From the forthcoming Humanoid Encounters: 1900-1929:
Location: Sainte Miande, near Toulouse, France
Date: September, 1900
Time: Midnight
When a freak storm lashed the Gulf of Lyon and the inland villages were battered by winds of ferocious force, a farmer on the outskirts of the village was awakened by an insistent tapping on the window of his downstairs bedroom. At first he dismissed it as the wind rapping a twig on to the glass but finally he got up and went to the door with a lantern. A strange sight met his eyes. In the doorway stood a boy, aged about ten, wrapped in a piece of sacking. His hair was long and yellow; quite unlike that of the local boys; and his face almost luminously pale. He appeared to have no clothes apart from the sack and as he stretched out; his arms towards the light, the farmer noticed that there were only three fingers on each of his long slender hands. As he stood there uncertain of what to do, his wife’s voice roused him into action. She had come from the bedroom taken one look at the strange tableau and told her husband to bring the child into the house. She roused the fire in the kitchen, placed the shivering boy before it and covered him with a blanket. He slept the night on a mattress in front of the fire.
In the morning the couple found him some clothes belonging to the oldest son, but it was soon apparent that he didn’t know how to put them on. At first the farmer took him for some dumb waif; a simpleton, but it soon became apparent that he could speak, but in a language they had never heard before. Even the most commonplace things appeared to astonish him. He was bewildered by a cup containing warm milk, and had to be shown how to drink from it. A knife and fork were complete mysteries. When a farm cat strolled through the door the boy backed away, apparently in fright. The farmer and his wife, totally bemused by their uninvited guest, told the story to the village priest, Father Rene Mouville, a retired Lyons University professor who had entered the priesthood at the age of fifty.
Once the priest met the boy, he knew there was no obvious solution. The child was quite unlike any human he had seen before. Even the construction of his body seemed, exceptional: his hips were extremely narrow and his rib-cage almost an inverted V-shape, quite the opposite to a normal chest structure. Just looking at those delicate, three fingered hands made the priest feel a strange sense of foreboding. The next day he took the child back to his house to be cared for by his housekeeper. He soon found that the boy had a fantastic intelligence. Unable to communicate by any form of language, Father Mouville began by drawing simple diagrams of everyday objects, which received no response. Then one day he wrote down a series of numbers in the form of clustered dots. Immediately the boy took the paper and pencil and began writing dots at high speed. When he passed back the paper, Father Mouville found that he had worked out the cube root and square roots of all the groups of numbers.
As the weeks passed the boy’s confidence grew. He began to master simple words, and to go out with the priest on his rounds. He began to be accepted in the village as almost ordinary instead of a curiosity. Basic physical phenomena fascinated him. He would sit for hours by moving water or watching birds in flight and the movement of clouds. It was as though he had never seen such things before. Then after Christmas, 1900, he became ill. At first the symptoms seemed to be those of a heavy cold, and after a few weeks he seemed to have recovered. But by February he was sick again, this time with a high fever and a deathly pallor. A doctor was sent for and confessed himself mystified. The child’s heart was the slowest he had ever heard, almost half the speed of a normal human. He should be taken to a hospital, but in his condition such a journey could well have been fatal. So the boy who came from nowhere became weaker and on the second week of March he died and was buried under an ash tree in the graveyard of Sainte Miande.
Source: John Macklin, ‘Casebook of the Unknown.’
Type: E or H?
Comments: Shades of Kaspar Hauser. Did the boy come from some unknown subterranean kingdom? Or did the storm that night caused some kind of tear between dimensions in which the unfortunate boy fell through?
Humanoid Encounters Series - Albert S. Rosales
Phantoms & Monsters: Unexplained Encounters
- JUST RELEASED!Phantoms & Monsters: Mysterious Encounters
Phantoms & Monsters: Bizarre Encounters
Phantoms & Monsters: Strange Encounters
Phantoms & Monsters: Cryptid Encounters
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