Ansbach

So let's get into his story.

He was born on November 29, 1857, in Ansbach, Bavaria, which is Germany today.

And Ansbach is very close to Nuremberg.

His father, Ferdinand, was a physician and a district medical officer for the government, and Theodor was born to Ferdinand's second wife, Maria Sophie von Stromer, who was the daughter of an army colonel.

We don't know much about Theodor's childhood.

This caused Philip to begin to doubt him.

After the failed attempts to clarify Kaspar's origin, Philip moved him to Ansbach and placed him with a schoolmaster named Johann George Meyer.

It was a quieter setting, away from all the attention Caspar had received in Nuremberg, but it wasn't the grand future that he'd been promised.

Worse than that, it was a complete change in the world he had known with George and Philip.

Now, if Caspar had staged everything that was documented about his life, it makes him a fraud, but that doesn't completely solve the mystery either.

If he invented the story of growing up in a dungeon cell, then who was he really? And where did he come from? How did he arrive in Nuremberg with such limited speech and the walk of a toddler? And what was his life like before he suddenly appeared? Whatever the truth is seems to have died with Caspar.

Caspar is buried in Ansbach, the city where he died, and his body lies under a tombstone that calls him the riddle of his time.

On a dusty road near Columbia, Mississippi, during the spring of 1913, William Cantwell Waters was minding his own business as he traveled toward his next destination.

O'Leary's office at the U.S.

Tank Museum in Ansbach looked down over a wide avenue bordered with preserved examples of armored fighting vehicles through the ages.

With winter sunlight on the snow, they set like squatty gargoyles passively guarding the approach.

There was a massive dinosaur-like Mark 7, which had reached the unprecedented speed of 6.5 miles per hour in 1916 and struck terror into the hearts of the Imperial German troops at the Battle of Somme.

I don't know about back then, but nowadays it definitely is.

At the information booth, he was surprised to be told that a helicopter was waiting for him.

He had expected a five-year-old Dodge staff car for the 180-click ride to Ansbach.

Click kilometers.

This letter, which he wrote to his family, contains the account of the tragic event.

You know that when my best friends A, C, and Z were gone, I became particularly intimate with my well-beloved Ditmar of Ansbach.

Ditmar, that is to say a true and worthy German, an evangelical Christian, something more, in short, than a man, an angelic soul, always turned toward the good, serene, pious, and ready for action.

He had come to live in a room next to mine in Professor Grundler's house.

He knows he has been duped, and it is deeply embarrassing for a man of his stature.

So he effectively dumps Kaspar in a town called Ansbach, placing him with a very strict pedantic teacher named Meyer.

Stanhope basically stops visiting, though he does continue to pay the living expenses.

So Kaspar goes from being the toast of high society, performing magnetic parlor tricks for philosophers, to sitting in a cold room working as a lowly law copyist.