Sideshow 5: Whisked Away

a chemist and doctor. But behind this sophisticated facade was a difficult snake, oil salesman and general scoundrel about town. To those who really knew him, and there weren't many, he was less of a superman and Clark Kent and more of a jackal and hide. One of his items, though, was a canary in the coal mine or the Changing Times. On August eighth of eighteen forty, he advertised a woman's hair removal powder on the front page of the New

York Daily Herald. He wrote, we could never think of falling in love with a woman whose fuzzy face bears a resemblance to the back of a half picked goose and wonder how anyone else ever could. But ladies removing their body hair wasn't anything new, of course, and can be traced back thousands of years to civilizations across the world. Egyptian women sometimes removed their head and pubic hair, Elizabethan

women did away with their eyebrows. Ancient Romans used a myriad of pumice stones and tweezers that were at a lady's disposal. In America, though, female hair removal had yet to be commodified and institutionalized. But then that all started to change. In eighteen eighty, the King Camp Gillette Company created the first modern razor. It appeared at a time when the upper and middle class continued their efforts by

separating themselves from the working class. Personal hygieing was utilized, arguably weaponized at times, to fight against what was considered to be improper. By the early nineteen hundreds, to be clean shaven was a basic expectation of good breeding, and so here Joseph Trust was tapping into a veritable gold mine of class anxieties uppercross Victorian Americans. You see, were in the habit of clinging to any life raft that

would keep them floating above the masses. Codd advertising language meant that women weren't directly asked to do something as masculine as getting rid of their five o'clock shadow. Instead, they were just smoothing their surfaces out, dissolving the rough bits, and bleaching away their nonconformity. And of course, manufacturers knew that many women, an established economic force by this time, would be drawn in blade refills. New designs and fancy

creams kept them coming back for more. Charles Darwin too weighed in on the body hair issue with a hot take in his book The Descent of Man. He claimed that humans have less fur than their ape ancestors because less hairy mates are more sexually attractive. We evolve out of hair. Following that logic, he believed that excessive hair puts a person in closer proximity to a primitive state. Closer, to use his words, to the savage, it seems that women who wore their hair wild and untamed were being

boxed out of proper society. But if proper society wasn't going to take them, there was another place that would welcome them, for better or for worse, with open arms. The stage I'm Aaron Manky. Welcome to the Side Show. All we know for sure is that Julia Pastrana only ever wanted to be loved. It's evident from the few words that she left behind. Her complete life story has been a treasure hunt for contemporary scholars as they've tried to find clues scattered across the pages of history. But

sometimes the dead have their way of keeping secrets. Our story begins on a quiet day in Sinaloa, Mexico. It's a state that occupies a narrow stretch of land that sits between the Sierra Madre Occidental Mountain range to the east and the Sea of Cortez to the west. The terrain is carved with peaks and valleys and covered in

fertile soil. In eighteen thirty four, Sinalo was recently freed from Spanish rule, but for the previous three hundred years, the indigenous population had been squeezed by colonization and ravaged by disease and war. It's here that we meet our two hunters, or as some claim, they were herders, walking a familiar worn path up a mountain, tracking their game. Just up ahead sat a cave. It's rocky Mouth, daring them to enter. So they did, and what they found

there startled them. They found a woman, haggard, half feral, and captive. But she wasn't being held by just anyone. No, she told them she was being imprisoned by a bear. She pleaded for their help, but the hunters were ill prepared, so they told her that they would come back with assistance. Just as they turned to leave, though they were thwarted, the bear had come home. The surprise left them with no choice. They had to act fast, but then they saw something else. The bear was holding a cub in

his arms. Legend tells us that the cub was this woman's daughter, the product of this inner species hostage situation, and the baby was nothing like the hunters had ever seen before. Black fur covered her face and body. Although she cried and cooed like any other human infant, it seemed that she was half person and half beast. The infant Julia, was taken from her mother and brought to the city, violently altering her life path and the woman

she would become. You see, women are often treated as blank slates for the stories of men, and the tale of Julia Pastrana would be no print for her. This was just the beginning. What we do know now is that she was born with two congenital conditions, hypertrichosis terminalis, which caused dark hair to grow all over her body, and gingerble hyperplasia, which caused overgrown gums. Some scholars believe that she could have been a member of the a

