Green Children of Woolpit

From TinWiki.org

The Green Children of Woolpit are said to be an apparently normal boy and and girl who for some unknown reason had green skin when they, sometime between 1135 A.D. and 1154 A.D., were found in Woolpit, England. Farmers were working on their farms when they heard loud screams; when they went to investigate, they found two children, a boy and a girl, all huddled together. They were using an unknown language, and their clothes were made of a strange looking, fabric. But what was stranger still, was the children's skin was green. They were both taken to a place owned by Richard de Calne, where the local people tried to care for them. But the children would not eat or drink anything that was given to them until someone brought in some fresh beans still attached to the stalks. The children indicated that they wanted them and then proceeded to open the stalks; but when they saw nothing in them, they started to cry. When shown that the beans were in the pods instead, the children quickly ate what they could and ate little else but green beans for some time after. Soon after they were found, the boy became ill and eventually died. But the girl was fine, eventually losing the greenish tinge to her skin. When she eventually learned the local language, she told many of her origins which only deepened the mystery of where she came from. She said that “she and her brother had come from a land with no sun; the people there, all green, lived in a perpetual twilight called Land of St Martins.” When she was asked how she had come to be found outside the pit, she could only say that she and her brother had heard bells, become entranced... then the two of them were in the pit and could see the light from the mouth of it. Though the girl lived a full life after her discovery, and marrying a local man, she was never able to give any further information in solving the mystery of her and her brother's origins and odd arrival in Woolpit. Other versions of the story place the incident in Banjos in Spain. Some other versions also say the children traveled through a series of underground caves before they came to be found in the wolfpits, others say they walked through a waterfall.

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