After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Dark Truth About Victorian 'Freak Shows'

Episode Date: February 2, 2026

Julia Pastrana was a Mexican woman exploited as a sideshow attraction in life and grotesquely exhibited even after her death because of her appearance. Her story is part of the dark history of the Victorian 'freak show'. Anthony tells Maddy the story.This episode was edited by Hannah Feodorov. Produced by Stuart Beckwith and researched by Phoebe Joyce.You can now watch After Dark on Youtube! www.youtube.com/@afterdarkhistoryhitSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A hush falls as the lamps dim and the benches creak beneath an eager audience. Posters outside promise a grand and novel attraction. It's an audience familiar with seeing giants and dwarves. People hold from the empire's edges to be caged and displayed, features catalogued, humanity reduced to diagrams and theories. Now they wait for Julia. As she steps into the light, the showman scans the audience for its reaction. Murmurs ripple through the room, comparisons or whispered, doctors lean forward, notebooks ready.

Under there on blinking stairs, Julia feels the room close in. Her body claimed by their curiosity, her humanity left unseen. In Victorian side shows, human lives were caged and sold a spectacle. This is the story of Julia Pastrana, a Mexican woman who was exhibited before paying audiences, confined, scrutinized, and became the greatest curiosity of the 19th century. In life, she was displayed as something less than human, and even in death, her body was preserved and toured, shown again and again for profit. From the Victorian side show, this is After Dark.

Hello everyone, I'm Maddie. And I'm Anthony. And in today's episode, we want to look at the dark and frankly uncomfortable history of the Victorian side shows, or as they were often referred to, freak shows. It's worth noting right away in this episode that we're going to be addressing historic racism, abelism, and we're going to be referring to language that we've used in the context of its time, which some of you may find offensive. So if you want to skip this episode, that is. completely understandable, and we look forward to your listenership on a different episode soon. Today, we're going to take you through the Victorian sideshow or freak show, as they were known, through one woman's experience in particular. She was known as Julia Pastrana. That was her stage name.

We unfortunately don't know her birth name, and as you're going to find out, there's a lot that's missing from her narrative. She was a woman from Mexico, born with a genetic condition that caused excessive hair growth and facial distortion. And she became one of the world's most famous, so-called curiosities in the 19th century, sometimes being advertised as the bear woman or the ugliest woman in the world. But before Julia and the sideshow itself, let's quickly establish the origins of this culture. So, Anthony, you're going to be taking us through this history today. Can you give us a sense of the history that the so-called freak show has? Because it's surprisingly long, really.

It is. When I was looking into this for this episode, that's one of the things that struck me. I see it very much as a 19th century phenomenon. But then as soon as you start to peel back those layers of history, it actually makes sense when you see the origins. And it goes back. We see the origins in the late 16th and early 17th century. So if you think about the, it always comes back to print culture, doesn't it? Almost everything, like crime reporting, all of this kind of thing. But we see the emergence of cheap print. culture pamphlets about extraordinary bodies. And we see this when we're doing undergrad history, even like the pamphlets about conjoined twins, for instance. So we're fascinated. We're seeing a society

that's fascinated by this type of difference or this novelty. And of course, they are fascinated on moral and religious grounds. They're trying to understand why this has happened, what God is trying to tell us through these differences. So there's always a lesson to be learned. here supposedly from these, quote-unquote, sort of deviations from normality. Yeah, absolutely. This then leaps from the page in the 17th century. So we have the rise of cabinets of curiosities. And I'm sure people have heard of these, but may not be quite sure exactly what it entails. Initially, these were just collections, often very small collections, that were open to the public for a fee. So you would see things that looked like

scientific categorization. They would be classified, bones, potentially. They would be labelled. And we have an example from John Tedeskant, the elder and the younger, so a family affair here, who travelled the world and they were collecting basically. And they would bring their collection back to their house, which was known as the Ark, again, those biblical religious references. And this was open to public view. So they would have bones. They would have exotic animals or the remains of exotic animals. They would have the body parts or artifacts that were relating to indigenous peoples. And there, that collection is still with us today because it passes into the name Elias Ashmole may sound somewhat familiar. He is very much associated with

the history of the British Museum and then, of course, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. So that collection passes into modern day, but it very much is trying to normalize this idea of a them and an us, and also the kind of schadenfreude thing of going, look how, look at us, look at us in our bodily perfection and our societal perfection, and look at them, look at the otherness. Yeah, it's all about otherness and it's all about categorising, you know,

these other things and making them fit into literally neat boxes, you know, in the case of the Cabinet of Curiosity, yeah. I wrote my PhD on a Cabinet of Curiosity. We did, yeah. We should absolutely do this history as an, as an, episode because there's so much to say here and there's certainly a lot of darkness and, you know, a lot of, as you mentioned there were the British Museum and the Ashmolean, there's a lot of this history that's still on display in plain sight, you know, and is sometimes engaged with and sometimes

