The Green Children of Banjos

The Legend:
In August 1887, two strange children were found near Banjos, Spain.
Workers were harvesting their fields when they heard frightened cries; investigating, they discovered two children, a boy and a girl, terrified and huddled near a cave. They were screaming in a language that was not spanish, and their clothes were made of a strange metallic cloth... but stranger still, the children's skin was green.

The two were taken to the home of an important and respected man in the village, where the local populace attempted to take care of them, but the children refused to eat or drink anything that was offered. The boy soon sickened and died; but the girl finally began to eat a diet of uncooked vegetables, mostly raw beans, and was soon healthy and hearty.

The strange girl lived for five years after her appearance, during which time her skin slowly lightened to a normal caucasian tone; she also learned Spanish, but what she told of her origins only deepened the mystery.
She said that she and her brother had come from a land with no sun; the people there, all green skinned, lived in a perpetual twilight. There was a land of light, but it was beyond a great water. When she was asked how she had come to be found outside the cave, she could only say that she had heard a loud noise and then been pushed through something... then she and her brother were in the cave and could see the light from the mouth of it.
With her death, any hope of solving the mystery faded.

Variations
The earliest version of this story that I've found is in John Macklin's Strange Destinies, published in 1965... it's far more detailed than the other accounts, and likely the initial source for this particular story. For reasons I'll make clear later, this variant will be examined separately.

Both Macklin's book and Charles Berlitz's book, Charles Berlitz's World of the Incredible but True, give the month of August as being when the children were found; Warren Smith's book, Strange Women of the Occult, only says that the children were found "in the autumn of 1887." And while both Macklin and Berlitz give the source of the location as being Banjos, Spain, Smith never mentions the location of the occurrence; instead, Smith claims that stories of similar children being found also occur in "France... Spain or Germany," which seems to indicate he thinks this occurrence was in none of those three countries. I included his version here because of the correlation in the year given for it's occurrence... all agree it happened in 1887. (By the way, I've found no other indication of similar stories from France or Germany.)

Berlitz describes the children as having Asian shaped eyes; Macklin and Smith both describe the children as being slightly Negroid in appearance with deep-set and almond-shaped eyes.
There is disagreement also on how the children came to be in the cave. Smith gives the version that appears above; Berlitz says that the girl claimed to have been deposited in the cave when she and her "companion" (Berlitz does not state they were siblings, though both Macklin and Smith do) were swept up by a whirlwind and dropped outside the cave where they were found. Macklin quotes the girl as saying (to an un-named villager): "There was a great noise. We were caught up in the spirit and found ourselves in your harvest field."

Theories
Berlitz puts no theories forward in his book to explain the event, being content to simply recount the occurrence. Macklin, however, puts forward several theories -- not his own, he claims, but not ascribed to anyone in particular, either. The theories he briefly mentions are:
A) The children were from Mars.
B) The children were from a 'fourth dimension' existing next to ours.
C) That un-named 'scientists' know that "continual underground living brings on a bluish-green pallor."

Smith also forwards several theories about the origins of the children: that they came from an alternate "anti" dimension, that they may be related to tales of an underground race... but most interesting is that he acknowledges that there are variations of the story that claim it occurred in France, Spain or Germany. As he states the matter: "Whatever the country, investigators have discovered the details of the unsubstantiated legend are always the same...".

I've only found one variation of this tale, which claims it occurred in Woolpit, England, in the 1100's; and, as will be discussed below, it seems likely the Green Children of Woolpit story is the actual source for the story of the Green Children of Banjos [See also: The Green Children of Woolpit]. Having said that, let's examine Macklin's account of the story in more detail.

