69: The Boy Who Came From Nowhere: Kaspar Hauser | Red Thread
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Just as the weary city settled into uneasy slumber, a ragged boy appeared at the gate. Every villager who glimpsed him, who would later whisper his name, Kasper Hauser, felt a tremor of guilt as if confronted by a mirror that reflected their own hidden cruelties. Fear and fascination warred with the murmuring crowd, for he spoke not a single word, yet carried the weight of a thousand questions.

From the drooping shoulders of the guards to the trembling hands of the magistrate, none could hide the shudder that passed through them. Restless whispers drifted through the long corridors of power where men prided themselves on order. Every attempt to unravel his origin only deepened the shadows in which he seemed to wander. Yielding to a curious blend of pity and dread, the magistrate ordered the boy be clothed and fed.

Even as the first bark of the morning huntsman echoed across the misty fields, though, the boy's vacant gaze remained fixed on some distant, unseen horizon. Perhaps it was because he was untouched by the filth of civilization coming from beyond the walls of man. Something ancient, primal even, seemed to tremble behind his silent eyes. Trailing behind him like a mournful dirge, the secrets he carried rotted in the air.

Even now, his past haunted him. In the loneliest of hours, the boy would stand at his window, staring into the abyss while the world attempted to answer the questions he had not the voice to ask. Now, the truth of his existence hangs between the known and the unknown, as delicate and perilous as a spider's final trembling thread. Perfect word to end that little intro on, thread. Due to this being, of course, the red thread, I'm joined by friendly Geordies. Hello, good sir.

Hello, I am intrigued. You're intrigued immediately. That's good. Oh, totally. Okay, well, that sounded sarcastic. Do you want to go back to the initial excitement? Sorry, I just sound sarcastic all the time. I don't think that I can. This is just me. And I'm guessing Kira is not excited. What? I'm excited. Are you? I thought that you just knew everything that was happening. Is it so much of a mystery that you don't even know, having researched this for days?

Once I finish the document, I cleanse my mind of everything and then I go in with a fresh perspective. Wow. She's an amnesic. Oh, that's incredible. She forgets immediately what she writes afterwards. Yeah, no MIB flash for you.

Welcome to Red Thread, joined by Jordan, as per usual, as well as Kira, the research writer of the documents each week. She does an exemplary job. She does an incredible job researching this in the small amount of time we afford her. She does, honestly, like, without her, this show isn't possible. So a big thank you to her, as per usual. And we've brought her along once again to answer any questions we may have that she may have the answer to.

Kira, how was it? How was this one? This is a really interesting case. I'm actually excited for it. Very interesting just how the mystery of this young teenage boy just kept, I don't know, unraveling but kept going. Yeah, progressing. Was it ever really solved? No. No.

Also just the clothes that they're wearing at that time. I've got to say, I'm a big fan of the Red Thread episodes where it's... You can imagine that there was a lot of wealthy men wearing wigs. I like that period. Yeah, you've always told me that that's your favourite time period is when men could wear wigs. Is there some kind of...

Is that so much to ask? Is there some level of deeper fascination with wigs for you? Like, is it fetishistic in nature? I don't know. It's simultaneously hilarious and classy. Where else do you get that in history? Yeah, it's a shame that we're moving from that. Like, you can't really... I mean, George Washington looks like a joke and a boss at the same time. It's incredible. It's funny now how the only people who are able to wear wigs, well, other than actresses and stuff, are, like...

judges over here in Australia and Britain or people ashamed of their hair loss. I guess... But then people still make fun of that. They're two-page. Yeah, they're slightly different. And they're trying to hide the fact that they're wearing a wig. Yeah, true. So it is really only judges. It's just judges. And I'm glad that that is carried over.

I think that it should also be absolutely mandated that every parliamentarian has to wear one. Why stop there? Why stop there? Go as far as you can. Everyone is mandated to wear giant volumous wigs at least once a week. The local service station. We should have a designated wig day where everyone has to wear it. Otherwise you get thrown in jail.

Alright, so this week on Red Thread, we are tackling the question of who was Kasper Hauser, the boy with the mysterious past, the unknown past even. This is a story from the 1800s, a historical story. So I thought that, Jordan, this would actually be a very interesting one for you because you're quite a fan of history, let's say, especially the time periods with wigs. So this felt perfect. So it is a

Very, very interesting story about where a boy came from. So we'll start right now with chapter one, who was Kasper Hauser. To spoil the surprise, Jordan, immediately, we may never really know, and we certainly don't know at the moment...

Who was Kaspar Hauser? Kaspar Hauser quite literally appeared out of nowhere in Nuremberg, Germany on May 26th, 1828. As he struggled to walk and as he wandered the local square with no apparent direction, two local townspeople, one being a local shoemaker, found the teenager approximately 16 years old at the time and tried to offer assistance. Shoemakers are still a thing now, right? It's more of like an artisan thing now if it's not made in a sweatshop, right?

Oh, are you talking about, I don't know, Zippo or whatever it's called? I don't know what that is. I think it's like the Amazon of shoes. Is a shoemaker the Mr. Minute guy that glues your boots together? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, no. Yeah, I think it's people taking like leather and shit and making it from scratch, not in like a, you know, mass produced way. It's like an art form.

At least it was back then. I think back in that time period, well, maybe earlier, like the 1700s and stuff, being a shoemaker was one of the most notable and well-respected things a community member could be because you couldn't do anything without wearing shoes, obviously. So yeah, they were a big deal back then. How the times have changed. Especially in a time when I'm pretty sure that Nuremberg would have been more or less an open sewer that people lived in.

Oh, yeah, for sure. As most cities in Europe were. For sure. Like, if you were just walking around in that day and age, you would have stepped in human turds like their dogs. Oh, yeah. They would be all over the street. You wouldn't be able to avoid... The thing I think about most with that time period is just how bad everything must have smelled.

Yeah. Just constantly. Oh, yeah. You know what I found out the other day? I can't even remember him. And the Americans are again going to laugh at my- George Washington. Ignorance of you. No, it's not George. Not everything is George Washington Jackson. Barack Obama. There were other presidents. Yeah. Okay. There we go. Yeah. I've gone through them all. The two presidents of the United States started dusted. You know that Simpsons gag? I can't even remember his name. He's like, I'm Andrew Anderson. I died in 30 days. You know that thing? Yeah.

That guy did die in 30 days, and I don't know why. They wrote it down because it was the 1800s of, oh, he died of a broken heart, something like that. No. But the reality is Washington was a swamp.

And it was a swamp that people just shat in the swamp. It would have been one of the most awful places to live on earth. Wait, so you actually were going to talk about Washington, just a different form of Washington. Oh, crap. You're right. Yeah, sorry. I completely take that back. You're absolutely right. What the hell? Just a random guess in the air.

Out of anything. Yeah, you're right. Absolutely. I don't know who that president was, but it's pretty much just accepted now that that guy died purely just because of how unsanitary Washington is. That's the time that we're living in. So even a president, even the most protected person in the world at the time, died from the unsanitary conditions of the world at that time. Yeah, just because of turds, pretty much. He died because of turds. Yeah.

I was going to say there's worse ways to go, but there might not be worse ways to go. That might actually be the worst way to go. It might be the worst way ever. It's just like if Steve-O died in the port-a-potty, that'd be a pretty bad time to go.

Awful, awful place. Yeah, just the smells of that time period. Like in all the beautiful paintings and stuff we have of that time period, it always looks so romanticized. But then I put myself in that setting and I just imagined just how fucking disgusting everything must have been. And it's like, why? No wonder they were painting such beautiful sites of it because it was a form of escapism probably. Knowing that

If they pulled themselves away from the paintings, they had to be faced with the hard truth that there's, you know, your neighbor's turds right outside your doorstep. Awful. It's all right. There's no turds in the painting ever. Yeah. Where's the realism? God damn it.

We need more photos. There is a reason that this, not this period, but just before was the romantic era. That was it. Just deleting turds out of history. Like Stalin purging members of the commentary. People always say like the internet, fire, the stick. Yeah. Those things are like our best inventions, maybe satellites, GPS. Honestly, it's probably just indoor plumbing. Yeah. Yeah.

Toilets and dumps. Actual designated dumps. There was nothing that was more of a leap in medical marvel than people thinking, how about we just come up with some sort of like trash cart and it dumps it out of the town? That might be a good idea. Yeah, instead of just leaving it everywhere we walk and exist in. Yeah. Fantastic. Although I always wonder how quickly that's going to catch up to us. What do you mean? Like, surely the dumps fill up.

The world just becomes a giant dump. Yeah, yeah. I mean, obviously, that's going to be like hundreds of years from now. But there has to be some negative to building giant landfills and filling them up with towering amounts of trash. Hey, Kristen, how's it tracking? With Carvana Value Tracker. What else? Oh, it's tracking.

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oh yeah, without it, there's so many problems with it. Especially at this day and age. Yeah, dude, there's heaps. There's a lot of problems. But that is just pretty much history, isn't it? It's like, as Wizard Churchill said, one damned thing after another. It's just like, oh fuck, these fires, we'll extinguish that one. Oh, I created another fire over here. Now we've got to extinguish that. That's the whole thing. It does show how childish my view, like my worldview is though. As long as the trash is literally out of my sight, it doesn't exist until this point where we're thinking about it for me. Yeah.

That's so bad. How many issues are out there that are just like that for me? Who knows? I'm sure we'll find out. So they tried to offer assistance, this shoemaker and another local townsperson. They were left confused by his strange repeated sentence. Him saying, I want to be a cavalry man as my father was. Uh,

Obviously not in English as my sentence also was not in English, but obviously that sentence was not in English, but instead in old Bavarian dialect. Yeah. That's a, that's a throwback. Remember those days? The only reason I know of Bavarian is because Bavarian cheesecakes are like the best. Those are the best. Yeah, me too. That's it. So good. And you're right. Yeah.

Hauser wore ratty clothes, a silk necktie and a waistcoat and gray jacket, pantaloons and a worn out and old torn up boots. Well, luckily he met a shoemaker immediately. That's a good connection to make if his boots are destroyed. He also had a handkerchief that hadn't been embroidered with the initials KH.

In his hands, Hauser held a letter that was addressed to Captain von Wesenig, the captain of the 4th Squadron of the 6th Cavalry Regiment. What this letter contained added more layers to the mystery. The first part of the letter was written by an anonymous poor laborer,

By poor, we mean obviously like destitute as well, I would assume. Destitute laborer who claimed he found Hauser as a newborn with the request of raising him until he turned 16, then he could be sent to the cavalry division in Nuremberg. The other part of the letter was apparently written by Hauser's mother explaining how Hauser was born on April 30th, 1812 and how she was unable to look after or feed the child as his father had passed away, thus giving him up to the laborer. In the letter, she named him

Stranger still, the letter explained that for most of his life, he had been quite isolated, never allowed in his guardian's house, and was rarely allowed outside of his cell. The letter told Captain Von Wessenig, quote, drive him away or hang him in the chimney. Damn.

Which I think means either like get rid of him, give him to the cavalry. I think it's give him to the cavalry division for whatever reason or basically execute him. I don't want anything to do with him anymore. So that's correct here?

Yeah. That reading of that? Okay. So yeah, whoever, wherever he had come from, and whoever he's legal guardian in quotation marks, if there was such a thing at the time, they clearly didn't want anything to do with him at this point. And they basically sent him out into the world on his own.

With this note, the laborer also wrote that he had taken custody of Casper on the 7th of October, 1812, when Casper would have been around six months old. When taken to the captain, he did not know Hauser and was equally as perplexed as the townspeople were. With no idea what to do, they took Hauser to the local police who interrogated him in an attempt to uncover whatever answers they could. Hauser struggled to talk and unfortunately gave no real information. Hmm.

information repeating quote horse horse and quote don't know end quote to any questions however one officer put a pencil and some paper in front of him and he wrote his full name casper hauser

They observed that Hauser behaved like a child. It was like he was just learning how to read, for example, as well as write and walk. His feet were found to be entirely smooth, like he had never walked much in his life at all. They did note, though, that he was, quote, clearly not a madman or an idiot, end quote. Unsure what to do, the police treated Hauser like a vagrant and held him in a town prison at Nuremberg Castle for two months until they could kind of decide what to do with him. So what are you thinking at the moment, Jordan?

