A girl who was kidnapped at a young age has been reunited with her biological family 53 years later.

57-year-old Susan Gervaise was just four years old when she was “stolen” by travelers who offered her mother to take the child on a trip to Disneyland after befriending her family.

The travelers, a Scottish couple, allegedly told Susan’s birth mother that the girl could go with them on a trip to Disney theme park and that they would return her to her home in Pontefract, West Yorkshire, after the vacation.

As Susan revealed, she and her six siblings lived at a travelers’ site with their mother, who was a single parent, at the time.

Convinced by the couple’s promise to return Susan to her after the trip, the mother agreed to let her daughter travel internationally and went on to provide the strangers with her daughter’s birth certificate.

While the couple indeed took the girl to the Disney theme park as promised, they decided to keep her forever because they “had two boys and really wanted a girl.”

“As a child I lived with my six siblings in an old vicarage on a traveler’s site. We weren’t travelers. My mum was on her own and we were all in and out of foster care,” Susan recalled.

“I was befriended by a couple on the site who were from Scotland, the woman, who I call my mum, had MS and they had two sons.

“I think they wanted a girl. They asked my mum if they could take me to Disney and she gave them my birth certificate so I could be put on their passport.”

Susan went on to explain that her temporary caretakers never returned her to her biological family before admitting she had the chance to travel the world while being “spoiled rotten” by the Scottish couple.

“They took me to Canada then Australia and later New Zealand. This was always their plan. I lived with the traveling community and lived a cherished life where I was spoiled rotten,” she added.

“My mum died from MS when I was 10, but even then, being raised in the hub of a traveling community I was very loved. I have always been happy growing up. I traveled the world.”

As Susan, who is now a grandmother-of-four, revealed, she only realized she was “stolen” from her family when she was 16 and needed to get a passport to travel from New Zealand to Australia where she now lives.

“We went to New Zealand and I didn’t need a passport to get into the country, but when it came to returning to Australia, I did,” Susan recalled in an interview with The Wakefield Express.

“I applied, but I needed a signature from my mother or father – that’s when dad told me they didn’t adopt me, I had been stolen.”

As a result, Susan had no option but to wait until she was 18 before she could reapply for a passport and return to Australia.

There, she eventually met her husband and “just carried on” with her life without letting the “enormity” of what had happened in her childhood affect her.

“It was only when somebody who was adopted asked me what my family back in the UK would be feeling and that was a lightbulb moment for me,” she said as she recalled the moment she figured out it would be nice to reconnect with her siblings.

Following an investigation led by her husband, Susan managed to get in contact with her family who “were crying hysterically” when they found out she was still alive.

The grandmother-of-four has since visited England where she was reunited with four of her siblings.

“To this day we don’t know why the police were never involved. I’m thinking it must have been because my mum gave them permission to take me and the fact we were in and out of foster care,” Susan said of her bizarre experience.

“But there have been several appeals through Missing Persons over the years and my mum continually returned to the traveler’s site after moving away to look for me.”

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