This Bradford housewife says she was raised by monkeys, but is her story just bananas?

Marina Chapman claims she was raised by capuchins in Colombia

PUBLISHED: 23:08 GMT, 31 March 2013 | UPDATED: 09:07 GMT, 1 April 2013

She certainly knows how to climb a tree. And, as the glossy PR photos demonstrate, Marina Chapman can also pull off a passable impression of a chattering primate.

But is her exotic life story bananas? That’s for you to decide.

The housewife, who lives in Bradford, has spoken publicly for the first time about a bizarre chain of events that — she claims — saw her raised in a South American rainforest by capuchin monkeys.

Jungle behaviour: Marina's daughter Vanessa describes a 'normal' family walk as one which includes her mother climbing trees

Jungle behaviour: Marina Chapman who says she was raised by capuchin monkeys

Mrs Chapman, a grandmother who was born in Colombia in the Fifties, says she spent five years of her childhood living with a ‘family’ of the tree-dwelling monkeys in the north-east of the country.

In a memoir published later this month, she says she was four years old when kidnappers abducted her from the garden of her family home and left her for dead in a rainforest.

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Two days after she was abandoned, Mrs Chapman (who moved to the UK as an adult) says a group of monkeys discovered her lying alone, ‘curled up on the ground in despair’.

They soon began looking after her, she says. Some fought off hostile predators, issuing ‘screams . . . so intense and horrific that I hid under a bush’. Others taught her how to survive by scavenging bananas, figs, nuts and other wild food.

Over time, she says she developed ‘dry, leathery’ skin and powerful ‘sinewy’ arms and legs, learned how to sleep in a ‘hollowed-out piece of tree trunk’, and discovered an ability to communicate in their rudimentary language.

Monkey love: It is believed that the monkeys who took care of Marina Chapman in the forest were weeper capuchins

‘I imitated the noises the monkeys made for my own amusement,’ Mrs Chapman recalls. ‘But I soon realised that sometimes a monkey — or several monkeys — would respond.

‘So I practised the sounds that they made . . . If there was an immediate danger their call would be even higher — a sharp, high-pitched scream, which was usually accompanied by the slapping of hands on the ground.’

The claims, made public when a portion of Mrs Chapman’s autobiography, The Girl With No Name, was serialised yesterday in The Mail on Sunday, have met with a mixed reaction from primate experts.

‘I can accept that a four-year-old child could imitate the feeding behaviour of wild capuchin monkeys and that they would not harm the child,’ the zoologist Desmond Morris tells me.

‘In that way she could just about have survived. I have myself hand-fed wild capuchins in a forest in Central America.’ But, Morris adds, ‘the idea that they might have helped me in any way seems far-fetched’.

In one remarkable passage of the book, Mrs Chapman, who does not know her exact age, but believes she is now in her 60s, claims one of the elder monkeys saved her life after she had eaten some poisonous berries.

The animal, who she gave the nickname ‘Grandpa’, led her to a muddy stream and submerged her head to demonstrate that she should drink the brackish water.

‘I began coughing and then vomiting — great heaving gouts of acid liquid that burned my throat,’ she recalls. Though highly unpleasant, ‘the purging worked’, she believes, because it forced the poisoned berries from her stomach.

Living among the monkeys, Mrs Chapman found herself ‘growing filthier and filthier,’ and ‘scratching more and more . . . I became home for all manner of little creatures. Not only was my skin growing drier and scalier, I was also soon crawling with fleas’.

After what she estimates to have been five years, she was rescued from the jungle by a party of hunters who drove her to Cucuta, a large city in the north-east of Colombia near the Venezuelan border.

There, aged nine, she began calling herself Luz Marina. After narrowly escaping being sold into prostitution, she spent her teenage years with a group of homeless street children in an organised petty crime ring.

Wild child: Marina at home in Bolton Abbey, North Yorkshire, in 2009, climbing onto a tree-trunk hole, similar to those in which she would find a bed during her time in the jungle

Later, she found work as a housekeeper. Her initial employer abused her. But she was then taken in by the working-class family of a local woman called Maruja Eusse, who found her work with some cousins in Bogota. The family, who worked in textiles, later attempted to emigrate to the UK. In 1978, they spent six months in Bradford, where she met and fell in love with John Chapman, the organist at an evangelical church where she worshipped.

They married shortly afterwards, when Marina was in her late 20s, had two daughters, and for the ensuing three decades have lived inconspicuously in tidy, three-bedroom semi in Allerton, a suburb of Bradford.