Just absolutely entranced. That's it. I am as curious as the cops are. Where did this boy come from? And when he got trapped in the prison, yeah, good call. How smooth were his feet? Is it a crime to have smooth feet? Is that why he was thrown away in jail? And again, doesn't it feel like something from the time to really note that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Quite smooth. If someone took a look at my feet right now, they'd probably think that I hadn't walked a day in my life as well, even though.

I am known to walk. So you're basically Casper Hauser, but you know English. Yeah, wait, Kira, are my feet smooth? Do you think my feet are smooth? They're pretty smooth. Yeah, okay, sweet. There we go. Why did you get away with such smooth feet? Do you not have smooth feet? I don't think I have the smoothest.

Do you think that yours are notably smooth? Chuck them up on screen and let everyone see. All right, wait. I can get them up. Get yourself on WikiFeet. This is for WikiFeet, yeah. Not feet for free. There you go, feet for free. They're on screen. There's my little puppies. Get those grippers down.

Kira, do you think that you have smoother feet? You're not getting her feet off on screen. Those are for me, Jordan. Don't you dare. I was just asking, you know. For science. That was the whole plot the whole way through. You show yours, Kira. It was a little scheme. Do you reckon that you have smoother feet than Jackson, though? Or does Jackson have very... Because I can't see.

No, Jackson would have smoother feet. Really? Jesus. Wow. There you go. My last job, I had to wear worker's steel cap boots. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. That screwed them up for life.

Yeah, she wears the steel toe-capped boots of our household. She does all the hard work. Yeah, that is a manual labour shoe, isn't it? Yeah, it was full on. Steel-capped. Super stinky as well. Oh, yeah, yeah. Lid is not great, is it? No. They don't have any room to let the stink out, Kira. All right, where was I? Chapter two, A New Deadly Life.

Local townspeople were interested in seeing the mysterious teenager with many gathering to catch a glimpse of him. He was seen as a wild and feral child and the effects of his isolation and poor education were showing. He turned away most food, besides bread and water, and ate with no concept of manners. Maybe that's why he was imprisoned. Manners were a big deal back then, weren't they? I think so. Yeah, yeah, no, manners were huge. Not anymore.

No, it wouldn't even be noted. Again, wouldn't be noted. No. He was astonished and amazed when he first saw things like a lit candle, which he burned his hand on trying to hold, and a mirror. It was determined that he was around 16 years of age, but did not appear to be rather intellectually impaired by his upbringing, though it was noted by the local mayor, Mayor Binder, that the boy seemed to be a quick learner, rather adaptable, and he didn't seem to have any trouble with memory. I don't know if you could say that

He didn't have any kind of intellectual holdbacks from his time in captivity, considering he burned his hand trying to hold a lit candle, and he was confused by mirrors. Do you think that's a mental impairment, or he's just never seen it before in his life? It did appear to be rather...

That's a big question. Yeah, I mean, but you can be... Yeah, I guess it's more so what you're saying, Jordan. I don't think it inherently means that someone is born with an impaired brain. Yeah, it's probably to do with his upbringing.

The police felt that they could not continue to hold Hauser in the prison for any longer, despite not getting any further in their hunt to find his origins. So Hauser was placed in the care of teacher and scholar George Fredericks Dormer. Dormer, 28 years old, had been a secondary school teacher, but was unable to continue working due to an eye condition. Under his guidance... I love how like 28 years old back then is probably like nearing retirement age. Yeah. Like he had to retire because he was going blind.

Oh my god, that's so true. It's probably from all the stink fumes from the shit in the street. He lived until he was 75. What's that, Kira? He lived until he was 75. True, yeah, I guess that does throw a wrench in the pipes. Now, is this still the period where that's really strange that someone lives that long? I don't know, let me have a look. 1800s life expectancy. Yeah.

The average life expectancy globally. I just want Europe. Yeah, give it to Europe. Globally was 30. I don't know. In 1800s, Europe, life expectancy at birth generally ranged from 30 to 40 years. Wow. Damn.

I guess you're probably just averaging out all the babies that die, though. I was just about to say, this was due in part to high infant mortality rates with about half of all children dying before adolescence. God, it is so strange to think about that because I was just reading recently. We really don't understand how good we've got it. We sit here, we consume our slop, we talk about...

Like, you know, all these YouTube beefs, this is the end of the world. Man, there was periods not that long before this, say even in the 1700s, where...

A third, a quarter of the population would just die of famine frequently in Europe, the rich part of the world. Or plagues, like literally plagues would just wipe out entire countries, basically. Constant threat of warfare. That's a weird thing to think about now, because now we just live in the nuclear age where it's kind of just eliminated more or less. And there's sort of just these little proxy wars that are almost, again, just...

YouTube content, more or less. It's kind of like this weird, dumber version of what they thought wars would be in 1984. Obviously, they're still causing loss of life and stuff, but nothing to the degree that was routinely happening in Europe. And also, just the endless threat constantly of just, you know, you could be in Nuremberg and

tomorrow the French might decide to invade. You'd never know. Classic French. You'd never know. Yeah. And you would also not have the education to know either. Like, you wouldn't have any kind of idea, generally speaking, of what is happening. And just to put it in context, like, half of all children die before adolescence. So...

We always see that when we're talking about historical families and stuff, how they would have to have 15 kids, basically, because about 12 of them would die before hitting adulthood. Yeah. Crazy stats like that. Yeah. It's always amazed me how we actually did get to the stage where we're at.

It's honestly astonishing, isn't it? It's really like there's just never been a period of history anything like this. As in, the 1700s is a lot closer to ancient Rome than we are to the 1700s. We've never been afforded the comfort in our lives to be as annoying as we are now, basically. Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's such a good summary. It's sad, but true, but good.

Yeah. Thank God I was born now, basically. Who knows what it would be like in 100 years and we know exactly what it was like 200 years ago, for example. We'll just be consciousness uploaded into the algorithm. That's it. And we'll just imagine this podcast. That's awesome.

So under Dalma's guidance, Hauser began to learn fast. He got better at speaking, writing, reading. He learned how to play chess and the piano. And he was also allowed to explore the world of arts, painting and drawing. Dalma was also interested in homeopathy. Homeopathy?

Yeah, either or, don't you reckon? Homeopathy. Fuck me. Homeopathy. Homeopathy. Homeopathy sounds natural to the Australian tongue, doesn't it? Yeah, man. The issue is I second-guessed myself halfway through reading a word, and then it just fucking like... Snowballs from there. Yeah, it slips out of my mouth, a jumbled mess. I have no clue. Regardless, he was interested in this. What is it, like a naturalist thing, Kira? Yeah.

Yes, so it's like alternative medicine. Which, what the fuck was alternative medicine like back then in the 1800s? Probably better than actual medicine, I reckon. Yeah.

Maybe like oils and herbs and plants and things like that. Plants, yeah. But I thought that's basically what medicine itself was based on. Yeah, there was a very faint distinction. I guess medicine back then would have included phrenology. So regardless, Dahmer was interested in this made-up science and would treat Hauser regularly. Dahmer noticed that Hauser was very perceptive

The boy would pick up on small things and had a heightened sense of smell, taste, and incredible eyesight. He was sensitive about colors, loving red, but hating the color green, making him dislike nature. What? What? He was sensitive about colors, loving red, but hating the color green, making him dislike nature. That's such an odd detail. Hating the color green makes you dislike nature. Okay. Nature is green. But do you love and hate colors that deeply?

No, but I'm not one of those people that... What's that thing where people say that things taste like red or feel like black? I don't know. Some people just have that... They have their senses mixed up, and so they have a different sensory experience to colors than the rest of us do. I think color for me is way more, like, subconscious, I think. Like, obviously...

There's been a bunch of science over the 50 years, especially in marketing, about how colors alter people's perceptions. You know, red makes you hungrier. Yeah. And blue makes you more comfortable or something like that. Regardless, there's been a lot of research into how colors make you feel. I think, obviously, I'm human, so I think I'm affected that way. But, of course, I think most of that is just subconscious. There's no kind of willing...

willing drive behind it or awareness of it. I would never be able to say, well, I love red and so that makes me like certain things, for example. I would probably need a scientist to determine that for me. Whereas he's able to say that he hates the color green, therefore he dislikes nature so much. That's just odd to me.

Well, I guess he probably just has more of an emotional connection to it because he doesn't have language as a sort of label. True, yeah, that could be an interesting angle because he was theoretically raised without language. Maybe that became his language. Yeah, and you would just kind of just like, I suppose, blind people have better hearing. Yeah. Kira, were you going to say something?

It's not just nature. He disliked anything color green. Anything that color green was ugly. Okay, so it was just way more surface level than what I'm saying. He just really disliked green. Okay. He could read and distinguish colors and objects apart in the dark. With his eyes closed, he could tell the difference between gold, silver, and brass just by feeling them. It was reported that, quote, when Professor Dalmer held the North Pole... I reckon I could do that.

You reckon you could distinguish between gold, silver, and brass? I reckon I could do that. Yeah. In weight, maybe. Is gold, like, super light? Yeah, I don't think that that's that impressive. I think that George Friedrich Daimler just sucks. It might have been impressive then when they didn't have any idea of anything. Maybe. When the town professor was a guy impressed by him hating the color green, maybe it was...

It was reported that, quote, when Professor Dahmer held the North Pole of a magnet towards him, Casper put his hand to the pit of his stomach and, drawing his waistcoat in an outward direction, said that it drew him thus, and that a current of air seemed to proceed from him. What is that, a fancy way of saying he farted? What is that? A current of air proceeded from him. What does that mean?

Someone dumb it down for me. Yeah, I don't know what the hell he's talking about. Said that it drew him thus and that a current of air seemed to proceed from him. The South Pole affected him less powerfully and he said that it blew upon him. So he's basically saying that he was affected by magnets, I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And we are. Are we? If I'm to learn anything from the frequent infomercials of magnet mattresses. Believable.

Hauser could also pick up on the sense and feelings of the homeopathic medicines that Dahmer would often use from a distance. Dahmer was impressed with his progress and his abilities shining through, but was annoyed by Hauser's local fame within the community. Many wanted to see him and talk to him, with Hauser for a short while enjoying the limelight as the town darling, although some were more suspicious of his sudden appearance. Over time, he gained the nickname

Child of Europe. Wow. Pretty cool. What a name. With his new proficiency with language, Child of Europe does sound very Eurovision-y to me. Doesn't it? Yeah, it's true. A bit pretentious in my opinion.

With his new proficiency with language and perhaps feeling more comfortable in his surroundings, Casper began to more clearly recount his time growing up. He described the cell that he was kept in. He claimed it was around six feet long, three feet wide, and three and a half feet high.

for everyone out there that is every australian out there and people that don't use the imperial system that is 1.8 meters by 0.9 meters by one meter and he spoke of sleeping on a straw bed in said cell so yeah that's like a fucking harry potter under the staircase basically like that's that size that you would expect for him to be kept in basically right that's very yeah yeah

Very, very small conditions. Unsurprisingly, he was only ever left bread to eat and water that had a strange bitter taste that made him fall asleep. Really? He was getting drugged to sleep, Kira? Apparently so. Wow, I'm surprised that they had stuff that you could put in water that just knocks people out back then.

Oh, no, you'd absolutely have those things for sure. What would it be? Homeopathy. Ah, right. The color green. Actually, it would be the color purple, I think. Purple probably has the most sleep effect. When he would later wake up, he would sometimes notice that someone had visited him in his sleep. For example, his nails and hair would be cut. Damn, I wish that happened to me. Yeah, me too. Imagine how productive life would be if some servant came along and did all the things you didn't want to be done to you while you're asleep.

Oh, God. It's honestly speaking about my ideal life. I would love to just be locked in a cell with a laptop that has no internet connection. And then that happens. And I go to sleep and I wake up and it's like, oh, sick, there's bread here. And I don't have to worry about cutting my nails. Someone's cleaned up my kitty litter box as well. My litter box in the corner. Yeah.