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Reprint from http://holloworbs.com/green_children_wolfpitte.htm

“ Sometime during the 12 century, a monastic chronicler in England by the name of " Gervase of Tilbury " recorded a strange account of two " children " who suddenly appeared near a small town near Bury St. Edmunds, England. The account was also recorded in the writings of several other chroniclers who lived at the time or sometime afterwards. These include:
William of Newbury -- HISTORIA RERUM ANGLICARUM, written in Yorkshire, England (1136-1198?); Abbot Ralph of
Coggeshall -- CHRONICON ANGLICARUM; and also the chroniclers Giraldus Cambrensis and Walsingham. The account was more recently related in FLYING
SAUCERS UNCENSORED, by Harold T. Wilkins (Citadel Press., New York, N.Y. 1955., pp. 97-98). From their combined accounts we can piece together the following bizarre story which the chroniclers swore to be true:

“ One warm, sunny day in the 12th century some farmers and other residents of the small town of Wolfpittes, England ( some seven miles distant from the larger village of Burry St. Edmunds ) were startled to see two young children wandering around, as if disoriented, in some ancient ' pits ' or ' trenches ' known to the locals as the ' Wolf-Pitts ' -- after which the small village had taken it's name. These excavations were ancient, but no one seemed to know when or by whom they were dug, but the consensus was that they were at least partly artificial, and very ancient. The most shocking thing about the children, which the residents of Wolfpittes encountered, was that they had skin which was olive-green in colour, yet the rest of their features were as human as the average Englishman.

The villagers attempted to communicate with the children but were unsuccessful, as they soon discovered that the young boy and girl spoke a language which was completely unfamiliar to the villagers. The townspeople had compassion on the children and took them to the village and offered them various different kinds of food, all of which they seemed unfamiliar with and which they refused. However, when they were shown some beanstalks, they took them greedily, but instead of opening the bean-pods, the children attempted to open the stalks themselves, as if they had been accustomed to opening stalks in this way (apparently a practice they had learned in the land from which they emerged). Upon finding nothing in the stalks, the children began to weep. Unfortunately, the shock of entering our world was too much for the young boy, and even though he became partly acclimated to other forms of food, he nevertheless became weaker and weaker and finally died as few years afterwards. The young girl, however, adjusted quite well to her new surroundings. In fact she eventually grew into a mature, beautiful woman, and later married a gentleman from the nearby town of Kings Lynn. As time passed, her husband patiently instructed her in the complexities of the English language, and soon she was able to communicate fairly well, and the story she told of where she had come from and how she had arrived in our ' world ' with her brother was even more incredible.

She told her husband that her people all had skin similar to hers, or rather similar to what her skin had once been like, as over a period of years and exposure to the outer elements the greenish tinge had left her. She described her world as a cavernous, subterranean country of enormous size, a country which went by the name of " St. Martin's Land." The land in which she lived was described as 'twilight' in nature, yet there was a large underground river, on the other side of which there was another land more brightly lit. One day, she and her brother were herding some type of underground animal when they heard something like the sound of ' bells ' emerging from one of the cave passages or tunnels which lined the perimeter of this underground land. Out of extreme curiosity, they entered this tunnel and followed the passage upwards for what could have been a few days, although in their underground land it is probable that they did not have any concept of what ' day ' or ' night ' was. After their long and weary journey up the steep incline they suddenly emerged into the brilliant sunlight of the British countryside. The change from their twilight world was dramatic, and the children walked around in the pits or trenches starved, half-blinded and disoriented. They shortly afterwards attempted to re-locate the small opening through which they had emerged, but were unable to do so, because of the blinding light. At about this point the farmers found the children and took them to the village.

A somewhat similar incident 'may' have been repeated in the small hamlet of Banjos Spain in August of 1887, several hundred years after the incident at Wolfpittes and several hundred miles distant. We state that it MAY have been repeated to some degree simply because there appears to be some confusion surrounding the Banjos account, apparently due to the possibility that some well-meaning researcher may have confused the two incidents, in essence attributing some of the events that in fact took place near Wolfpittes with the Banjos account. Basically, the Banjos incident reportedly involved two children with greenish skin who emerged from a CAVERN near the town (not 'pits' or 'excavations'), spoke an unknown language, and so on, although the details are sketchy. Some of the accounts of the Banjos incident repeat the Wolfpittes story almost verbatim, as if, as we said, someone somewhere mistakenly confused the two events, perhaps due to a lack of detail in the Banjos, Spain account.”

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