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

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 to Bradford, Yorkshire. Which is where we find her today.

To read more on this story, click here: Was Marina Chapman Really Brought Up By Monkeys?



You may be interested in reading: Woman Says She Was Raised by Monkeys - Daughter Helps Share Her Incredible Story.

Woman Says She Was Raised by Monkeys - Daughter Helps Share Her Incredible Story

When Vanessa James was a little girl, her mother would tell her bedtime stories of growing up like Tarzan in the jungle raised by a colony of monkeys.

As James got older, she learned those accounts were not fantasy but part of her mother's unbelievable history.

Between the ages of four and ten, Marina Chapman's family consisted of 20 or so Capuchin monkeys, native to the jungles of South America. Her memory of how it all started is hazy-she remembers sorting peas in her village when in an instant a hand covered her mouth and she awoke in the jungle.

"All she can remember is being chloroformed with a hand over her mouth," James, told London's Sunday Times this past week. "It's assumed that the kidnap went wrong,"

Two days after fending for herself, she was approached by a colony of monkeys who taught her by example to forage, feed, and survive as one of their own.


"Acting entirely on instinct, she tried to do what they did: she ate what they ate and copied their actions, and, little by little, learned to fend for herself," according to a press release for the Marina's memoir, The Girl With No Name, to be released in 2013 by Pegasus Books.

Why some people adopt monkeys, dolls as a children

As Chapman adapted to jungle life, she lost any language she had learned in her early years, and instead developed an inhuman ability to scale trees and to communicate with creatures native to the forest. After more than five years, she was discovered by hunters who sold her into slavery in exchange for a parrot.

How to help victims of child trafficking 

A year later she escaped, narrowly avoiding a life of prostitution. She then lived off the streets in Colombia, relying on her stealth knowledge gleaned, in part, from her education in the jungle. In her 20's while working as a household staff for a Colombian family, she was brought on a trip to Bradford, England. There she met her future husband at a church, a bacteriologist named John Chapman, and she never left. Together they raised two children. She worked as a cook, and later in social services helping at-risk youth.

Over the past five years, her daughter Vanessa, now a 23-year-old film composer, has been devoted to transcribing her mother's memory, matching the nuts and berries, and wildlife in Chapman's jungle recollections, with those native to the area she was abandoned in. Recently, mother and daughter traveled back to Colombia to find Chapman's long-lost family, reconnecting with some surrogates who took her in in her teens. She even tried re-entering the jungle before being stopped by military officials.

There have only been a handful of modern-day accounts of feral children surviving this unique upbringing and ultimately assimilating back into human life. In 1999, a young boy was rescued in the Uganda jungle after being raised by monkeys. It took him eight years to learn to speak again.

Today, Chapman is in her mid-50s, though she has no document proving her exact age. Her English writing is weak and her daughter provided much of the translations for Barrett-Lee's formulation into memoir. According to James, the most glaring sign of her mother's past is the fact that she rarely, if ever, cries. "I guess it's an emotional effect of her earlier life," said Vanessa in her interview with Times.

Chapman's memoir, The Girl Without a Name, authored by both mother and daughter, as well as Barrett-Lee, was purchased by publishers in the U.K., Holland, Australia and Italy this past February. It's slated for release in the U.S. by Pegasus books sometime in April of 2013.

Vanessa and her mother both declined an interview with Yahoo! Shine, opting instead to wait for the book's publication. It's unlikely interest will subside six months from now. For Marina, the chance to tell her story is second only to the opportunity to help young victims of kidnapping. She plans to donate a portion of the proceeds of her book to charities to combat child trafficking and slavery in Colombia.

Cheetah, The Chimpanzee that Starred in Tarzan Movies Dead at Age 80

Condolences poured in to a Florida primate sanctuary Wednesday after it announced the death of Cheetah, a chimpanzee that the sanctuary said starred in the Tarzan movies during the 1930s.

The chimpanzee died Saturday after suffering kidney failure the week before, the sanctuary foundation said on the site. He was roughly 80 years old, Debbie Cobb, the sanctuary's outreach director, told CNN affiliate WFLA.

Cobb recalled Cheetah as an outgoing chimp who loved finger painting and watching football and who was soothed by Christian music, the station said.

Several chimpanzees appeared in various Tarzan movies, many of which were popular in the 1930a and 1940s. The Florida primate sanctuary said its chimp appeared in the Tarzan moves from 1932 through 1934, according to WFLA.

According to the website Tarzanmovieguide.com, "Tarzan the Ape Man" was released in 1932 and "Tarzan and his Mate" in 1934. Both movies starred Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan. Weissmuller was the first speaking Tarzan, according to the Internet Movie Database website. He died in 1984.

Weissmuller appeared in Tarzan movies through 1948, according to the online movie guide site, with other chimpanzees appearing in the role of Cheetah.

Cheetah came to the primate sanctuary from Weissmuller's Florida estate around 1960, Cobb told WFLA. He was the most famous of the sanctuary's 15 chimpanzees.

"He was very compassionate," Cobb said. "He could tell if I was having a good day or a bad day. He was always trying to get me to laugh if he thought I was having a bad day. He was very in tune to human feelings."

Cheetah was known for his ability to stand up and walk like a person, sanctuary volunteer Ron Priest told WFLA.

Another distinguishing characteristic: "When he didn't like somebody or something that was going on, he would pick up some poop and throw it at them," Priest said. "He could get you at 30 feet with bars in between."

Still, Cobb told the station, "He wasn't a chimp that caused a lot of problems."

Cheetah is not believed to have any children, Priest said.

His age was advanced for a chimpanzee, Cobb told WFLA. In the wild, the average chimp survives 25 to 35 years, she said, and they can live 35 to 45 years in zoos.

Another chimpanzee named Cheeta lives on a primate sanctuary in Southern California named C.H.E.E.T.A (Creative Habitats and Enrichment for Endangered and Threatened Apes). The sanctuary's creator, Dan Westfall, said on its web site that he was saddened to hear of Cheetah's passing in Florida. He said he and others at the sanctuary "send our deepest sympathies to our colleagues at Suncoast."

Westfall writes on the site that he was told Cheeta was one of the original chimps in the Tarzan movies during the 1930s and 1940s. However, when he began working with a writer on Cheeta's biography, research revealed "that our Cheeta is unlikely to be as old as we'd thought, although he is clearly old," Westfall wrote. "It is also difficult to determine which movies, if any, our Cheeta may have been in."

People from several countries offered condolences for Cheetah on the Florida sanctuary's site in several different languages. A few credited him with helping them develop a love for animals.

"Cheetah will remain forever remembered in history," someone in Malta wrote.

Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O'Sullivan hold hands with Cheetah the chimpanzee in "Tarzan and His Mate."