0
Two children appeared one day in the village of Woolpit, England in the 1100s. A boy and girl claiming to be siblings were totally normal, apart from having green skin. They spoke their own language and refused to eat anything other than green beans. Once they began eating other food they lost their green color, but the boy got sick and died after being baptized. The girl, once she learned English, explained that she and her brother came from St. Martin's Land, an underground place where everyone was green.
Sounds like a folk tale to me! But Wikipedia has some explanations if it turned out to be true:
Quote
Many Flemish immigrants arrived in eastern England during the 12th century, and they were persecuted after Henry II became king in 1154; a large number of them were killed near Bury St Edmunds in 1173. Paul Harris has suggested that the green children's Flemish parents perished during a period of civil strife and that the children may have come from the village of Fornham St Martin, slightly to the north of Bury St Edmunds, where a settlement of Flemish fullers existed at that time. They may have fled and ultimately wandered to Woolpit. Disoriented, bewildered, and dressed in unfamiliar Flemish clothes, the children would have presented a very strange spectacle to the Woolpit villagers.[23] The children's colour could be explained by green sickness, the result of a dietary deficiency.[1] Brian Haughton considers Harris's explanation to be plausible, and the one most widely accepted,[24] although not without its difficulties. For instance, he suggests it is unlikely that an educated local man like Richard de Calne would not have recognised the language spoken by the children as being Flemish.