What a life, Jordan. I can make that happen for you if you want. We can imprison you. Oh man, it's tempting. It really is. The two windows in the cell had been boarded up, so he had no access to light, which might explain his good vision in the dark. Is that how vision works? Like if you're raised in the dark? I know it worked for Batman, but does it work for this? Like if you're raised in the dark, you're just naturally good at seeing in the dark?

Yes. I've got to imagine that once you go outside though, your eyes will burn out of the sockets basically from the light. Blinded. Yeah, that would be awful.

Whoever kept Hauser there did not want the teenager to know his identity, seemingly wearing a mask when talking to him, which only happened just before he sent Hauser away. It was unanimously thought that Hauser must have been put away in his cell and kept from the world somewhere from the age of two to four. As one big key to this thinking was that it appeared like instead of learning the language, it was more as though he was remembering it. He was learning the language so fast that he in fact even began to write an autobiography. Wow.

Well, that's impressive. He's probably not intellectually disabled then. No, no, no, no. He is just adapting and coming up with his own form of learning. Because that's something else that's really interesting. It's a tad suspicious if you ask me personally. If you've been held captive in isolation for 16 years of your life, the largest development period of a human being

That entire period you spent in isolation away from any kind of education or knowledge or even human language, and then you come out and pick up the language within a year? That's a bit suspicious. Wait, so you're saying that he was...

about sitting there and saying... I'm not saying that yet. Don't put words in my mouth. I'm just insinuating it happily. We'll see how it goes. So good. Detective Jackson. Education investigator. LAUGHTER

Does it not seem weird to you, though, that at like 16 years and then comes out and immediately starts banging out autobiographies and slamming on the keys like Beethoven would? Maybe if he was just keeping that sort of child mind that Buddhists talk about. It actually doesn't seem that strange to me that you would keep the baby formation because he is probably learning how to speak a language the way that babies learn to speak a language, which is not how we learn.

Babies do not pick up their local ESL Grammarly, you know, let's learn Japanese. They basically just look at mouths. That's what they do. Look at mouth shapes. So you think that's what he was doing? Yeah, I think he was that but 16. So it could make sense that he's doing it. Isn't it incredible that this guy might actually be-

If only we scoured his brain, if this guy sat there and said, all right, let's try and figure out how this guy is learning, it would probably be better than Steiner, Montessori, our education system. He's probably killed it. He's probably figured it out. That's how humans naturally throughout time have learned. It's through your environment and through experiencing. It's always going to be the best form of education.

Yeah, totally. But to learn how to write your own autobiography, which, you know what, maybe it was like really badly written. Yeah, we don't know the quality of it. Yeah. Could have been awful. Probably was shit. So, yeah, just asking someone in year one to write an autobiography. And then I was hungry and then mum got me a Coke. Kira, what were you going to say?

It wasn't just like speaking and writing that he was learning. It was also like chess and behaviors and things to do and horse riding and all this stuff in an incredibly short period of time, less than a year. Whoa. Isn't that like brain overload? Yeah. That's what I think. Whereas Jordan is all in. He's a believer. I feel like, don't you feel like a lot of your life though,

You could be learning things, but you're sort of just not interested in learning things. And so instead you just waste your time watching Netflix. Yeah, maybe. But also I feel like I just...

I feel like even though he's lived 16 years in captivity, if that is true, he's already gone through large phases of learning things. Even if he exists in a vacuum in that cell, I think he's already probably used up that time where he would take on those giant developmental changes by learning things like

you know bread shows up today or the texture and flavor of bread or how dark things are like just just general knowledge things that he's picked up through observation i think once you hit a certain age and your brain hits certain milestones uh taking in knowledge that way probably becomes a bit more difficult but i'm not sure i don't know the science behind it yeah me neither but now that you're mentioning it maybe i don't know i was just lying about the whole thing

Just some celebrity. Yeah, it could be. Like the Nikato avocado. Yeah. Oh, yeah. The very first social media star. Yeah.

Kasper Hauser. So he claimed that his guardian, the jailer, let's call him, had taught Hauser how to stand and walk as well as write his own name before bringing him to Nuremberg where he was then instructed, sorry, where he then instructed Hauser to state, quote, I want to be a cavalry, I want to be a horseman as my father was, end quote. Hauser now claimed to have no idea what that meant when he first said it. Ooh.

So he had no idea of the context of why he needed to say it or what it even meant. He was just told to say it. That's what he claims. Why a cavalry... Fuck me. Jordan, you just say it. Jesus Christ. Cavalry man. Thank you. Cavalry man. Cavalry man. As my father... Yeah, I'm assuming they were maybe an honorable position back then that was rather well paid, relatively speaking. So maybe that's why he said it or was told to say it.

Yeah. Yes. But why does he want him to be noble and respected? Yeah, if he clearly, he also said in the same letter, hang him if you don't want to do that. What the hell? It's a pretty extreme jump between affection. Either give him this esteemed position or kill him. Whatever you want. I'm easy.

So saying that like his mother maybe wanted him to be a Kavrumi man. You put this onto me now. It's so hard. It's the curse. I don't know why it's such a hard word to say for me. And his guardian was now saying, look, this is his mother's wishes, but do with him what you will. His mum wanted that. I don't know. Maybe the dead father was a horse rider.

Well, he says, he does say like my father was. Yeah. Okay. Interesting. I mean, if it's all lies, then it's an interesting backstory that he's given this entire situation. Real quick, before we continue, let's hear from the sponsor of this episode, ZocDoc, with

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Whoa. Yeah, you're thinking exactly what I'm thinking. They had toilets back then? Yeah, yeah.

That professor must have been rolling in money. He had his own toilet. I'm just thinking about how many people in the past died on the toilet. You hear so many kings and emperors taking a shit and then someone goes in with a spear and just bam, right? I don't think there's, other than sleeping maybe, I don't think there's a more effective time to attack someone. Yeah, totally. Totally. Especially just the shock of someone kicking the door down while you're taking a shit.

Yeah, I mean, it's the most... You know, like, I don't know, when you were, like, in primary school or whatever, you'd just kick it down and they'd be like, fuck off. I always tell this story. Back in... I distinctly remember this, actually. Back in preschool, for some reason, the toilets didn't have... They didn't have walls or anything. It was just a room full of toilets on the ground and, like, you all went in there at the same time and, like, used... What? Yeah, I know. It was weird. There were no cubicles. Every time I tell someone that, they had the same reaction. Oh, that's incredible.

Like a dog kennel or something. Yeah, it's like a... Or go out, do your pees and poos. A communal... Back to business. A communal shitting room. Isn't it weird that you all just synced at the same time? It's just like, yeah, it's time. Go to bed. Well, no, I think that's where I... I cannot shit in public. Like, in public toilets or anything like that. And I think that's where that is born from. I used to hold... Like...

desperately hold it hold on to it until i would get home from school because i was so paranoid of shitting because you're like it's human it's not even just human nature it's animalistic behavior like you look at dogs shitting out in the you know when you take them out the eyes on them whether they're fucking scanning the perimeter while they shit always terrified of anything happening also don't you think that they look quite guilty and ashamed when you look at them taking a shit oh yeah that's natural

Do you think you'd have a smile on your face if I barged in and stared at you while you were taking a shit? I just always thought that a dog, if they were taking a shit and you were just looking at them, they'd just have this response of, hey, mate. That's it. Just, yeah, yeah. No. It's a deeply shameful thing across species. Yeah, it's funny. So this man attacked with a knife, most likely aiming for his neck, but Hauser moved and it wounded his forehead instead.

The last thing Hauser heard before passing out was the following words. Quote, you must die before you get away from Nuremberg. End quote. Different articles report different wordings, but the intention of the phrase is the same.

I mean, that just comes down to translating it from Old Bavarian, I assume. It's probably very hard to translate pretty directly. Following investigations yielded no answers and there was no evidence of someone entering the house. The blood trail had shown that Hauser had first fled to the first floor where his room was, but then he returned downstairs and climbed through a trap door into the cellar.

Hauser then dropped the bombshell to the police investigators. He said that he recognized the voice of the masked assailant. It had been the same man who previously kept him as a prisoner. Oh my God. This just gets deeper and deeper. This is so interesting. It's the man in the iron mask in reverse. Why would you? Okay, so if the prisoner wanted this man, Casper, dead,

Why wouldn't he have just killed him when he held him captive for 16 years? I don't know. Why would he then let him free and then come back and try to kill him like, what, six months later? Guys, come on. Why hasn't this been turned into a movie? It should be a movie, yeah. It absolutely should be. Has it, Kieran? Has it been turned into a movie?

Casper Hauser movie. I'm sure it's like a, yeah, the Enigma of Casper Hauser from 1974. How good would this sell as sort of, I don't know, like an erotic thriller or something? What gave you the idea of erotic from any of this? Just because of masks. There's always masks in those European erotic thrillers. What's it called? Eyes Wide Shut? Yeah, Eyes Wide Shut, those kinds of things.

It's one of those things that's simultaneously trash and class. Casper, the Enigma of Casper Hauser, though, is directed, written, and produced by Werner Herzog. What? Yeah. Surely this is a documentary, right? No, but I don't think it's a documentary. So it is a thing. Yeah, it's a drama film. 1974. It might have been his first thing. Wow. Werner. Yeah. Far out. He never misses, does he? No, he's a fun director.

I'm watching that. Yeah, we should watch that. Wouldn't it be incredible if that becomes one of the bad films that we have to watch? Oh, yeah, for everyone listening out there, Jordan and I and also another Australian friend called Connor from Real Boys are doing a kind of bad movie watch podcast.

each week. It's available over on patreon.com slash the official podcast and official.men if you want to watch us watch bad movies. It's a lot of fun. The first episode is already out and we're doing another one later today. I'm looking forward to that. The Octoman was in the last episode as well as Clash of the Worlds. Can I just get on the record? I am not looking forward to it.

They were excruciatingly bad. Jordan could not believe how bad bad movies are. I really didn't. I thought that it would be fun, but no, bad movies are just bad. Yeah, they were bad. They were bad. We're looking for the hidden gems, though. We're searching through our giant list of bad movies. We're going to find it eventually, the hidden gem.

I think Werner Herzog could probably be on the list with some of these movies, surely. Damn, okay. After recovering, it was decided that Hauser should move out of Dahmer's home. Dahmer was frustrated that Hauser wasn't taking his studies seriously and had also become increasingly suspicious of Hauser and thought of him now as a bit of a liar, saying, quote, Casper Hauser's nature had lost much of its original purity and that a highly regrettable tendency to untruthfulness and dissimulation had manifested itself. End quote.

In January of 1830, Hauser was moved to the home of businessman Biberbach, with a policeman assigned to regularly watch and guard him. This living arrangement only lasted a few months, but the two did not get along and often argued. Seemingly, Biberbach quickly realized what Dahmer had noticed himself, that Hauser had a tendency to lie and be lazy. Biberbach's wife commented that Hauser had horrendous mendacity and was full of vanity and spite.

That's interesting. That speaks to his character. This is basically the first character assessment we've received of this Hauser, Casper Hauser so far. Yeah, but it's too grandiloquent, isn't it? I would really like to know what that means in modern words. I mean, I know that they're modern words. I know that we use these, but don't you think that they're just such old sentences that you're not really grasping? Full of vanity and spite, I think is pretty straightforward. He was an arrogant child who was tough to deal with.

Or teenager. Yeah. And horrendous mendacity. Mendacity. What is mendacity? Lying? Yeah, I think it's like, it's drama, dramatics, right? Mendacity is to be dramatic about things, I believe. Yeah, okay. It's untruthfulness and lying. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so just, I don't know, I guess essentially just saying exaggerating things to the hilt. Yeah, and doing so in an arrogant manner. I would assume so.

