Was Marina Chapman really brought up by monkeys?

Is Marina Chapman a survivor or a fantasist? We meet the Bradford woman who claims she was raised in the jungle by monkeys – and who still enjoys nothing more than grooming her family 

Simon Hattenstone

The Guardian, Saturday 13 April 2013 

Marina Chapman says she isn't as mobile as she once was. It's not so easy to climb trees these days, let alone swing from them. Well, she is about 60 or 62 years old – maybe older. She's not sure. Chapman is tiny, sinewy, bendy. At times she doesn't look quite human – a bit simian, a bit feline and quite beautiful. 

Perhaps it's not surprising that Marina Chapman seems different from the rest of us. In her formative years, she says, she grew up with monkeys. Only monkeys. For around five years (again, she's unsure – there is no reliable means of measuring) she says she lived deep in the Colombian jungle with no human company. She remembers learning to fend for herself – eating berries and roots, nabbing bananas dropped by the monkeys, sleeping in holes in trees and walking on all fours. By the time she was rescued by hunters, she says, she had lost her language completely. And that's when life really got tough. She claims she was sold into a brothel in the city of Cúcuta, lived as a street urchin and was enslaved by a mafia family, before being saved by a neighbour and eventually moving toBradford, Yorkshire. Which is where we find her today. 

It's an unbelievable story, and many have chosen not to believe her. Most publishers refused to touch her forthcoming book because they thought she was a fake. The Girl With No Name certainly raises interesting questions about authenticity and memory. Is Marina Chapman a fantasist who has embellished her past or a childlike woman trying to make sense of a remarkable childhood? 

It is a snowy spring day in Bradford. Chapman's home is full of books, music and pictures. At one end of the lounge is a grand piano, at the other a massive cathedral organ. Husband John is a retired scientist who plays the church organ, daughter Vanessa, 28, writes music jingles for a living, while Joanna, 32, works for a pregnancy crisis centre and has three children. 

Marina has lived in Yorkshire for 30 years and speaks in a wonderful, Colombian-Bradford hybrid – flat vowels with lisping, Latin American flourishes. While John prepares macchiatos and double espressos, Marina talks about her first memory, from shortly before her fifth birthday. She was playing close to her home when she was aware of two adults creeping behind her. "I saw a hand cover my mouth – a black hand in a white hanky. Then I realised there were two people taking me away. There were children in the background – I could hear them crying." 

Continued and video: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2013/apr/13/marina-chapman-monkeys

Marina Chapman claims she was raised by monkeys for five years

IT IS an amazing - some might say unbelievable - tale: how a housewife from Yorkshire, England, spent five years as a young child being raised by monkeys in the Colombian jungle.

Jonathan Petre

Mail on Sunday

March 31, 20139:49PM

Yet experts have found no evidence that Marina Chapman’s story is a fantasy - and now she has told it for the first time, in riveting detail.

In a new book, exclusively serialised by The Mail on Sunday from today, Mrs Chapman reveals how a colony of capuchins taught her how to survive after she was abandoned in the rainforest by kidnappers who botched her abduction.

She copied the monkeys' eating habits and high-pitched cries and even learned to climb trees, though she slept in a hollowed-out tree trunk at night. And on one occasion a monkey she called Grandpa because of his sprinkles of white fur cured a crippling stomach pain by leading her to the river and encouraging her to drink until she vomited.

Mrs Chapman's story - which has echoes of the Tarzan tales - began in the Fifties when she was drugged and abducted from her Colombian home at the age of four.

In her memoirs, The Girl With No Name, Mrs Chapman recalls the moment she awoke to find herself in the forest.

 "At a distance of several paces were monkeys staring at me. After a short time, one of the monkeys left the circle and approached me. Afraid, I shrank back into a ball, trying to make myself as tiny as possible," she says.

"He reached out a wrinkly brown hand and, with one firm push, rolled me over on to my side. I quivered on the soil, tensed for the second blow that was surely coming.

"But it didn't - the monkey had lost interest. He had now returned to the circle, squatted back on his hind legs and resumed watching me, along with all the others. Then they all seemed to want to inspect me."

She said the way they enjoyed each other's company ‘made them feel like a family’ – and although there were nights when she cried for hours out of loneliness, she also felt happy to be with the monkeys and realised 'I was gradually turning into one of them'.

She said she was later rescued by hunters and sold into prostitution before ending up in England, marrying a church organist. Now a mother of two and grandmother of three, she lives with her husband John in a three-bedroom semi in a middle-class suburb of Bradford.

She thinks she is in her 50s but cannot be sure of her birthdate.

Her claims were met with incredulity when they surfaced last year, but they have withstood scrutiny, and now National Geographic is planning a documentary about her. Mrs Chapman’s daughter Vanessa, 28, describes her mother as "wild and spontaneous", adding 'She was sometimes criticised for her style of parenting, but her only example was from a troop of monkeys."

Experts say monkeys are known to accept young humans into their fold. In 1991, a six-year-old Ugandan boy, John Ssebunya, was found in a tree having spent three years in the wild, cared for in part by vervet monkeys; and a two-year-old boy known as Bello was found living with chimpanzees in Nigeria in 1996.

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/world/marina-chapman-claims-she-was-raised-by-monkeys-for-five-years/story-fnd134gw-1226609984362