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Julia Pastrana

Julia Pastrana (1834–25 March 1860), also kown as the ape woman, was a Mexican woman born with hypertrichosis and a sideshow performer in 19th-century Europe.

Life

Pastrana, an indigenous Mexican, was born in 1834, somewhere in the Sierra of Sinaloa State. Her ears and nose were unusually large and her teeth were irregular.

In 1854 as she was exhibited in New York at the Gothic Hall on Broadway as ‘The Marvelous Hybrid or Bear Woman’. Her ‘handler’ was one M. Rates who allegedly discovered the young Julia as a servant girl to the governor of Sinaloa, Mexico. A museum advertisement from 1857 proclaimed, "The Bear Woman is a curious and interesting little lady, whose entire face and person are covered with thick black hair. She has also a resemblance to the Orang-Outang, and in fact it would seem that she is half Monkey. Julia was found in Mexico, in a cave with animals of different kinds, and is pronounced by Dr. Mott, of New York, a Hybrid creature. During her exhibition, the Bear Woman entertains her visitors by singing pretty little romances, and by Dancing a Highland Fling, Polka, &c. Julia is very good natured, she behaves herself like a little lady and wherever she is exhibited she becomes the pet of all ladies and gentlemen, and by her strange appearance in a glistening Spanish costume, she highly amuses the children."

One of the members of Medical society who examine her was Dr. Alexander Mott who declared her ‘the most extraordinary beings of the present day’ and ‘a hybrid between human and orangutan’.

Julia then moved on to Cleveland with a new promoter, J. W. Beach, and it is there that Dr. S. Brainerd declared her a ‘distinct species’. That analysis was, of course, quickly added to all subsequent promotional materials.

Theodore Lent (also known as Lewis B Lent) purchased her and taught her to dance and play music and took her on a worldwide tour with the name "Bearded and Hairy Lady". She also learned to read and write in three languages. During her performances in London, Julia sang romances in both Spanish and English and danced what are described as ‘fancy dances’ – likely traditional Spanish numbers. In order to secure his investment, Lent married her in 1857. While there is evidence that Julia was infatuated with her husband, Mr. Lent was not a kind man. While in Vienna he forced Julia to undergo sensitive physical examinations and barred her from leaving their apartment during daylight. As their tour through Poland and on to Moscow continued, Mr. Lent became more and more controlling. In late 1859, while in Moscow, it was discovered that Julia was pregnant. The doctors feared a difficult childbirth due to Julia’s stature and narrow hips; however Julia was more concerned that the baby should take after its father. On March 20, 1860 her fears were confirmed when she gave birth to a hair covered newborn boy. The child lived only thirty-five hours.

During a tour in Moscow, Pastrana gave birth to a baby with features similar to her own. The child survived only two days, and Pastrana died of post-birth complications five days later.

Lent did not abandon the tour; he contacted Professor Sukolov of Moscow University, had his wife and son mummified and displayed them in a glass cabinet in London in 1862. When the popularity of the exhibit began to fade, Lent rented the mummies to an English traveling museum of curiosities. In 1864 they were taken on a tour of Sweden. Most unbelievably, during that same time, Lent met a young lady with similar features, married her and began touring her as Zenora Pastrana – Julia’s sister. The mummy rejoined Lent for a time and the four of them toured together, however Lent rented to mummies to a Vienna museum and began to claim that Zenora and Julia were one and the same. He was eventually committed to a mental institution.

Zenora left Russia for Munich in 1888 where she reclaimed the mummies and toured with then – this time to ‘prove’ that she was not Julia. In 1889 Zenora gave the mummies to an anthropological exhibit in Munich run by a man named J. B. Gassner before she retired again and remarried to a much younger man.

The mummies disappeared from the public view. They appeared in Norway in 1921 when a Mr. Lund bought them for his Norwegian ‘chamber of horrors’. In 1943, during the German occupation, the chamber of horrors collection was ordered to be destroyed however Lund was able to convince authorities that a tour of the ‘Apewoman’ – as Julia was now called – would prove beneficial to the treasury of the Third Reich. For several year, Julia and her son toured German occupied territories.

The mummies remain in the hands of the Lund family and were on display until the 1970s when there was an outcry over a proposed tour of the USA and they were withdrawn from public view. Vandals broke into the storage facility in August 1976 and mutilated the baby's mummy. The remains were consumed by mice. Julia's mummy was stolen in 1979 but stored at the Oslo Forensic Institute after the body was reported to police but not identified. It was identified in 1990 and has rested in a sealed coffin at the Department of Anatomy, Oslo University since 1997. In 1994, the Norway Senate recommended burying her but the Minister of Sciences decided to keep her, so scientists could perform research on her. A special permit must be obtained to gain access to her remains.

Quote

Charles Darwin described her in his book The Variation of Animal and Plants under Domestication: "Julia Pastrana, a Spanish dancer, was a remarkably fine woman, but she had a thick masculine beard and a hairy forehead; she was photographed, and her stuffed skin was exhibited as a show; but what concerns us is, that she had in both the upper and lower jaw an irregular double set of teeth, one row being placed within the other, of which Dr. Purland took a cast. From the redundancy of the teeth her mouth projected, and her face had a gorilla-like appearance."