Feral Children: The Wolf Girl of Devils River, The Ukrainian Dog Girl, and The Kellogg Experiment
Feral Children used to be the stuff of legends, but their stories are shocking, devastating, and real. Today, we're diving into multiple stories of feral children: the girl who was raised by her dog when her parents forgot about her, the legend of the wolf girl of Devils River, and the human experiment where a scientist tried to raise his son alongside a chimpanzee to unforeseen consequences.
TW: Child Abuse, Animal Abuse, and Mention of Suicide
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SOURCES
Wolf Children And Feral Man by Robert M. Zingg https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.158185/page/n19/mode/2up
Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children by Michael Newton https://archive.org/details/savagegirlswildb0000newt_c0m8/page/182/mode/2up?q=Singh
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amala_and_Kamala
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/rett-syndrome/symptoms-causes/syc-20377227
https://brian-haughton.com/ancient-mysteries-articles/wolf-girl-of-devils-river/
https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/espantosa-lake
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nv3ocntSSUU
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxana_Malaya
https://allthatsinteresting.com/oxana-malaya
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93HymGXC_wM
https://www.the-sun.com/news/6449905/walked-all-fours-barked-raised-wild-dogs/
TRANSCRIPT
One cold evening in 1991, an older couple was laying in bed in a small village in Ukraine when they heard a strange sound.
There was rustling coming from just outside their window and a low, soft growling noise. Something must have gotten into the trash, though, this didn’t really sound like any animal they recognized. The old woman looked at her husband and told him to see what it was.
He got up and went to the window, when all of a sudden, he screamed for his wife to come quick.
There, sniffing around the trash, was a large dog. But next to it was an eight year old girl, behaving just like the dog. She was crouched on all fours and covered in dirt, and she was growling and eating from the trash the same as the dog.
Authorities came to investigate the scene. What they found was- in fact- an eight-year-old girl who appeared to be more dog than human.
She ran on all fours, easily and naturally, the way you or I might jog. She barked, growled, and whined to communicate—a full vocabulary of dog sounds that she used the way a dog would. She ate by putting her face directly into her food and using her tongue, not her hands. She panted with her tongue out when she was hot. She cleaned herself by licking. She also had an incredibly acute sense of smell and hearing—she could identify people by scent before she saw them.
But authorities had the same question that I had when I first heard about this story. How did this happen?
Oxana Malaya was born on November 4th, 1983, in a small village called Nova Blahovishchenka, in the southern part of what was then the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. By all accounts, she was a normal baby. Healthy. Alert. Meeting the developmental milestones that doctors look for in the first year of life.
But her parents were very, very heavy drinkers. The kind who drank until they forgot they had responsibilities, like looking after their children.
And it seems like one night, when Oxana was about three years old, they forgot about her entirely.
It was winter in Ukraine- piercingly cold. And little Oxana had been left outside, alone, in the dark. At just three years old her parents forgot to unlock the door so she could come back in. She didn't know what to do, She didn't know how to get back inside on her own,
But she knew where there was warmth.
Behind their house, there was a kennel where the family kept their dog, a mutt named Naida (NYE-dah). And without really any other option, Oxana crawled inside. She curled up against the dog's warm body. And Naida kept her warm.
After that, her parents didn’t come looking for her. Maybe they just forgot about her, maybe Oxana figured it was safer to stay with Naida than her parents.
But What happened over the next five years shocked the authorities. Oxana lived in the kennel with Naida, only spent time with her and other dogs in the area, and learned to survive by doing what the dogs did. At first, she’d speak to the dogs as if they were her other child friends. When they’d bark or pant back at her, she’d repeat it, until she was speaking more dog than human. She ate what they ate—which was mostly scraps thrown into the yard. Drinking the way they drank, lapping water from bowls. Communicating the way they communicated—barking, growling, whining.
And she sounded very convincing, here is a clip of her barking that was shown on 60 Minutes Australia.
Oxana is one of the best documented cases of Feral children that we have, and scientists were actually able to learn a lot about early childhood development from her. For instance, what happens to a child’s brain when they are no longer learning from humans?
