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Speaker 1: Welcome to Aaron Benky's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of

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Speaker 1: I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild. Our world is

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Speaker 1: full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book,

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Speaker 1: all of these amazing tales are right there on display,

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Speaker 1: just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet

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Speaker 1: of Curiosities. Human beings are all different. Every experience shapes

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Speaker 1: us into the kinds of people we become. No one

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Speaker 1: thing is responsible. Each of us is the product of

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Speaker 1: nature and nurture working together. Sometimes that results in the

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Speaker 1: next world leader, other times it leads to a life

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Speaker 1: of crime. For one man, his unique upbringing didn't guide

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Speaker 1: him toward fevery or murder, but he did wind up

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Speaker 1: serving as a member Parliament. He also found himself as

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Speaker 1: the topic of conversation, both during his life and afterward.

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Speaker 1: George Rearsby Sitwell was born in January of eighteen sixty

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Speaker 1: to a wealthy family. His father, Sir Sitwell Rearsby Sitwell,

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Speaker 1: was a baronet, hereditary title just below that of a

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Speaker 1: baron and above a night Sadly, the man passed away

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Speaker 1: when George was only four years old. All the property

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Speaker 1: he owned prior to his death was passed down to

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Speaker 1: his son, and so was his debt, but that didn't

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Speaker 1: stop the child from being proud of who he was.

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Speaker 1: He had a knack for making himself the center of attention.

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Speaker 1: Soon after his father's death, George had been writing on

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Speaker 1: a train when he announced his name entitled to a

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Speaker 1: fellow passenger. He told the man, I am four years

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Speaker 1: old and the youngest baronets in England. To say George

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Speaker 1: was difficult would be an understatement, and that difficulty manifested

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Speaker 1: itself in various ways. For one, he was ambitious, becoming

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Speaker 1: a member of Parliament before he turned thirty. He also

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Speaker 1: married young, when he was twenty six and Lady Ida

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Speaker 1: Dennison was only seventeen. The pair tied a knot, although

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Speaker 1: it was clear from the start that they were horribly

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Speaker 1: wrong for each other. Only days into their marriage, Dennison

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Speaker 1: fled back to her family's home. She hated her new husband,

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Speaker 1: and more than that, she hated the expectations that came

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Speaker 1: with being a wife. They forced her to return to him,

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Speaker 1: though what she did, but she resented everyone for it.

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Speaker 1: Nine months later, she gave birth to a baby girl,

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Speaker 1: angering her husband, who had hoped for a male heir.

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Speaker 1: It would be another five years before their first son, Osbert,

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Speaker 1: was born in eighteen ninety two. As time went on,

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Speaker 1: Sitwell increased both his wealth and his political power. Much

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Speaker 1: of the money went to his wife, who spent it

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Speaker 1: almost as fast as he could earn it. But George

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Speaker 1: also found ways to invest his fortune, possibly as distractions

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Speaker 1: from his terrible marriage or to occupy his time after

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Speaker 1: losing his parliamentary re election. He ended up becoming a

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Speaker 1: prolific inventor, although none of his creations ever became very popular.

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Speaker 1: The Sitwell egg, for example, was supposed to be a

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Speaker 1: complete meal designed for a person on the go. It

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Speaker 1: was a ball of white rice shaped like an egg.

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Speaker 1: In its center a piece of smoked meat. None of

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Speaker 1: the local shops were interested in carrying it. He also

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Speaker 1: came up with a toothbrush that played a popular song

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Speaker 1: as the person brush their teeth. This actually became a

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Speaker 1: real product as a way to encourage children to brush

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Speaker 1: their teeth just a century later. Perhaps the world wasn't

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Speaker 1: ready for George's unique idea. There was also a tiny

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Speaker 1: gun he created to protect himself from wasps. The agings

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Speaker 1: sit Well didn't just invent things though. He also took

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Speaker 1: a keen interest in restoring his family home, Rennischell Hall

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Speaker 1: in Derbyshire, England. But as he worked to restore it

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Speaker 1: to its former beauty, he began to develop some odd habits.

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Speaker 1: Visitors to the home were greeted by a sign that read,

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Speaker 1: I must ask anyone entering the house never to contradict

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Speaker 1: me in any way as interferes with the functioning of

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Speaker 1: the gastric juices and prevents my sleeping at night. He

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Speaker 1: also mislabeled all of his medicinal vials to discourage others

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Speaker 1: from sampling their contents when he traveled. His philosophies on health,

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Speaker 1: in particular, were something special. Nonfiction writing was okay, but

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Speaker 1: the body could not handle writing novels. According to him,

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Speaker 1: he believed fiction would be a drain on one's condition.

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Speaker 1: George's views and beliefs were odd and rarely based on

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Speaker 1: sound logic, but he was also a lifelong student, learning

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Speaker 1: all that he could on esoteric topics such as medieval

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Speaker 1: wool gathering and gardening. He even wrote a detailed history

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Speaker 1: of the fork. Sir George Sitwell led a strange and

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Speaker 1: troubled life. His wife hated him, and his family didn't

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Speaker 1: understand him. Yet regardless of how the world perceived him,

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Speaker 1: he never shied away from the man. He truly was

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Speaker 1: one of a kind. It's inevitable that many of us

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Speaker 1: have grown up to be like our parents. Our mannerisms,

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Speaker 1: are ways of speech, even our taste in movies and

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Speaker 1: music are because of the people who raised us. Heck,

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Speaker 1: every time I laugh, I hear my father's voice as

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Speaker 1: if he's in the very same room as me. But

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Speaker 1: how much of who we are is based on how

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Speaker 1: we were raised and how much is based on our dna.

