In Chapman’s incredible 'The Girl With No Name: The Incredible True Story of the Girl Raised by Monkeys,' she says she was kidnapped as a child. Then she was abandoned in the jungle, taken in by capuchin monkeys for 5 years, found by hunters who traded her to a brothel for a parrot — and eventually brought to England as a maid.
© NIR ELIAS / REUTERS/REUTERS
A British woman's forthcoming book claims she was raised by monkeys after being abandoned in the jungles of Colombia.
A British woman's forthcoming book tells a chimply amazing tale about how she was raised by monkeys in the Colombian jungle.
Marina Chapman, a housewife from Bradford in northern England, claims she was kidnapped from her childhood home near Cucuta, Colombia, sometime in the 1950s and then abandoned by her captors in the jungle near the Venezuelan border.
Her book, "The Girl With No Name: The Incredible True Story of the Girl Raised by Monkeys," details how she took up with a group of capuchin monkeys and spent the next five years living with them as a pint-sized Jane of the Jungle.
She learned to climb trees and caught birds and rabbits with her bare hands, her daughter told Australia's Sunday Times.
"I got bedtime stories about the jungle, as did my sister," Vanessa James told the newspaper. "We didn't think it odd — it was just Mum telling her life. So in a way it was nothing special having a mother like that."
Eventually, she was found by a group of hunters, who traded her to a brothel for a parrot, according to the Sunday Times.
She was later taken in as a maid by a Colombian family, who brought her to Bradford for a business trip in 1977.
She met a man named John Chapman, a former church organist and bacteriologist, at a church meeting, and they later married.
Her daughters claimed Chapman raised them like little monkeys and kept insects and varmints around the house.
"When we wanted food, we'd have to make noises for it," James said. "All my school friends loved Mum as she was so unusual. She was childlike, too, in many ways."
Five years ago, James and her mother, who believes she is in her early 60s, returned to Columbia to try to track down her birth parents, but didn't find them.
James is helping her mother write the book to shed light on the plague of human trafficking in South America.
It is due out in April, and a British film production company was also reportedly planning a television documentary
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