The Death of Kaspar Hauser

The case

The note in the purse was written backwards. When a policeman searched Ansbach's Court Garden on 14 December 1833, where Kaspar Hauser said a stranger had stabbed him, he found a small violet purse holding a pencilled message in mirror writing. Its author offered to say where he came from: from the Bavarian border, on a river whose name was left blank, with the initials M. L. Ö. The note was meant to look like a taunt from an assassin. It also contained a spelling mistake and a grammatical slip that Hauser habitually made, and it was folded into the particular triangle in which he folded his own letters.

Hauser had been a public mystery for five years. On 26 May 1828 a teenage boy was found in the streets of Nuremberg carrying two letters, one addressed to a cavalry captain. He could say little beyond that he wanted to be a cavalryman like his father, and could write his name. Later he described a childhood spent alone in a small dark cell, fed on bread and water by a man he never saw, until he was taught to stand, walk and repeat a sentence and was led to the city. Nuremberg adopted him, and he was taken in by a schoolmaster, Friedrich Daumer, who found he had a gift for drawing.

The story drew crowds and theories. The most persistent held that Hauser was the infant hereditary prince of Baden, born in 1812, supposedly spirited away and replaced by a dying baby so that another line could inherit. Others thought him a fraud. Some of his own episodes fed the doubt. In October 1829 he was found bleeding from a cut on the forehead in Daumer's cellar and said a hooded man had attacked him; sceptics noted he had recently quarrelled with Daumer, who had accused him of lying. In 1830 a pistol went off in his room and grazed his head, which he explained as an accident while reaching for books.

In 1831 an English nobleman, Lord Stanhope, took custody of him, paid for two journeys to Hungary in search of his origins, and promised to take him to England. When those trips came to nothing, Stanhope placed him in Ansbach with a strict schoolteacher, Johann Georg Meyer, and kept paying his expenses from a distance. Hauser worked as a copyist in a law office and longed for England. His protector, the jurist Anselm von Feuerbach, died in May 1833. On 9 December Hauser and Meyer argued badly, with Stanhope due to visit at Christmas.

Five days later Hauser came back to the Meyers' house with a deep wound in his chest. He said a stranger had invited him, in the court gardener's name, to see a newly bored well in the Court Garden; finding no one there, he walked on toward a monument, where a bearded man handed him a purse and stabbed him as he reached for it. He was anxious that the purse be found but showed no interest in its contents. Hauser's condition worsened and he died on the evening of 17 December 1833. He was about twenty-one.

The Ansbach court of inquiry found too many inconsistencies to accept his story and leaned toward a self-inflicted wound, perhaps meant to revive interest in him, that went deeper than he intended. The examining doctors agreed the wound could have been self-inflicted, but no attacker was ever found and the question was never formally closed. Stanhope later published the evidence against Hauser and confessed that he had been deceived.