Coxy people. Promotional materials from later in her life would claim that she was a member of a root digger tribe, a derogatory term given to a number of culturally separate and distinct communities in the region. Julia came to live in the home of Pedro Sanchez, one of Sinaloa's governors and a man with a penchant for curiosities. There she became a servant and also was said to have taken

on the role of liven entertainer. We know that she left his home in eighteen fifty four, although the details of that exit are hazy, but it said that she eventually came into contact with three men, Miguel Ritez, Francisco sepel Veda, and most famous of all, Theodore Lent. We don't know the act details of their arrangements or how she came under their employ Newspapers tell us that in the company of her male comrades, she boarded the S s Or Above and left Vera Cruz for New Orleans.

She arrived in the Ports city on October eighteen fifty four, took a steamership up the Mississippi River to St. Louis, and then finally went on to New York City. And it's here that we meet her again, reincarnated as someone new. According to promotional posters, she had become known as the Marvel Hybrid and the Bear Woman. She debuted at Gothic Hall on Broadway, a tiny form in a red dress,

dancing to a tinkling piano. According to the New York Tribune, the eyes of this Lucius Natura beam with intelligence, while its jaws, jagged, fangs, and ears are terrifically hideous. Nearly its whole frame is coated in long, glossy hair. Its voice is harmonious, for this semi human being is perfectly stile and speaks the Spanish language. The papers compared her arrival to the spectacle of Joyce Heth and claimed that

Barnum himself was being well out. Barnumed Theodore, though, decided that he would get the upper hand over all of them. He would marry Julia in secrets and become her legal guardian with all the rights that afforded him and Mary. They did on November nine of eighteen fifty. Her other managers were furious, but Julia stood by and made it clear that it was her choice. She wouldn't give up

her husband for anyone, she said. But as we know, the idea of choice in these situations is often an attempt to mitigate harm or side with the lesser of evils. It has been reported that Julia truly loved Theodore and felt that he saw her for who she truly was, but some scholars have speculated that he also saw dollar signs when he looked at Julia and only wanted to possess her for his own gain. And this is how

things went. For a good long while. Theodore kept recreating Julia, further embellishing her act with songs and dances and costume changes, and in all of it, her advertisements teased that she was nothing more than a domesticated beast. One man Dr Alexander B. Mott wrote a letter of certification for Julia, claiming that she was a hybrid of a human and an orangutan. He called her a mysterious animal and mused

over her missing tail. So while her contemporary white bearded ladies were marketed as beacons of Victorian propriety beautiful oddities if you will, her suit women of color were often billed as freaks of nature. Not only was her womanhood in question, but her very humanity. And it was upon this platform that she toured all over North America, her story and body being exploited at every turn. Whereas the paper's new Barnum dealt in humbuggery and hoax, they believed

that Julia was the bona fide real deal. It's a that her audiences were largely content with, believing that she was something less than human, and as they looked at all the cash that flowed in, Theodore couldn't have been more pleased. Everyone seemed to have an opinion about Julia's looks, so much so that she was shut down for obscenity.

On November five, eighteen fifty seven, she took the stage as the star in a play in Berlin, but unbeknownst to her and Theodore Lent, spies from the German police were in the audience, and unlike other places Julia had traveled to, German authorities were on guard against displays that they considered to be tasteless, degrading monster shows. The police called her appearance immoral and quite literally feared for their children.

