In the cemetery of the small Bavarian town of Ansbach there is a peculiar tombstone: “ Hic jacet Casparus Hauser. Aenigma sui temporis/ignota nativitas/occulta mors (Here lies Kaspar Hauser. Enigma of his time/unknown birth/mysterious death) . Beneath it lie the remains of a 21-year-old who was stabbed to death in December 1833.
Hauser appears in history on May 26, 1828 in Nuremberg, when the master shoemaker Beck found him when he was leaving a tavern. He was stumbling, confused and dazed, and muttering incomprehensibly. Looking childish, he showed two letters that he carried with him. One of them -written by his supposed mother-, said that he had been born on April 30, 1812 and that his name was Kaspar, and that his father, deceased, was a soldier of the sixth cavalry regiment. The other, anonymous and dated 16 years later, was addressed to Captain von Wessenig of the Sixth Regiment. The heading read: “from the Bavarian border”, and said that it had been entrusted to him as a baby to be cared for and educated in the Christian faith and now it was sent to him because the boy wanted to be a soldier and urged him to pick it up … or hang it. A subsequent graphological analysis determined that both letters had been written by the same hand.
Shortly after arriving in Nuremberg, he remained in the custody of Mayor Andreas Hiltel, and it was then that he began to tell part of his story. He told that he had lived in a dark place and that he slept on straw ; that a man left her bread and water but sometimes it tasted bitter, and it was on those occasions that she used to wake up with her hair and nails cut. That man, whom he never saw, taught him to write his name and to walk. Furthermore, the stranger allegedly taught him to say the phrase “I want to be a cavalryman, like my father was” (in Old Bavarian dialect), but Hauser claimed that he did not understand what these words meant.
a mysterious life
In the end the authorities handed him over to the custody of the school teacher, philosopher and poet Friedrich Daumer. With occult interests, Daumer tried to shed light on the boy by experimenting with homeopathy and mesmerism, very fashionable at the time. On October 17, 1829, Daumer found him wounded in the cellar of the house: he said that a hooded man had tried to kill him . Daumer did not believe him; I had a suspicion that he was a boy with an undisguised tendency to lie and exaggerate. When the boy was unable to clearly justify the alleged attack he had suffered, the suspicion became a certainty. The teacher thought that it was Hauser himself who had inflicted the wound.
Since he appeared, the rumors about his origin have not ceased: some said that he was a wild child, others that he had a princely origin associated with the noble house of Baden, and many considered him a swindler. In 1830 we find him living with the Biberbaschs family, where on April 3 he suffered a mysterious accident with a pistol that accidentally discharged and injured him on the right side of the head. The authorities took up the matter again and assigned him as his new foster home that of Baron von Tucher, who soon complained about Hauser’s vanity and lies. In 1831 the case attracted the attention of the English philanthropist Lord Philip Henry Stanhope, and he requested custody. Stanhope spent large sums of money trying to solve the riddle of his origin: he believed he was of Hungarian origin because Hauser remembered some words in that language . He dedicated himself to investigating even the smallest indication that Kaspar himself told him, such as when he said that the Hungarian Countess Maytheny was his mother. It was all in vain. After Hauser’s death Stanhope published the result of his investigation: “I openly confess that I have been misled.”
In December of that year Stanhope transferred him to Ansbach to put him under the protection of an upright and pedantic school teacher named Johann Georg Meyer, a relationship that quickly fell apart due to Hauser’s constant lies. It was that same year that Kaspar got a job as a copyist in a law firm while his life was the talk of all his neighbors.
On December 9, 1833, Hauser had a very heated argument with Meyer. Stanhope was hoping to visit Ansbach for Christmas and Meyer told him she didn’t know what was going to happen. And on the evening of December 14, 1833, Kaspar came home with a wound on the right side of his chest . He said that a man had attacked him in the Residenz Ansbach palace garden while giving him a sack. The police found it: it was purple and inside there was a message that could only be read in front of a mirror. Its content revealed Hauser’s origin: the Bavarian border and that the initials of his name were MLÖ. But he did not convince anyone. The court of inquiry suspected that he himself had written the note : certain grammatical errors, typical of Hauser, appeared in it. The court concluded that Kaspar had stabbed himself… and he overdid it. He died on December 17, 1833.
The memory of Kaspar still remains immutable in the garden of the Residenz Ansbach: “ Hic occultus occulto occisus est : here a mysterious was murdered in a mysterious manner”.
Reference:
Bondeson, Jan (2005). The Great Pretenders: The True Stories Behind Famous Historical Mysteries, W. W. Norton & Company
