ITC 64: Green Children of Woolpit

In The Crease (ITC) is where history, mystery, and the human condition collide. Hosted by J E DOUBLE F, each episode blends storytelling, analysis, and dark humor to explore the strange, the forgotten, and the unsettlingly relevant.

🎧 New episodes release bi-weekly.
📅 Current Season: ITC Season 4 (Episodes 61–80).

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:14):
The streshold omens step through past, present, future. We are
not time.

Speaker 2 (00:35):
To think, think the time thinking, sun.

Speaker 1 (02:15):
Ski the crease.

Speaker 3 (02:19):
You're listening to end the Crease, and I'm getting feedback,
so hold one second. Please, there we go apologize for
that you are listening to end the Crease. The show
that slices deep into the shadows of history, peels back
some of the footnotes no one else dares to read,
and drags the strangest stories into the light. I am

(02:42):
your host, j E. Double F and tonight we're headed
somewhere quiet, somewhere green, and somewhere very very old. This
is episode sixty four, The Green Children of woolped.

Speaker 4 (02:57):
Now.

Speaker 3 (02:58):
The story begins in a field in Sulfolk, around the
year eleven fifty, maybe a little earlier, maybe a little later.
The crops are ripe, the sun is high, and a
grip of English peasants stumble across something no one in
the village will ever ever forget. Two children, pale, dirty, confused,

(03:25):
speaking no no language, dressed in strange clothes, and green,
not metaphorically, not poetically, actually green.

Speaker 2 (03:41):
On.

Speaker 3 (03:41):
What follows is a mystery that refuses to die, a
story passed down from over eight centuries, one that's been
called legend, miracle, myth, poax, parable and possibly the first
alien encounter and recorded English history. What was it? Or

(04:04):
was it something sadder, stranger and far more human. Well,
tonight we are going to dig into the chronicles, weigh
some of the theories, and revisit the pits where it
all began. We'll meet the girl who claimed to come
from a land of eternal twilight and the boy who
didn't survive long enough to even tell his side. We'll

(04:25):
talk a bit about famine, war ferries, some scientific stuff.
I'll probably struggle saying, language, trauma, saints, sound, all of it.
And then what happens when the village is confronted with
something that cannot explain? Eight hundred years of retellings, one

(04:46):
mystery that keeps slipping out of the noose. This is
in the Crease episode sixty four, The Green Children or
a woolpit. Let's go down into that pit and see
what comes back. So here we are in Woolfpit, mid
twelfth century, a place of prayer, plows and a little

(05:07):
bit of a quiet reputation, the kind of English village
where everything was small except for the mysteries people carried
inside their heads. It was hard at season, and the
world moved in skice and sweat and bushels of beans
and bushels of gossip. Chickens ran loose, children learned Latin
by way of hymnals, and the wolves that they said

(05:29):
were mostly gone. Mostly Now. I know some of you
are going, But that's not how it's called. You're correct, not.
The name isn't actually woolf pit. If you pronounce it
the correct way, it's wolf pit. And it came from
the old wolf trapping Pits still littered around the fields,

(05:52):
deep earthen traps covered in brush, dug centuries earlier into
the woods, and they were darker in the line between
man and you know, beasts were maybe a little more negotiable.
But by the eleven hundreds the pits were half forgotten,
more symbols, really a reminder that danger once lived closer,

(06:12):
that untamed things sometimes left the trees and came from
you know, for our sheep, or worse, your soul, and
that in this world holes were dug for things that
did not belong. So imagine in this world holes now
just there. And it was a perfectly normal morning. The

(06:35):
sun was rising over the fields still damped with the mist.
Sir Richard Decown's household stirring with servants, peasants heading out
together the last of the broad beans before rod or
rain got to them. And then a cry, not the
bleeding of a sheep, not even the shriek of a bird,

(06:58):
something higher, something human voices, even two of them, childlike,
wordless and half buried. A group of reapers followed the
sound toward one of the older pits, its edges now
blurred with thistle on ivy. They were really expecting something

(07:21):
along the lines of a fox, or maybe even a
trick of the wind, or even the worst fear among it,
God forbid, a child from the village had fallen in
while chasing something stupid. Instead, they looked down and saw
two children, one boy, one girl. But it wasn't any

(07:41):
known family from wolf Fit, not from any village within
walking distance, and not from anywhere that could be named
at the moment. And oh yeah, they were green, not olive,
not sickly green. Later, just scriptions would try to make
sense of it. Some called their skin tinted like leeks,

(08:04):
others compared to the tree moss or unripe wheat. But
what mattered in the first instance was in shade or spectrum.
It was the complete wrongness of it all. The skin
of the children shimmered under the canopy of the pit,
like some unspoken rebuke of the natural order. Their eyes
were wide and hollow with fear. They spoke in a rapid,

(08:25):
fluid tongue that had no echo in Latin, French or
even Old English. Their clothes, woven from strange coarse cloth,
were dyed in colors of the villagers didn't recognize neither peasants, brown,
nor noble's velvet. One of the harvesters made the sign
of the cross. Another muttered to word he probably hadn't

(08:49):
used since childhood. Changeling. Now you have to understand, in
medieval England, where literacy was rare and the nearest monk
was the closest living thing to a news anchor, stories
lived longer than logic. People believed in signs, They believed
in miracles. They believed too in curses and green children

(09:10):
appearing out of a pit. That could be That could
be all three, depending on your theology. Yet fear gave
way to compassion, or at least to curiosity. They were
just children. After all, the villagers pulled them out, carried
them toward the center of wolf pit like something holy

(09:31):
or haunted, or perhaps a little bit of both. And
what followed, depending on how much you believe in coincidence,
was either divine encounter or one of the strangest refugee
stories England has ever known. All news traveled faster than
a confession during lynt. Within the hour, the baker's princess

(09:54):
was swearing up and down. He'd seen their eyes glow
in the dark. By afternoon, the local priests had been summoned,
holy water in hand, and the girl clung to the
boy like a frightened fawn. She spoke only in her
strange tongue, her voice thin and tremulous. The boy, smaller,
said nothing at all, his eyes half litted, his breathing shallow.

(10:16):
His skin was greener than hers. One thing was certain.
They were clearly malnourished. Attemps to feed them failed spectacularly,
and never tried bread. The children recoiled, Porridge made them wretch.
An old crone offered a cup of goat's milk, and

(10:36):
they spat it out, panicked and wide eyed. Two days
they ate nothing. The rumors continue to swirl. Were they
fasting for some unknown religious reason? Had they been cursed
by a hedge? Which were they even human? The priest

(10:59):
baptized and reemptively, you know, just to be on the
safe side. Meanwhile, Sir Richard Dicalm, the women land holder
and reasonablely well read man, offered to take them into
his household, perhaps out of Christian duty, perhaps because deep down,
like everyone else in wolf Pit, he couldn't look away.