Interesting. I mean, that does... And there's several people that have corroborated that character assessment. Prominent people as well. It's not like these were just random people. There were people that took him in, tried to home him and help him out, and then decided, Jesus, this kid sucks. This guy is shit. Get him out of here. Get him back into the sewer streets where he belongs. There were also a few incidents that were the nail in the coffin and made Bieber back ask for Hauser to be removed.

In April of the same year, Bieberbach heard a pistol go off from Hauser's room. The police outside of the home and Bieberbach quickly made their way to Hauser where they found him unconscious once more and bleeding from a head injury. According to Hauser, he had been trying to reach some books from a high shelf and climbed on a chair to give him more height. He claimed that he fell and on the way down accidentally knocked a hanging pistol on the wall and set it off.

Many questioned the possibility of this being an accident, including Bieberback, who was now entirely done with the boy and wanted Hauser out of the house. So Hauser moved again, this time into the home of Baron von Tucker, a city official. Fuck, I love any name with von in it. It's so cool. So good. And Baron. Yeah, Baron. Excellent choice of words for your son. Yeah.

Yeah, Baron Trump. It's just such a cool name. A city official where he stayed for 18 months. A running theme, though, he stayed here for quite a while longer. The relationship between Tooker and Hauser, though, was also not good. Tooker had come to the same conclusions as those before him. So, where are your thoughts at now, Jordan? I wonder why. I wonder why he got into lying.

I reckon that's all about. Yeah, that's what they're saying. He got into the habit of just becoming a liar. Well, you don't know. He might not have got into it. He might have already had a fascination or obsession with lying. Oh my God. If Jackson's right again. I mean, I've read the document and I definitely agree with a certain theory about things.

a certain theory. Yeah. But I want you to, we've got to get to the theory. I want you to come to your own conclusions though, based off of the information, of course.

Yeah, right. But it sounds like it's very leading information. I mean, I have my opinions, though. Sounds like you're dropping a lot of clues. I can't hide my opinions. Chapter three, Lord Stanhope. There was someone in the background that had a great deal of interest in Hauser, a British nobleman by the name of Lord Stanhope. He had heard the stories and rumblings about a feral child, also called the Foundling, that wandered into Nuremberg and the strange past he was slowly revealing.

Stan Hope began to meet with Houser regularly in 1831 and by the end of the year declared his interest in taking him in as a ward, as his ward. Imagine being so inherently interesting to everyone that a fucking, like a royal family member comes out, visits you and is like, yes, I'll take him. He's mine now. I'll be gone in here. I mean, look at the painting of this guy. What a bull. Yeah. God damn. Isn't that incredible? Fucking awesome.

So he's pretty much just Logan Paul's friend, essentially. What do you mean? Just adopted into greatness for no reason. Oh, right. Just kind of a, I don't know, just intriguing for some reason. Just put him in there. Oh, this guy wears his hat backwards. Yeah, here you go. Be a medium. This guy's sick. I want him in my house permanently. You're mine now. Permanently.

The mystery of Hauser also greatly intrigued him. Where did the boy come from and who was he really? It was a mystery he wanted to solve. Perhaps this was planted and fostered by Hauser himself in the mind of Lord Stanhope. Yeah. I mean, that's what the document says. In the build-up to requesting guardianship over Hauser, Stanhope showered him with gifts and promises of a better life. He also declared that the pair would travel to countries like England.

I mean, at the time, that sounds cool, I guess. I guess. It's not Hawaii or anything, but it's something. No, it's just Germany that doesn't speak German. Yeah, with a different scent of shit on the streets. Maybe this also had an effect in the deteriorating relationship between Hauser and those such as Tucker.

Stanhope moved Hauser to Ansbach and put him under the supervision of a very strict schoolmaster named Johann Meyers. Stanhope invested a lot into trying to discover Hauser's origins. He would post rewards for any information on Hauser's childhood, but no one ever came forward and the money was never claimed. At one point, Hauser claimed he could remember certain words that were Hungarian and Slavic.

Stanhope latched onto these crumbs and took Hauser to Hungary twice, hoping that if Hauser was from the country, the trips would bring back memories and be a bit fruitful in his investigation. But Hauser never recognized anything in Hungary, and the same seeds of doubt every other adopted family had experienced were now planted in Stanhope. A Hungarian nobleman who had met Hauser had apparently claimed to Stanhope that he and his son had shared a good laugh when they remembered Hauser and his histrionic behavior. Histrionic.

histrionic means uh i think that's that means dramatic yeah over the top dramatic to that effect hauser was now claiming that a hungarian countess by the name of maitheny was his biological mother so he just i think house is throwing anything at the wall now yeah so yeah i mean when everyone says that you're a liar seems kind of like maybe maybe you're a liar

Something we haven't touched on yet is the dreams that Hauser was having. He told those around him that his dreams were filled with castles, coats of arms, and often a well-dressed lady and a man with a sword. This fueled speculation that perhaps these dreams were of Hauser's previous life, and maybe he actually did come from some sort of noble or wealthy descent. What were you going to say? I don't know. It's just like the theories begin.

And obviously, as usual, as is tradition on this podcast, we are starting with obviously the most likely one. Yeah, and it was all born from dreams. Ha ha ha!

Stan Hope liked this idea and sent off many inquiries and letters to possibly track down Hauser's possible family in Hungary. But again, nothing ever came back. Stan Hope was quickly losing faith in Hauser. All of his attempts to find Hauser's hopefully wealthy background were failing. And he was getting reports from Myers. Myers is the person that's looking after Hauser in the meantime, isn't he? Yeah, the school master. The school master, right. So the person that Stan Hope had left him in kind of...

training with, education with basically, management. So yeah, Myers reported that Hauser was not doing well in his studies and he had been shown to exhibit a tendency to tell lies. See, everyone's fucking saying it, Jordan. They are, aren't they? No one said anything else about his personality at all except for his lies. He must fucking suck at lying then if everyone knows. What's the point of doing it?

He's just going in too grand. That's his problem. Yeah, he hasn't calibrated the sneak. He hasn't learned how to do it successfully yet. Yeah. There's a lot to cram in in a year. True, yeah. He couldn't have learned how to lie in his cell for 16 years. It's all very new to him. The art of deception.

That actually does make a lot of sense, really, honestly. Learning a language would be the easy part. Yeah, learning to control and manipulate people. That's more difficult, especially if you've got no concept of people at the time. Yeah. When Stanford was in England, he would write letters to Hauser, but over time they became more formal and less affectionate. So it was like a fucking summer project for the Stanford guy, and then he's got bored of it. Godless interest, yeah. Oh, the games these royals play.

This change in mood was no doubt not lost on Hauser. Stanhope visited Hauser and Meyer in January of 1832. Hauser didn't know this would be the last time they would ever see each other as Stanhope returned to England alone. He continued to financially support Hauser from a distance but left him completely under the care of Meyer.

Lord Stanhope did make a short stop in Mannheim, where he then met the Grand Duchess of Baden, Stephanie. Stephanie had given birth to a boy in 1816, but he had only lived for a short time before passing away. There were rumors that Hauser was possibly the Prince of Baden. Stephanie was given a letter and a book detailing Hauser's life, to which he responded emotionally and expressed that she wanted to meet him. Stanhope assured her that he would arrange it, but he never did.

I don't know why the fuck he didn't. But yeah, I guess he said no to that. But yeah, it's possible that he could have been a prince, Jordan. Nah, don't you reckon? No way. Why not? Because it's nobility. It's called noble for a reason. Nobles don't lie.

Very 1700s thoughts. Yeah, they're very straightforward people, the Nobles. What you see is what you get with them. Especially the next photo after that is a woman that you can tell is filled with intrigue. Oh, man, it's such a cool aesthetic. Fuck. Isn't it?

Well after the fact, Stanhope published a book presenting all the information and discoveries he had made regarding the life of Kasper Hauser. In it, he stated that he had taken it as his duty to, this is a quote, his duty to openly confess that I had been deceived. End quote. Some believe Stanhope of ulterior motives in connections to the House of Baden, but other academics paint Stanhope as simply a man who wanted to know the truth. And then, yeah, we have a picture of Stephanie de Bohanay, uh,

Who, yeah, she's the royal family member of the Badens who is said to have been the mother of Kasper Hauser. And yeah, I mean, this aesthetic is just so fucking cool. I love this period of time where the royalty actually had intrigue and political machinations constantly, like all royal families did at the time. It's pretty boring now. Well, you know what? Apparently that still happens in the British palace, but...

Again, it just has no power. There's no ramifications for it. The traditions continue on, but it has been stripped of its power. But that same dynamic happens. Well, not stripped of the power. Probably for them, it feels like stuff is happening. Like all the different family issues and lies and deceit and political aspirations and stuff. But just in the general sense of the world, royalty means very little now. So the scale of the outcome of these little trysts

And affairs really just doesn't boil down to anything for regular people anymore.

Yeah, that's a really good point Whereas back then These things actually just shaped the countries That they existed in entirely Someone new could be in power Based off the Plots and Machinations of royal family members Or non-royal family members at the time That could then affect entire cities And groups of people Just broadly and massively Yeah Pretty crazy Which is what makes it so cool

Because it's history. And history is cool. Chapter four. The end of Casper Hauser. Hauser, now 21, was living under the stern rule of Meyer. They had been clashing regularly with Hauser, unhappy living in such strict environments and feeling rejected over Stan Hope not taking him with him to England and Meyer frustrated with Hauser's deceitful nature.

When Stanhope was previously trying to trace back Hauser's origins and thought he may be of wealthy or noble heritage, Hauser began to act a bit differently, a bit more royal, if you will, with his chest out and head up, but now he was given a job as a copyist at a local law office and he was very unhappy with this.

A big argument blew up on the 9th of December 1833, a few days before Stanhope was apparently going to visit once again. Hauser was apparently feeling very nervous for what Stanhope was going to say about this argument, and he was fearful that this could have been the excuse Stanhope may have needed to stop funding his life and supporting him in such a way, since he had obviously grown disinterested anyway.

He would, however, never get the chance to talk to Stanhope about it, as on the 14th of December, just five days later, Hauser came running into Myers' house at 3.30pm with a bleeding chest wound. Myers looked stunned, but also suspicious, with him first asking if he'd been in an accident. Hauser struggled to talk, barely getting out each word, but replied, quote, Went off guard and man had knife. Gave bag. Stabbed. Ran as hard as could.

But imagine that an old Batarian or whatever. What is it? Bavarian. Batarian is from a video game. That's very nerdy. That's from Mass Effect. Again, different articles report different wording, but the general phrase is the same.

Maya called for a doctor to assess Hauser, who determined how bad NDP's injury was, by sticking his fingers into the stab wound. Oh, nice. There we go. His shit-covered fingers. It's just proven now, isn't it? Homeopathy was better. Yeah. It was at this point.

He determined medically and scientifically by the fact that a significant portion of his finger had disappeared into the wound that yes, it was very, very bad. The police were notified and immediately... I guess that's the scale of like testing how bad the wound is, is how far your hand can go inside.

I think I can go in deeper. Hang on. Oh, man. Comes out the other side. With his unwashed hands covered in shit. Yeah, imagine him like fiddling his fingers around in there too, like wiggling them around. No, not the wiggle. No! The wiggle. Oh, my God. That wound. Jesus. It's like getting a tattoo, but way worse. Yeah, an internal tattoo. Yeah.

With the doctor's slimy, greasy fingers. Oh, no. I wish we could go back to those days. Didn't know they had KFC back then. Why the greasy? Well, from the shit. The police were notified and immediately arrived to question and investigate the events. How's it set? Surely the fucking doctor should be charged with a crime here as well. You probably could be. Yeah, that's manslaughter. Do the damage.

Hauser said he had been given a message to meet someone at the Arnsbach court garden. Some articles don't say what was in the letter to make him go there in the dead of winter alone. While others said that the letter stated information on his mother was waiting at the park for him. So that's what made him potentially go. The theory is that he had whoever is meeting that had information on his mother and family.

Yeah, I guess. I guess that could be a compelling reason to go alone. But why wouldn't he tell anyone? God, the mystery. The mystery just keeps unraveling, doesn't it? Why would he not tell anyone if that was the case? Why would he not be like, hey guys, heading out for the night. Some guy said he knows my mum. See ya. Maybe he felt like he had no one to tell. I mean, but he did. He had fucking Maya.

