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Sunday, March 23, 2014

MYSTERY CASE#9:

The Green Children of Woolpit

On these days, if I will see children with green unusual skin I would think that it's just a matter of costume for a birthday party or something, I would see them as little hulks or they're one the bastard kids playing with green paint.

But that's not the case in  during the reign of King Stephen (ad 1135-54), two children were found weeping and wandering, lost and forlorn, in the great pits used to trap wolves at the village of Woolpit, in Suffolk. Pretty normal looking children except they were green, and they spoke a language that was unknown to the folk of St. Mary's.
They were taken to Sir Richard de Calne, at Wikes (purely as amusement), but the children once there wept bitterly. They were fed bread and other food but they refused everything even though they were extremely hungry (the girl afterwards acknowledged this fact). Finally some beans that were freshly cut and still had their stalks attached were brought - the children madly tried to open the bean stalks as if they were the pods and thought that the beans were inside - but finding nothing they once again wept. Someone stepped forward and showed them that the beans were in the pods - the children were happy at this and fed on the raw beans with great delight. For a long long time that's all they ate. The boy was extremely unhealthy and died within a year of being found. But the girl grew strong and spent the rest of her life in the area. With time the green faded and she took on the appearance of any other normal "non green" human. She later on married a man from King's Lynn in Norfolk and learnt English.


This enabled her to tell of how herself and her brother had come from a land called St. Martin's Land, where there was no sun, only a permanent hazy twilight. She said that they had been following their flocks (presumably of green sheep or something?) when they had entered an underground passageway and stumbled out, on the other side, into the bright sunlight of Woolpit.

Though the Woolpit story is included in two 12th century sources, it must be born in mind that the chronicles of the time, though describing political and religious events, also listed many signs, wonders and miracles that would not be accepted today, but were widely believed at the time, even by educated men and women. Perhaps then, the strange apparition of the Green Children was a symbol of disturbed and changing times intermingled with local mythology and folk beliefs of fairies and the afterlife. Whatever the truth of the matter, unless descendents of ‘Agnes Barre’ can be traced, as some have suggested, or further contemporary documentary evidence unearthed, the story of the Green Children will remain one of England’s most puzzling mysteries.

MysteryCase#9: UNSOLVED

              

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