The Most Mysterious Boy In History | Random Thursday

the world is littered with mysterious people whose origins have never been discovered DB Cooper the man in the iron mask Tommy Weizhou but perhaps no mystery is more enduring than the mysterious and disturbing case of kaspar hauser let's set the scene it's Nuremberg Germany May 26th 1828 actually Germany isn't really a thing yet it's actually annex province of the Holy Roman Empire which was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire the young boy is found wandering through the streets to saurian it and confused he's dressed like a poor person his jacket torn and tattered but he's also wearing a really expensive silk scarf and has a finely embroidered handkerchief with the initials K H stitched on it and even though he was around 10 or 11 years old he walked like a toddler like he'd never walked before in his life and he complained about his feet hurting although his old and worn out shoes probably didn't help that out very much and he couldn't really speak he could say his own name basically repeat what other people said and everything that he could say was weirdly horse-related in fact the only full sentence that he could speak was I want to be a horseman like my father who was this kid's father apparently he didn't know but a note that he carried on him said that his father was in the cavalry and that the writer of that note who was not his father was afraid for his own life this kid just kept getting weirder he was taken in by friedrich Dahmer a local schoolmaster who found more peculiarities of caspere's and longer games around him for one thing he was very sensitive to light and sound he could see in almost near darkness and could hear a whisper perfectly clear all the way across the room on the flipside being out in the Sun was painful and blinding to him he only ate bread and water everything else made him gag he actually liked he'd never seen a candle or a mirror before in fact the first time that he saw himself in the mirror he tried to catch the reflection and he didn't recognize himself it was almost like he'd been locked away in a dark room his whole life and as he started to learn how to talk his story began to take shape or at least what he knew began to take shape which wasn't much all I could remember was being kept in the dark for years in a small enclosure so small that he couldn't actually stand up so his feet were tender and he had no idea who his captor was because he never actually saw his face and when he was sent to Nuremberg the captor blindfolded him and made him look down at the floor the whole time so he couldn't tell where he was coming from terrifying background for sure but under Dahmer's care Kasper began to thrive if he showed a knack for drawing and music and actually became a little bit of a local celebrity things were looking up for Kasper but then his past came back to haunt him one evening in late 1829 Casper didn't come down for dinner so Dahmer searched the house looking for him he found him in the cellar bleeding from a cut across his forehead according to Casper he was attacked while he was on the Privy by a man who said you will have to die ere you leave Nuremberg and the voice of this man was the same as its captor and about nine months later people in the house heard a gunshot and they rushed up to Casper's room to find him on the floor with a head wound and after he recovered he claimed that he was standing on a chair trying to grab some books and then he slipped off the chair and on his way down he accidentally grabbed the pistol that was hanging on the wall and somehow that caused the pistol to go off yeah Casper was a problematic guest and for that reason he kind of bounced from one person's care to another one of them was a guy named Lord Stanhope who was particularly obsessed with finding out Casper's origins and spent quite a bit of money to do so he took Casper to Hungary because apparently Casper knew how to say some Hungarian words and he claimed at one point that his mother was a Hungarian countess but it didn't produce any results and along the way Lord Stanhope began to sort of doubt his credibility in December of 1831 Casper was transferred to the town of Ansbach where he was under the care of another schoolmaster johann georg meyer it did not go well Maier was a strict disciplinarian and he didn't really trust Casper he felt like he was withholding and deceitful so the two of them kind of butted heads quite a bit throughout 1833 toward the end of the year Lord Stanhope was supposed to visit and he said that he was going to take Casper over to England to kind of look around over there and Casper was really looking forward to that but then on December 14th the story of kaspar hauser came to a fittingly mysterious end Casper came home from the park with a deep stab wound in his chest he claimed that a man lured him into the park saying that he had information about his mother but once they got into the park he actually stabbed him while handing him a bath police later searched the park and they found a violent bag with a note inside the note was written in mirror writing and it said this Houser will be able to tell you quite precisely how I look and where I am to save house or the effort I want to tell you myself where I come dot dot dot I come from dot dot dot the Bavarian border dot dot dot on the river dot dot dot dot dot I will even tell you the name M L o hopeful Casper deteriorated over the next few days incoherently muttering something about writing with pencil before he finally passed away on December 17th he was buried next to a tombstone that read here lies kaspar hauser riddle of his time his birth is unknown his death mysterious 1833 from here the mystery of kaspar hauser only deepened that note that was found at the park for example contains several grammatical errors that Kasper commonly used it was also folded in a way that Casper often folded his letters did he stab himself was there some mysterious conspiracy around him that his captor come back to fulfill his dastardly plan this has perplexed people for over 200 years there are two main competing theories around Casper Hauser's identity the first one is something that I'm sure many of you have been yelling at the screen throughout this entire video which is that he was just a liar and an attention-seeker I mean it worked for him he got to stay with some very respectable people got to travel with a lord not bad for a peasant kid some of the evidence for this theory is the fact that his story had massive inconsistencies inside of it and every single person that took care of him at one point or another had trouble with the fact that he lied all