(11:23):
So we go into Sir Richard's House of Curiosities, his manner,
still just a mile or so from the village, its
moat fed by a slow moving stream and lined with
carefully pruned willows. Inside, the children were cleaned, clothed, and
given quarters that had last howls. Some traveling monks servants

(11:43):
were instructed to be patient. The cook was more not
to force the issue of food, which made what happened
next all the more bewildering. Was storing broad beans, stalks, pods,
and husk. As the story goes, the moment the green

(12:05):
children saw them, their demeanors shifted. They reached out, grabbed
at them like the life lines that they were, and
when they cracked, the pods open and found beans inside.
They devoured them raw, unwashed hole. It was the first
thing they'd eaten in days. The cook, albeit stunned, offered more.

(12:29):
The children ate them all the next day, more beans,
then more, and then some more. For a while, broad
beans were all they would even touch out to the household.
It was breathtaking to the priest, a minor miracle to
the villagers, who were already retelling the story with glowing
skin and floating eyes, and made things only that much weirder.

(12:55):
Who eat for all beans and nothing else? Who cries
in joy over his talk of logumes? Who wanders into
your world throw a hole in the ground, then survives
on peasant feed? No one really had answers the girl.
The girl was changing, started to smile more. She spoke

(13:19):
still in her unknown tongue, but with more confidence. She
learned to hold a cup properly. Her green ewe, once
deep and unsettling, began to fade and thing into something
closer to pale olive, then tan than normal. The boy

(13:40):
didn't change fast enough. By the time the priest baptized him,
the boy was already weakening. He barely responded to touch,
He spoke very little, slept too long, and the girl
stayed by his side, whispering in their unknown language. No
one knew what was being said. There's a strong possibility

(14:04):
maybe she didn't either. When he died, he was buried quickly,
as was the usual practice. No mother to grieve though,
no name to chisel into the stone, just a shrouded bundle,
lowered into the earth under a wooden cross marked with
a date no one would remember. Outside the chronicles, wolf

(14:25):
Pitt had taken in two children. It had but one,
but she was learning fast. The girl, soon to be named,
though we'll never know what her real name was, began
picking up the local dialect for some nouns, then some

(14:47):
short sentences. He shadowed the other girls in the manner,
listening more than actually speaking. By the end of the
year she would communicate. And when she could communicate, they
asked where had she come from? Why was her skin

(15:08):
even green? And what was the language she was speaking?
And she gave them an answer, or rather she gave
them a story. Come from Saint Martin's Land. That was
the name she gave it. Not a country, not a village,
not a family estate, a land where the sun never

(15:31):
fully rose, where everything was tinged with green, where the
people worshiped Saint Martin and the attended churches that looked
almost familiar. She described a world of twilight, not darkness,
not night, but an endless dusk, like the hours just
before the sun disappears, the kind of light that makes
shadows seem a little bit taller and colors more uncertain.

(15:54):
She and her brother, she said, had been hurting animals
near a cave. They had heard the sound of bells,
church bells, faint and strange, so they ended up following
that sound into the cave and through the dark, and
then suddenly they were in wolf pit. No explanation, no route,

(16:16):
just a shift in space, a shift in light, and
a shift in world. To her, this made perfect sense.
To everyone else, it sounded like either a divine revelation
or a trial trying to make sense of trauma, the
only way she knew how. Sir Richard took her words seriously,

(16:38):
the priest less so, the villagers being the villagers that
they were. Now they just added to the long list
of oddities. But we know she had survived. She was
no longer green, and now she was speaking English, or

(16:58):
close enough to English. You knew how to need bread
and say grace. But she was still mystery, and in
a village like wolf Pit, mysteries don't die. They tend
to evolve. Now the girl would grow older, possibly marry,

(17:19):
possibly possibly just being forgotten entirely by the world outside
a wolf pit, but inside her arrival would be retold
again and again by firelight, by alehouse, and by cautionary tale.
Two green children appeared in the harvest fields, one died,
one lived, and the pit that once caught wolves had

(17:42):
caught something stranger. Now with history, they're often told the
history is written by the victors, and it's usually accurate.
But in the twelfth century, history was written by monks,

(18:05):
mostly the kind with you know, bad teeth, worse hair,
and sharp quills and a tendency to insert random ghost
stories between records of taxation and saintly miracles. So when
it came time to record the tale of wolf pittsgreen children,
the girl who claimed to be from Saint Martin's Land
and the boy who died too soon to say anything,

(18:26):
the job would fall to not one chronicler, but two.
They would never meet the children, They never visited the village,
but they wrote the story down anyway, because that's face
as some tales are too strange to leave untold, whether
that's made up or not. So let's start with William

(18:49):
of Newburgh, a canon regular of a monastery up at Yorkshire.
Is he best described or he's best described as the
medieval equivalent of a skeptical academic with a pinch it
for ghost stories? A William wasn't in the business a
fairy tales. His history of English affairs was meant to
chronicle the serious events of the time, battles, king's disasters,

(19:11):
you know, politics, things like that. But somewhere between the
account of King Stephan's miserable reign and an antidote about
animated corpses crawling out of graves, yes, that's really a
story that I might cover. In season five, he includes
the story of the Green Children, albeit reluctantly. He all
but apologize to the reader for doing so. Now, I

(19:34):
know this sounds ridiculous, he basically said, but there were
just too many respectable people who swore it was true.
His source unknown, his tone weary but sincere. He even
admits upfront that it defies logic. Two children, green skinned,

(19:58):
unable to speak the language, eating nothing but a raw
beans just appeared from a hole in the ground, and
one would die. The other learns English and describes the
world bathe and perpetual twilight. To William, this wasn't folklore,
it was a phenomenon. Unlike any responsible historian of his age,
he wrote it down right after chronically a couple of

(20:21):
vampire incidents and before returning to more normal events like
royal tax disputes. And I wish I was making all
of that up, and I am not. That's the key
to understanding William. To him, there were miraculous in the mundane,
shared the same parchment. Then there's Ralph of some really

(20:43):
English sounding name, something like Coggshale, the abbot of a
monastery down in Essex. Closer a little bit too, wolf Pitt,
a little bit closer to the source. Ralph included his
version of The Green Children and the Chronicon Angel, written
some decades after William's, and while his account is shorter,

(21:04):
he claimed something William didn't firsthand testimony. Now, according to Ralph,
he got the story directly from Sir Richard de Kine,
the very man who took the children in and raised
the girl. That makes Ralph's version a bit of a
second hand account, one degree from the actual witness, which,
let's face it, for a medieval standard, means he was

(21:26):
basically there.

Speaker 1 (21:29):
Now.

