Let's take you back to 1871, in England in the village of Turville. Here, there was a house no different from the others but many stay around it and wait for something. The house's door open, several adults come out of it, they looked surprised and say that all the rumours turned out to be true. The woman goes out on the porch and asks a few more people to come in. Inside there was an eleven year old girl sleeping on the bed. She looks pale and thin and despite the loud people conversation the girl doesn't wake up. According to her mother, it's been six months since she fell asleep.
It is the story of longest sleep in history. The record belong to a girl named Ellen Saddler who slept for nine years. She was born in the English village of Turville in the second half of nineteenth century in a bg family. She was the 12th kid, her parents weren't wealthy and worked hard to make the ends meet. They taught their sons and daughters to help them from an early age and Ellen was no exception.
When she turned eleven, she left home to work as a nanny in a nearby town. While away from her family and surrounded by strangers, Ellen began to feel bad, she had headaches, felt discomfort and felt certain drowsiness. These symptoms became so severe that the girl couldn't work properly. She returned to her house in the village where her parents sent her to the hospital. The doctors also couldn't figure out how to help her because they couldn't diagnose her. They spent 18 weeks trying to cure her as a result still unwell, Ellen was discharged from the hospital. After returning home she experienced severe headache and drowsiness and even worse. Then one day she quietly laid down on her bed and fell asleep. Ellen woke up only after nine years. All this time her mother fed her milk and tea as she was loosing weight and strength. Soon people started coming to her house to see an unusual phenomenon. The news of a sleeping girl spread like a wild fire in the country. People called Ellen's house as the sleeping cottage.
Ellen was pale, thin, her feet turned cold and lips bacame blue and it seemed that life was slowly leaving her body. Her parents took donations for her treatment and hence many people called it all a performance for money. For some reason, her mother didn't allowed doctors to stay with her for a long time. Some said that her mother gave her sleeping pills everyday to not let her wake up. Some even said that they had seen a conscious girl sitting by the window. There are no solid proof/truth of her official diagnosis by doctors as her mother never allowed. It might be possible that the girl fell inta a coma or had another severe disease that was unknown to science at that time in the nineteenth century.
Well, the story has a good ending as one day the girl woke up. She didn't remembered what had happened and was very surprised when she got to know about her long 9 years sleep. Afterwards, she had a slow growth but her health wasn't that bad. She later married and had six children. In 1911, at the age of fifty she passed away.
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