Trust in Me

Let's meet some curious individuals, shall we?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Benky's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild. Our world is
full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book,
all of these amazing tales are right there on display,
just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet

(00:27):
of Curiosities. Human beings are all different. Every experience shapes
us into the kinds of people we become. No one
thing is responsible. Each of us is the product of
nature and nurture working together. Sometimes that results in the

(00:49):
next world leader, other times it leads to a life
of crime. For one man, his unique upbringing didn't guide
him toward fevery or murder, but he did wind up
serving as a member Parliament. He also found himself as
the topic of conversation, both during his life and afterward.
George Rearsby Sitwell was born in January of eighteen sixty

(01:10):
to a wealthy family. His father, Sir Sitwell Rearsby Sitwell,
was a baronet, hereditary title just below that of a
baron and above a night Sadly, the man passed away
when George was only four years old. All the property
he owned prior to his death was passed down to
his son, and so was his debt, but that didn't
stop the child from being proud of who he was.

(01:32):
He had a knack for making himself the center of attention.
Soon after his father's death, George had been writing on
a train when he announced his name entitled to a
fellow passenger. He told the man, I am four years
old and the youngest baronets in England. To say George
was difficult would be an understatement, and that difficulty manifested

(01:53):
itself in various ways. For one, he was ambitious, becoming
a member of Parliament before he turned thirty. He also
married young, when he was twenty six and Lady Ida
Dennison was only seventeen. The pair tied a knot, although
it was clear from the start that they were horribly
wrong for each other. Only days into their marriage, Dennison
fled back to her family's home. She hated her new husband,

(02:16):
and more than that, she hated the expectations that came
with being a wife. They forced her to return to him,
though what she did, but she resented everyone for it.
Nine months later, she gave birth to a baby girl,
angering her husband, who had hoped for a male heir.
It would be another five years before their first son, Osbert,
was born in eighteen ninety two. As time went on,

(02:38):
Sitwell increased both his wealth and his political power. Much
of the money went to his wife, who spent it
almost as fast as he could earn it. But George
also found ways to invest his fortune, possibly as distractions
from his terrible marriage or to occupy his time after
losing his parliamentary re election. He ended up becoming a
prolific inventor, although none of his creations ever became very popular.

(03:02):
The Sitwell egg, for example, was supposed to be a
complete meal designed for a person on the go. It
was a ball of white rice shaped like an egg.
In its center a piece of smoked meat. None of
the local shops were interested in carrying it. He also
came up with a toothbrush that played a popular song
as the person brush their teeth. This actually became a

(03:23):
real product as a way to encourage children to brush
their teeth just a century later. Perhaps the world wasn't
ready for George's unique idea. There was also a tiny
gun he created to protect himself from wasps. The agings
sit Well didn't just invent things though. He also took
a keen interest in restoring his family home, Rennischell Hall

(03:44):
in Derbyshire, England. But as he worked to restore it
to its former beauty, he began to develop some odd habits.
Visitors to the home were greeted by a sign that read,
I must ask anyone entering the house never to contradict
me in any way as interferes with the functioning of
the gastric juices and prevents my sleeping at night. He

(04:05):
also mislabeled all of his medicinal vials to discourage others
from sampling their contents when he traveled. His philosophies on health,
in particular, were something special. Nonfiction writing was okay, but
the body could not handle writing novels. According to him,
he believed fiction would be a drain on one's condition.

(04:25):
George's views and beliefs were odd and rarely based on
sound logic, but he was also a lifelong student, learning
all that he could on esoteric topics such as medieval
wool gathering and gardening. He even wrote a detailed history
of the fork. Sir George Sitwell led a strange and
troubled life. His wife hated him, and his family didn't

(04:47):
understand him. Yet regardless of how the world perceived him,
he never shied away from the man. He truly was
one of a kind. It's inevitable that many of us

(05:10):
have grown up to be like our parents. Our mannerisms,
are ways of speech, even our taste in movies and
music are because of the people who raised us. Heck,
every time I laugh, I hear my father's voice as
if he's in the very same room as me. But
how much of who we are is based on how
we were raised and how much is based on our dna.
It's the old nature versus nurtured debate. Well, Dina Santa

(05:34):
Char may hold the answers. In eighteen sixty seven, a
group of hunters were prowling through the jungle of Uttar Pradesh, India.
When they came to a clearing some distance away, they
noticed the entrance to a cave. The hunters approached the
cave carefully, anticipating what they might find inside. It could,
after all, be a ferocious animal. A creature did emerge,

(05:55):
it ignored them at first, unbothered by their presence. The hunters,
though did not raise their es. They couldn't bring themselves
to kill something so unique. What they had countered was
neither a bear nor a wolf, but something completely unexpected.
They had found a boy, probably no more than six
years old, and knowing they couldn't leave him in the jungle,
the hunters gathered him up and brought him to an

(06:17):
orphanage in the nearby town of Agra. It was there
that he was given the name Dina Santa Char santit
R was a Hindi word meaning Saturday. The day they
had found him. He was considered a feral child because
he couldn't walk upright or know how to conduct himself
around other people. He couldn't even speak, but he did
understand his new guardians to some extent. He had been

(06:39):
raised by wolves, and his behavior reflected that. He ate
raw meat and walked on all fours. He chewed on bones,
which in turn had sharpened his teeth, and he couldn't
form words, so he communicated with grunts like an animal.
He found it difficult to stand on two legs like
everyone else. He also had trouble following simple directions. For example,

(07:00):
pointing at an object or a plate of food was
a foreign gesture to him, as wolves didn't use their
paws to indicate things of importance, and he never learned
to speak the language of his caretakers, although the effects
of living around other human beings did eventually rub off
on him. Santa Char learned how to stand on two legs,
and it was said that he figured out how to

(07:20):
put on his clothes later in life. Surprisingly, one human
habit came quite naturally to him, smoking He found the
practice so enjoyable he became a chain smoker before his
death at the age of thirty four. It's been theorized
that Santa Char may have been the inspiration for the
young man cub Mowgli in Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book series.
In those novels, Mowgli is an abandoned child raised by

(07:43):
wolves in the jungles of India. Yet he was not
the first, nor would he be the last child raised
by wolves that the orphanage would take in. Three more
children were welcomed after him, including a girl and two boys,
all who had been classified as ferrell. In fact, over
the years, more than fifty children had been discovered living
with animals in the jungles of India. One boy was

(08:05):
found in nineteen fifty seven, crawling out of a cave.
He had been stolen from his home by a wolf
when he was only eighteen months old. Other children, though,
were often abandoned by their parents for being born with
intellectual disabilities, and India wasn't the only place where children
were being raised in the wild either. In the mid
nineteen eighties, a young Ukrainian girl named Oxana Malaya was

(08:27):
taken in by stray dogs when she was just three
years old. Her alcoholic father left her outside one night,
so she crawled into a structure with the dogs to
stay warm. She ended up living on the streets for
five years, eating scraps of food and crawling on all fours,
until social workers found her. I got her the help
she needed, enrolling her in various therapies to help improve
her speech and control her feral urges, and she eventually

(08:50):
learned to speak fluent Russian and got a job on
a farm. But she was never the same. Who knows
how she, or Santa Char or any of the other
children neglected by society might have turned out had they
been given the tools to thrive. Instead, they were cast
aside and left defend for themselves and it makes one
wonder in this story, who are the real animals. I

(09:17):
hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities.
Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about
the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show
was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership with how
Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore,
which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and

(09:40):
you can learn all about it over at the World
of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.
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