Speaker 3 (21:30):
Ralph added several details that William either didn't know or
chose not to include. He named the land they said
they came from Saint Martin's land. He emphasized that everything
in that land was green, not just the people, but
the fields, the rivers, the light itself. He also described
the cave more explicitly, and the sound of bells that

(21:51):
lued the children in that part stuck a chord with
a lot of the readers. Bells meant churches, and ur
meant Christianity. So how could two Christian children be so
utterly alien? Now the two chronicles agree on the core

(22:14):
facts of this story. The children were discovered during harvest.
They spoke no known language, They refused all food except
raw beans. The boy died shortly after baptism. That end
that the girls survived, learned English, and claimed to come
from a strange land with notable daylight. But then they
diverge in the subtle meaningful ways. William places the event

(22:39):
during the reign of King Stephan somewhere between eleven thirty
five and eleven fifty four. Ralph, on the other hand,
says it happened under King Henry the Second, so that's
post eleven fifty four, potentially into the eleven sixties and
eleven seventies, and that's not a small difference. That's two kings,
one civil war, and a fair bit of national trauma
between them. Either one of them got it wrong or

(23:01):
they were each working off separate retellings. Let's face it,
oral tradition has never been a truly reliable timekeeper, and
there are other variants as well. Ralph emphasizes the children's
inability to eat normal food and how desperate they were
for the beans. Williams he mentions it doesn't dwell on it.

(23:24):
William interestingly refers to the girl as wanton and impudent
once she grew up. Ralph uses even spicier language that's
attis let's just say naughty, which translated from monks speaking.
You know. Basically, she had a bit of a sense

(23:44):
of humor and didn't take orders from pious men. According
to William, the girl eventually left a wolf pit, married
a man from King's Lynn, and lived a normal life.
If you can call a former alien bean eater becoming
household a housewife normal. Some later researcher tried to track

(24:06):
her down. One suggests that she may have become a
woman named Agnes Barry who married a royal official named
Richard Barry, a man known to have ties to Sir
Richard de Calm. Well, let's face it, that is a
hell of a coincidence if true. I mean, the girl
from the pit didn't just survive, she ascended from mystery
to marriage, from outsider to English gentry. But that's just

(24:31):
a theory. We have no documentation to prove the connection.
It's just a possibility, not a conclusion. Then, a story
like this has possibly the possibility is well kind of
where everything resides. But let's zoom out a little bit.

(24:51):
Whether the Green Children appeared under King Stephen or Henry.
The Second England in the mid eleven hundreds was not
a calm place. Stephen's rain often called the anarchy with brutal,
had bloody civil war, nobles fighting noble castles, changing hands
almost weakly, if not daily, full towns being raised and rebuilt,

(25:13):
famine displacement, and even foreign mercenaries running wild. Well Henry
the Second's reign comparably was a bit more stable, but
not by much. His sons rebelled against him, nobles schemed
in the background, and in eleven seventy three, just miles
from wolf Fit, one of the bloodiest confrontations occurred the

(25:34):
Battle of Foreignham. And here's why this matters. At Fornham,
King Henry's forces crust a coalition of rebellious nobles. Among
them were Flemish mercenaries who had been imported into England
by the Earl of Leicester and he were killed, others scattered,

(25:58):
and in the aftermath anti Flemish sediment surge. Some local
English lords saw Flemish communities as traders. Families disappeared, homes
were burned, children went missing. Now, unlike the rest of
the story, this isn't speculation, This is documented. And for
them did we mention it's barely a half day's walk

(26:22):
from wolf Pit. So a new theory begins to bloom.
What if the children were real? What if they weren't
from some fantasy land. What if they were Flemish? Let's

(26:42):
explore it. They spoke a language no one understood. Now
medieval Flemish sounds nothing like Old English. Their clothes were
strange Continental styles often looked alien to English peasants. They
avoided food. Traumatized kids often re fuse unfamiliar meals, who

(27:03):
were found near harvest season, exactly when chaos was settling
from the rebellion. They came from Saint Martin's Land, possibly
a garbled version of Bornum Saint Martin, a real Flemish
settlement in the region. But I know what you're saying,

(27:25):
the green skin well, some medical historians have proposed a
diagnostic answer for this, hyperchromic anemia, also called green sickness,
a condition caused by a severe malnutrition and iron deficiency,
which can result any noticeable greenish color when fed properly.

(27:50):
Say oh, I don't know, with beans rich in iron
color spade just like the story. But then why the bells,
why the cave. It's easy to dismiss those details as

(28:11):
imaginative retellings, But what if they weren't metaphors? Ficher it
Two Flemish children, young, confused, traumatized, are hiding in an
abandoned mind shaft or chalk tunnel during or after a massacre.
They hear church bells. They follow the sound even crawling

(28:31):
toward it and emerge into a village that sees them
as something other. They're hungry, weak, apparently inarticulate to these people,
and they're dressed in foreign clothes, oh and green. So
the story spreads, the facts begin to blur, and by

(28:52):
the time it gets to two monks with quills, it
becomes myth. Real trauma becomes wonder And that's how history
works sometimes, and sometimes that's just how it survives. Well,
let's not pretend William and Ralph here were just scribbling
legends for sheer entertainment. They had reasons. In the twelfth century,

(29:16):
England was still wrestling with ideas of Christianity versus paganism,
civilization versus wildness, community versus outsider. To some of the
Green children were parable and allegory. Two strangers fall from
the earth. One dies, the other is baptized, learns the language,
marries and becomes one of them. It's about assimilation or

(29:40):
conversion or just survival, pick your metaphor. They all kind
of fit here. And as weird as the story is,
the ending is almost conservative. The girl sheds her greenness,
learns English, marries, becomes normal. Hey, the system wins but

(30:03):
the details, details won't just die. Despite the neatness of
the ending, the story never settled. It still lingers because
the details are too strange, too specific, and too human
to be dismissed entirely. We want to believe there's something
more to it. We want to believe a tunnel between worlds,

(30:27):
a shimmered veil between light and shadow, a place where
dusk never ends, and Saint Martin still hears prayers in
a language lost the time. Somewhere, maybe Saint Martin's Land
still waits, or you know, maybe it never existed at all,
except in the mind of one green girl trying to

(30:48):
explain the unexplainable. We have William of Newburgh, Ralph of
caugeshawl one skeptical, the other closer to the source. Both
recorded something they really couldn't explain, but dared not to ignore.

(31:09):
Because stories like this, stories that blur that line between
miracle and metaphor, have a way of surviving long after
the monks are nothing but dust. And whether it was
just a tale of war refugees, fairy children, or accidental
tourists from another world, mystery didn't die in that pit.
It walked out, and it spoke some English about it,

(31:31):
and it refused to go away, but that we will
be back in about three and a half or so minutes.
Thank everyone for tuning in, whether it's kal RN radio
on x SHR media, on YouTube, kalare on it, rumble
in my own feeds. I greatly appreciate it. We will

(31:52):
be right back.