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Speaker 1: It's the old nature versus nurtured debate. Well, Dina Santa

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Speaker 1: Char may hold the answers. In eighteen sixty seven, a

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Speaker 1: group of hunters were prowling through the jungle of Uttar Pradesh, India.

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Speaker 1: When they came to a clearing some distance away, they

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Speaker 1: noticed the entrance to a cave. The hunters approached the

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Speaker 1: cave carefully, anticipating what they might find inside. It could,

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Speaker 1: after all, be a ferocious animal. A creature did emerge,

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Speaker 1: it ignored them at first, unbothered by their presence. The hunters,

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Speaker 1: though did not raise their es. They couldn't bring themselves

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Speaker 1: to kill something so unique. What they had countered was

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Speaker 1: neither a bear nor a wolf, but something completely unexpected.

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Speaker 1: They had found a boy, probably no more than six

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Speaker 1: years old, and knowing they couldn't leave him in the jungle,

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Speaker 1: the hunters gathered him up and brought him to an

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Speaker 1: orphanage in the nearby town of Agra. It was there

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Speaker 1: that he was given the name Dina Santa Char santit

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Speaker 1: R was a Hindi word meaning Saturday. The day they

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Speaker 1: had found him. He was considered a feral child because

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Speaker 1: he couldn't walk upright or know how to conduct himself

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Speaker 1: around other people. He couldn't even speak, but he did

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Speaker 1: understand his new guardians to some extent. He had been

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Speaker 1: raised by wolves, and his behavior reflected that. He ate

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Speaker 1: raw meat and walked on all fours. He chewed on bones,

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Speaker 1: which in turn had sharpened his teeth, and he couldn't

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Speaker 1: form words, so he communicated with grunts like an animal.

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Speaker 1: He found it difficult to stand on two legs like

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Speaker 1: everyone else. He also had trouble following simple directions. For example,

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Speaker 1: pointing at an object or a plate of food was

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Speaker 1: a foreign gesture to him, as wolves didn't use their

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Speaker 1: paws to indicate things of importance, and he never learned

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Speaker 1: to speak the language of his caretakers, although the effects

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Speaker 1: of living around other human beings did eventually rub off

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Speaker 1: on him. Santa Char learned how to stand on two legs,

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Speaker 1: and it was said that he figured out how to

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Speaker 1: put on his clothes later in life. Surprisingly, one human

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Speaker 1: habit came quite naturally to him, smoking He found the

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Speaker 1: practice so enjoyable he became a chain smoker before his

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Speaker 1: death at the age of thirty four. It's been theorized

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Speaker 1: that Santa Char may have been the inspiration for the

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Speaker 1: young man cub Mowgli in Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book series.

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Speaker 1: In those novels, Mowgli is an abandoned child raised by

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Speaker 1: wolves in the jungles of India. Yet he was not

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Speaker 1: the first, nor would he be the last child raised

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Speaker 1: by wolves that the orphanage would take in. Three more

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Speaker 1: children were welcomed after him, including a girl and two boys,

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Speaker 1: all who had been classified as ferrell. In fact, over

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Speaker 1: the years, more than fifty children had been discovered living

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Speaker 1: with animals in the jungles of India. One boy was

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Speaker 1: found in nineteen fifty seven, crawling out of a cave.

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Speaker 1: He had been stolen from his home by a wolf

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Speaker 1: when he was only eighteen months old. Other children, though,

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Speaker 1: were often abandoned by their parents for being born with

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Speaker 1: intellectual disabilities, and India wasn't the only place where children

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Speaker 1: were being raised in the wild either. In the mid

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Speaker 1: nineteen eighties, a young Ukrainian girl named Oxana Malaya was

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Speaker 1: taken in by stray dogs when she was just three

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Speaker 1: years old. Her alcoholic father left her outside one night,

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Speaker 1: so she crawled into a structure with the dogs to

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Speaker 1: stay warm. She ended up living on the streets for

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Speaker 1: five years, eating scraps of food and crawling on all fours,

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Speaker 1: until social workers found her. I got her the help

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Speaker 1: she needed, enrolling her in various therapies to help improve

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Speaker 1: her speech and control her feral urges, and she eventually

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Speaker 1: learned to speak fluent Russian and got a job on

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Speaker 1: a farm. But she was never the same. Who knows

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Speaker 1: how she, or Santa Char or any of the other

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Speaker 1: children neglected by society might have turned out had they

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Speaker 1: been given the tools to thrive. Instead, they were cast

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Speaker 1: aside and left defend for themselves and it makes one

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Speaker 1: wonder in this story, who are the real animals. I

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Speaker 1: hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities.

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Speaker 1: Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about

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Speaker 1: the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show

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Speaker 1: was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership with how

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Speaker 1: Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore,

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Speaker 1: which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and

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Speaker 1: you can learn all about it over at the World

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Speaker 1: of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.

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Speaker 1: Ye