The Delphos Wolf Girl

In July 1974, at least four people saw a child of about ten or twelve years old, with blonde, matted hair and wearing tattered red clothing, running through vines and bushes in a wooded district on the north-west edge of Delphos, a small town in Kansas. One witness described encountering the girl during a search for her; she didn't speak but only growled at him before running off. Children had also seen the 'girl' eating out of cat and dog dishes.

About 7.30 am in the morning of 22 July, Mrs. Joe Stout saw the child in a shed on an unoccupied, overgrown lot. She came face-to-face with 'her' sitting on a picnic table only five or six feet away. She wasn't sure if it was a boy or a girl, except that it was wearing a red dress. It made an odd gurgling sound when she tried to get closer and then jumped down from the picnic table and disappeared through a small hole in the wall. Mrs. Stout thought the child was definitely human and not deformed, although it ran on all fours. She described it as about the size of a six year old, with a horseshoe shaped scar running from its right eye to its mouth. She denied the possibility that it was a monkey or other primate.

Mrs. Stout said she saw the child for the second time around 4 pm, and again about 8.30 pm the same day. During a late-night search of the area, Mr Stout was scratched on the shoulder and a neighbour, a teeenager called Kevin Marsh, was scratched on the throat from behind. Both only got a glimpse of their diminutive assailant. The sheriff of Ottawa County, Leonard Simpson, organised a posse to search the area, but they found no trace that anyone or anything had been there..Residents also reported chasing the girl through milo fields, but officers sent to search the area found no trace of the wild girl.

On Tuesday evening the girl was reported by a resident to be inside a shed. Officers and about 35 residents surrounded the shed, but they found nothing.

Although sheriff Simpson was sure that people had seen something, he wasn't convinced it was a child. He suggested that  the reports could have been caused by the large amount of cats and dogs running loose in the area (!). No children had been reported missing anywhere in the state, and without any new evidence Simpson announced that he'd closed the case.

According to Simpson, although most people who thought they saw something had, for some reason, changed their story by the next day when asked to give statements, the Stouts, Kevin Marsh and another teenager, Doug Kaiser, maintained that they had seen a little girl. People living in the area were afraid of what 'she or it' might do next, and parents of young children told The Wichita Eagle that they were either keeping their children indoors or well within sight.

Despite the scepticism of some, those who saw something strongly believed it was a child. Mrs. Stout was convinced she saw a child. She said objects in the shed, including dolls from a collection formerly kept in barrels along with some clothes, had been moved during the night, although she didn't see or hear anyone near the shed. When she first saw the child she noticed that someone had lined the dolls up on the picnic table and covered them with pieces of cloth.

Newspapers in the area dubbed the mysterious child the 'wolf girl', but there were no more reports and no trace of her was ever found.

Two and a half years previously, in December 1971, Delphos had again been at the centre of controversy over a strange occurrence. On 2 November 1971, sixteen-year-old Ronald Johnson was looking after sheep with his dog, at the back of his family home, when he heard a rumbling noise and saw a mushroom shaped object illuminated by blue, red and orange lights about 25 metres away in a grove of trees. The object was about eight feet in diameter, and seemed to be hovering about five feet off the ground. Before long the object began to glow at the base and took off with a whining noise, the glow temporarily blinding the boy.

Johnson brought his parents out just in time to see the object high up in the sky, over a full moon in size, before it vanished over the horizon. Walking into the grove of trees where the object had been, the family found a glowing grey-white circle. Mr. and Mrs. Johnson felt inside the circle and found that the soil felt as if it were crystallised. Strangely, Mrs. Johnson noticed that her fingers had become numb after touching it and that when she tried to rub off the bits of soil on her leg, the part of the leg she touched also became numb.

Soil samples taken from the glowing ring were obtained by a ufologist called Ted Phillips, who had them tested by seven independent laboratories. Tests showed the presence of fungus-like substance but were ultimately inconclusive as to the exact nature of the ring, and there is still much debate about the case.