Speaker 5 (32:11):
Woll can I feel the spoken no name?

Speaker 6 (32:14):
Sunlight burned but didn't warm, Green veins on the thinner skin, eyes.

Speaker 5 (32:22):
Like glass, amiss the storm.

Speaker 7 (32:25):
Your words most sideways in my mind, like words that
fly with broken skies.

Speaker 8 (32:32):
Claim this soil is yours by blood roots.

Speaker 7 (32:35):
Don't ask the stars to lie.

Speaker 5 (33:16):
Taught to speak, but not to me limx songs. I've
never heard your harvest, moonion knuves.

Speaker 7 (33:25):
Your kings, old taste like fash beneath your words.

Speaker 5 (33:30):
I walk the spiral to your gate, no bad back home,
no map to trace.

Speaker 7 (33:37):
You stare like mirrors that won't break, But I still
hear another place.

Speaker 1 (34:12):
You're found, true green.

Speaker 5 (34:16):
Shadows in Louis.

Speaker 1 (34:18):
But who.

Speaker 5 (34:21):
You speak for? The silence that raised us school dreamer home?
We never.

Speaker 6 (34:35):
Your hands filled walls around the name you say His
mind befits a heavily between the cords and the child
of Dusty Alagona.

Speaker 8 (35:00):
Either no star, no scot.

Speaker 5 (35:13):
Just a salad doesn't echo, just a soil'll never hear.

Speaker 3 (35:43):
And welcome back. Oh, I almost didn't make it back
in time. It's one bad thing about a fractured ankle.
Don't quite move with the speed I used to. You
have to remember that and make longer internation music next time. Now,
where where where does this story take us from here? Well,

(36:03):
when a story refuses to die for eight hundred years,
there are basically two possibilities. It's either a skeleton in
history's closet, or it's a mirror we keep turning to
see ourselves in. And I think for the Tale of

(36:24):
the Green Children a wolf pit. I think I'm going
to embrace the power of hand here, because no matter
how many monks wrote it down or scholars try to
explain it, we keep coming back to the relatively same
unanswerable question, who or what were they? And often when

(36:48):
logic taps out, the speculation begins. So tonight, in true
ITC fashion, we're going to sort the theories like tools
on a bench. Some are going to be bluntished trements,
and some are scalpel sharpen well one or two maybe
a little radioactive, but all of them in some way
are trying to shine light into that pit. So let's

(37:13):
just we're gonna jump into the big one. Okay. Long
before Area fifty one, before alien autopsies, in green and
gray skin memes, there was a different other world. It
was closer, wilder, less about distant galaxies and more about
the hill behind your cottage, a stream that whispered too clearly,

(37:35):
the barrel you were warned never to disturb. In medieval England,
the fairy realm wasn't metaphor. It was geography, a parallel
reality just beneath the surface. You didn't need warp speed
to visit. You needed a little bit of bad luck

(37:55):
and a poorly time to walk through the woods. And
the story of the green show kind of fits this
folklore like a velvet glove, strange speech that's a check
alien dress. Yep, absolutely green tanted skin. I mean hello,
color of fairy blood, beer of bread and meat. Well,

(38:16):
let's face it, that's kind of classic fairy lore. Only
eating beans. Possibly the one crop shared between worlds and
the cave is a portal. It's a direct hit Fairie
mounts and tunnels are traditional interests to the other world.
The girl's own description of Saint Martin's Land reads more

(38:37):
like a fairy territory, eternal twilight, a place where Christian
saints exist but dimly like echoes through a forest, a
spiritual halfway house between our worlds and theirs. In fact,
there is a specific fairy category and British lure for
these kinds of encounters, called intrusions from the Other Side,

(39:01):
which also would make a really good song. I need
to make sure wreat that one down now. When people
stumbled out of wood, confused, altered and unable to describe
where they'd been, or children appear from nowhere with stories
of twilight lands, these were not treated as fiction. They
were treated as cautionary tales. And even the green hue

(39:22):
isn't an anomaly, and many fairy traditions, green isn't just
a collar. It's a warning, the sign of something neither
dead nor alive, a creature touched by something older than
man and deeper than language. So under this theory, the
green children didn't emigrate, they escaped, or worse, they were

(39:44):
cast out, or maybe they wandered too far from the
sounds of the bell, which in many traditions panish to
the fay as. If the ring of Wolfpit's Abbey didn't
just bring them to our world, it could have trapped
them here. And while the boy withered and died, unable

(40:07):
to adjust, a girl learned the rules of our world.
She unlearned the Faye way. He ate human food, spoke
human words, and slowly the Faye the green faded. No,
I know, I know, I already mentioned area fifty one,
so let's go here with number two. It was only

(40:33):
a matter of time before someone said, wait, green skin,
strange language, mysterious origin. Are we sure they weren't from
HM space? So let's enter the extraterrestrial theory. Now. This
version exploded in the twentieth century, right when the public
started swapping angels for astronauts and fairies for flying saucers.

(40:56):
Opponents claimed the children were not from another country or
even another dimension. They were, in fact from another planet,
a dying world trapped in tilight twilight, perhaps one tidally
locked to its star, where one hemisphere bakes and the
other freezes. The children came from the temperate twilight band.
One misstep throw a wormhole or an alien transportation air

(41:17):
and suddenly boom, here they are in Wolfpit. The green skin, well,
that's either atmospheric or nutritional adaptation or a result of
photosynthetic biology aliens with chlorophyll in their skin. The language
will not a dialect, not even Flemish. It was just
alien Martian and the diet it could easily be explained

(41:42):
as earth food isn't exactly USDA compliant on Rigel seven.
And even the sounds of bells could be chalked up
as a special resonance from the teleportation process or a
homing beacon from their own technology. It became the cave
became a rapture and space time. It's the ancient aliens

(42:03):
theory with a touch of medieval filter. Now is there
any evidence of this? No, not even a craft saucer
made of beans. Maybe. But in fairness, if Roswell can
fuel a million documentaries, Shirley Wolfpit gets at least one
theory on the board, and the logic isn't wildly worse

(42:25):
than saying they were radioactive fairies. It just trades a
little bit of woodland mysticism for galactic mystery. At the
end of the day, both versions want the same thing,
a world not like ours, rules we don't even understand,
and that enticing thrill of a mystery that refuses to behave.

(42:48):
So now let's put away some of the magic and
sci fi and let's talk about the most grounded and frankly,
in my opinion, the most compelling explanation is rooted not
in folkl or but in hard history. And we've touched
on it, but let's build on it fully.

Speaker 6 (43:04):
Here.