But they didn't get along. Yeah, but still, I'd probably tell someone just in case. I mean, he's going to meet some unknown person. He's already had one assassination attempt made on his life before. I'd probably tell someone that, hey, I'm going to meet someone suspicious. I'm scared. Please. And if I am stabbed, please don't finger my wound. Either way. Either way, he went to the park alone and saw a man who suddenly attacked and stabbed him in the chest.

Police went and searched the area and found the purse slash bag that Hauser was talking about was still there and found a mysterious note inside. It read, and this is another quote, the contents of the letter, quote, Hauser will be able to tell you quite precisely how I look and from where I am. To save Hauser the effort, I want to tell you myself from where I come.

dash dash dot I come from from dash dash dash the Bavarian border dash dash on the river dash dash dash dash dash I will even tell you the name M L O what the hell what does it mean what do the dashes mean why are the dashes there is it like a game of hangman like you know you're meant to fill in each dash with a letter the Bavarian border on the river maybe

Or maybe, yeah, he's later far out. To save Howza the effort, I want to tell you myself from where I come, dash dash. Hmm.

So the letter was written in, oh my God, Spiegel Schrift or mirror writing, contained spelling and grammar mistakes and was folded into a particular triangle form. Hauser, quickly deteriorating, was unable to identify his attacker. Myers, who could not get over his biased opinion of Hauser at this point, thought that this might have been an injury he inflicted to himself. That's incredible. He's lying. Still. Get up, pussy. At this point. He's just seen a doctor stick his whole hand in this wound and he's like, yeah, he's faking it.

Hauser remained absolutely steadfast in his claims that he was attacked however until he ultimately died on December 17th 1833 in his final breaths he muttered quote many cats are the death of the mouse tired very tired still have to take a long trip

End quote. Then death. What does this mean? Did this man ever say a cohesive sentence in his life? Just speak plainly, man. All this mystery. So much mystery. I mean, to go back to what you said, though, like if you're on your deathbed, you're probably very delirious. Nothing's probably going to make sense. Whatever you say, right? Especially if it's from a wound like that. Blood loss.

I guess, I don't, man, I hope that I say something cohesive. No, no way. I hope that I just say something very mysterious and people like us hundreds of years later are trying to decipher absolute gibberish. Just the most confused, I'm going to say the most confusing thing on my deathbed just to make sure that people are still talking about it. Just in my family. Such a bitter move. Just so I'm not forgotten. It's a desperate last play.

Of immortal life. It's very desperate, isn't it? Yeah. Please don't forget me. This guy's really thought about, I don't know, if this is just all a mad hustle, this guy's sick. Yeah, I mean, to be fair. What a con artist. I mean, he literally, what an interesting life to lead in that time period. He like literally met royalty. If this was all born from lies, all credit to him.

Yeah, I mean, he wouldn't be getting into the cavalry or anything like that. He just would have been a stable boy or something. Probably died from getting kicked in the head with a horse. No mystery there. Fucking suffocated cleaning some chimney or something. Like a hundred different ways he would have died and he died in the coolest way possible. The coolest, without a doubt. A commemorative plaque was put in the court garden that reads, quote, Hic occultus occulto osticis est.

which translates to, quote, here a mysterious person was mysteriously killed, end quote. Damn. See, I mean, look at his grave. This guy, again, like this is the coolest way of dying. If you're going to live a life, you may as well live it well. And he did. I can't believe, isn't it incredible that even in a time of scant resources,

You are able to increase your socioeconomic status by miles pretty much just by making people do what we're doing now and going, huh? Yeah. That's it. That's his economic utility. Yeah, just making people look at you and notice you. I mean, it literally is time and time again the most effective way of increasing one's social standing. If you're not going to be noticed- What, just going like, what's the secret? What is it? Well, it's-

Just making people ask the question in of itself. Like, what's up with that person? What are they doing? I want to learn more. That's why YouTube is so big, for example. Social media in general. That's why social media is so important. It's how entire careers are born overnight.

Yeah, so his tombstone reads, quote, here lies Caspar Hauser, riddle of his time, his birth was unknown, his death mysterious, end quote. And I will give it that, even though it seems pretty straightforward to me personally, like it is, his death is certainly mysterious. It's a very weird

Very weird death, at least. I still think that he's a straightforward person. Well, straight... I mean... Not what I would describe him as. No, he's not a straightforward person. But I think I'm more... What's the word I'm looking for? I don't know if realist is the right word. But yeah, I guess I'm taking more of a realist standpoint where I know that people...

pretty actively lie, like generally speaking, as made evident by the many people who said he lied. So you can literally chalk up most of the things that happened in this story to him lying just straight up as he is showing you. Yeah, you can. You can. But what I find even more mysterious now is what is the truth then? What is the truth? In fact, the lies make it even more mysterious. He's just a master of mystery, this man.

Alright, well let's find out. Maybe that's the way to go. Maybe if you just endlessly lie, people are enraptured with you constantly. Yeah, I think there's a balancing act with it though. Really? I don't know if that boy who cried wolf moment ever comes. To be a good liar, you need to actually succeed at lying. And if you get the reputation of being a liar, then you have failed at lying.

Yeah, but I don't know. There's also just like, I don't know, like your Nigel Farage or Trump characters, right? Kind of just known for being dishonest. Heavily carried by charisma, though. Heavily carried by charisma. And also heavily carried by people who still believe them to be telling the truth. Yeah, that's true as well. That's definitely true as well. But don't you think that there's also just a...

I don't know. People just constantly... This is something... Holy hell. Now that I think about it, I remember reading a book about persuasion that was just talking about why Trump is so good at holding people's attention. And he was saying that one of the things that he does that's really genius is...

Sometimes, you know, just through human error, he'll be speaking and he'll say something that is incorrect. And then he'll get called up on the press for saying that thing that is incorrect. And he'll just keep saying that thing that is incorrect deliberately. Well, yeah, he doesn't back down from it.

Doesn't back down from it, but just the fact that that happens kind of makes people narrow in and say, no, no, he's making that up. He's making that up, which just drives more attention, which is sort of just sort of what's happening with this guy here, don't you think? Yeah, he just keeps doing it over and over again. He keeps lying about it so everyone's sitting there and going, what?

Yeah, because most people, 99% of people aren't going to look deeper than the surface to determine truly if something is a lie, especially in political cases of the modern world. People aren't going to do their own research. And at the same time, how can you expect people to when...

Like, even the sources themselves are lying in a lot of cases, right? Like, it's very hard to determine what is true and what is not true in the modern era. And even back then also, by the way, like, it was probably even harder. It's always just a problem, isn't it? Always.

Yeah, it's hard. I don't know what, I mean, I guess that is the best way of kind of manipulating people. And it's what happens in relationships too, right? When you gaslight someone, you're basically telling them over and over again, the same lies until they themselves struggle to determine what is real and what is not real. It's that repeated action of constant lying and manipulation that kind of self-validates it in a way.

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It may be. Yeah. Anyway, so that's the story of Casperhausen. Now we come to the theories. Our...

The two main theories that we've kind of compiled for this episode, I'm sure you could come up with your own theories as well, like Alien showed up and maybe he was a reptilian skinwalker or something like that. Well, that's a given and always that's probably the most likely explanation. But this is sort of just like when World Idol was a thing and you got all the idols from across the planet and you gave away the 12 points.

like obviously Australia was going to vote for Australia so you just immediately gave them 12 points from Australia yeah yeah we're giving that as a gimme like you obviously know that that's clearly the case factually and we're going to say that repeatedly and repeatedly clearly the case factually we are going to say that repeatedly until you believe it by the way as well yes

But yeah, we're going to save that for another episode where we talk about aliens and stuff like that. This episode, we've determined two main theories. So we're going to go over big little lies. Number one, the first theory. Kira, would you like to read it or do you want me to read it? You can say no. I can read it if you want. Okay.

So everyone who entered Hauser's life left with the conclusion that Hauser was a liar. It makes sense then that the most realistic theory of Hauser's mysterious upbringing is that it is a fabrication created to gain attention. Mm-hmm.

Hauser claimed that his entire life up to the point that he entered Nuremberg had been spent living in isolation, trapped in a cell. However, he learnt how to read, write and behave in a socially normal way very quickly, almost too quickly, within a few years. Like, he stopped acting in a manner that would make him appear intellectually impaired. See, I told you. I told you, Jordan. It was too quick. Too quick. But this is what I want to know.

Is it too quick with modern interpretations or is it sort of just what Lord Pulverston thought? Depends which Lord Pulverston you're talking about. Lord Pulverston from 1800s or Lord Pulverston who lives in Britain right now. There could be one. We don't know for sure. It could be a continuing bloodline. So many Pulverston.

No, I mean, yeah, I think these theories are born from the understanding of modern science. Okay. All right. I don't like this theory at all, but go on. Some doctors have suggested that he wouldn't have survived the conditions he was brought up with in most of his life either. Hmm.

There's some interesting research to suggest that Hauser may have had scars that matched receiving the cowpox vaccine. The vaccine was mandatory at the time in the area from 1807 in the kingdom of Bavaria and 1806 in the Swiss canton of Bergau. Bergau, yeah, I guess. Mandatory vaccinations. I was surprised by that too. Like what did that even look like? Hmm.

So the conspiracy to give everyone autism is a 200-year-long project. Maybe Hauser was the original... What's it called? What's it called when zombies... Yeah, yeah, patient one. Patient zero of the autism vaccine, which is why he could taste the colour red or whatever. Now, that's a more likely theory. The vaccine gave him autism, and that's why he was an annoying liar. LAUGHTER

He just didn't fit in. Maybe, man. You didn't hear that, did you? That wasn't in your little theory part. I wonder why. Yeah, maybe. Okay. So we all learned something about Kira today, didn't we? Too scared. Too scared to tell the truth. Too scared of the truth. Coward. Sorry, at least you've got beautiful feet. Oh, my God. Jesus.

So many internet attacks at once.

Don't you reckon? You have autism. You have beautiful feet. It's all so twitchy. We're hitting all the right audience metrics right now. We're going to get the feet people and the conspiracy theorists on board. Vaccinations. It's all in there. It's probably like the Venn diagram. Misinformation. Huh? I said the Venn diagram of those two audiences is probably actually just a giant circle. Totally. There's no crossover at all. It is all crossed. It's all the same. It's all the same. Okay. Okay.

Hauser did have these scars and in order to get the vaccination, he would have had to leave his cell and go to a permanent vaccination room located in the Munich town hall. It's very unlikely that he could have done this in secret and without Hauser having been seen by someone or having memories of the event. Yeah, I mean, that's true. 100%. Like how, like would a doctor have come out and secretly administered this vaccine in this dark, dingy cell and not then told anyone about it?

Maybe if it was the doctor. Oh, you think the guy who held him captive was a doctor? Well, I mean, that man is even more mysterious than Hauser. To be fair, to play devil's advocate, that would explain how he was able to look after him so well in such dimly lit, like, bad conditions. Keep the cells so clean that he didn't get any diseases or anything like that. If he was a learned doctor. Yeah.

From the time you just stick your finger in a wound. Also, he put magic sleeping potions in his drinks to make him fall asleep. Magic sleeping potions, yeah. Yeah, true. That's doctor stuff. It is doctor stuff. Interesting. Knowing the right amount. Yeah. So that mystery has unraveled. We know that that man has been demast. I now believe Hauser completely, all of his statements, rested on that one point of contention. Yeah.

And finally we can put that to rest. We can put to rest that that guy was obviously a masked doctor and, again, because he's putting in three vaccines, he would love masks, wouldn't he? True. That's where it all started. Goddamn lockdown. He locked down Hauser as well for 16 years. Oh, my God, yeah, the isolation continues.

Oh, man. Yeah, you're so right. This was just patient one. This was just the New World Order's grand conspiracy to see what it would do to people. This was government overreach on one poor boy. If he had gone to the beach, he would have been arrested.

