Kaspar Hauser 26 May

On May 26, 1828 a young boy was found wandering the streets of Nürnberg, Germany. He was wearing peasant clothing and could barely talk. He had with him a letter to the captain of the 4th squadron of the 6th cavalry regiment, asking the captain to either take him or hang him. The shoemaker took the boy to the house of captain Wessenig where he said only, "I want to be a rider like my father." Further demands for information resulted in tears. He was taken to a police station where he wrote a name: Kaspar Hauser. The boy was taken into care and taught to speak and write and it emerged during the ensuing months that he had lived in a dark 2×1×1.5 metre cell with only a straw bed and had been fed on bread and water. The first human being he had seen was a man who had taught him the phrase, "I want to be a rider like my father", and to write Kaspar Hauser. Eventually he was released and the next thing he remembered was walking about in Nuremberg. Unsurprisingly, the boy was the talk of Nurnberg. Some connected him with the family of the Grand Duke of Baden. If this were true, his parents would have been Karl Ludwig Friedrich, Grand Duke of Baden and Stephanie de Beauharnais, adopted daughter of Napoleon I of France. The Countess von Hochberg was the alleged culprit for the boy’s captivity. These rumours gained credence when on October 17, 1829, a hooded man tried to kill Hauser with an axe but managed only to wound his forehead. Then on December 14, 1833, a stranger stabbed him fatally in the chest and he died three days later. The final twist to the tale came in 2002, when the Institute for Forensic Medicine af the University of Münster analysed hair and body cells that belonged to Kaspar Hauser. The genetic code was a 95% match to that of Astrid von Medinger, a direct descendant of Stephanie de Beauharnais. Bad Badens in Baden Baden!