General · EdgepediaSeptember 17, 20266 min read

Marina Chapman

Marina Chapman is a Colombian-born British woman, born around 1950, who says that as a young child she was kidnapped, abandoned in the Colombian rainforest, and lived for about five years with a troop of capuchin monkeys before being returned to human society.¹ Her real date and exact place of birth are unknown; no birth certificate has been found.¹^•² She has lived in Bradford, Yorkshire, since her late twenties and told her story in the 2013 memoir The Girl With No Name: The Incredible True Story of a Child Raised by Monkeys.¹ The claim has attracted wide skepticism: most publishers initially refused the book, reviewers questioned its plausibility, and there is no definitive scientific evidence supporting it.³^•⁴^•⁵

Key fact	Detail
Born	Colombia, around 1950; exact date and location unknown¹
Central claim	Abducted around age four or five (sources give 1954 and slightly different ages), abandoned in the jungle, and living about five years with capuchin monkeys¹^•³
Later account	Sold to a brothel in Cúcuta, escaped, lived as a street child, enslaved by a mafia family, rescued by a neighbor³
Move to Britain	1977, to Bradford as a nanny for her adoptive family's children; married John Chapman six months after they met at church³
Memoir	The Girl With No Name (2013), written with daughter Vanessa James and ghostwriter Lynne Barrett-Lee⁴
Reception	Most publishers rejected the book as a fake; Kirkus Reviews called it a story that "often doesn't ring true"³^•⁴
Scientific status	No definitive scientific evidence supports the claim; some primatologists question whether a young child could survive so long integrated with a monkey troop⁵

The account in her memoir

According to Chapman's story, pieced together by her daughter Vanessa James, she was playing near her home in a remote Colombian village when two adults seized her, covering her mouth with a cloth she believes was soaked in chloroform, and drove her deep into the rainforest, where they abandoned her.³ Sources differ on the details: the Allen & Unwin edition says a four-year-old was abducted in 1954, the Guardian interview places the kidnap shortly before her fifth birthday, and Kirkus gives the age as five.¹^•³^•⁴

She says she wandered looking for people, found none, and eventually came upon an extended family of small monkeys, thought to be capuchins.³ At first they ignored her. In her telling, a turning point came when food poisoning from tamarind left her writhing in agony and an elderly monkey she calls Grandpa led her to muddy water; she drank, vomited, and began to recover, after which the young monkeys befriended her.³ She describes copying the monkeys to survive: eating berries and roots, grabbing bananas the monkeys dropped, sleeping in holes in trees, climbing, and walking on all fours. By the time hunters found her, she says, she had lost her language completely.³

Chapman herself has qualified the book's subtitle. She says the monkeys did not provide for or raise her; even at five she was much bigger than they were. She scavenged food from them, and what they did was accept her into their extended family.³

Return to human society

The account turns darker at this point. Hunters sold her to a brothel in the city of Cúcuta, where she was named Gloria, forced to clean, and regularly beaten; she says she escaped just before she was to be forced into prostitution.³ She then lived on the streets of Cúcuta with other homeless children, renamed Pony Malta by friends who thought she resembled the short brown bottle of the soft drink, and supported herself by stealing, hiding from victims and police in treetops.³ A household that took her on as a domestic servant, renaming her Rosalba, turned out to be a family of criminals who enslaved her; a neighbor, Maruja, helped her flee and sent her to Bogotá.³

At around fourteen she was adopted by Maruja's daughter Maria, who told her to choose her own name; she called herself Luz Marina, after a Colombian beauty queen.³ In 1977 the adoptive family, which had done well in the textile business, sent their children to Bradford, then one of the centers of the wool industry, and Chapman followed as their nanny. She met John Chapman, a retired scientist, at church, and the two married six months to the day after they met.³ She trained as a cook and eventually became a chef at Bradford's National Media Museum.³

She told her family the story only gradually and never in a linear fashion, partly because her memories were confused and partly out of shame. Her husband learned the full account only after they were married; he had assumed her mentions of monkeys referred to animals around her village.³ On a later trip to Colombia with her daughter she never found the rainforest where she says she lived, but she did locate the brothel and the mafia house, and a neighbor remembered her as "the girl who came out of the jungle".³

The book and its reception

Vanessa James began writing her mother's story in 2006 as a private family document; after two years and one research trip the original version was complete.¹ The book was published in 2013 as The Girl With No Name, credited to Marina Chapman with the novelist and ghostwriter Lynne Barrett-Lee, appearing from Allen & Unwin in Australia, Mainstream Publishing in the UK at £12.99, and Pegasus in the United States.¹^•³^•⁴ Although presented as a first-person account, the preface by James and the epilogue by Barrett-Lee show how the book was assembled: Barrett-Lee describes being given "a huge, unwieldy document" of her subject's tangled memories, which she then scripted.⁴

Reception was skeptical. Most publishers had refused the manuscript because they thought she was a fake.³ Kirkus Reviews concluded that it was "an intriguing adventure story that often doesn't ring true. Caveat emptor."⁴ The Guardian's interviewer, Simon Hattenstone, noted that the memoir at times reads like fiction, with many lucky, last-second escapes, yet found Chapman's low-key, in-person telling convincing, and framed the open question: a fantasist who has embellished her past, or a childlike woman making sense of a remarkable childhood?³

Questions of evidence

The story raises problems of memory and verification. Chapman has no memory of anything before the kidnap, cannot locate the jungle where she says she lived, and is unsure of her own age.³ Her husband attributes the amnesia to stress, a survival mechanism in which her energy was fully occupied with staying alive.³ Commentators have raised false memory syndrome and the possibility that she unconsciously invented the monkeys as a way of coping with a traumatic childhood.³

In December 2013 the National Geographic Channel broadcast a documentary, The Woman Raised by Monkeys, which weighed the evidence, from signs of arrested bone development to her reactions to images of capuchins, as she and her daughter traveled to Colombia to seek her long-lost family. The program found her completely sincere and open to testing, but left viewers with more questions than answers.⁶ More broadly, there is no definitive scientific evidence to support the claim, and some primatologists have questioned whether a young child could survive for years in the wild integrated with a monkey troop.⁵ The story has nonetheless circulated widely: the Spanish-language edition, La niña sin nombre, became a best seller, and outlets such as Animal Planet planned to visit Colombia to try to retrace her history.⁷^•⁸

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Society and history › Social life and human behavior

Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Sep 17, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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