Obstetricians in Germany weighed in, worried that pregnant women would miscarry at the sight of her. They also tossed around threats of maternal impression, the idea that those in the family way were infinitely susceptible to any kind of upset, and that those anxieties would manifest in the body of the child. The authorities were afraid that more babies would be born looking like Julia. This, of course, caused her

great pain. It was when people saw her as a full person that she felt truly animated, truly alive and actualized, But so often this wasn't the case. A friend once noted that there was always a light fog of sadness that hung over her, resigned to a life and narrative that kept her humanity locked away in the shadows. After the backlash in the press, Theodore reimagined the performance as a set of short song and dance numbers, A burlesque

act and private meetings, all for a fee. Of course, Julia attracted the attention of hermann Otto, a sympathetic German circus showman. He wrote that for those who knew her, she was warm, thoughtful, and spiritually gifted, with a sensitive heart and mind. It affected her very deeply in her heart, having to stand beside people instead of with them, and to be shown as a freak for money, not sharing any of the everyday joys in a home filled with love.

But then something happened that held the potential to change all of that. In eighteen fifty nine, she and Theodore were in Moscow. Their tour was keeping them busy in afloat, but she was starting to feel strangely different. It wouldn't be long before she realized why she was pregnant. Now, instead of Julia being told that she was a risk to expect it mother's, she was becoming one. Obstetricians grew concerned with this news. They feared that her particularly narrow

pelvis would prove to be dangerous. At best, birth is a physically traumatic experience. At its worst, it can be deadly. Her labor began on March eighteen sixty and she was attended to buy a handful of doctors. What we do know is that the doctors use forceps to help the baby out. We can imagine that they were clamped to his skull or to his shoulders, crushing him, and around four in the afternoon he was born, and as the doctors held him for the first time, they were horrified.

The baby's body was covered in thick black hair, just like his mother. Tragically, the baby, unnamed in the history books, died thirty five hours later, and Julia would fare no better. First came the chills, and then the shaking. An intense pain in her abdomen was followed by unbearable swelling and finally a fever. It said that a crowd of spectators gathered around Julia's deathbed. If Theodore sold tickets, we don't know, but could we put it past him. It said that

her last words were, I die happy. I know I have been loved for myself. Julia followed her baby into death on March eighteen sixty. According to the Romantics, she died of a broken heart. This, of course, is nonsense. A broken heart theory was just yet another story about her that became repeated just another tale that was tacked on to her body's canvas. In the end, doctors listed her official cause of death as inflammation of the uterine membrane and the lining of the abdominal cavity. It wasn't

a beautiful death in which Julia slipped away gracefully. It was brutal. Theodore, however, was not one to mourn. Instead, he had an idea. Death is usually the end for most of us, but the longest stretch of Julia's career was just beginning. The unscrupulous Theodore Lentz, committed to never losing a dime, sold the bodies of his wife and

child to a professor at Moscow University. Whether they commanded a high price or not depends on how you determine their value, but they lined his wallet with the equivalent of about eighty four thousand dollars in today's currency. In the lab, Julia and her son's body were subjected to a top secret cocktail of embalming liquids. It was reported that since the child's body was quite fresh, it was easy to mummify. Julia, on the other hand, proved to

be more difficult. She had to be injected several times over a long period in order to mask the smell of decay. All the while, the professor took photographs and notes, recording diligently as the human husks on his table changed color and shape. After six months of work, it was time for the postmortem debut at the University of Moscow's Anatomy Museum. In life, just as in death, Julia Pastrana became a sensation. The embalming process also had a curious

side effect. It seemed that her dissection had finally proven her humanity. The papers were surprised to report that, after a grueling internal examination, her body was indeed human. She wasn't an ape after all. The widower, Theodore length, though, stuck around it, said that he liked the mummies so much and was so impressed by that Moscow University professor's work that he bought back the bodies of his wife

and son for nearly twice what he'd sold them. And like most showmen of that age, Theodore already had his next destination in mind, Piccadilly Circus in London, home to curious wonders from all over the world. In the early months of eighteen sixty two, he set up shop, he dressed his dead bride in a Russian dancing dress she had made herself, and his son in a sailor suit. Two years later, in eighteen sixty four, the bodies of

