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Green children of Woolpit

The Green children of Woolpit are subterraneans or fairies sighted in England in the 12th century.


Place

Woolpit in England is on the border of Norfolk and Suffolk in Thefford Forest. The events supposedly occured during the middle of the 12th century around 1135 to 1154 A.D.


Story

There are several different stories about these children, but all are similar. In every story a girl of about ten years old with a boy of a few years younger were found at the mouth of a cave dressed in clothes that were unknown to anyone. Some described their clothing as being made of a strange metallic cloth. Their skin was green and the villagers that found them said that the language they spoke was like no other they had ever heard before.

The children were taken to a man by the name of Richard de Calne. The people made their best effort to care for the children, but they refused to eat or drink anything for some time until they were offered fresh bean stalks. At first the children wept because they thought the stalks were empty. When they realized that the beans were still in the pods on the stalks they ate their fill of the beans very quickly and would have nothing else to eat for quite some time.

The local people tried to nurse the children back to health, but about a year after finding them the boy became ill and died. The girl, on the other hand, became very healthy and some say that she lived long enough to marry and that she lived as a servant. In other stories it is said that she lived for only about five years after being found. The girl did learn the language and she told how she had gotten to the surface and gave some descriptions of her homeland.

She said the name of her land was called "St. Martin's Land." Also, according to her statement, there was a lot of other people, green skinned like herself under the Earth's surface, although by this time her skin was no longer green and had become more like ours is today.

The land from which they appeared had no sun, only a light like what we would call twilight all of the time. She claimed that beyond a great body of water there was a land of light.

The children were asked how they had made it to the surface. In different stories there have been described different ways of how this happened. In the original story, the brother and her were leading their flocks and they heard the sound of bells. The sweet sound of bells lead them to the surface. In another story it was just the sound of the bells that caused them to explore the place. Yet another story tells that they were walking and something pushed them and they fell through a hole and then wondered to the top.


Theories

The village people of Suffolk and Norfolk are left to believe that the legend was started because the guardian of the children tried to kill them by giving both of them arsenic then left them both to die in Wayland Woods so he could take control of what would have been their estate when they reached the proper age.

The Woolpit people believe that these were the same children that were found, They were alive, but they were very ill and disoriented.

There have been several theories relating to the two green children. Were they aliens from Mars, maybe from the fourth dimension next to ours, or were they from an anti-dimension and could they be connected to the tales of the under-race?


Source

Written by Tasha Slone Copyright 2008