On an August night in 1859, Julia Pastrana discovered she was pregnant. She was twenty-six years old, far from her birthplace in Sinaloa, Mexico, and traveling through Russia with a husband who had built a career out of displaying her. The child she carried shared her unusual features, and the delivery in March 1860 was difficult. The baby boy lived only thirty-five hours.
Five days later, Julia Pastrana died from complications of childbirth, reportedly whispering that she was glad she had been loved for herself. Whether those were her exact words cannot be verified, but what followed is certain: her husband, Theodore Lent, sold her body and that of their infant son to a Moscow University professor for preservation. Julia Pastrana was born in 1834 in a small settlement called Santiago de Ocoroni, in the Mexican state of Sinaloa. From birth, she was covered in thick black hair and had a large protruding jaw with oversized teeth.
The condition was later identified as hypertrichosis, a rare genetic disorder, but in her lifetime, no such explanation was offered to the public. The details of her early childhood vary by source, and some of the stories were later fabricated by her employers to increase ticket sales. One popular version claimed that her mother belonged to a cave-dwelling tribe of indigenous Mexicans who resembled apes, a tale invented entirely for promotional purposes. What is known is that Julia’s mother cared for her within the local community, where she was referred to as “wolf woman,” and that after her mother’s death, Julia’s uncle sold her to a circus.
Another account claims that Julia and her mother were found hiding in a cave by herdsmen, and that Julia was placed in an orphanage because her mother’s care was deemed inadequate. All accounts agree that Julia eventually came to live in the home of Pedro Sanchez, the governor of Sinaloa, where she worked as a maid and provided him with constant amusement. Under his protection, she learned to read, write, and speak new languages. She was described as sweet, intelligent, charming, and charismatic.
In 1854, at age twenty, Julia decided to return to her tribe, leaving the governor’s home. It was during this journey that she encountered an American showman named M. Rates, who persuaded her to travel to the United States and perform on stage. Some accounts say Sanchez sold her directly to the circus, while others claim a customs official named Francisco Sepulveda purchased her and brought her to America.
The exact circumstances remain unclear. Once in the United States, Pastrana debuted at the Gothic Hall on Broadway in New York City in December 1854. Publicity described her as a “marvelous hybrid” and “the Bear Woman from the Wilds of Mexico. ” Although she was genuinely talented, dancing the Highland fling and singing Spanish folk tunes, the crowds that gathered to see her were far more interested in her appearance than her musical abilities.
She stood only four and a half feet tall, with a large jaw, thick lips, and black hair covering her entire body. She performed under a series of stage names: the Baboon Lady, the Hairy Woman, the Ape Woman, the Bear Woman, and even “the Nondescript. ” After her New York performances, she toured the East Coast and Canada, attending military balls and gala nights where her growing fame attracted long lines of men eager to dance with her. By then, her manager was Theodore Lent.
Seeing her success in America, Lent decided the next step was a European tour. To build publicity, he had Pastrana examined by various doctors and scientists, using their opinions to validate claims that she was a hybrid human and animal. Dr. Alexander B.
Mott privately certified that she was half human and half orangutan. Other doctors agreed, with one stating that Pastrana belonged to a distinct species. In London, Lent continued to fabricate details about her background, claiming her native tribe lived in caves and had intimate relations with bears and apes. At the same time, he assured audiences that she was sociable, clever, and kind, and that “the nature of woman predominates over the orangutan.
” Not everyone was fooled. Samuel Nealon Jr. , a comparative anatomist with the Boston Society of Natural History, declared her a perfect woman. The surgeon Francis Buckland, who visited her in London in 1857, described her facial features as “hideous,” but noted she had an exceedingly good figure, a sweet voice, and a taste for music and dancing.
He believed her true story was simply that she was a deformed Mexican Indian woman. After her death, Charles Darwin discussed her case, remarking that she was a “remarkably fine woman” with a thick masculine beard, a hairy forehead, and a face with a gorilla-like appearance caused by the redundancy of her teeth. Lent had earned a small fortune from exploiting Pastrana, but he wanted more. She received many marriage proposals, and it is said she declined them because the suitors were not wealthy enough.
Some historians claim Lent hoped to marry her to an extremely rich man for his own benefit. But when rival showmen like P. T. Barnum began taking interest in Pastrana, Lent decided he couldn’t take the risk.
He married her himself so she could continue generating wealth. Her feelings toward him remain uncertain, but she appeared to love him. Lent was controlling and limited her freedom, refusing to let her go out during the day because being seen in public could hurt the show’s revenue. She had few friends and was widely regarded as a human curiosity.
In Vienna, she became close to the actress and singer Frederica Gosman, to whom she said that Lent loved her for herself. Gosman later noted that Pastrana carried a light fog of sadness with her always. The German circus owner Hermann Otto met Pastrana in Vienna and wrote of her sad situation in his book. He described her as a monster to the whole world, an abnormality put on display for money, taught a few artistic turns like a trained animal.
But to those who knew her better, she was a warm, thoughtful, spiritually gifted being with a sensitive heart and mind, deeply affected by having to stand beside people instead of with them, and be shown as a freak for money rather than share the everyday joys of a home filled with love. Following the deaths of Pastrana and her child in Moscow, Lent sold their bodies to Professor Sokolov of Moscow University. Sokolov, unaware of Lent’s plans, had developed a new technique blending mummification with taxidermy. The results were so lifelike that when Lent saw them, he bought the bodies back, believing he could profit by displaying them across Europe.
A few years later, he found another woman with features similar to his late wife. He met Marie Bartel and convinced her father to allow the marriage, promising he would never exhibit her. He lied. Before long, Marie was on stage dancing and singing as Zenora Pastrana, advertised as Julia’s little sister.
Lent toured Europe and the United States with her for many years, and they eventually retired to St. Petersburg with their fortune. Shortly after retirement, Lent’s mind began to fail. He was once seen screaming naked on a bridge, tearing banknotes apart.
He was committed to a Russian mental asylum, where he died in 1884. His widow returned to Germany and sold the bodies of Julia Pastrana and her child. For around fifty years, the bodies were displayed in museums, circuses, and amusement parks around the world. By the 1950s, they were kept in storage.
In the 1970s, they were exhibited once more in Sweden and Norway and met with public outrage. In 1973, the owner of the bodies, Hans Lund, placed them in a carnival storehouse near Oslo. Three years later, the storage facility was broken into. Pastrana’s body was stolen and her son’s remains were badly damaged and eventually finished off by rats.
Police found Pastrana’s body in 1979, but did not know whose it was. It was stored at the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Oslo until 1990, when a journalist identified her remains. A debate followed over what to do with her body. In 1997, Pastrana was sealed in a coffin and transported to the Department of Anatomy at Oslo University.
She remained there until February 2013, when her body was finally returned to Mexico. A Catholic funeral was held, attended by hundreds of locals, and Julia Pastrana was buried in a cemetery in the town of Sinaloa de Leyva, near her birthplace. A film based on her life, The Ape Woman, was released in 1963, and another, titled Velvet, was in development at the time of this account.