There's a concept in psychology called the "critical period." It's a window of time—usually in early childhood—when the brain is primed to learn certain things. Language. Social bonding. Emotional regulation. The brain is essentially waiting for specific inputs, ready to build the neural architecture it needs to process them.
But if those inputs don't come during the critical period, the window starts to close. Hence why it’s called “critical” The brain stops waiting for those inputs and instead prunes away the unused neural pathways and moves on.
For language, the critical period is roughly birth to puberty, with the most crucial years being the first five, which is when Oxana stopped talking to other people.
Because Oxana had some language exposure in those first three years from living with her family, she was actually able to relearn language after she was rescued.
But five years with dogs instead of humans still rewired her in profound ways.
She was eventually placed in an institution, and rehabilitation took years. She had to learn how to walk upright again, to use utensils, to bathe, and how to speak.
By her early twenties, Oxana could speak fluently. She'd learned to walk again, to dress herself, to function in ways that would have seemed impossible when she was found.
But there were limits. Hard limits that all the therapy in the world couldn't fix.
In 2006, a British child psychologist named Lyn Fry conducted a detailed assessment of Oxana. What she found really alarmed her. Oxana was twenty-three years old at the time, but her drawing skills matched those of a five or six-year-old child. Her overall mental capacity was equivalent to about a six-year-old's. She could count but struggled with addition. She couldn't read fluently. She couldn't correctly spell her own name. There were parts of her development that were frozen from the time she lived in the dog kennel.
And her speech, while technically fluent, had a quality that Fry described as "odd." Flat. Lacking the natural cadence of normal human conversation.
Fry came to the conclusion Oxana didn't have the social or cognitive abilities to live independently. The critical window had closed.
What we know now is that she is forty-one years old. She still lives at the same care facility near Odessa where she was placed as a child. She works on the farm there, milking cows and caring for animals She receives a government pension. And though She will never live on her own she seems to have a fulfilling life. But the trauma from her childhood still follows her.
In an interview, a journalist asked her about her life And Oxana answered: "When I feel lonely, I find myself doing anything—I crawl on all fours. This is how lonely I feel."
That statement really stuck with me when I first read it. Because what if some of these psychologists overlooked part of her story? What if when they were looking into what made her a dog, they forgot about the part that made her human.
Psychologists were so quick to use Oxana as a test subject. She was a perfect specimen in some ways. You can’t do experiments where you have animals raise humans because obviously that is insanely unethical (not that that’s stopped a lot of experiments from happening, which we’ve talked about plenty on this show) so you just have to wait for a feral child to be discovered.
But at the core of the story I see a little girl who was rejected by the two people who were supposed to love her the most, and was fully accepted by Naida. So when she feels lonely she repeats the behaviors that made her feel loved and accepted.
Reading about Oxana’s story really got me thinking about these types of children, and as it turns out, as sad and horrible as her story is, she’s not the only one. Throughout history there have been many accounts of feral children, but not all of them were rescued like Oxana was. And that brings me to the wolf girl of Devil’s River.
In 1845, in what’s now Del Rio, Texas, a young boy is out in the field, watching his family's goats.
He knows to watch the animals closely because there are wolves in the woods, and sure enough, as he gazes toward the tree line he sees them: a pack, maybe five or six strong, loping through the brush toward the herd. But there was something wrong. Something that brings to mind the awful legends he’s heard his whole life.
Because running alongside them—keeping pace, moving on all fours —is something that isn't a wolf at all.
It looks like a girl.
She’s Naked. Covered in dirt. Long, matted hair streaming behind her like a dark flag. She moves with the pack like she belongs to it, her hands and feet hitting the ground in the same rhythm as their paws. And when they reach the goats she doesn't hang back. She doesn't hesitate at all. She attacks with the wolves, tearing at the animals with her hands and teeth, snarling and ripping their flesh like she'd done it a hundred times.
The boy doesn't move, he’s completely frozen. He watches until they disappear into the brush, dragging their kill with them.
