Housewife Raised By Monkeys: Marina Chapman Claims She Was Kidnapped And Reared By Capuchins

Marina Chapman, a British housewife, said she was kidnapped and raised by monkeys for five years in a Colombian jungle before being sold to a brothel in exchange for a parrot in her new book.

According to the Daily Mail, Chapman, 62, said she was kidnapped when she was five-years-old in the 1950s and left in the jungle in an abduction gone wrong. That’s when she moved in with a colony of Capuchin monkeys and learned to catch prey like rabbits and birds with her bare hands, just as the primates do.

“She obviously learnt to fend for herself and only once got very ill when she ate some poisonous berries,” her daughter, Vanessa James, told the (U.K.) Sunday Times.

Chapman said she was raised by the monkeys, who are known for accepting humans, for five years before being found by humans. She said she was eventually sold to a brothel in Cucuta where she was beaten frequently as a prostitute.

She eventually escaped and was adopted by a Colombian family, who named her Marina Luz.

Chapman married her current husband, John Chapman, and lives in Yorkshire with two children, which she raised almost similarly to the way the monkeys raised her.

“When we wanted food, we had to make noises for it. All my school friends loved Mum as she was so unusual. She was childlike, too, in many ways,” James said. “I got bedtime stories about the jungle, as did my sisters. 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.”

James told the Sunday Times she is helping her mother write a book, “The Girl With No Name,” slated to be published in April. Blink Films is also planning to make a television documentary on Chapman’s life.