Speaker 3 (43:06):
In the mid twelfth century, Flemish immigrants settled across East Anglia,
skilled artisans, weavers and merchants that brought a distinct culture
and a distinct language with them. Some lived in communities
like Fornum Saint Martin, just a short walk from wolf Pit.
And then came the rebellion in eleven seventy three to
the Earl of Leicester raised a Flemish army and marched

(43:28):
against King Henry the Second. The uprising was crushed at
the Battle for him, and the fallout was severe. After
the battle, these Flemish civilians were targeted, their homes destroyed
in entire entire families were killed and scattered, and maybe,
just maybe, in that chaos, two children siblings, young and helpless,

(43:50):
could have fled into the countryside, their clothes just simply Flemish,
strange to the English eyes, their languae which absolutely incomprehensible,
the fear of food, trauma, culture shock, maybe even a
religious dietary norm as we mentioned their green skinned malnutrition,

(44:12):
severe iron deficiency. Children growing up in hunger, possibly living
on four eaged weeds or moldy grain, can develop that
pallor of a greenish shwe and when finally brought to
the wolf pit and fed real food those such as
the iron rich broadbeans, their collars would just fade. And

(44:34):
as we've touched on the story of Saint Martin's Land,
just a simple translation miss up a place they barely
remember and name heard in passing, maybe misunderstood. You tate
it through trauma and translation. All of it makes sense.
It's not romantic, it's not magical, but it is achingly human.
Two orphan children, basically war refugee, one survives, one does it,

(44:58):
and the village is unable to explain what they saw,
began to build a legend to fit the gaps. But
let's stay on that medical lens a moment longer. Green
sickness was was a diagnosis known for centuries, sometimes associated
with adolescent girls, sometimes with poor diet. It was characterized

(45:19):
by the following pale or greenish skin, fatigue, poor appetite,
and behavioral withdrawal. It's caused by severe iron deficiency, and
before modern nutrition, it wasn't uncommon, especially in children displaced
by war, living off roots and beans, drinking contaminated water,
hiding and caves or barns, or surviving on one specific

(45:40):
crop say brawl Lagumes. Once refed and placed in care
of their symptoms could just an easily be reversed. So
when chroniclers say the girls lost her green hue over time,
it's actually biology here for transformation from alien to a semis.
It wasn't a spiritual journey. It was simply iron in

(46:04):
the bloodstream. Now some scholars believe none of it happened,
or rather something happened, but it was retold and reshaped
into a parable. A Christian narrative about sin, redemption and community,
consider two children emerge from a dark place. One is

(46:25):
saved through baptism and assimilation, the other dies. The survivor
Mary's joined society and the mystery is absorbed into the faith.
The girl becomes a stand in for the convert, the boy,
the damned, the green skin, original sin, the diet, spiritual hunger,
the strange land, paganism or heresy. In this view, the

(46:47):
story isn't about real children at all. It's about how
communities react to outsiders, how difference it's feared, than tamed,
and then eventually erased uthers. I've even suggested tail mirrors
the Saxon conquest of Britain, that the Green Children are
echoes of the Briton's displaced, misunderstood and faded into myths.

(47:12):
There are a couple more folk lore myths around here
that we really haven't touched on. The Babes in the Wood,
two children abandoned by a cruel uncle, lost in the forest,
and ultimately dying under an oak. The story, first recorded
in the sixteenth century, share some themes innocence, abandonment, death,

(47:34):
and the moral guilt of a society that failed to
protect them. Now, some folk lores believe the Green Children
legend may have been a precursor a Colonel truth that
evolved in the fiction, or maybe vice versa. Either way,
both tales force us to ask some uncomfortable questions who
watches over the loss, and what happens when no one
comes looking? And how does a village turn that guilt

(47:58):
into a story. And then there's also possibly the simplest
explanation to some two children lost, possibly orphans, possibly escape servants,
possibly just dare I say, lost wanderers. They fall into

(48:19):
a pit. They pulled out, malnourished, terrified, unintelligible, and unfamiliar.
The villagers react with confusion, fear, and eventually care. The
boy dies, the girl learns, grows, becomes part of the community,
and the story told again and again, becoming something else,
something else, and something weird enough to live forever. In

(48:43):
the end, every theory is a kind of translation of
fear in the folklore of tragedy, in the legend of truth,
into something we can stomach. Some people will see the fairies,
others will see the aliens, some refugees, and others just
basic metaphors. What they're all doing, every one of them,
is reaching into the dark and trying to name what
they find. And that, more than anything, is what the

(49:09):
Green children represent, not answers, but how we invent them.
We give those kids a story, We give them skin
and saints and twilight. We buried one, we married the other,
and then we passed it down. That's base. Its what
mankind is done for a very very long time. Some

(49:38):
stories end with a death, some with a wedding. But
the good ones, the ones with that echo, never really
end at all. They linger like fall in a field
long after the harvest, and the green children a will pit. Well,
they've managed to linger for over eight hundred and fifty years,
depending on who you believe. No one really knows exactly

(50:01):
what happened, and no one ever will. But the footprints
they left in the soil of English vocal or haven't
been completely washed away. They survived kings, plagues, reformations, empires,
because it turns out, it doesn't matter whether they were fairies,
aliens or slimy shorphins. Matters is we have never stopped

(50:25):
telling their story, and that says more about us than
it does necessarily about them. So let's go back briefly
to what we know. The one child dying, the one surviving.
He learned English ate real food, worked in a manor house,
and possibly even married a man from King's Lynn, and

(50:45):
vanished into the folds of normal life. She left no
known writings, no portrait, no grave, just a trail of
whispers and one extraordinary claim that she came from a
world not like this one. Whether that world was real
or remembered wrong, whether it existed under the hills or
inside a child's trauma riddled mind, that's beside the point.

(51:11):
Because her story would travel further than she ever could survive,
because two men put ink to parchment, William and Newberg,
the reluctant believer, Ralphail Coggeshall, the closer witness. They wrote
the Green Children into the margins of history, right next

(51:31):
to rebellions, in royal births, crusades, and miracles. And remember,
they didn't necessarily frame it as fable. They framed it
as fact. Strange fact, albeit possibly misunderstood fact, but true
enough to preserve. And their gift was simple. They didn't
try to explain it. They just told the story and

(51:55):
left the rest of us. Fast forward a few centuries.
The story goes quiet for a while, like a sleeper
beneath the hill. Then came the fifteen hundreds. The humanist
William Caden Or Camden references the children in his work Britannia,
a nod to the tale still alive in local memory.

(52:16):
By the sixteen hundreds, writers like Robert Burton The Anatomy
of Melancholity of Melancholy and France's Goodwin The Man in
the Moon are name dropping the Green Children as curiosities
of English folklore. Then the Victorians get hold of it,
and they do well. They do what victorians do best.

(52:36):
They romanticize the hell out of it. Suddenly it's in
chap books and folklore journals. It's paired with other strange
happenings from the countryside. It becomes a metaphor for lost tennisense,
for otherness from the mystical countryside. England was rapidly paving
over with trans in factories. They weren't laughing at this story.