For days after the sighting Ronald's eyes were painful, and he had headaches and suffered from nightmares for around a week.

Later Ronald Johnson claimed that he'd acquired psychic powers since his close encounter with the UFO. A short time after the sighting, he reported meeting a strange 'wolf-girl' with wild blond hair, wearing a torn cloth coat, who escaped him by running away on all fours when he got close.

If his statement is true, he may actually have seen the same wild girl that the Stouts and others saw three years later. If so, who or what was she? Whether she was an abandoned child, a runaway, or something altogether more unusual, its impossible to say without more information.

A more bizarre report, from the early spring of 1971, involved inhabitants of a neighbourhood in Mobile, Alabama, who claimed they had encountered a  'wolf woman' roaming around at night, described by one witness as having the top half of a woman and the bottom part of a wolf. The Mobile police investigated the reports but the results were inconclusive.

The Delphos Wolf GirlThe Delphos Wolf Girl
A girl (or possibly a boy) aged around 10 was seen wearing a tattered red dress, on 22 July 1974 at around 07:30. Mrs Joe Stout said she saw the child twice more the same day: and during a search that evening, Teenager Kevin Marsh also caught a glimpse of the child.

No further trace
Although efforts were made by the local county sheriff to find the girl, nothing more was seen of her. By the next day, when he came to take statements from witnesses, most had mysteriously changed their mind.

True or hoax?
Although the story seems plausible, we have to ask ourselves why the witenesses changed their minds. In addition, we must remember that Delphos was no stranger to fame. In 1971 another teenage boy reported seeing a UFO there.

...If these stories are not outright hoaxes, they clearly indicate the presence of extraordinary, otherworldly creatures which challenge consensus views of reality. On the other hand, in some cases it is possible both to believe the witnesses and to keep one's ties to reality intact. In the Delphos, Kansas, area during July 1974, for example, several persons encountered what a newspaper described as a "young child about 10 or 12 years old, with blood, matted hair, dressed in tattered clothing, running through vines and brush in a wooded area in the northwest edge of Delphos." She was dubbed the "wolf girl." Though local authorities never found her, she may well have existed, probably as a mentally retarded runaway or abandoned child.

Some medically educated theorists have suggested that sightings of werewolves really were of individuals afflicted with a rare genetic disease called porphyria. Porphyria sufferers experience tissue destruction in the face and fingers, skin lesions, and severe photosensitivity. Their facial skin may take on a brown pigmentation, and they may fall victim to personality disorders. The aversion to light, plus the physical disfigurement, may lead the victim to wander about only at night. "These features," British neurologist L. Illis wrote in a 1964 issue of Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, "fit well with the description, in older literature, of werewolves."

I don't know about all the implied UFO stuff and the fungus, and I'm always ready to give an eye-roll to "Psychic Powers"; but as for the child..
I'd say she was probably a mentally disturbed girl who'd been abused and managed to escape. As you'll note she was wearing a dress, so somebody cared enough for modesty to cover her. A true Feral child is almost always naked. Also she showed a capacity for playing with human toys, which shows human contact at some point..
I'd say this was a girl who was severely beaten and maybe retarded or slow..
If she got loose her parents might not have reported it as they would be facing jail time when anyone saw the condition their child was in..

wolf women you say?
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when i did research on her, i did alot of reading on feral children.  one thing i noticed is how they take on physical traits of what raises them.  like wolf-raised children grow hair all over the body, their eyes shine at night, their caninies and fingernials are elongated....
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Sir Kenelm Digby, later one of the Royal Society’s founders, is the first to mention Jean de Liège in 1644, having interviewed those who had seen him a few years earlier7. As a five-year-old during the religious wars, Jean took to the woods with fellow villagers. When the fighting moved elsewhere, the villagers returned home, but the timorous Jean remained in hiding for 16 years. In the wild, his senses sharpened; he could scent “wholesome fruits or roots” at a great distance. When he was finally captured at the age of about 21, he was naked, “all overgrown with hair”, and incapable of speech. In human society, he learned to talk, but lost his acute sense of smell.