the time in fact Lord Stanhope himself wrote a book later on that countered many of Hauser's accusations on his story and said he was a very deceitful person for example his claim that he only ate bread and water his entire life is kind of hard to believe because that will inevitably lead to scurvy and he didn't have scurvy plus his behavior doesn't really line up with other stories of people who were kept in captivity for long periods of time in fact psychiatrists carlion hard once wrote if he had been living since childhood under the conditions he describes he would not have developed beyond the condition of an idiot indeed he would not have remained alive long his tale is so full of absurdity that is astonishing that it was ever believed and is even today still believed by many people so according to this theory he injured himself whenever he wanted to get something from people for example that first time that he got that cut on his forehead and he claimed that he was attacked by his captor or while he was on the loo well it turns out that he and Dahmer had had a bit of an argument the day before and his fatal wound occurred when he was hoping that Lord Stanhope had taken to England and in the case of that fatal stabbing he probably intended to do a flesh wound and it just went too far he wouldn't be the first person to injure himself to get attention in fact there's an entire mental illness around this called Munchausen's syndrome or it used to be called munchausen syndrome today it's called factitious disorder imposed on itself although most people who have factitious disorder don't do it to achieve any specific goal or to have any kind of financial gain most of them just do it out of this deep-seated need to be pitied and cared for but that's not what makes Casper stories so intriguing if that was it it probably would have been forgotten a long time ago but there is another theory it's pretty juicy theory number two that Casper was the heir to the house of Baden much like Lone Star and Spaceballs Casper was an honest-to-god prince in theory to explain this we can I have to get knee-deep in European ancestry so let's get in the spirit the Grand Duchy of Baden is a territory in the southwestern and what is now modern Germany along the Rhine River this was a quite perplexing time in history a period in betwixt the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire and the creation of Germany a period of European history that many scholars referred to as a cluster the ruler of Baden at the turn of the 19th century was Charles and his wife Stephanie de Beaune who was a cousin and adopted daughter of Napoleon Stephanie bore three daughters and two sons both of which died in infancy so when Charles passed away in 1818 his throne passed a lude with the first his uncle Ludwig reigned for 12 years before he died in 1830 upon his death the throne passed to his half brother Leopold this happened at about the same time the Casper story was traveling to the countryside like butter on crumpets and it sponsons scandalous scuttlebutt the rumor was that Leopold's mother Louise Caroline the Countess of Hochberg was a notoriously ambitious woman as she masterminded her son's ascent to the throne by removing an heir from Charles the first one of the male children who died in infancy would have been around Casper's age and many began to speculate that Caroline switched out the baby with a dying baby and then hid away the legitimate heir and when they discovered that the heir was alive and well and living as kaspar hauser they had her murdered to preserve the crown hmm so perhaps kaspar hauser came from royalty I mean it wouldn't be the first time crazy machinations were used to get the crown so yeah a big part of kaspar story was that he came from a wealthy family he had spent a lot of time around horses he had a silk scarf that no peasant would have been able to afford and he actually knew some details of stately manors that were able to be corroborated later on now it is quite possible that both of these scenarios are true he was deceitful he was a schemer and a liar but then when the story started getting around this rumor that he was the legitimate heir to the throne then the world family you know they nipped it in the bud they took him out but this royal connection or suppose a royal connection is why the story continued to grow and why people are still talking about it 200 years later plenty of books have been written on this case Verner Herzog did a movie about it called the mystery of kaspar hauser and of course when modern DNA testing became a thing people jumped on it a 1998 DNA test that use of blood sample from the underwear that he was wearing when he was murdered was kind of a bummer it didn't turn out any connection to any royal family or descendants of the royal family however in 2002 a different DNA test was done with mitochondrial DNA and they compared it with a woman named Astrid von med enger' who was actually a descendant a female descendant of Stephanie de Beaune and it actually showed a 95 percent match double however they used a different blood sample in 2002 than they did in 1998 and those two blood samples did not match each other so it's still not fully known which the blood samples are even his so I'll leave it to you what do you think crazy attention-seeking liar or legitimate heir to the throne or both let's put a pin on this mystery down the comments so that's kaspar hauser I've been kind of fascinated by this story my whole life I grew up you know real-life mystery books when I was a kid and this was always one of them that just really stood out to me was just fascinating you know nobody knows who this kid came from and yeah I hope you enjoyed that this your first time here I invite you to check out this video because Google thinks you'll like it and any of the others might be on the sidebar over there and if you do enjoy them and you're not subscribed I invite you to subscribe if I have earned it I invite you to subscribe because I've come back with videos every Monday and every Thursday t-shirts as always available at the store dancers with Joe calm slash shirts thanks again for watching you guys go out and now have an eye-opening rest of the week and I'll see you on Monday love you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 2,110,248

Rating: 4.8703823 out of 5

Keywords: answers with joe, random thursday, kaspar hauser, nuremberg, mystery, mysterious person, holy roman empire, lord stanhope, munchausen syndrome, factitious disorder imposed on self, people held in captivity, european royal history

Id: jiiCvdnoPGc

Length: 11min 30sec (690 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 05 2019