Marina Chapman: Meet The Woman Who Was Adopted And Raised As A Kid By Monkeys

Giddy stories make the world go round. And when you think you have heard it all, the world stumbles and heaves forward with a neck-breaking quake. Behold, another crazy story, like a careless hoe, lies on the ground. This is the story of Marina Chapman, the woman who claimed she was raised by monkeys. There are many who do not believe this story and it is not really about counting those who believe and those who do not believe. It is more of counting the categories in which Marina’s army of unbelievers fall into.

There are those who say that Marina’s story is a case of false memory syndrome which has been described as the condition in which a person’s identity and interpersonal relationships center on a memory of a traumatic experience that is objectively and clearly false but that the person strongly believes that they occurred. There are some who believe that the story is just an outright fake. And there are some, like the Guardian who think the story is fiction. “At times,” the newspaper said, “her memoir does read like fiction – there are so many lucky, last-second escapes.”

But we are not here to disprove her story. Smarter people and professionals ranging from psychologists, anthropologists, biologists, and editors. We are not going to attempt a rehash of their submissions. We are just going to tell Marina Chapman’s story as she told them.

Marina Chapman Monkey story

Marina was kidnapped when she was five or so. She cannot remember exactly how old nor the name of her village nor anything in the way of parents, siblings, and friends. All she can remember was that she was taken. At first, Marina thought she was being taken beyond the shores of Colombia and trafficked. She believes that she wasn’t alone as she has a faint recollection of hearing the whimpers of other children in the vehicle.

It turned out that the kidnappers were not human traffickers. They just dropped her in the middle of the jungle and left her there. Alas, they were recreational kidnappers if there are people like that – there should be, it is a sick world, sick, sick world.

On the jungle alone, Marina wept and wept and hoped – actually expected – that the kidnappers would come back for her and take her home. Or perhaps passersby. The kidnappers didn’t come back. Passersby didn’t pass by the jungle. Marina had to fend for herself.

The first thing she ate gave her a terrible food poisoning that she nearly died and, in fact, might have died but for the timely arrival of a monkey with a mother’s heart. The monkey led her to a stream of muddy water. She drank the water which was so bad she threw up. She survived.

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The monkey took the girl to the troop. “They were just tolerating at first,” Marina said. “They don’t really love you. One day one of the younger ones landed on my shoulders, and if you’ve never been hugged in your life, and this animal climbs over your shoulders and puts their hands on your face, I tell you it’s the nicest touch.”

That was how they clicked. The monkeys adopted Marina, thought her what was safe to eat, where to get them, how to get them, how to climb trees, to walk on all four, and the language of monkeys. Curiously, the monkey first passed this message of love when “they started to wee on my leg.”

Marina spent years with these monkeys which are thought to be capuchin monkeys who are called New World monkeys as they are only found in the Americas and who are close to and understand humans. While with the monkeys, Marina lost her human language and basically became a monkey – an honorary monkey.

The rescue and more adventures

Someday, hunters came and rescued Marina Chapman. Rescue is not the best word because they didn’t take her to a kind home and rehumanize her; they dehumanized her by selling her to a life of prostitution. Luckily for Marina, she escaped just as she was able to be given to her first man. She ran to the city of Cúcuta located at the border with Venezuela. There, as she walked the streets as an urchin she was captured and sold to a mafia family where she was basically their slave.

Again, she escaped with the help of a Good Samaritan woman called Maraju who sent Marina Chapman to live with one of her children in Bogata that Colombian capital. It was here that she met John the Englishman who later became her husband.

Whatever happened to Marina Chapman

Today, Marina is basically a normal woman raising her kids in Bradford, England. She is a normal citizen although one with a powerful personality and some would say weirdness. For instance, it was rumored in the British press that she was trying to raise her children like monkeys, denying them food except they make the high-pitched monkey screams which she learned so well during her monkey days.

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Marina denies this and dismissed them as nonsense. “When they were younger,” Marina Chapman explained to the Guardian, “and they wouldn’t eat their breakfast, I used to tell them about these animals. And I’d show them how to open their mouths like a monkey.” Her point is that she used the monkey tactics to distract them and get them to eat and not as a prerequisite to eating.

Her daughter Vanessa who helped her write her memoir collaborated with her mother’s story.

Despite being in her sixties, she is as strong as a rock. “Nobody ever beats her in an arm wrestle,” her husband John a retired scientist said. There is a story on how she once climbed the church roof to decorate it and fell and hit her head on the wall on her way day. “There was a hole in the wall,” she said, “A doctor came to check me. They couldn’t believe I was OK.”

Image source: The Guardian