Ancient Out-of-Place Travelers and A Portal to Another Dimension: The Green Children of Woolpit

The harvest had come to Woolpit, a small village in the countryside of Suffolk, England. In the dappled light of one late summer in the 12th century, reapers worked the fields near the ancient wolf-trapping pits from which the village took its name. But on this particular day, their work halted as an extraordinary sight emerged from the shadows of one such pit: two children—skin tinged a peculiar shade of green and dressed in strange, unfamiliar clothes. Unable to communicate in any language the villagers understood, the children seemed bewildered and lost. According to William of Newburgh, the chronicler who first recorded the tale, the harvesters, unsure of what else to do, seized the children and brought them into the village. In a separate account by Ralph of Coggeshall, a knight by the name of Sir Richard de Calne intervened. Moved by the strange sight, he took the children to his manor, where they were treated with great care. Both chroniclers noted that the children refused