Mrs Chapman’s bizarre but incredible story only emerged last October, after she signed to Andrew Lownie, a well-known London literary agent who has represented everyone from Gloria Hunniford and Norma Major to David Hasselhoff and Kerry Katona.

Lownie negotiated a lucrative book deal with the publisher Mainstream, and arranged for Lynne Barrett-Lee, an author who is also one of his clients, to ghost-write the manuscript. Rights to Marina’s autobiography have now been sold in seven countries.

Initial coverage of the book deal saw Mrs Chapman widely compared to Mowgli, the young protagonist in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, along with Tarzan, the baby bought up by apes in the novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

But the unlikely nature of her tale also sparked understandable scepticism. There is, after all, little to corroborate the claims about her five years in the jungle, and cynics have wondered if the tale has been spectacularly embellished as part of a lucrative hoax.

They point out that there is no contemporary coverage of her disappearance or survival story. And some sceptics have also noted that the average four-year-old girl is far larger than the capuchin monkeys who allegedly ‘adopted’ Mrs Chapman.

However, despite extensive investigations, no evidence has been unearthed to definitively prove that her tale is a fantasy. Indeed, most primate experts say it has at least half a ring of truth to it, since capuchins are generally well-disposed to humans.

One of the generally-cuddly animals was for a time owned by Ross Geller, the character played by David Schwimmer in the TV sitcom Friends. Another is currently the property of pop singer Justin Bieber.

‘Some aspects of the story might indeed be true, as monkeys and humans share some similar facial displays, cognitive abilities and behaviours, and can indeed ‘bond’ together quite tightly, if the right conditions occur,’ says Dr Bonaventura Majolo, a primate expert from the University of Lincoln.

‘However, some other aspects are pure fantasy. For example, I don’t think there is any evidence of “active” teaching in monkeys and some of the explanations for the events described in her story appear to be very anthropomorphic — ascribing human emotions and feelings to monkeys.’

Whatever the truth, occasional cases of children being raised by primates have certainly been documented in the past.

Family tree: Marina and her husband John with their two daughters Vanessa, left, and Joanna, far right, in in St Ives, in 2012

In 1991, the ‘Ugandan monkey boy,’ six-year-old John Ssebunya, was rescued after three years in the wild, being cared for by vervet monkeys. And in 1996, a two-year-old Nigerian called Bello was found living with chimpanzees.

Mrs Chapman’s claim to have been kidnapped also seems vaguely credible. Though the apparent date of the abduction, in 1954, pre-dates Colombia’s civil war, child kidnappings were commonplace in the region at the time.

Friends add that if her story is an invention then it certainly isn’t a recent one: she has been privately talking about her extraordinary experiences for decades.

In October, a Sunday newspaper travelled to Colombia and tracked down Nancy Forero Eusse, the granddaughter of the woman who ‘rescued’ Mrs Chapman in Cucuta in the Sixties.

Nancy recalled how ‘Marina Luz’ had often shared her story of being raised by monkeys. At the time, the future Mrs Chapman would like to spend her afternoons sitting in the branches of a mango tree. ‘It was such a curious thing,’ recalled Ms Eusse. ‘She would hang out in that tree. Not just in the branches, but high up, right at the top.’

After moving to Yorkshire and starting a family, Mrs Chapman worked part-time at the National Media Museum, and at a local nursery, remained active in her evangelical church, and started a small catering company.

She never shared her remarkable story with colleagues and neighbours, perhaps because her English wasn’t quite up to it, but often discussed it with her husband, a bacteriologist, and daughters Vanessa and Joanna.

Their mother’s past was evident in her child-rearing techniques, they recall. ‘When we wanted food, we’d have to make noises for it,’ her younger daughter, Vanessa, has said. On occasion, Mrs Chapman would bring furry mammals into the house, including rabbits, which she caught in hedgerows using her bare hands.

‘I got bedtime stories about the jungle, as did my sister. We didn’t think it odd — it was just Mum telling her life. So in a way it was nothing special having a mother like that.’

It was Vanessa, who works in TV, who persuaded Mrs Chapman to write an account of her childhood. It ended up in Mr Lownie’s hands after she cold-called his agency.

Even if the tale is invented, Mrs Chapman wasn’t motivated by greed: her proceeds from publication of the book have been promised to a charity that works with street children.

Meanwhile, the National Geographic channel is now planning a documentary in which they will return to the jungles of Columbia with Mrs Chapman.

Perhaps she’ll meet a few old friends.