You know what's hilarious? I can't believe that that theory completely crosses over, which makes me think, what if it's true? What makes me think is time cyclical? Were the 1800s experiencing the exact same stuff that we did? I don't know, but it seems like it, eh? I'm honestly amazed and seriously think that it's more likely than him just being a liar. It's so...

I can't believe it. What an overlap. The idea that he was actually held captive for 16 years by a doctor. Yeah, by a doctor that was part of the Illuminati. The Illuminati who wanted to push... Get everybody into lockdown. Oh, so this was their 200-year plan. And give everyone the vaccine to make the world autistic. Okay. This 200-year plan that started with Hauser. Got it. I believe it.

It's really, at least, at the very least, it could be a Dan Brown novel, you know? Yeah. I'm sure this is actually- The Da Vinci jab. If we go deep enough on the internet, I'm sure we can find at least one person espousing this theory. Surely. Or at the very least, guys, get it going. Start that conspiracy wagon. Jordan will be first on board.

Wouldn't that be incredible if that does just become part of the whole QAnon circle? Oh, my God. Oh, yeah, everyone knows Hauser was the man that was... This is just a fact. He was the one that created autism. The only one powerful enough for it.

Hauser obtained strange injuries throughout his short life that many saw as too suspicious not to be self-inflicted. Like the pistol incident where Hauser said he fell off his chair trying to reach for a book and knocked the pistol that was hanging over and then it went off at his head. Many questioned how this could even be possible. I mean, it could be possible, could it not? I don't know.

Could you have set off a gun by knocking it over? I would think so, especially back then if it was just what... I don't know anything about guns, so I don't know why I'm acting like I'm an authority on this. But like, wouldn't it... Yeah, I would imagine they're just kind of small cannons. Yeah, yeah, basically. And if there's any kind of friction, could that potentially ignite the gunpowder inside?

I could see it. And even if it's not that, then maybe it's a loose mechanism of the firing trigger or whatever. Yeah, our American audience, you nation of gun nuts, tell us if that's the correct answer. Because it sounds like it could be. It doesn't sound like it's completely unbelievable that a gun could accidentally go off when it hit the ground. It's not like, I really doubt guns back in the 1800s had a safety trigger on them, for example. Yeah, me too.

In the first assassination attempt, no one saw the strange man dressed in black. In the final assassination attempt that was out in public in mid-afternoon, it was winter and cold and no one saw the stranger once again. There was also the note that they found in the purse where Hauser was stabbed. The note contained writing areas which aligned with Hauser's writing style.

and where he was at with his literacy knowledge. Where was he at with his literacy knowledge at the time? I mean, he was writing an autobiography. I thought he would have been learned at this point. Yeah, he was smart, but he wasn't like... He still made mistakes. He wasn't a scholar. Yeah. Yeah. The way it was folded to in the particular triangular shape was something that Hauser was also known to do. Mm-hmm.

After he was stabbed, Hauser made the point that the police needed to find this purse, but he never questioned or asked what was in it. Hauser thrived on the attention he received. He wanted it and more, and perhaps for a good reason, as his life had improved drastically from the likely destitute and vagrant lifestyle he had experienced before being thrust into the care of some of the city's wealthiest.

This may have fueled his continuous lying. It also seemed like these injuries and acts of extreme dramatic attacks all happened around the times that Hauser believed he was moments away from being thrust back into that life of vagrancy. As those he lived with became tired of dealing with his theatrics and lies. Yeah, you're tired of dealing with my theatrics, huh? Well, I just shot myself in the head to fake being attacked.

I mean, kind of self-confirming the issue there, right? Yeah. Damn. How much would being poor suck back then? That you just stab yourself in the chest and go, yeah, I don't reckon it's fatal. Oh, it was. Holy hell. I'm just thinking of the online arguments. Someone's out there probably right now arguing that, well, actually, it was worse to be a rich person back then. Like, no, clearly it was not.

Clearly not. How could you will actually? It was worse being a rich guy back, especially when, I'm sorry, can we just go back and look at a picture of Lord Stanhope? How could it be bad being that guy? I wish I was Lord Stanhope. Well, you see, every time he went outside, there were paparazzi everywhere. He couldn't travel from A to B without them.

About people taking his portrait. Painting it, sketching him in a hurry. Yeah, very slowly. It's very hard being a royalist. Continuing on with this theory, author Jan Bondeson, who is also a medical scientist...

covered Hauser in his novel, The Great Pretenders, the true stories behind famous historical mysteries. And in this book, he described Hauser as manipulative, possibly delusional young man who loved attention. He suggested that Hauser could have suffered from a mental or even neurological disorder, which may have explained his mood swings, his attention-seeking attitude, and how he acted when he was first found.

As perhaps the spoken gun in this case, and why this may be the most likely answer for the event, later writing analysis conducted on the initial letters that Hauser had arrived with in Nuremberg found that the same person had written both letters. So even though they claim to be from the captor and the mother separately, this suggestion has been made that Hauser wrote both of them.

There you go. That's pretty compelling. Well, we do have his style of writing from his autobiography, yeah. Yeah, but I feel like I just do not understand handwriting analysis because you have to take a capture of someone's handwriting in the most natural way.

They have to naturally be doing it, basically, without any kind of thought. It's just like ID. But I feel like I could fake handwriting pretty easily and you'd not be able to tell. I don't know. Yeah, you reckon? I just don't know enough about it. How do they determine that I wrote something or people write the same thing? Are the Ds the same or something? How do they determine it?

I think it's even the slight pressure you put on certain letters and curvatures. Yeah, but if I was knowledgeable about that, then though, can I just push the pen down slightly more and then fuck up their entire investigation? I think you could.

I think you could, especially back then. It just feels like everything would have been much worse. Investigations would have been worse. So these letters were analysed in modern times again to compare them. Ah, crap, yeah. Far out. Stop jumping back and forward in the time frame. It's like a very confusing director. Just assume that any investigation that we talk about is done in the modern era, like from the 80s onwards.

Right, okay. So before this, it's pretty much just what Lord Stanhope reckons. Yeah, basically. And then after that, it's what these spoilers think, is it? I'm getting very angry at these spoilers that we read at the end. It's starting to annoy me about this podcast. You know what I feel like in this? Just an investigator in Scooby-Doo.

It's never ever a monster. Never. No.

Well, don't worry. We're coming to the number two of the most popular theories, the Lost Prince Theory. The most popular theory, however, over time is that Caspar Hauser was a hereditary prince of Baden. According to this theory, when the Grand Duke Karl and Grand Duchess Stephanie de Beauharnais gave birth to their son, it was swapped at two weeks old and replaced with a sickly infant by his grandmother, Countess Louise Carleen von Hochberg, and then Caspar was hidden away.

The child with Carl and Stephanie then passed away not long after and left the two with no sons. This pushed Carl's uncle Louis I to move up the succession line and he did eventually become Grand Duke of Baden after Carl died in 1818. Louis I died in 1830 and was succeeded by his half-brother Leopold, who was seen as unable to inherit the status as his parents' marriage was seen as morganatic.

meaning of a lower class. Theorists believe it was a political move for power by Louis I and Leopold. There you go, Jordan. That's something. That's your political machinations right there.

Yeah, no, I don't know. Oh, come on. No, I'm sick of these, like, there's a Fantasia chick and, oh, yeah, I was from royalty. No, you weren't. I'm giving you a gimme. You know why? I'm just so sick of so many people in your life coming up to you and saying, do you know that I was related to aristocracy in Austria? And you always sit there and think, yeah, but so was I. If you go back far enough, at some point, some milkmaiden is going to fuck a prince at some point. Yeah.

It's going to happen. We're talking about in the same, like, 10-year period here, not, like, hundreds of years. Yeah, I know. But it reminds me of that same type of person. Did you know that I'm actually from royalty? Where's the crown? Crown or bust? I'm sorry. You're a results person. Yeah, where's the results?

There are some strange facts that string this theory together. The timing aligned, contrary to what Jordan's trying to assert right now, the timing aligned as both infants were apparently born in 1812. Howser told stories of being stuck in a dark cell for as long as he could remember. He could have been kept in isolation from a young age. When he was taught how to read, write, and behave, he picked it up very quickly, and many noticed he acted with a courtly grace

It's suggested he may have previously learned or been around others like this previously. To go along with that, actually, that could explain why he's such a liar as well, since that is the weapon of the royal people, the nobles, is to lie. Courtly grace. Oh, yes, the intrigue. Yes, yes, yes, that does make sense. So maybe that's where he learned he's lying from the upper class.

He also learned how to horse ride incredibly fast, an activity that he would have done if remained in his previous life. There were attempts on his life before the killing blow, which could have been someone trying to stop and silence him before he got a chance to learn his true heritage.

Apparently, the mayor of Nuremberg, Mayor Binder, also received an anonymous letter in 1828 that claimed Hauser was a member of the Grand Ducal family of Baden. There are no copies of this letter, so we don't know what it said beyond that. Also, it could have potentially been sent by Hauser. Let's not rule that out. A year later, a reputable publication also reported on Kasper Hauser and how he must have been kept away in isolation because he came from an upper-class family and his birth stood in the way of someone. Apparently,

It could have also been to hide him as a possible result of a love affair. They made a point that if he came from a lower class, he most likely would have just been murdered, not hidden away, and then sent to Nuremberg. The argument was made that he simply must have been a legitimate child to be hidden away for so long. Otherwise, what's the point? Who's going to do that with a lower class child? What's the whole point of this charade? If it is true that he was imprisoned...

or kept safe for 18 years, 16 years, and then freed to live a life. Like there has to be some level of purpose behind that. Not just that. Yeah. There has to be some level of purpose. If it was, if it was just a, a poor child, or even if the intent was inherently to kill this child, they would have just done it immediately. It was the 1800s. They probably would have got away with it. Hmm.

A man we haven't touched on yet is Paul Johann Anselm von Fauerbach. He was a scholar and held a big interest in Hauser as he conducted a lot of research into his life while also being another person who had supported Hauser himself. When the theory that Hauser was a lost prince was first kind of declared, Fauerbach denied this by saying it was, quote, a romantic legend without any legal or factual basis, end quote. But he actually ended up changing his mind.

If this was a YouTube video, change my mind. Kasper Hauser was not royalty. He would have successfully changed his mind during that video. You did a few of those videos, didn't you?

Yeah, I did a couple of those. They were fairly successful. It's just that the thing is Australians just aren't as combative as Americans are. You don't have those big debates. You put out something controversial and then everybody just looks at you awkwardly and just thinks like, okay. No one wants to limelight as much as Americans do with their media? No, no, Christ, no. No. I would imagine even if you went on...

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It sucks being Australian for that. I'm telling you now. You should bring it back, though, and actually go to a university campus and do Change My Mind. Kasper Hauser was a royal prince. No one would know what the fuck you're talking about. Would you get one bite? Everyone would just walk by you. It'd be so funny. Maybe one professor would be really triggered by it. Yeah. Kasper Hauser was a prince, not on my watch. Kicks over your table, punches you in the face. Ha ha ha.

I thought this was a place of debate. This is a place of education. I'm going to educate my fist into your face, bitch. It would be great to get punched in the head by one of those real beta-looking university lecturers. Oh, yeah. With the sort of balding head, the really weak little arms, the weaselly posture. That guy smacking you. That would be incredible footage. Why? Just fetish-wise?

Look, I'll probably try and give it a wank or two. I don't think it'll work out, but I'll give it a go. Give it a go. Give it a good old college try. I'll give it a shot. I'll have a go. Anything you want. I just think that it'd be honestly footage that it would become an immediate meme if that guy tried to lay like a WWE Smackdown. It'd be great for your online career. Wouldn't it?

But regardless, Fowler back. Yeah. So he changed his mind. Quote, I discovered Casper. I discover. I discover Casper House's probable origin as a prince of the House of Baden and send the Queen Mother of Bavaria at her request under a princely oath of confidentiality, a memorandum, which contains the dreadful secret.

