Marina Chapman is a British housewife living in Bradford in Yorkshire and is married to a church organist. This doesn’t sound particularly unusual but her life story is anything but normal.
Chapman says that she was kidnapped in Columbia at the age of 5, presumably for ransom and later abandoned in a remote village and left for dead in the middle of the jungle.
She was adopted by a troupe of Capuchin monkeys who fed her and helped her to adjust to their lifestyle. She spotted the monkeys in the jungle and started eating their discarded fruit and nuts, eventually forgetting her parents and even her own name.
She spent about five years with the monkeys before being found by hunters and sold into human slavery to a brothel in Cucuta in exchange for a parrot
Her feral instincts helped her to escape from this and live as a street kid, before being adopted by a loving family in Bogota as a teenager and giving herself the name of Marina.
View the Book – UK
The Girl with No Name: The Incredible True Story of a Child Raised by Monkeys
View the Book – USA
The Girl With No Name: The Incredible True Story of a Child Raised by Monkeys
Andrew Lounie, the book’s agent says:
“She was confronted by about twenty curious capuchin monkeys,”
By following them and copying what they ate and drank, their social activities, their language, Marina gradually became part of the family for five extraordinary years. They fought, played and shared tender and terrifying experiences. Marina developed extraordinary super-human abilities such as tree-climbing, stealth and animal communication.”
Once while living with the monkeys, she ate too many of a certain type of berry and became very ill with stomach cramps and nausea. She thought one of the monkeys was trying to kill her because it took her down to the river and kept pushing her head into the water.
She says she looked into the eyes of the monkey and knew it wasn’t a bad monkey. She then started drinking the water which helped her to vomit out the poison and flush out her system.
She made a trip to Britain in her mid-twenties with a family that employed her and while in Britain, met her husband John at a church in Bradford. They married and have two children.
“When we wanted food, we’d have to make noises for it,” her daughter said “All my school friends loved Mum as she was so unusual. She was childlike, too, in many ways.
Her daughters said the story made sense “When you are raised by her, you just find it normal.’
The daughters considered giving their mother a lie detector test, but instead they went to Colombia to try to verify her story. They say they tracked down locations and found people whom they claim corroborated their mother’s story outside the jungle.
“Mom seemed more excited about finding her monkey family,’’ Joanna Chapman explained. “She’s learned recently that monkeys can live up to 55 years, and she’s recently gone, ‘They might be alive, I might find the one.’”
“There’s no evidence she’s lying,’ according to Douglas Candland, a professor of psychology at Bucknell University specializing in feral children “What happens over time is of course the more you tell the story, some aspects of it get sharper, and some get forgotten.”
The Girl With No Name has been serialised in theMail on Sunday and The Sun. Numerous other papers and broadcasters have picked up on it including BBC Breakfast TV (10 April), Victoria Derbyshire, Radio 5 (10 April), Newsround, CBBC(10 April), This Morning, ITV (11 April), Saturday Live, Radio 4 (13 April) and first press interview The Guardian Weekend (13 April)