Julia and her baby were toured through Sweden. Meanwhile, Theodore was off searching for another break, and in Bohemia he found it well her He had learned about Marie Bartel, another bearded woman. It has said that her family kept her locked away, but somehow Theodore managed to ingratiate himself with her family enough to seek her hand in marriage. Her father obliged, but made Theodore promise that he wouldn't show her for money, but unfortunately this was before Google

and background checks. Just a few days in Theodore stole her shaving kits. He made grand plans to take her through Europe and gave her a new name to match them, Zenora Pastrana. Yes, Theodore had decided to style her as Julia's long lost sister, and for a decade they toured with Europe's best circuses and entertained royals. By the eighteen eighties, interest in their act began to wane, so they decided to put some roots down and open a wax museum

in St. Petersburg, Russia. Julia and her baby, though, had been left behind on loan to a Viennese museum, with Theodore being paid for the privilege. But the quiet, settled life wouldn't last long for Theodore and his second wife. It said that he began to lose his marbles and was eventually installed in a Russian insane asylum, where he would never be heard from again. It might sound like

a satisfying ending, but our story doesn't stop there. Free from his gravitational pull, Marie now struck out on her own, with the bodies of Julia and her baby in tow, but the threesome would never be a permanent sideshow fixture. The following year, Marie married a much younger man and left show business, and when she did, she passed her mummified partners onto a German showman. By the late eighteen nineties, the pair was not longer of much interest to the

medical or scientific communities. We lose track of the two for a while until they surface at an amusement park in Oslo. Their home. There wasn't an anatomy museum, but a chamber of horrors displayed alongside various body parts and bottled sea monsters. Horrific I know, and this would be Julia and Baby's story. For the intervening decades. They rotated in and out of storage units, appearing at various installations before being sent off to warehouses. Collectors came knocking over

the years, offering top dollar for the remains. Julia went on one final tour, but it wouldn't last long. While visiting a town in Sweden, local authorities used a law from eighteen seventy five to threaten confess ation of the mummies if they were put on display. After that, she was sent to the winter headquarters of a fair ground in Oslo, and it's there that she fell to pieces. Vandals tore her dress, ripped her child's arm off, and

broke her jaw. It seems that Julia and her child were treated in death exactly as she had been in life, Displayed for entertainment, handled like a possession, and decorated with whatever narrative sold the most tickets, And when they no longer serve their purpose, they were locked away and left a rot. Human beings seen as nothing more and sideshow prompts. It's always alarming when you find body parts at the

town dump. It was nine in the suburbs of Oslo, Norway, and some children who were playing in a garbage heap found a severed, mummified arm. The owner wasn't immediately clear, but she was soon found. Julia Pastrana stood quietly in an abandoned caravan nearby, missing life and limb. Time hadn't been kind to her, but neither had the world. She was quite literally torn apart, stuffing exposed, and suittures popped. Some of her skin and clothing were missing, and to

further compound the cruelty, so was her baby. She would resurface ten years later in a janitor's closet in the basement of the Forensic Institute of Oslo. It's clear that no one still quite knew what to do with her, and today we have to wonder what took so long to figure it out. But by the ninety nineties, rumbles

could be heard through the hallowed academic halls of Oslo. Scholars, historians, and activists began questioning the university's decision to keep her body, and across the Pond in New York, a play was being produced about her life. Its story shocked audiences rather than entertained them, and it drummed up interest in a petition to the Mexican embassy in Oslo to send Julia home.