(52:59):
They were longing for it, and in that they ended
up resurrecting it.

Speaker 5 (53:05):
Not today.

Speaker 3 (53:06):
A wolf pit is a quiet village, tree stone cottages,
roads that don't go anywhere fast. But if you visit
you'll find a sign near the village green. It's painted
in old medieval style, with a dark border and stylized lettering,
and right there in full collar, two Green children, the
boy and the girl, no longer lost, no longer strange,
now part of the town's identity. They stand next to

(53:32):
a stylized wolf pit. Their hands are clasped, their skin
faintly green, as if the legend has been allowed to
breathe but not overwhelm it. There's no monument, no shrine,
just that image as it's a village is saying we
do not know what happened here, but we remember it.

Speaker 5 (53:54):
Now.

Speaker 3 (53:54):
Part of the beauty of this legend, part of why
I wanted to talk about it tonight, is that this
legend has no vochanical version. There's no single master document,
no a Vatican approved timeline, just two medieval chronicers, centuries
of retelling, and layer upon layer of interpretation. Each generation

(54:15):
has seen in the story what it has feared most
or maybe perhaps most desired. To the medieval mind, the
children were divine mystery to the Victorians, a romantic parable
to folklorist, a portal narrative to ufologist, early alien contact,
to historians, war orphans wrapped in myth a sociologists, a

(54:39):
story about xenophobia and assimilation, and to the people will
fit local heritage is a dash of weird and to
us here now they are all of it because the
Green children aren't just a tale. There are kind of

(54:59):
a litmust test what we see when we look at them.
You see two strange children, and your first instinct is
to feed them, Well, that's one kind of story. If
your instinct is to convert them, cleanse them, control them,
that's a completely different one. If your instinct is to
fear them, kill them, bury their memory, that's a third option.

(55:20):
And this story has shadows of all three villagers fed
the children, baptize them, except that the girl bury the boy.
Some fear them, some help them, some just simply watched.
It's this one tiny story from a forgotten corner of England.
We see all the ways humanity handles the unknown with kindness,

(55:41):
with cruelty, with curiosity. But let's not forget the most
haunting parts. Really, we've just breezed over it. For the
most part. Girl lived, a boy didn't. He died within days,

(56:03):
perhaps from illness, perhaps from trauma, perhaps from a world
that refused to bend to him. He never learned the
language and couldn't eat the food, couldn't adjest, and he vanished.
And the girl, well, we've talked about her story, and
between the two, the duality adapt or dies baked into
the story, and that's part of why the story still works.

(56:28):
Neither reading is necessarily wrong because it has room for all.
So what did WILLF. Pitt find that day? Children? Refugees, fairies,
something else? Entirely? The truth is the pit. It never
told us and maybe it never will. Two, it's kind

(56:59):
of fun today. You'll find the green children referenced and novels, music,
children books, folk albums, podcast UFO documentaries, and tourists prosures
because yeah, you have to. But you'll find them in
conversations between these folklores, between the locals, between the skeptics

(57:20):
and believers. And that's what really really matters. Because one
child died, one child lived, one was buried in land.
He didn't understand the others absorbed into it, and yet
here we are still talking about them, and not because
of the color of their their skin, although that is interesting,

(57:42):
not because of where they came from, but because of
what they made us see in ourselves fear, wonder, and curiosity.
So here we are sixty minutes. That's the game normally,
but sometimes history, oh you know, like a good hockey team,
it just won't clear the zone. So this story isn't

(58:05):
going to stay in regulation because I'm not done skating
around this story. So let's lace up, do one more
shift with no clocks, no whistles, just some fun, fun
conversation when we come back from this next song, Welcome
to the fourth period.

Speaker 9 (58:42):
They came with quiet steps, no banners, no demand, skin
like canby words like when too strange to understand. We
built this home from stone and stone, not hate, not fear,
not spite.

Speaker 5 (58:59):
But don't ten that open doors. Don't need someone to
guard at night. It's not all shame. It's just a.

Speaker 6 (59:09):
Locking key because loving you don't me thow lose the
right to protect me.

Speaker 5 (59:17):
Guard the gate, but feed the stranger. Draw the line,
but poul o blame. We stand for love, but not
for danger. This house was earned and won't.

Speaker 1 (59:36):
Be ray.

Speaker 9 (59:47):
See the board of Sassy Scars, where freedom cost its toll.
You preach the flood, but never ask who cleans up
when it rolls.

Speaker 5 (59:59):
It's not about the skin or name.

Speaker 8 (01:00:02):
It's how you come and why.

Speaker 5 (01:00:04):
Respect the road, respect the rules, and will list you
to the sky mercying surrender.

Speaker 6 (01:00:14):
It's the strange to choose, but no home stands on promises.

Speaker 5 (01:00:19):
The doors can't close a fuse.

Speaker 8 (01:00:23):
Guard the gate, but feed the stranger.

Speaker 5 (01:00:28):
Light the lamp man. The fame.

Speaker 10 (01:00:33):
Truth works hand in hand with danger.

Speaker 5 (01:00:39):
To love his land. We name its name.

Speaker 10 (01:01:19):
Compassion with no anchor. Is a ship lost to the tide.
In silence in the name of peace leaves the wolves
to rule inside.

Speaker 6 (01:01:30):
So raise the.

Speaker 10 (01:01:31):
Walls, but build them just, and let the ones who
weren't a rise in trust.

Speaker 2 (01:02:11):
God the gate.

Speaker 5 (01:02:12):
But see the stranger.

Speaker 2 (01:02:17):
Show the line. Welcome ride, We shure the road that
on us honor.

Speaker 5 (01:02:27):
Not glad, we tre not travels by.

Speaker 2 (01:02:33):
We got.

Speaker 5 (01:02:39):
Wee gin, we hold.

Speaker 3 (01:02:53):
Well, And welcome back to the fourth period. As we
go into overtime. Since al is off, I decided to
explore this subject with a different light, one I think
that ties more into today. And as the story of

(01:03:14):
the Green Children of wolf Pit fades in the legend,
there's a natural temptation to leave it behind with the
rest of the medieval curiosities. A strange account lodged between
tales of famine royal succession, recorded by two monks over
eight hundred years ago. But if we're honest with ourselves,
the more unsettling part of the story isn't even the

(01:03:35):
Green skin for the Twilight Homeland or the We're all
being high it. Although that is really weird, it's that
quiet question of the villagers of wolf Pit were forced
to answer, and one we still face today. What do
you do when someone completely foreign arrives in your midst
We live in a world with borders, laws, and national identities.

