Kaspar Hauser

Summary

On 26 May 1828 a youth of about sixteen appeared in Nuremberg with two anonymous letters, and later said he had spent his life alone in a dark cell. He died of a stab wound at Ansbach in December 1833, and who he was has never been established.

For almost two centuries the most widely believed answer was that he was the hereditary prince of Baden, taken from his cradle in 1812. A mitochondrial DNA study published in 2024 has ruled that out. His origin, and whether his wounds were dealt by an attacker or by himself, remain open.

What is documented

The arrival. On Whit Monday, 26 May 1828, the youth appeared in Nuremberg carrying a letter addressed to the captain of the 4th squadron of the 6th regiment of light cavalry. Its anonymous writer said the boy had been left in his house on 7 October 1812 and that since then he had "never suffered him to take a single step out of my house". An accompanying note, supposedly from the boy's mother, gave his birth date as 30 April 1812, asked that he be sent to the 6th regiment at seventeen, "for there his father also was", and described his father as dead.

His own account. As his carers recorded it, he said he had been kept alone for as long as he could remember in a small, almost dark room, fed on bread and water, until a man he did not know taught him to write and brought him to Nuremberg. It is set out in the account the jurist Anselm von Feuerbach published in 1832, whose English translation of the same year described him as "kept in a dungeon" from early childhood. No keeper was ever identified, and no place of captivity was established.

Carers. The teacher Georg Friedrich Daumer took him in on 18 July 1828. Later the English peer Philip Henry Stanhope, 4th Earl Stanhope, became his guardian and moved him to Ansbach, where he was taught by a schoolmaster named Meyer and worked as a clerk at the court of appeal. Its president was Feuerbach.

The first wound. On 17 October 1829 he was found bleeding in the cellar of Daumer's house with a wound to the forehead, and said a man with a blackened face had attacked him. His supporters called it an attempt on his life; his critics, a self-inflicted injury to revive flagging public interest.

The fatal wound. On 14 December 1833 he came home with a deep stab wound in the left side of his chest, saying a stranger had attacked him in the Hofgarten, the palace garden at Ansbach. He died on 17 December. According to the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica, many believed the wound to be "the work of his own hand", meant to lend colour to his story rather than to kill him. Stanhope himself eventually became "decidedly sceptical" of his stories. No attacker was ever identified.

The prince theory. On 29 September 1812 Stéphanie de Beauharnais, Grand Duchess of Baden and adopted daughter of Napoleon, gave birth at Karlsruhe to a son who officially died at 18 days old, before he had been named. The theory holds that Countess Louise Caroline von Hochberg had the prince replaced by a dying child so that her own line would inherit, and that Hauser was the stolen heir. Daumer and Feuerbach both came to favour it. In 1875 the official records of the prince's baptism, post-mortem examination and burial were published in the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung.

DNA, 1996. The Institute of Legal Medicine in Munich and the UK Forensic Science Service analysed blood on underwear that Hauser was said to have worn on 14 December 1833. The mitochondrial DNA did not match the maternal line of Stéphanie de Beauharnais; the work was published in 1998. The sample's authenticity was questioned, including rumours that the bloodstains had been altered for display.

DNA, 2002. Forensic scientists in Münster tested hair and swabs from his hat and trousers. The results were weak, disagreed with the 1996 result, and differed from the Baden line at a single position, which by the standards of the time could not exclude a relationship.

DNA, 2024. A team of 17 authors, with Walther Parson of the Medical University of Innsbruck as first author and including an author of the 1996 study and scientists from Münster, published new analyses in iScience. Ten of twelve single hair shafts from three sources gave results, all with the same mitochondrial DNA, of the West Eurasian haplogroup W, and matching the 1996 blood. The Baden maternal line carries haplogroup H1bs. The authors concluded that this "rules out a maternal relationship", and attributed the 2002 result to extraneous DNA picked up by the older method. They added that his origin cannot be narrowed to a region from his mitochondrial DNA alone.

Leading explanations

He was not the prince of Baden. Established. Three independent technologies and samples from several sources agree, and his lineage differs from that of Stéphanie de Beauharnais. The records published in 1875 had already told against the theory; the DNA settles it for the maternal line.

An impostor, or a troubled young man who invented or embellished his past (the view of his many critics, Stanhope eventually among them; contested). The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica judged that "the evidence is in any case in complete confusion", and reported that the writer Andrew Lang, in Historical Mysteries (1904), inclined to regard Hauser as "simply a humbug". A key argument of his critics is that no child could have survived the captivity he described without lasting physical harm.

A child genuinely kept in isolation (his own account and his supporters' view; unverified). No keeper, place of confinement or family has been found.

The fatal wound: murder by an unknown assailant (his own account; unproven) or self-inflicted (suspected by many at the time; unproven). The Britannica entry today puts it as a wound "either self-inflicted or, as he claimed, dealt by a stranger".

Current status

Partially explained. The question most often asked about him, whether he was the prince of Baden, has a firm answer: he was not. The samples attributed to him now agree with one another, which the 2024 team takes as demonstrating their authenticity. Who he was, where he spent his first sixteen years, and whether his two wounds were inflicted by another person are unknown. A documentary find identifying his family or his keeper would change that. No further genetic study had been published by September 2026, as far as the registry has found.

Last reviewed: September 2026. Records are provisional. Where the evidence changes, the entry changes. Found an error? Tell us.