When he told people back in town what he saw, most of them laughed. A naked girl running with wolves? Sure, kid. But a few of the older folks exchanged worried looks. Because they all grown up with a really devastating legend of the area. But they always thought it was just that, a legend, and now they weren’t so sure.
The legend said back in May of 1835, a young couple named John and Mollie Dent were living in an isolated cabin near the Devil's River in southwest Texas, right next to a place called Espantosa lake
And the land itself had a reputation. Espantosa means "frightful, or frightening" in Spanish, and the stories about that lake went back decades—a mysterious fog that rolled in without warning, sightings of strange creatures in the water, rumors of a spectral headless rider who appeared on the shores. The indigenous peoples of the region avoided it. The Mexican settlers crossed themselves when they passed nearby. It was not a place you wanted to be alone.
But this couple was very much alone. The area was totally isolated except for the two of them, When one night during a violent thunderstorm, Mollie went into labor.
John could tell something wasn’t right during labor., Their closest neighbors were goat ranchers miles away, so John decided he’d ride out to find help, but he never made it back. He was struck by lightning during the journey.
The next day, the goat ranchers found Mollie’s body out in the brush near their home. She’d gone searching for John. But what they didn’t find was her baby.
The ranchers could see that all around her body were wolf tracks.
The ranchers assumed the obvious: that wolves had taken the baby . Carried it off into the night after searching for food in the storm.
They buried Mollie near the cabin and said a prayer. And that's where the story might have ended—filed away as just another frontier tragedy
Except years later, many people in that area would claim to see a young girl running with a pack of wolves.
In 1846—a full year after the boy's sighting—a Mexican woman living near San Felipe Springs came forward with her own story of seeing a young girl running with a pack of wolves. And then Apache trackers in the area reported finding a child's footprints mixed with wolf tracks in the sandy soil along the Devil's River. Sometimes the footprints were accompanied by handprints, pressed into the ground beside them—like whoever made them had been running on all fours.
By this point, the legend had a name: the Lobo Girl of Devil's River. And someone decided it was time to do something about it.
A group of vaqueros organized a hunt. They'd capture the girl, they said. Bring her back to civilization. Save her from the wild, or at least prove once and for all whether she existed.
The hunt lasted days. They tracked her through the brush, following wolf prints toward Espantosa Lake—because of course she'd be near the frightful place, the cursed place, the stretch of water that everyone with any sense avoided. On the third day, they spotted her.
She was running with the wolves, naked and wild, her hair streaming behind her. They gave chase. They cornered her near the river's edge. And according to the tale, what happened next was chaos—the girl screaming in sounds that weren't words, the wolves howling, the horses panicking. But they couldn’t catch her. The wolves came to her aid and In the confusion, she slipped away.
There were scattered reports after that. A few more sightings over the years.
But she was never caught. Unlike Oxana, she was never brought back to tell her story. And with nearly 200 years passed,, people have started questioning if these stories were ever anything more than legends.
But decades later there would be another feral children case that would take the world by storm, and would even be taught in textbooks for decades. And unlike the wolf girl, these two girls were real, though their story also has the feel of a legend
In October of 1920, an Anglican missionary named Joseph Amrito Lal Singh was traveling through the jungle near Midnapore, in Bengal in eastern India when villagers told him about ghosts they'd seen near a giant termite mound. Spirits, they called them. Manush-Bagha—Bengali for something like "man-bodied, beast-headed creatures." They emerged from the mound at twilight, the villagers said, and they moved like nothing human.
Singh was a practical man. He didn't believe in ghosts. But he was curious enough to investigate.
So he staked out the mound. Night after night, he watched from a distance, waiting to see what would emerge. And on the third night, he saw them.
First came a wolf. Then another. Then a third and a fourth, the whole pack emerging from a hole at the base of the mound. And then, crawling out behind them on all fours, came two small figures.
Children. Girls. Naked and filthy, their hair matted into thick clumps. He claimed their eyes reflected the light like animal eyes, as if their biology had changed to be more like the wolves. They moved with the pack, even disappearing into the jungle to hunt with them.
