Italian police recently discovered two siblings, ages 6 and 9, raised on an isolated farm in Piedmont by their virus-obsessed father.
During the flood that affected the Italian province of Piedmont in April, local carabinieri visited an isolated farm in the foothills of Lauriano, a small comune near Turin. They were there to issue a temporary eviction notice for the safety of the residents, but what they found shocked them – a 9-year-old boy and a 6-year-old girl in diapers, both unable to speak, read, or write, who didn’t show up in any local registers. Their Dutch parents, a metal sculptor and a stay-at-home mom, claimed that they were home-schooled and otherwise had everything they needed, from food to toys and books, but the children were ‘ghosts’ who didn’t show up in any Italian records and seemed completely cut off from the outside world.
Photo: Annie Spratt/Unsplash
According to the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, the children’s 54-year-old father had been living in Italy for three years, but no one in the village had ever noticed the children; they had never been registered with the local authorities or attended school. The conditions in which the carabinieri found them also hinted at complete isolation and almost no education. The children could barely speak, they couldn’t read or write, and they were described as extremely aggressive, even to each other.
Born in Germany, the ‘Ghost Children,’ as the Italian media dubbed them, had arrived in Italy at some point during the COVID-19 pandemic. Il Messagero describes their 54-year-old father as “obsessed with the coronavirus and other laboratory-grown viruses” and did not want to have his children vaccinated. He reportedly thought nations were creating viruses in laboratories and planned to “contaminate the world,” so he wanted to keep his family safe.
“I love my children, I just wanted to protect them,” the two siblings’ father said, adding that he and his wife provided them with everything they needed to lead a normal life.
“He had made the farmhouse independent from an energy and water point of view. For this reason, he had managed to isolate himself almost completely,” the mayor of Livorno said. “To reach the house, you have to walk a long path through the woods.”
Now the Juvenile Court of Turin has declared the parents unable to properly take care of the children and has ordered the placement of the two minors in a special facility under the guardianship of the CISS (an NGO specialized in the care of youths), while waiting to entrust them to a family that can raise them.
A couple of months ago, we featured a very similar case in Oviedo, Spain, where a COVID-obsessed father kept his sons in complete isolation for over three years.