not, which is interesting. So, okay, so we have the cabinet of curiosity. But of course, one of the things about the cabinet of curiosity is it's sort of dead and dusty. Everything in there is a stagnant object, even if the collection itself is constantly changing and being added to, there aren't necessarily living people or beings or animals within that. So when do we get this introduction of living fleshy people who are put on display to the public? Well, we start to see it in the early 18th century and it's this idea of otherness that we were talking about, but it takes on a new, as you say, fleshy reform. It's now we start to tour to market towns. It is known as a version of an early freak show, as we know it, in the 19th century. So we have people who are considered giants

in those times. We have people who are dwarves. We have hairy women, as they were described. And again, it's this performance of otherness that comes from the cabinet of curiosity, that comes from that 16th century print culture, but now it's existing alongside pantomime. It's existing alongside theatre. And then, of course, we see the further development of this in the early Victorian age, where this becomes a global enterprise. There is a kind of a standardized format that underpins the performance of the freak show, as it was as it was called, in its own right. But then it's also underpinned with this idea of, this is actually medical, this is actually scientific. If you're coming to see this, you're actually participating in the wonders of modernity

and how we're starting to classify and understand these people. It's always justified in those terms. isn't it? This is the production of knowledge in action, and you, the public, are contributing to the greatness of British, in this case, knowledge or American knowledge, you know, sort of civilised Western knowledge. And also, you know, you mentioned the sort of global scope of it there in the 19th century. And there's a sense that this is very much tied up with empire. We're going to talk about colonialism a lot in this episode, I think. Talk to me then about the sideshow. the freak show as it becomes known in the 19th century. So we have all these kind of early iterations and this idea of curiosity, this idea of looking and the sort of the normalized gaze looking

at the other as being integral to the cabinets of curiosity of the early modern period. But what happens at these so-called freak shows? And where do they spring up? Where could you go and see this, for example, if you were in early 19th century, Britain or America? So we're talking about fairgrounds. We're talking about versions of traveling circuses. So they're coming to you in many ways. You're possibly, especially if you live in one of the more populated hubs, cities, etc., you're probably not having to go very far at all, actually, at certain times of the year. And as we said, this is now progressed to an exhibition almost of biological rarities. At the same time, there is ideas of decorative rarity, tattoos,

pierced bodies. And we are seeing this well into the 20th century, by the way. We see, you know, we might think that this is just a 19th century phenomenon, but it does, we have pictures of these people. So it's, I know that's available in the 19th century, but it's certainly, yes. Before anyone writes in and tells you, photography was a thing in the Victorian era. But we have more modern photography as well. So we're pushing into the 20th century. And so we moved from the idea that we talked about in the early Victorian era, Maddie, about the kind of medicalization and the scientific thing. Now, particularly in the late 19th, early 20th century, we're talking about shock and entertainment. And this,

This is now becoming, I think it always was, but it's more blatantly exploitative almost. And it's leaving us with a lasting stigmatization of differently able bodies, of people with disabilities. We don't know exactly how many freak shows there was at any one time. But if you were to say there's about 375 musicals in London at around the close of the 19th century, 1875 or so. So freak shows, as they were called, are making. up a decent proportion of what's filling the roster on those musical bills. So, you know, they're there. They're very much part of it. And they're part of everyday entertainment culture by

now. We're going to talk in a little bit about the woman who this episode is going to kind of percolate around. But I just wonder, this is just sort of, I don't know, come into my head as we've been talking about that. I wonder if the 19th century brings with it such a kind of homogenization of experience. I'm thinking about the industrial revolution at its absolute zenith in this moment and that for a lot of people in big cities, anyway, certainly in Britain, they are living lives that are not that different from their neighbour. People are working in factories, the working class experience of poverty, of shift work, of how the household is made up, all of that is quite widespread. Obviously, there's a lot of room for nuance and sort of personal experience

within that, but that everyone's life is so sort of prescribed and ruled by a broader societal structure that this idea of otherness of something extraordinary or something, you mentioned shock there, something to sort of shock you out of the mundanity of the life you might be leading. I wonder if that is part of the appeal, actually, with the musicals generally, you know, as a way of escape, but certainly with these ideas of the freak shows. I think absolutely it is. I think that, that, I think that, I, I think that, I think you're absolutely right. And it goes hand in hand with, I think, the rise of the 19th century freak show, particularly, with also this idea of control and ownership in the British context,

but also in the American context. It's very much that museumization of things that's happening in Britain around then going, we're collecting this, we own it, we have control over it. And it's, even in its oddity. And so, but I think it's absolutely what you're saying as well, those two things go hand in hand. So it's very 19th century in that sense, but it's the absolute antithesis on the other hand. And that's why it's so popular. Yeah. And I suppose that feeds into empire as well, right, this idea that, you know, certainly for Britain and the British Empire, like, we are, we are in control. We possess these strange things as a way of stabilising ourselves and our own, how we define ourselves. This is a way to define yourself against stuff that is different from you, basically,

and to make you feel better and more secure about it, which is a sort of, you know, age-old tale of human nature, I suppose. Talk to me then about Julia Pastrana. She is the person that we have come to discuss today. I know that we have a version of her handed down to us through the archive from the freak show itself. And there's going to be a lot of gaps in that knowledge and a lot of cruelty I'm imagining. So what can we strip back to the bare fact of what we actually know about her and her early life? Surprisingly little. That was one of the the things that stood out to me about this. Is it surprising, though?

