Julia Pastrana
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Julia Pastrana (1834–25 March 1860) was a woman born with hypertrichosis who took part in 19th-century exhibition tours in Europe. Pastrana, an indigenous woman from Mexico, was born in 1834, somewhere in the Sierra of Sinaloa State. She had hypertrichosis terminalis; that is, her face and body were covered with straight black hair. Her ears and nose were unusually large and her teeth were irregular. Charles Darwin described her as: "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."
Theodore Lent (also known as Lewis B Lent) discovered her and purchased her from a woman who might have been her mother. Lent 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. They married and she became pregnant.
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. He later found another woman with similar features, married her and named her Zenora Pastrana. He was eventually committed to a mental institution.
The mummies disappeared from the public view. They appeared in Norway in 1921 and were on display until the 1970s when there was an outcry over a proposed tour of the USA and they were withdrawn from public view.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.
In popular culture
- Marco Ferreri's film The Ape Woman (1964) is based on her life story.
- Alternative rock band Ass Ponys named a song after Julia on their 1993 album Grim.
- In a 2004 episode of The Ricky Gervais Show on XFM, Karl Pilkington referenced the "Victorian Ape Woman" in the popular recurring section, Monkey News.
- Norwegian pop singer Kaada named a song after Julia, on his 2006 album Music for Moviebikers.
- The 2009 album Ancient Greeks and Circus Freaks by Intercontinental Music Lab features the song "Ordinary Bones", on the subject of Julia Pastrana.
- The Image Comics published comic book Proof features a fictionalized account of Julia's history. The collected version of this story was released as the TPB "Julia" in July, 2010.