Singh was astonished, he had never seen anything like this before. He had to learn more, and he had the audacity to shoot the mother wolf so that he could enter the den where all the wolves lived.
When he got inside, he saw two human girls huddled with wolf pups in a tight ball of fur and limbs.
He named them Amala and Kamala. And he took them with him.
Amala was tiny—maybe eighteen months old, Singh estimated. Kamala was older, perhaps eight years old, old enough that she'd clearly spent years living this way. And according to Singh's diary, they were only human in the way they looked
They walked on all fours, their knees and palms calloused from constant use. They refused to wear clothes—tore them off whenever Singh's wife tried to dress them. They ate raw meat, crouching over it and tearing at it with their teeth, growling if anyone came too close. They slept during the day and came alive at night, prowling the orphanage grounds in the darkness. They showed no interest in human beings whatsoever.
But Sing was determined to show the world that he could civilize them. He took them to his orphanage and began the slow, painstaking process of trying to teach them to be human. Teaching them to walk upright, to eat cooked food. Teaching them that humans could be trusted.
He’d never see it all the way through, though. Amala died within a year. From his diary we can guess that she had a kidney infection, possibly dysentery. Singh wrote that Kamala seemed to mourn her, refusing to eat for days, searching the orphanage for her sister. That’s one thing that transcends being human, other species still grieve their loved ones.
But Kamala lived for nearly a decade after that. She learned to walk upright, sort of—a shuffling, unsteady gait that never looked quite natural. She learned about thirty words, enough to make simple requests. She learned to wear clothes without tearing them off. She learned to smile.
She never learned to be fully human, though, Sing said. She died in 1929, around age seventeen, of kidney failure and tuberculosis.
But I would ask sing, what does it mean to be “fully human”. If you only know 30 words, does that make you not human? If you can’t walk without a limp, does that make you not human? I get the sense that Sign was a researcher on his high horse who thought that if you couldn’t exist in a very typical fashion, you were less than human. So I wanted to dig a bit more into his research, because it was clear that there were flaws in the way he was studying these girls.
And it turns out, I’m not the only one who thought that. When Singh published his diary in 1942 it became a sensation.The story was even taught in psychology classes for decades. It appeared in textbooks. It was held up as evidence for the importance of socialization in human development.
And almost all of it was a lie. Or at least some very important parts were
See, even at the time, there were doubts. Local villagers contradicted Singh's account. A newspaper article from 1926 reported that a tribal farmer had actually led Singh to a hut where he'd found the children in a cage. Not a wolf den. The dramatic rescue where Singh said he saved the girls by killing the mother wolf, was completely fabricated. Scientists pointed out problems with Singh's claims: human eyes don't produce eyeshine, so the light reflecting off their eyes at night was physically impossible.
But Singh was a missionary, people considered him a respectable man, and he had photographs. People wanted to believe, so for the longest time, no one questioned his findings.
It wasn't until 2007 that the full truth came out.
A French surgeon named Serge Aroles had spent years investigating historical cases of feral children, digging through archives across four continents. And what he found about Amala and Kamala was damning.
Singh's "original diary"—the one he claimed to have written day by day as he cared for the girls—was a fake. Handwriting analysis and paper dating proved it had been written after 1935, six years after Kamala died. He'd fabricated the whole thing after the fact.
The photographs were staged too. The famous images showing the girls walking on all fours, crouched over raw meat, moving like animals? They were taken in 1937—years after both girls were dead. They showed two other children from the orphanage, posed and directed by Singh to recreate scenes from his invented diary.
The orphanage doctor—the actual medical professional who had examined Kamala—stated that she had none of the wolf-like traits Singh described. No unusual teeth. No glowing eyes. No fixed joints that prevented her from walking upright.
And multiple witnesses reported something worse: that Singh had forced Kamala to perform like a "wolf girl" for visitors.
Letters between Singh and his co-author Zingg revealed the motivation. Zingg had written to Singh about the "financial value" of the story and had sent him money. The whole thing was, as Aroles put it, "the most scandalous swindle concerning feral children."