(01:03:58):
Wolf Fit didn't have any of those in the modern sense,
no passports, no customs, no federal agencies. But they did
have with something far older and far more immediate, the
raw instinctive reaction to the other. And somehow, in the
middle of a brutal civil war, in a time where
rasa and witchcraft could be death sentences, these people encountered

(01:04:20):
two unknown children and chose to act not with fear
but with compassion. And that choice is not just historically remarkable,
it's kind of morally instructive. Now, this isn't to romanticize them.
If we don't know how every villager reacted, we only
know that someone, most likely Sir Richard Dekon, took the

(01:04:44):
children in, gave them food, shelter, and baptized them, gave
them names, and more importantly, gave them time, time to
learn to recover to adapt in the twelfth century, this
wasn't just kindness, this was survival. And what makes us,
I think worth revisiting a little bit in the modern

(01:05:04):
era is how often we now frame our discourse around
foreign us, especially in the area of immigration, in terms
of astract, policy and threat. What happens at the border
is debated in courtrooms and on cable news is on
the end our own other shows here on Klorrn and
as such our media. But what happens in the neighborhood,

(01:05:24):
in the village square, in the moment when someone different
shows up unannounced, that is still deeply human. It's not
about laws, about instinct, and at that time in that era,
wolf Pit past their test at least in this little
bit of narrow historical moment, and no before any angry

(01:05:47):
letters come in. Though this isn't about excusing illegal immigration.
This isn't a political argument per se. It's an anthropologic
reflection because what fascinates me is not necessarily the legality
of the Green children's arrival, but the humanity of the response.

(01:06:09):
No one in wolf Pit asked for two male, nurish, nonverbal,
oddly dressed children to arrive in the middle of a
harvest season. They simply had to decide what now. In
that respect, the Green Children are not just relics of

(01:06:31):
a medieval mystery, they're kind of archetypes. They represent every
moment when a community confronts the unknown, whether that's a
new language, a new face, or a new culture, and
has to decide whether to recoil, to investigate, or to
extend a hand. This episode is often framed as folklore
or science some self science fiction, or maybe they were

(01:06:54):
aliens story. But if we accept the most grounded theory
that they were probably Flemish children or placed by political violence,
then what we're looking at is an early refugee case
in a society I chose to respond with care rather
than with sudden punishment or exile. There's no indication they

(01:07:14):
were rounded up, detained, or driven out. They weren't integrated overnight.
It took months, maybe even years, but one of them
made it, and that's detail quietly noted in both tellings
is perhaps the most haunting of all. The boy did
not survive what his sister lived, she adapted, and so forth.

(01:07:35):
In modern terms, we might just simply call this an
attrition rate, but new in terms, it's a tragedy and
a warning. Integration is not automatic. Not everyone survives this placement,
even in the vessel circumstances. It takes more than open arms.
It takes infrastructure, paints, patients, and a willingness to be
inconvenience by empathy and for the individual involved to want to. Now,

(01:08:04):
to be clear, the conditions of modern immigration, especially illegal immigration,
are vastly more complex than what the face to. People
of wolf Pit today were dealing with a bunch of
systems and media personality that are more for themselves than
anything else. We have entire networks of transit trafficking, policy failures,
and geopolitical tension. But because the Green children didn't arrive

(01:08:28):
with intent, they weren't an invasion. They weren't economic opportunists
or ideological migrants. They were just kids scared, hungry, and
lost in the village. Without understanding them, still responded in
a way that prioritized dignity over fear. Now, the lesson
of wolf Pit isn't that we should ignore caution or

(01:08:51):
caution is human. The villagers were undoubtedly wary, but they
didn't let that master size into coroyalty. That's a line
we walk even the day between being cautious and being callous,
sometimes rightfully. And let's not forget that assimilation is a
two way street. The girls simply didn't remain an outsider

(01:09:14):
forever to learn the language, adjusted to the diet, married
and through the culture. There is a fine balance between
welcoming the outsider and asking them to engage with the
values of the place they've arrived in. Wolf Pitt remarkably
seemed to strike that balance. Children were not worshiped or tokenized.

(01:09:40):
They were folded in one successfully, one tragically not. Maybe
that's actually why part of this story lingers, because it's
not a fairy tale. It's not a parable with a
morally neatly sewn up at the end, but to reminder
of how difficult and necessary it is to make room
for difference without surrendering identity, mercy, without compromising discernment, to

(01:10:03):
hold your ground and still hold out your hand.

Speaker 1 (01:10:09):
To me.

Speaker 3 (01:10:09):
If there's a final takeaway from wolf pitts that societies
are not remembered for how they repel outsiders all the time.
Sometimes they remember for how they absorbed them or failed to.
The villagers could have turned away, could have abandoned those children.
Through those elements it might have been even easier than
what they did. But instead they said an example that
resonates not because it was perfect, but because it was decent,

(01:10:32):
measured in human In a world that we see increasingly
demanding instant judgment about absolute positions and ideological purity, maybe
there is something quietly revolutionary about a village and just said,
let's see what happens in this one little case. History

(01:10:54):
is filled with sieges in kingdoms, battles and treaties, but
once in a while, it gives us something just a
little bit small, a little bit more lasting. Two children,
green skinned and terrified, standing on the edge of a wheatfield.
The people met them there. Now that said, we have
spent the last handful of minutes considering what the villagers did.

(01:11:19):
Write not because they were uniquely noble or unusually enlightened,
but because their reaction to two children can offery quiet
blueprint for how humans can respond to the unknown. And
yet their response was in shape by government bureaucracy or
mass media. Wasn't filtered through chain of command, policy or

(01:11:43):
national security briefings. It was local, it was personal. It
was instinctual, not the sense of fear but of care. Yes,
the children were strange, but they were also vulnerable, and that,
more than anything, dictated the villagers' behavior. So what if
the strangers who appeared weren't children? And what if, despite

(01:12:04):
their green skin, they didn't resemble us. Let's advance the scenario,
if you will, not necessarily to science fiction, but to
a question that, by all statistical logic will eventually become
a very very real one. How would modern society respond
if too extraterrestrial, being small, intelligent, and clearly not even

(01:12:26):
appeared on Earth with no warning. Now this isn't necessarily
rhetorical exercise. For decades, scientists and policy theorists have considered
this very question under the banner of first contact. United
Nations has loosely theorized about it. SETI. The Search for
Extraterrestrial Intelligence has published a few white papers, but there's

(01:12:49):
no international standard, no global procedure, no VAT it can
counsel conveying in advanced in their history. We do have
to draw from the history of how humans treat outsiders,
especially those was oh, I don't know, unfamiliar language, behavior
and or appearance is a mixed report card at best.
If two grayskin non verbal beings were discovered in a

(01:13:10):
remote town in Montana or in a farmer's field in
rural India, the response would not be local or instinctual.
It would be global and immediate. The presence of intelligent
non human life on Earth would be the most significant
event in modern history, and with hours, it would be
absorbed by the machinery of modern state craft, media, and
military protocol. To be clear, there would be no medieval

