daumer, who began to educate him. Kaspar learned to read, to write, to draw. He showed a gift for drawing. Daumer, who was interested in homeopathy and in animal magnetism, also experimented on him.

6:05 He claimed that Kaspar could see in the dark, that he could feel the pull of metals through paper, that he was sensitive to things ordinary people could not perceive. Kaspar did not object. He had nowhere else to go. And then, in October of 1829, someone tried to kill him. On the 17th of October, Kaspar was found in the cellar of Daumer's house, bleeding from a wound on his forehead. He said that while he was alone in the house, a man had come in, his face covered by a black hood, and had struck him. He said the man spoke to him. "You still have to die," the man said, "before you leave the city of Nuremberg." He said the man had the same voice as the one who had brought him out of the dark room. The authorities investigated.

6:54 No one else had seen the hooded man. Some believed that Kaspar's story was true, that whoever had locked him away for 16 years had come back to finish the job. Others noticed that the wound was not deep and that Kaspar had been in trouble with Daumer for lying shortly before. They suspected he had cut himself to win back the sympathy he was afraid of losing. It was not the last time this question would be asked. By then, a rumor had already begun to spread, and it would follow Kaspar Hauser for the rest of his life. It said that he was a prince. In the autumn of 1812, a son had been born to the Grand Duke of Baden and his wife, Stephanie de Beauharnais, the adopted daughter of Napoleon.

7:38 The baby was the heir to the throne of Baden, and 16 days after his birth, he died. The rumor said that he had not died at all. It said that a dying infant had been swapped into his cradle, and that the real prince had been carried away and hidden so that another branch of the family could inherit the throne. It said that he had been kept in a cell, in darkness, for 16 years, and it said that the boy in Nuremberg was born in the autumn of 1812. It was a perfect story: a lost prince, a wicked stepfamily, a secret prison, an assassin in a black hood. Pamphlets were printed about it. People who had never met Kaspar Hauser became passionately convinced that they knew who he was. One of them was an English lord.

8:26 Philip Henry Stanhope, the fourth Earl Stanhope, came to Nuremberg in 1831 and was captivated by Kaspar. He was rich, charming, and generous, and he obtained custody of the young man. He spoke of taking him to England. He paid for investigations into his origins and took him on journeys to Hungary, hoping that the sound of the language might wake some memory. It did not, and Stanhope's enthusiasm began to cool. He arranged for Kaspar to move to the town of Ansbach and placed him in the house of another schoolmaster, a stern man named Johann Georg Meyer. He promised to come back for him. Then, he left. He kept paying for Kaspar's upkeep, but he never returned. In Ansbach, Kaspar was watched over by one of the most respected legal minds in Germany, Anselm von Feuerbach, President of the Court of Appeals.

9:20 Feuerbach had studied the case since 1828. In 1832, he published a book about it, calling Kaspar's imprisonment a crime against the soul of a human being. Privately, he became convinced that Kaspar really was the lost prince of Baden. In May of 1833, Feuerbach died suddenly. He was 57. Some of Kaspar's supporters believed he had been poisoned. Kaspar, meanwhile, had begun to write about himself. In Nuremberg and in Ansbach, he set down his own account of his life in the plain, careful sentences of someone who had only recently learned to write.

10:02 He described the dark room, the bread and water, the man who taught him his name. He described the first time he saw the sky. He wrote as though he expected to be doubted. By then, he had every reason to. By the end of 1833, Kaspar was working as a copyist in a law office in Ansbach. He was 21. The fame had faded. The visitors had stopped coming. He argued with his schoolmaster, who thought him a liar. He was waiting for Lord Stanhope to come at Christmas. On the 14th of December, 1833, Kaspar came running back to the Meyer house, wounded and gasping. He had been stabbed in the chest.