End quote. This memorandum that he talked about contained only speculations from Fowler back and he insisted that the evidence was only circumstantial. In it, he opines many of the same things we've already gone over. The fact that Casper had been kept captive for years was indication that he was a legitimate child and ordinary people would not commit a serious offense such as this for 16 years. He believed that he was kept captive to save his life and the fact that he had never been ill suggested the cell must have been extremely clean and freed from insects and rodents implying some level of

wealth let's say he was also fed regularly and he had a toy horse and dog to amuse him i think a toy dog casper had never spoken ill of the jailer and never complained of his treatment on the basis of this reasoning fauerbach concluded that hauser had been swapped with another baby at birth which was either dead or about to die for the inheritance plan to play out he was then taken to hungary where he lived relatively freely for several years until his life was endangered by some cause

potentially by the royal family discovering the plot. From that point, he was then hidden in the cellar to be kept safe. Rather interesting, I think. Look, man, honestly, I'm back on board. Yeah? Don't you think that that is something that, you know, palatial intrigue would do, especially developing at this point when

royalty wasn't as medieval as it was. Things got more civilized and I thought that they'd maybe think, look, I can't really offer prints. It's a bit, it's a bit extreme. Yeah. But again, you say that, but I still don't understand why I guess the argument is made by like, okay. So the, the, the Royal family, Stephanie or whatever, or someone close to Stephanie knows that this plot is going to go down. So they make the switch and,

before the uncle and stuff can assassinate the child so they make the switch and the other child is already dead so they make the switch I was going to say if it was a plan orchestrated by the uncle and the power hungry people then they would have just killed Hauser in the first place like there would have been no need to keep him alive in a cell for 16 years so this would have had to have been done by someone sympathetic to Hauser yeah

Well, it's also that man in the eye mask thing happened, right? It's not just a book, yeah? I don't know. Man in the eye mask. Oh, I think it was actually leather. Yeah, I think so. Eye mask is a book, but there was a man that was kept in leather by some Spanish king in a leather mask and was given everything that he wants in a really nice cell. He just wasn't allowed to leave the cell ever. Well, I mean, so there is a, I mean, there's historical evidence

precedent then for this kind of thing to happen. It could happen. The other one is, I mean, this is just, remember that guy? What was his name again? Remember that Austrian guy that like impregnated his daughter and kept her in a cell? Oh yeah, that's totally different kind of. It was the worst story ever. He wasn't royalty.

Well, you know, you go far enough back maybe, but, like, you know, like, those kids when they came out because, you know, it was one of those – this is what I hate about these kinds of things. You just – you get horrified and you go, oh, my God, what was the bathroom like? You know, like, you just keep going further. Yes. And I –

remember hearing that the children when they came out were fast adopters uh obviously the mother was educating them in there and educating them well but they also just had a strange way of talking because they'd never really seen anything in the outside world or had any surroundings to it at all and so they were obviously weird

They had weird ways of speaking. Well, they didn't know. They had no kind of concept for society, so how could they be raised with the same societal norms and standards? Obviously, they're going to be weird. Well, what they did have was a TV down there. And, again... Doesn't matter. That's like someone being raised entirely off social media and Facebook. They're going to come out weird. Oh, yeah, totally, totally. They'd definitely come out weird, but it's more just about... I can't remember exactly what they were saying, but the way that they were speaking was Austrian...

but it just wasn't Austrian like anyone else would speak it. And they did have the influence of television showing them what Austrian sounded like and should sound like, and they understood what snow was theoretically and all these things, but actually just being completely deprived of these things puts you in this strange situation where you are able to adapt and learn quickly and

It kind of does remind me a lot of this story. So you're still on board with the whole idea that there was a plot and he was telling the truth initially.

I think it's possible, man. I think, honestly, there's historical precedent for it. It does happen. It's exactly the same place. There's always weird people in Germany and Austria for some reason, like that captor guy there, like the guy that was saying, excuse me, are you interested in me eating you? And then people would go, yeah. And then they go, oh, actually, I've changed my mind. He's like, that's okay. Bye. And then somebody actually did just want to get eaten once. Yeah, then he did. Yes, yes, it was fine. Very strange people.

So maybe they did do this. Well, I mean, it doesn't even have any... This particular story doesn't have come down to necessarily any level of strangeness. It does come down to royals manipulating things for their benefit, which is obviously historically... There's so many stories. It's like what you were saying before, right? Like the easiest way to do this is to just kill the baby. It'll take a second, you're done. Yeah, but... Don't have to worry about it. That's if...

The perpetrator was the uncle that wanted the power. Like for this, like I said, for this to work out, then it needed to be someone that was loyal to the child and Stephanie and that side of the family, as opposed to the bad people, the bad royals, let's call them.

Also, hang on, just one more thing on this. In the Josef Fritzl case, the children in the basement thing, you know what else they found? What? They found it very difficult, apparently, to distinguish between what was reality and what was fake. As in, when they were watching TV, you could tell that it's like a news bulletin.

And you could tell that this is based off of reality. This is a TV show. They had, because they just had no concept of the outside world at all. It was very difficult for them to figure out what was a lie and what was true, which also could go into the thing of the fact that he's just endlessly lying. Yeah. Because he couldn't, once he was out, he couldn't determine what was reality and what wasn't. Maybe. Wow. That's actually very interesting. Yeah. I could see how that could play in potentially to someone who,

someone's main personality trait kind of encapsulating needing to lie because it's fundamentally rooted in how they perceive reality. Yeah, that's interesting. I would definitely have to take a look into that and see if there's other cases of precedence there, but I could see it.

I can definitely see the argument for this particular case. Because again, like you said, there is precedence for this. There has been situations that have happened and occurred like this. It's not totally out of the realm of reality. But what about the second half of the story where he is routinely assassinated or frequently assassinated? What would be the purpose of that? Killing him, assassinating himself? Yeah.

Or the other people just saying... I'm asking what's more believable to you, someone else assassinating him or him assassinating himself? And if someone is assassinating him, someone else is assassinating him, then what is the purpose for that? Well, obviously the purpose if somebody else is assassinating him is...

What if he does remember something? What if he does? But he said that the person who tried to assassinate him was the original jailer, who, as we've just determined, would have had to have been. Well, I mean, you've done things like that in your life where you thought, problem solved. Oh, crap, actually, that made it way worse. And then you tried to, like, you know. No, no, he's housed him. He's fed him. He's looked after him as best as he can for 16 years.

And then he has released him out into the wild. And then he's like, oh shit, I got to kill him now. Like why? We've just determined that that person in that case had to be, if the whole royal family plot thread is true, then that person had to have been on the side of Casper Hauser. Why would that person then choose to kill him? Yeah. Maybe just because he thought that he was going to get incriminated afterwards.

That's what I'm thinking. So maybe it was some guy that was paid to look after him. He went out and then he thought, fuck, one day the cops could get me and decided to silence it then.

Fuck, the cops could get me for that. So I'll murder this guy who's friends with a British royalty guy. I think that's going to lead more questions, is it not? Well, you know, if he was in a black mask and everything like that. I don't know. The scale of the lies afterwards, the scales of the lies like him attempting to

potentially kill himself if they were lies. He was going to extreme odds to kind of create these lies in the first place. They're not just, they don't seem to me like someone who's trying to discern between reality and fiction, like in the case of that Austrian story you're telling. It seems more like a manipulative form of lying than it is trying to make sense of things lying. Yes, that's true. That's definitely true. The other thing that I would say that's

in defense of the guy constantly lying, it is usually a case of children that do have traumatic upbringings that they lie a lot. They lie a lot. For attention and for comfort. That's what I talk about, like people that just grew up with, you know, raised foster kids. As a security blanket, yeah, because they don't want conflict, so they lie to prevent the conflict from happening.

Plenty of things like that. But also, again, the scale. If these were lies, he literally would have had to stab himself in the chest to create the lie. Yeah. That's such an extreme... I mean, it's so extreme. It totally is. Look, I... Jackson, I just really want this to be true. Yeah, I know. I do too. I would obviously... You've got to convince me, though. That's your...

That's your job right now. I honestly think out of the things that we have talked about in the past, this is definitely up on the scale of could have happened. Yeah. Could have. This theory is not... The secondary theory is not something that you could completely discount. No, I agree. It is impossible. Yeah. And it's... Yeah, I mean, I could see...

I can see it. I can see it. Like we said, there's similar situations that have occurred. It's not like he didn't claim to have fought vampires or anything insane, like out of left field kind of stuff where you can be like, well, clearly he's lying. So, yeah, I mean, it's not impossible. Kira, what do you think? I don't know. Come on. Nothing.

It's hard, I know. Come on, come on. What are you working about this secondary theory? Please give me something. I really enjoyed researching this secondary theory. I thought it was very interesting. I agree that out of all the theories and all the things that we've talked about, I did look into this and I was like, oh, maybe. Like there was nothing that precluded it from being a possibility to you?

I don't know. It did seem like it does with what you were saying with the child in how he was kept alone and then taken out and then sent to kill straight away. It does seem a little bit. It does sort of cut it for me. Yeah. But I found all the information really interesting. Yeah, of course. But the idea that someone had killed

Held this guy, Kasper Hauser, in a house for 16 years, and then when he was released, immediately came after his head. That kind of seems like too much of a leap for you. Yeah, like why? Why would they do that? Yeah. I do understand the argument that you do something and then you sometimes look back after and you're like, that was stupid. Why did I do that? And then you go to fix the mistake, but...

I don't know. Murder is such an extreme for that. Well, that's your only option. In that scenario, that's all you can do. No, you could be like, hey, come back. Oh, just grab him again. Free capture. You don't even have to grab him. Just say, yeah, you want to come back? We've made some upgrades to the cell. There's Wi-Fi and TV now. So there was also his dreams, dreams of castles. Wait, did I read all this?

Yeah. There was also his dreams. Dreams of castles, swords, dressed up men and women. Even when he could not talk, he was said to have been having these elaborate dreams that could have come from when he was a baby in those pre-imprisoned years. It's hard to believe he imagined these when, as he was alone in a cell, he hadn't, to his knowledge, seen these things before. It's out there, a bit wild, but stranger things have happened in history, so it's not entirely unbelievable. That was until it was debunked in recent years anyway. Well, there you go, Jordan. LAUGHTER

It's fainting, folks. I lulled him into a false sense of security. Why didn't we just read another paragraph? What the hell? What was the point of the last 20 minutes? There's no need. I needed to lull you into a false sense of security first. Okay, so you deliberately did that. I may have deliberately done that. I deliberately do a lot of things. Fuck, a descendant of the man in the black mask. Yeah, I'm a member of the royal family from 200 years ago.

So DNA testing, our good friend DNA testing, has been attempted on hair and blood samples from Hauser's clothing, but it hasn't obtained any solid results as DNA testing just wasn't good enough at the time. Until now, the improved sensitivities of the techniques enabled scientists to analyze the DNA from hair strands and look at mitochondrial DNA to see, and now prove that Hauser's mtDNA, mitochondrial DNA, did not match any member of the House of Baden.

And then there's a quote here from Professor Turi King on putting to bed this particular theory. So, quote, After death, our DNA degrades into shorter and shorter fragments until there is nothing left to sequence. The DNA analysis methods available in the 1990s and early 2000s worked well with long DNA fragments, but didn't give consistent results when they did DNA analysis of the various items from Hauser. It's really exciting that we have been able to use the latest methods to finally answer the question and rule out the Prince Theory.

So there you go. That is, unfortunately, all of the information we have on the life and history of Kasper Hauser. Most people believe one of these two theories. The tale of a boy who was swapped in a political game, who was then assassinated to keep the royal family from losing power. Or the tale of a boy who cried wolf until he was backed into the corner by his own lies. It's an interesting case and one where speculation and conjecture is ripe. One thing is for sure, though. Jordan was wrong. And

And Casper Hauser lived an incredibly interesting but short-lived life, and he will remain for now as an incredibly intriguing mystery that has puzzled many for centuries. I guess crying wolf until you kill yourself is interesting itself. It's pretty interesting. He could still be a lost prince of a different family. It doesn't completely rule it out. Or maybe the DNA sequencing is wrong. What's the point of that?