(01:13:34):
trial period, no careful period of observation from the village elder,
no initial phase of local hospitality. Beings would be detained,
not necessarily cruelly, but certainly with a level of control
and containment that prioritize risk over relationship. It would likely
be transferred to a secure research facility, studied by specialists

(01:13:56):
and shielded from the public eye until their nature, origin,
and threat level could be assessed. And in that response,
we would reveal more about ourselves than about them. And
that to me is the core of the problem in
this not because I'm an alien. I mean that has
some impact, but modern society has replaced local moral instinct

(01:14:18):
with procedural skepticism, and in many cases that's not necessarily wrong.
We live in a world with global threats, real dangers
and a need for structured response, but in a moment
of true first contact, not with a fleet of ships
over the White House, but which is two confused beings
that appear simply you know, boom, they're here. The initial

(01:14:40):
human reaction would be driven less by curiosity and more
by containment. And that may be prudent, but is it welcoming?
And one could argue that this is an actual necessary evolution.
Maybe what the story of Wolf Pit teaches us in
eleven fifty. The people a Wolf didn't face bio terrorism,
global pandemics, or the risk of artificial intelligence misinterpreting a

(01:15:04):
foreign signal as hostile code. They had their own dangers, yes,
but they were simpler in form The villagers could afford
to see the children first as people because they had
no tools, social or technological to reduce them to anything else.
In contrast, we have a world built on systems of categorization.

(01:15:25):
As soon as a photo of the Grays hit the Internet,
every possible lens will be applied. Theologians will speculate conspiracy.
Theorists would scream about infiltration. Readit what he erupped into
an orgasm of argument. Governments would hold press briefings denying
everything while simultaneously initiating high level containment operations, and somewhere
in a quiet lab, two beings who don't speak, don't smile,

(01:15:47):
and don't fit in the any known schema, would be
studied as subjects, not as guests, and have maybe no
idea why they're even here. The response would be thorough,
It would be professional in it. It would be, in
the deepest sense in humane. Let's rewind what if they

(01:16:07):
weren't agents of an invasion or the victims of crash.
They were just simply lost, separated from their species, stranded
like the Green Children, appearing not as conquerors or diplomats,
but its castaways. If that's the scenario, and we allow
for even the slightest chance of it, then the response
becomes not just a test of policy, but test of character.

(01:16:31):
I know, I know. The idea that highly advanced extraterrestrial
species can misplaced two of its own may sound absurd,
but from a historical perspective, accidental contact is far more
common than planned introduction. Columbus didn't set out to meet

(01:16:51):
the Taino people. The Norse didn't write up protocols for
Greenlandic Inuit encounters. Most cross culture contact on Earth have
been accidental, messy, and largely defined by the immediate interpretation
of the dominant culture, and more often than not, the

(01:17:12):
dominant culture assumed danger. It's worth asking whether we would
do the same, would retreat these, these beings, these great children,
for lack of a better phrase, with the same instinct
for protection that the people a wolf pit applied, Or
would we assume their presence was simply a prelude to war?
Of course, can't ignore the elephant in the room here.

(01:17:36):
Much of the response would be would hinge just as
much on their behavior. If they stood silently and watched,
we might assume surveillance. They tried the flea, we might
assume guilt. If they cried, screamed, or behavior radically, we
might assume a health threat. But we almost certainly would
not assume is innocence. And this reveals something about our species,

(01:18:02):
something that's may or may not have changed since the
twelfth century. Yes, back then, the presence of an unexplained
stranger invited narrative. The villagers, amongst even the chroniclers, little
story around the children lost this place, perhaps magical, perhaps otherworldly,
but still worthy of care. In the modern world, do

(01:18:25):
we start with stories anymore? Have stories been beaten out
of us that we start with analysis. We apply frameworks,
we run diagnostics and enduing, so we often strip the
subject of humanity before and we've even confirmed whether they
are in fact a threat. And this isn't a call

(01:18:47):
from Niatievanus or a blind side from my side to
come in and get everyone.

Speaker 5 (01:18:54):
First.

Speaker 3 (01:18:54):
Contact, even when it happens, should be treated with seriousness,
but also it should be treated with humility, because if
the Green children were somehow not of this world, and
that theory is still floated in modern circles, the wolf
Pit represents maybe the best case scenario for contact, not
because it resolved the mystery, but because it preserved the subjects.

(01:19:15):
It allowed them to live, or at least tried to
let both of them live. Yes, one child didn't make it.
We don't know the real reason, and the story has
passed down offers little detail, but the girl did, and
imagining it freeture first contacts. Perhaps the lessons of wolf
Pit is not how we explain the phenomenon, but how

(01:19:36):
we endure its ambiguity. When the world encounters something strange,
whether it walks out of a forest or hairy like Bigfoot,
or emerges from the sea like some locked ness monster,
or steps from a distant planet. Our first choice doesn't
have to be one of science. It has to be
of ethics. Do we reduce to data or do we

(01:20:01):
begin with some dignity? If there is a legacy in
the Green children a wolf fit, it may be not
in the truth of the origin, but in the truth
that they're welcome. The villagers didn't know what they were seeing,
but yet some at least knew how to respond, not
with fear but with care, not with certainty, but with patience.

(01:20:24):
If we can remember that in moments when it matters
whether we're dealing with migrants, anomalies, or aliens, we might
find ourselves not just prepared for the future, but maybe
perhaps more worthy of it. What do we make of it? Green?

(01:20:44):
Two children, green skinned, wide eyed, and bewildered, appearing without warning,
speaking no no language, and vanishing just as mysteriously into
the folds of English history. Were they refugees of a
civil war, survivors of famine and fear? Something stranger, a
living folk tale from a world we haven't mapped. Yet

(01:21:06):
whatever the truth, the story of the Green Children are
wolf Fit endures because it forces us to look inward,
ask us how we treat the unfamiliar, not in theory,
but in practice, and whether we still have it in
us as a person, as a group, as a culture,
to meet the unknown with curiosity instead of contempt, because

(01:21:27):
it's in the end, it's not really about them, about
where they came from. It's about who we were when
they arrived and their intentions. Thank you for joining me tonight,
as we've dug through the fog of medieval memory, folklore,
and future speculation. If you're still here sty're wondering, thank you.

(01:21:48):
That means maybe my spell worked a little. But don't
stray too far, because the next episode of Indcrease in
two weeks, we're heading to a battlefield where the dead
refused to rest, a clash from England's bloody Civil War
not just seen but seen again. We'll have Royal Investigator's eyewitnesses,

(01:22:08):
centuries of phantom soldiers replaying a battle no one can
seem to forget. It's not a legend, it's not rumor.
It's a legit documented haunting. That is the phantom Battle
of Edge hill. Until then, I ask, keep your eyes open,
your question sharp, maybe your mind just a little off kilter.

(01:22:33):
I am a jawle f and this.

Speaker 4 (01:22:35):
Was less the mo