That doesn’t mean that amala and Kamala weren’t real. And that their story didn’t need to be heard. So who were they really?
Probably disabled children who had been abandoned. Modern researchers have suggested they may have had Rett syndrome—a severe neurodevelopmental condition that affects mostly girls, causing loss of hand skills, difficulty walking, and limited speech. Some have suggested that they have been autistic, or had some other condition that made them seem "other" to the people around them.
In a time and place without diagnosis or support, children like this were sometimes cast out. Though, let’s be real, we’ve covered enough asylum episodes on this show to know that that was still happening up into the 1970’s.
their story still mimics the others in that they were abandoned by their caregivers.
But what happens when its your caregivers that are the reason you’re a feral child.
See, earlier, I mentioned that it’s really hard to study the feral children phenomenon because who is going to volunteer to have their children go be raised in the woods by wild animals. I see some of you raising your hands PUT THOSE HANDS DOWN!
There is a famous study, though, from the 1930’s, where two parents did agree to this. Or a kind of version of this. Because they wanted to see what would happen if their son was raised alongside a chimpanzee. And the outcome was…shocking to say the least.
This story starts with a psychologist named Winthrop Niles Kellogg
Before he earned his PhD in psychology, he'd been a combat pilot in World War I, flying missions over France and earning one of France's highest military honors for valor under fire. Colleagues described him as someone with very clear ideas about who was competent and who wasn't, and who wasn't shy about sharing those opinions.
In 1927, while still a graduate student at Columbia, Kellogg picked up a paper one day and saw an article about the "wolf children of India", amala and Kamala. He was absolutely fascinated by this case, But he disagreed with the psychological interpretation of the girls he was reading about. The article argued that feral children were most likely intellectually disabled from birth—that's why their parents had abandoned them in the first place, and that's why they couldn't be rehabilitated later. They said the wildness wasn't learned. But being intellectually disabled made them wild already. A horrible and incorrect conclusion, but so was a lot of pop psychology and psychotherapy back then. Here’s looking at you, Freud.
Kellogg thought that conclusion was backwards. He believed those children acted like animals because their environment had demanded it. They'd learned to be wild because being wild was how you survived in the wilderness. Given a different environment, they would have learned to be human.
Which meant, he reasoned, the opposite should also be true. And that’s when he got an idea
He couldn't take a human baby and raise it with wolves—that would be unethical, even in the 1920’s when the bar was low. But he could do the reverse. He could take an infant ape and raise it as a human. Give it the same clothes, the same food, the same affection, the same education as a human child. Treat it not as a pet but as a human member of the family.
And to really test the theory? He'd use his own family, he would raise His own child, 10 month old Donald, and a 7 month old chimpanzee name Gua side by side Like siblings.
When Kellog told his colleagues about this, a lot of them objected. They didn’t think it was ethical to use his own child in an experiment. Regardless, The experiment started in June of 1931, and For the next nine months, Gua and Donald were raised as twins. They slept in the same nursery, in matching cribs. They sat in high chairs at the dinner table. They wore the same diapers and rompers. They were fed from the same bottles, bathed in the same tub, kissed goodnight by the same parents.
But For those nine months, twelve hours a day, seven days a week, Winthrop and his wife Luella ran experiments on both children. Dozens of standardized tests measuring everything they could think of: “blood pressure, memory, body size, scribbling, reflexes, depth perception, vocalization, locomotion, reactions to tickling, strength, manual dexterity, problem solving, fears, equilibrium, play behavior, climbing, obedience, grasping, language comprehension, attention span, and others”.
And a lot of those experiments were exactly what you’d think they would be. Unethical, and kind of confusing. They measured the sounds their skulls made when tapped. Kellogg described the sound of Gua’s “like the crack of a mallet upon a wooden croquet or bowling ball.” which gives me the impression he was hitting them pretty hard. The couple spun Donald in a high chair until he cried to study his equilibrium. They even tested the pairs startle reflexes by firing a gun behind them while filming their reactions. Spoiler alert, neither of them liked that….