10:44 He said that a stranger had approached him that afternoon and told him he had news about his mother. The stranger had asked him to come to the Hofgarten, the palace gardens, near a monument to a poet. In the cold of the empty garden, the man had handed him a small purse, and as Kaspar took it, the man stabbed him and ran. Meyer did not believe him at first. The wound looked small, but it was deep, and over the next days, it became clear that Kaspar was dying. In the garden, the police found the purse he had described. Inside was a note, written in pencil. It was written in mirror writing, the letters reversed so that it could only be read in a looking glass: "Hauser will be able to tell you quite precisely how I look and where I am from.

11:32 To save Hauser the effort, I want to tell you myself where I come from. I come from, from the Bavarian border, on the river. I will even tell you the name: M-L-O." Kaspar Hauser died on the 17th of December, 1833. He was buried in Ansbach. His gravestone carries a Latin inscription: "Here lies Kaspar Hauser, riddle of his time. His birth was unknown. His death was mysterious." The court in Ansbach concluded that he had probably stabbed himself. They noted that the note in the purse contained the same kinds of spelling mistakes that Kaspar made. They noted that it was folded in a particular triangular way, the way Kaspar folded his own letters. And they noted that no one else had seen the stranger in the garden.

12:22 Some accounts said that the fresh snow there showed only one set of footprints. They suggested that he had meant to wound himself, as some believed he had in 1829, to revive the interest of the people who had forgotten him, and that this time he had gone too far. His supporters did not accept it. To them, the murder was proof of the prince story. Someone powerful had wanted him silenced. For a century and a half, the argument went on. Books were written on both sides. The case became one of the great puzzles of 19th century Europe. In the end, it was science that answered one part of the question. In 1996, a German magazine arranged for DNA testing of blood on a pair of underpants said to have been worn by Kaspar on the day he was stabbed. The results were compared with descendants of the House of Baden.

13:14 They did not match. Supporters of the prince theory objected that the clothing might not be his. More tests followed, on hair and other samples. And in 2024, a team of researchers using newer sequencing methods compared all of the surviving samples attributed to Kaspar Hauser. They matched each other, and they did not match the family of Baden. Kaspar Hauser was not the lost prince. But that answer only closes one door. It does not tell us who he was, and it does not explain the dark room. Another study, published in 2023, noticed something small. Kaspar's arm carried the scars of a cowpox vaccination, required by law in Bavaria since 1807. Somebody, at some point in his childhood, had taken him to be vaccinated.

14:05 Which means that whatever his life had been before Nuremberg, he had not spent all of it alone in the dark. Someone had registered him. Someone had brought him out into the world, at least once. Perhaps he was a poor and neglected child, kept hidden by someone who did not want him. Perhaps he exaggerated his story, and then found himself unable to take it back. Perhaps some of it was true, and some of it was not. We do not know. Tonight's signal. It is the note in the purse. If Kaspar wrote it himself, he wrote it backwards, by hand, in the cold, and he filled it with a riddle. He offered his readers a name, and then gave them only three letters, M-L-O. And he made sure that it could only be read in a mirror.

14:54 If someone else wrote it, then a stranger stood in the Ansbach Hofgarten that December, and wanted the world to know he had come from the same place Kaspar did. Either way, someone wanted to be found in a looking glass, and nobody ever was. Next time on Midnight Signals, we leave the 19th century and travel to Norway, to a cold valley above the city of Bergen, in the winter of 1970. A woman is found there, burned and alone, with the labels cut from her clothes. Investigators will spend 50 years trying to find out who she was. And the first real clue, when it comes, will point back toward Nuremberg.

15:35 This has been a broadcast by Midnight Signals. I'm Russ Chamberlain, guiding you through the shadows where history meets mystery. Visit midnightsignals.net to continue the conversation, explore more episodes, and say hello. If you enjoyed tonight's journey, please like, subscribe, and drop a review. Until next time, stay vigilant, seek the hidden, and remember, in every silence there is a signal, and in every signal a story waiting to be told.