But look, that's it, right? If it was wrong in the OJ case, it could be wrong here. We can't be sure of it. I mean, they're testing such specific DNA. Who knows what it could mean? Maybe she wasn't... Wait, no, she would have to be the mum. Does that mean that there is no other theory then, Kira? Not really, no. We solved it. We did it. That's it. Holy hell. So it's just he was lying.

Well, there goes, like we touched on, onto the theory that he was lying, that he may have suffered from some sort of mental or neurological disorder. But we can't really be sure of anything now. It's too long gone. And it is a mystery in the sense that

Well, who did you give birth to him then? Yeah, there's still that mystery. Where did he come from? I got to imagine that he was just a destitute vagrant that decided, hey, I might as well try my hand at lying and seeing where it gets me. He tried to lie to become a cavalryman because maybe it paid well at the time. I assume it would.

And that's why he chose to do that at 16 to escape the streets. But then the lie snowballed and snowballed and he was rubbing shoulders with Lord Stanhorpe and all of those, you know, the aristocracy and making enough money to like live comfortably. So...

Yeah, and then eventually though his lies caught up to him and he felt so scared of losing everything that he desperately went higher and higher with the lies and eventually succumbed to them by killing himself basically. By trying to make it look like he was being assassinated. To like breathe life into them. That's my most believable. But still, we don't know. We don't know who his parents were. We don't know where he came from or why. We still don't know that. And we won't for a long time, if ever.

So that's why it's ripe for conjecture. No, I'll tell you something else as well. This is another mystery that's just been unfurled. Do you think that he is a descendant of the fat kid from Two and a Half Men? Look at that man's face. It's a pretty odd point. Was that guy from Austria or Germany or something? Two and a Half Men? He does look like him. Don't you think? Yeah, I see. Come on. No one's talking about it.

Two and a half men. No one's talking about it. Two and a half men actors. Let's find out. If he's from like Europe to some degree. What even is that guy's life now? What does he do? Nothing? Angus T. Jones. No, maybe he's a child star. He had his moment.

Unfortunately, he was born in Austin, Texas. Yeah, but what's his ascendancy? True. Angus T. Jones, if you're out there listening, we've got a 23 in me. You find out where you came from.

What kind of life your ancestors lived? Where the hell is his early life? This man is as much of a mystery as Hauser. There's nothing there. We'll do a part two. Basically exactly the same. At 16, he turned out of nowhere and then was on set. And originally it was called Two Men, but they had to give him a job. He showed up on set with a note saying, act to me, act to me. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Charlie Sheen's son or hang me. Charlie Sheen took one look at the note and took pity on the poor boy. He said, you will be the half man now. Angus wept. He learned his lines very quickly. Amazingly so. Took to the hold of life quickly.

Alrighty, so that's going to do it for this episode. We've got a members question time right now for all of our Patreon members as well as our Official.Men members, the people supporting the show the most. If you want to join them, you can sign up at Official.Men for a free seven-day trial to ad-free all the Access Red Thread episodes. You get all Red Thread episodes ad-free. You can listen to it on Spotify as well if you connect your account.

And they are also delivered to you about four days free. So you get very early access. And we also put out a question thread each week where you can drop questions and we'll read them live on the show like we are going to do right now. Big thank you to all of our members.

thank you to everyone for listening of course thank you just listening helps out a lot and sharing the show with your friends rating it as well all those things help but if you want to you know sign up for those benefits official.men for a free seven-day trial members can utilize those subject question threads to ask questions we'll tackle on the show like these first one's from pdogg he says if you were in charge to give casper his first proper mill what would you say it must be

What's the most nutritious meal? I actually know. Your finest mutton. That would have been the best meal back then, surely. Mutton and potatoes. What else? What am I, an 1800s fucking peasant? That sounds delicious. Sounds sick, doesn't it? Yeah, it sounds so good. I actually had lamb shanks for dinner last night. It was so good. That's basically like modern day mutton. It's mutton. It's mutton. So good though.

don't they say that like if you don't eat for that long like for a long amount of time you need to wean yourself in otherwise you will just die from your stomach exploding

It can make you sick. Yeah, but he's not a starving African child. He had bread. Yeah, but his bread... Okay, we're going to get to that eventually. There's another question to do with the bread. Okay, yeah. In that case, I'd say... I'm going to play it safe, though. I'm going to say, let's toast that bread and put some Vegemite on it, and then we'll see how you do after that. I think that's going to be my first meal. Jesus Christ, could you imagine how much someone in the 1700s would hate that? They'd think it's witchcraft. Not from Australia. Yeah, absolutely.

I think that honestly, look, I am with the rest of the world. It is foul. No, what? I don't know. Everyone is always talking about how bad it is. And I said, what the hell's wrong with you guys? And then because so many people are talking about it, I did take a bite once and look down at it. It goes, it is bad. What the hell is it? Did you do the American thing, though, where you literally take a spoonful and just eat that? No. Did you have it on buttered bread? No.

Yeah, no. Yes, I added a butt and bread. Did you overdo it? You're not meant to put a lot on. Dude, I'm not this boy that grew up in the box. Apparently you are. You just said that you just took a bite of Vegemite within the last recent history. That's crazy to me. All right, okay. You can try and nitpick sentences and blow them out. You may as well have been raised in the box. Who doesn't wake up every morning in Australia growing up, have like

You know, two bricks of wheat beaks and some toasted Vegemite bread. What did you eat when you were growing up? God damn, man. Where you live is a double dose of Australia. Just factually. Factually. The fact that you're having wheat beaks and Vegemite for breakfast. You can't get any more Aussie than that. So good. Kira, did you have that for breakfast? That's really Australian. Is it? No, I didn't. Well, it's just one or the other is Aussie enough. You didn't have that, Kira.

I would either have cereal or toast and orange marmalade, I think, most of the time. Ew. No, what was the cereal, though? Uh...

I wanted Coco Pops. I think most of the time it was Corn Flakes. Yeah, I know. And isn't it so pathetic now looking back at it and for whatever reason our parents were saying, no, it's healthy. Corn Flakes. Corn Flakes. You may as well have given us Coco Pops. In fact, I bet you those quote unquote five essential vitamins and minerals that they kept advertising in Coco Pops were there and it was healthier. I think I had like Froot Loops on holidays.

Yeah, that was always the tradition, wasn't it? Unless you came from, like, a really pov household in the ghetto, then you had Froot Loops every day. Probably for dinner as well. But, like, other than that, I reckon Froot Loops was we're going to a holiday house. Yeah. Oh, when you'd go to, like, a holiday home and they had those, like...

Or like a caravan park. Tiny boxes for some reason. The tiny boxes, yeah, they were so good. Yes. I love those. That was so exciting. Yeah, I mean, they were exciting, but it was pretty much the same thing as when you got Napolitana ice cream and you'd be like, yay, three flavours, two of which I don't like. Yeah, exactly. But the choice, the choice, the choice is there. The choice is there. We were given the freedom. That was the first freedom that children would get is choosing a cereal flavour on holiday. Yeah. So good. Americans, let us know if you had those same little boxes in crap hotels.

Do you still eat cereal? Oh, yeah. Yeah. What's your main choice? Actually, now that I think about it, no, I don't. I'm still just thinking about the fact that I'm 12. I don't eat it at all anymore. What the hell? No. For the last 10 years of my life, all I've eaten is fruit in the morning. That's it. That's pretty good, then. It's something. Well, it is definitely something. Now I've moved into it. I've just been like, nah, I'm just having acai smoothies from now on. Oh, dude, acai is so fucking good.

Yeah. Haven't you noticed that? I don't know if the same things happen in America, but it is completely taken over. Taken over everything. You see flags at the front of every cafe. Yes, we have acai. Yeah. It's like beanie babies back in the day. But it's so good. It makes sense. It's so good. Yes. Yes, it is. Me, I have sultana bran. That's the only cereal I eat. I think it's raisin bran over in America. Raisin bran? No, yeah. Yeah. Good stuff. All right.

Oh yeah. So you said mead for him. Kira, do you have any, what would you give him for his first meal? Something like oatmeal. Oh, that's nice. Gentle on the stomach. Yeah. Oatmeal's good. Hmm.

All right, the boy asks, how will Jackson fit in Epstein into this intro? I can't see how he'd do it. And here's the dramatic plot twist for this episode. I did include Epstein into the intro. No. If you scroll up right now. Okay. All right, all right, all right. And we're putting this on screen right now. You guys all thought that I didn't put Epstein in the intro, huh? Yeah, I didn't. Yeah. Well...

If you highlight every single first word of each sentence, it spells out Jeffrey Epstein. No, are you kidding? Every single word. J-E-F-F-R-E-Y-E-P-S-T-E-I-N. Jeffrey Epstein was in front of your faces all along and you didn't even notice. You fools. Holy fuck.

Jeffrey Epstein strikes again. Dude, I'm serious when I say this. This is the most impressive thing I've ever seen. Ever. I can't believe it. You made like some murder mystery little note. And I left it until the end. You guys had no idea how much I wanted to say it right at the beginning, but I realized there was a Patreon question where I could fit this in very nicely and leave it as a little twist at the end.

Oh, my God. Oh, my God. I could see you highlighting things. Jackson, you know what? I've got to say, right up until this point, no offence, but I thought that you were somewhat of a slow-witted man. But now... The proof is in the pudding. Holy hell. But now I'm a slow-witted man who knows how to structure sentences. LAUGHTER

I want to see. You did that. I'm so impressed. I want to know if anyone noticed that before the episode, like at the start of the episode when I read it. Anyone says they're as much of a liar as Hauser is. There's no way anyone saw that coming. That will go down as the greatest plot twist I think we'll ever have. That was incredible. Yeah, so impressed. So impressed. All right, next one comes from Annika Gillette. Do you think that Casper was most likely just a person that was just faking this for attention? There wasn't a lot to do back then.

Yeah, that's... Either attention... Maybe not attention, but to get somewhere. I think he had like a real... He wanted...

He wanted to get off the street. So maybe not attention, but I think that he was doing it in a way to get himself a job, at least like a weird job interview. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that's, that's what my theory is. You guys want to add anything to that? Maybe I just think, yeah, the same thing. Well, you did say that he did like the attention. He likes that, but I suppose he was in the, look, anybody that is getting venerated and held up likes it. Yeah. Yeah. True. All right. Last question.

Is Semper Fi EDC guy is surviving off bread and water for years truly feasible?

So I looked this up and in 1970, psychiatrist Carl Leonhard said that if he had been living since childhood under the conditions he described, 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 absurdities that it is astonishing that it was ever believed and is even today still believed by many people. End quote. So that was a scientist in the 70s who said that. And he also...

I also looked up particularly about the bread. So the vitamin deficiencies from only eating water and bread would have been astronomical. There was a boy who recently went blind and partially deaf from only eating a restricted diet of potato chips and fries, for example. So even if it didn't kill him, he should have experienced irreparable damage if this was true. Whereas it didn't seem like he did. Like,

He seemed to have been intellectually held back, but not in a way like he was blind or anything. In fact, he was said to have good senses, if anything. So that seems like a bit of an odd. Well, okay. That's the weird thing then. Yeah. That in itself is strange. Why does he have the good senses? Yeah. Maybe we should, does that speak for a diet of only bread and water being potentially good for people?

Yeah, no. Which means that it was probably a lie. Case closed. All right. We should have ended it on the Epstein twist, honestly. Yeah, no, that was the height. We're ending it there. Just petering out about like, oh, yeah, bred for 16 years. Yeah, I could do that. Yeah.

That's going to do it for this episode of Red Thread. Thank you very much. Official.men, seven-day free trial. If you want to go help us out, that really does mean the world. Otherwise, you can just share it with friends. That's the best way to help out. Really appreciate it. Jordan's selling tickets probably. You can go check him out as well as his channels and stuff. Go do it because he's a good man, funny guy, makes good videos. Go check him out. Other than that, we'll see you next time. Bye, guys. Bye, guys.

Oh yeah, our bad movie stuff is also on the official .med stuff, so you can check that out too. Alright, bye.