This was 1931—the ethics of using your own infant as a test subject weren't quite as well established as they are today.
The early results seemed to support Kellogg's hypothesis, Gua was becoming more and more human every day.
She learned to respond to simple verbal commands in english. She mastered drinking from a cup and eating with a spoon. She figured out how to open doors. And Kellogg was thrilled to see that he was right, that it’s your environment that affects your behavior, not your innate sense.
But then something unexpected started happening.
While Gua’s behavior was becoming more “human”. Donald’s was changing, too.
By the time he was fourteen months old, Donald had developed what Kellogg called a "food bark"—a specific vocalization that Gua used when she wanted to eat. It wasn't a human sound. It was a chimp sound, a kind of rapid grunting that Gua made whenever food appeared.
At first, Donald seemed to be imitating her. But then he started using it on his own, unprompted, whenever he was hungry.
Kellogg watched as over the next 9 months, Donald started becoming more like a chimp. He grunted and panted like a chimp when he was excited. He bit people. He crawled on all fours even though he was fully capable of walking. When Gua figured out how to spy under doors by pressing her face to the floor, Donald started to do it too.
And then, His language development stalled. At nineteen months old—an age when most children are starting to combine words into simple phrases—Donald's vocabulary consisted of exactly three words. One of them was "Gua."
But what’s so interesting about this, is that while Donald started imitating Gua, she never imitated Donald. His innate humanity was a lot more malleable than her innate “chimpanity”. “Chimpness?” you get what I’m saying.
The Kelloggs had set out to humanize an ape. Instead, they were watching their son become more ape-like.
In March of 1932—nine months into what was supposed to be a five-year experiment—Winthrop and Luella Kellogg made an abrupt decision. The experiment was over.
Their official explanation was vague: they said they'd proven what they set out to prove. Gua behaved like a human child except when the structure of her body and brain prevented her. The research was complete.
But everyone who knew the family understood the real reason. Multiple accounts suggest that Luella pushed to end the experiment. She was freaked out by what was happening to Donald.
Gua was sent back to the primate research facility where she'd been born. I imagine when she got there she taught all of the other chimps how to use forks and wear pants.
And donald went on to graduate from Harvard Medical School. He became a psychiatrist in Bethesda, Maryland. He married. He had, by all external measures, a successful and normal life.
He never spoke publicly about being raised with a chimpanzee. There are no interviews with adult Donald, no memoirs, no accounts of what he remembered from those nine months, if he remembered anything at all.
In 1972, both of his parents died within a few months of each other. And in January of 1973, Donald Kellogg tragically took his own life. He was forty-two years old.
I want to be careful here. There's no evidence—none—that the experiment caused Donald's death, forty years after the fact. But unfortunately, that meant we’d never know what the long term effects of an experiment like this were.
The Kellogg experiment asks a question that the other cases of Feral children asks. And It’s a question I hear asked a LOT these days. What makes us human? Analysis of these cases tries to prove how “animal” children will become if left without a caretaker, but I think the opposite is true. I think the ability to adapt to their environment for survival is something that makes them more human. On the surface, Oxana appeared to have adapted to life as a dog, but she was a little girl dealing with trauma and abandonment, and she was able (at 3 years old) to survive on her own.
Same with Donald. His parents were subjecting him to a very unethical experiment. The hours were grueling and unending, all during a critical time for his development. And so he started learning from his one companion, his sister during it all.
But what do you think? Is our humanity so weak that we start becoming feral when exposed to wild animals, or is our ability to adapt part of our humanity? I know, it’s a heady question this week but I’m curious what you think. You can comment wherever you listen.
If you want even more spooky stories, you can check out our most recent bonus episode on Patreon and Apple podcasts subscriptions. February we covered Spooky folklore from the gothic south and appalachia, specifically folklore that traveled from West Africa over on slave ships. It’s scary, I learned a lot, I think you’ll love it. And you can listen with a free trial on both platforms, how about that.
Until then... stay curious.
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