The most famous wolf-children are the two girls captured in October 1920 from a huge abandoned ant-hill squatted by wolves near Godamuri in the vicinity of Midnapore, west of Calcutta, by villagers under the direction of the Rev JAL Singh, an Anglican missionary. The mother wolf was shot. The girls were named Kamala and Amala (above), and were thought to be aged about eight and two. According to Singh, the girls had misshapen jaws, elongated canines, and eyes that shone in the dark with the peculiar blue glare of cats and dogs. Amala died the following year, but Kamala survived until 1929, by which time she had given up eating carrion, had learned to walk upright and spoke about 50 words.

In May 1972, a boy aged about four was discovered in the forest of Musafirkhana, about 20 miles (32km) from Sultanpur, the region where five of the wolf-children mentioned by Sleeman came from. The boy was playing with wolf cubs. He had very dark skin, long hooked fingernails, matted hair and calluses on his palms, elbows and knees. He shared several characteristics with Kamala and Amala: sharpened teeth, craving for blood, earth-eating, chicken-hunting, love of darkness and friendship with dogs and jackals. He was named Shamdeo and taken to the village of Narayanpur. Although weaned off raw meat, he never talked, but learnt some sign language. In 1978 he was admitted to Mother Theresa’s Home for the Destitute and Dying in Lucknow, where he was re-named Pascal and was visited by Bruce Chatwin in 1978. He died in February 1985.20


In 1962, according to an unsubstantiated report, geologists found a boy aged about seven running with a wolf pack in a bleak desert region of Turkmenistan, central Asia. The men threw a net over the boy, but the wolves rushed to protect him, tearing at the net. In the end, all the wolves were killed. It was four years before the boy, named Djuma, was taught to utter a few words. He told anthropologists how he rode on the back of his wolf mother when the pack went hunting, and later learned to run on all fours. He was cared for in the Republican Hospital in Ashkhabad and it was years before he got used to sleeping in a bed. By the time of a news report in 1991, he was still crawling on all fours, eating only raw meat, and biting when he was angry. Dr Rufat Kazirbaev, chief of psychiatric research in the hospital, doubted if he would ever lose his wolf ways.21


In 1970, Elmira Godayatova, six, tried to follow her mother through a wood in Azerbaijan to her grandmother’s house in the village of Milgam. Mrs Godayatova told Elmira to go home – but she never got there. Relatives, friends and police searched in vain. Twenty-three days later, a forest ranger found the little girl sitting under a tree. A local newspaper reported: “She ate berries and grass, drank water from springs, and played with ‘doggies and puppies’. Apparently the girl found a family of wolves, and wolves are known never to attack near their home.” Elmira was taken to hospital to recover.

According to legend, in the early part of the 19th century, a wolf girl roamed the banks of the Devil’s River near Del Rio in what is even now the sparsely-populated wilderness of south-west Texas. The girl’s mother died in childbirth, and her father, John Dent, was killed in a thunderstorm while riding for help. “The child was never found, and the presumption was that she had been eaten by wolves near the Dents’ isolated cabin”, wrote the aptly named Barry Lopez in his book Of Wolves and Men.


Lopez said a boy living at San Felipe Springs in 1845 reported seeing several wolves and “a creature, with long hair covering its features, that looked like a naked girl” attacking a herd of goats. Others made similar reports the following year. Apache Indians told several times of finding a child’s footprints among those of wolves in that country.


A hunt commenced and on the third day the girl was cornered in a canyon. A wolf with her was driven off and finally shot when it attacked the party. The girl was bound and taken to the nearest ranch, where she was untied and locked in a room. That evening, a large number of wolves, apparently attracted by the girl’s loud, mournful and incessant howling, came around the ranch. The domestic stock panicked, and in the confusion the girl escaped.


According to Lopez, the girl was not seen again for seven years. In 1852, a surveying crew exploring a new route to El Paso saw her on a sand bar on the Rio Grande, far above its confluence with Devil’s River. “She was with two pups. After that, she was never seen again.”