But as was the case with Sarki Bartman's repatriation, Julia and her supporters faced a long difficult battle with high minded institutes that deemed themselves worthy to hold her captive in the name of science. This claim was dubious at best, and finally the institution relented in February of two thousand thirteen. She was dressed in a traditional hupil garment and laid

in a coffin. The rods and bolts that were used for exhibiting her body and death were removed and placed at her feet, and with that she was flown home to Sinaloa and greeted with the welcome fit for royalty. There she would finally rest in a tomb, dressed in a riot of flowers from well wishers from across the globe. It had taken a century and a half, but the world had finally seen her and loved her or who

she truly was. Everyone wants to be loved, but for the right reasons, of course, So if there's someone out there who you truly appreciate, if they bring a brightness to your life, maybe some joy, or they just make being here a little easier. Maybe now is a good time to let them know. But we're not quite done

here just yet. And if you stick around through this brief sponsor break, Robin will tell us one more tale from the side show and help us see what happens when the drama leaves the stage and heads to the courtroom. On July two, eighty three, a crowd appeared at the Halls of Justice in Manhattan, a formidable complex that housed both the court and a detention center for New York City. Curious onlookers had heard about one of the cases on the docket that day, and they were looking for a

free show. William Char, you see, had a bone to pick with P. T. Barnum. He had visited Barnum's American Museum and was angry about it. Standing before the Justice, Char recounted his experience from the previous day. After paying his quarter for admission, he entered the museum of the thousands of curiosities on display awaiting visitors. Char was there to see a brand new feature, Madame Josephine Clofolia build as the bearded Lady. Madame Clofolio was a hit in

part due to who she was behind the beard. She was a fair skinned woman of Swiss descent, born to a class, which gave her access to many refined social circles. Mid nineteenth century America was a time of high gender anxiety. Gender was conceived as a strict binary You were either male or female. You performed one or the other, but never neither, and certainly not both. But here she was a strikingly beautiful woman, just you know, with a beard.

When Char was faced with this performance, he was incredulous. He quickly deemed Madam Clofolia to be an impostor. She had to be a man in disguise. Char, standing amongst innumerable humbugs, decided that this gaff had gone too far. He believed he had been cheated, so he took Barnum and Clofulia to court, and there, at the place where criminals and corruption rubbed elbows, Josephine Clofolia and her lovely Victorian gown stood listening to a stranger challenging her womanhood character.

Witnesses were called upon to certified Josephine's legitimacy fortune Clofolia, her husband of three years, brought up the two children she had birthed, one of whom was still alive. Her own father backed him up. Barnum spoke his piece too. He claimed that he had paid her a large sum for her exhibiting work, and for the best of his knowledge,

she was a woman. In fact, he said, he had her examined by a few physicians, including one Dr Mott, the same man who had called Julia Pastrana's basic humanity into question. Even Dr Covill of New York City's Prison chimed in. He had interviewed her, he reported, and was perfectly convinced that, in spite of her beard, she was indeed a lady. The magistrate was convinced, and the suit was dismissed. Horace Greeley's New York Tribune reported the whole

story in great detail the very next day. His paper had a circulation of about two hundred thousand throughout the eighteen fifties, which made it one of the largest daily papers in the United States. And imagine this. Horace Greeley was also a good friend of P. T. Barnum. Almost immediately, Barnum was suspected of arranging the whole ordeal with char why Well, either because interest in Madame Cloudfulio wasn't as enthusiastic as a showman had hoped, or to make sure

He's museum with a bona fide. Bearded Lady became a top destination for visitors on the fourth of July, and it worked for better for worse. The article that spread throughout the nation's papers made the title Bearded Lady synonymous with the name Madame Cloudfulia, at least for some time in America. She continued to travel as a professional, covering her beard so that passers by wouldn't get a free

show she was given. With Julia and so many other hairsuit women of color were never afforded the label of respectability. The papers sung her praises, championing her beauty and writing that she had the finest set of whiskers that anyone had ever seen. Side show was written by Robin Miniature, with narration by me Aaron Mankey research for the series was by Robin Minna, Taylor Haggerdorn, and Sam Alberty, with production assistants from Josh Than Jesse funk Alex Williams and

Matt Frederick. Grim and Mile Presents was created in partnership with I Heart Radio. You can learn more about this show and everything else from Grim and mild Over at grimm and mild dot com, and, as always, thanks for listening.