Well, I mean, to the extent that she has been silenced, considering that she was notorious, I suppose, is the word that she was in her own time rather than famous. Because even with somebody like Joseph Merrick, who we have done a previous episode on, obviously he got to say an awful lot about himself, but Julia just doesn't have that agency. And one of the things that shows us that is that Julia

Pestrana is not even her real name. We don't know, as you said at the start of this, what her real name is. We know that she's born in Sinaloa in Mexico in 1834. It's likely, and we don't even know this, Maddie, it's likely that she was born into an indigenous community, but we're not 100% sure. We don't, now it's likely. We accept that that that's probably the case, but we don't know that from her, and we don't know that from any official sources. What we do know is, she is born with hypertracosis, which basically causes excessive hair growth over the entire body. It is sometimes referred to, or it was sometimes referred to as Werewolf Syndrome. So you can imagine the appeal that this might have had for the Victorian Freak Show, right?

Do we know anything about her childhood and how, before she becomes part of the Freak Show, how she is treated within her own community? I mean, you mentioned that we don't even really know the community into which she's born, but do we know something about her own life or her parentage or how she's treated in those first years? Again, not really. What we're going on is oral testimony from after the time she became famous and medical observations that were made then. But we think it's likely that she was separated from her parents or that she was orphaned or given up at a young age before she became part of the touring freak shows. And we think historians,

think that she came under the control of local authorities at some point. So that maybe there's some kind of institution involved, maybe an orphanage, which is why it leads to this idea that maybe her parents had given her up or she was taken from them. But very quickly, people see that there is the potential for money making here. And that then starts to shape the course of the rest of, who now we know as Julia's life. I mean, we shouldn't be surprised in the 19th century that institutions like orphanages or whoever it was that took her in, you know, was open to corruption and to, and to cruelty. like this. But it's, I mean, just immediately this is such a grim history and the fact that she's going to be monetized throughout her life is incredibly depressing. So talk to me about

the ways that she starts to become monetized and famous then, because, I mean, this is a long career and it's a career that's actually going to go beyond her own lifespan as well, isn't it? But what are the early stages of this? So let us introduce a man, Maddie Pellick. This is where it all goes. That's what this story is missing. Particularly wrong. So we have a man called Theodore Lent. He is an American or American German showman, basically.

He likely becomes aware of Julia in Mexico in the 1850s. And before this is when we start to get information about Julia, until then there's very little left. He is a showman, promoter, manager when he arrives in Mexico. He is specifically looking for freaks when he meets her. And she, once he gets his clothes into her, she becomes his absolute, this is the star of his show. And to the extent that he's not just content with having her as the star of his show to control her, he marries her in 1855.

So he very much legally then becomes the owner of this person. I'm so interested in this idea that he marries her because, you know, he's going to exhibit her as someone who is this contradiction of things. She's a woman, but she is also described as the ugliest woman in the world that she has this condition where she's covered in hair and she's described as looking like a bear or other animals. And she is compared to animals a lot. We're going to find that. The marriage, I mean, this is a very naive question. I suppose I have to ask it for the benefit. of the tape. Is there a world in which this is a romance and he wants to protect her from the life that she's had and whisk her off her feet and then actually the marriage is consensual? I mean, as I'm saying this, I know this is not going to be the case, but is there any hint that

there is a real relationship there? Or is this simply him using a legal process to control and collect her? This is a grey area because all of the negative stuff that you just said is just is true. It just is true. He's collecting her, he's controlling her. He absolutely takes utter control of her right now at this point in history. However, there are some researchers who argue that she was part of the commodification of herself, that she played into this, in order to gain herself freedom and agency and money and stability,

and that she was not a co-partner. You couldn't argue that, I don't think. And so it's interesting, right, because if that's the case, there's very little evidence to show that, but people have used circumstantial evidence to argue it. But if that's the case, you don't want to diminish any little bit of agency she might have had, that she might have actually been, you know what, I'm a bit of a businesswoman myself. So I'm going to, I'm in this situation, I'm going to try and make the best of it.

It's not in the archive to a great extent, but there are theories that she must have been to some extent involved because of the way that she behaved when she was on show. And we'll talk about that in a moment. And also because of the absolute secrecy that surrounds her earlier life because she was in a position to share that. She would have been able to share that. but by choosing not to, it feeds into the mystification of who she is now, as you said, the wearwoman, the ugliest woman in the world. So people, listen, it's all circumstantial.

I'm not sure how convinced I am of it, but I think it's worth noting simply because if she was involved, you wouldn't like to strip it from her. So it's a grey area. I agree. I agree. And it's something that we obviously can't really access in the archive and we have to just interpret from the gaps that are left behind. Okay, so Theodore Lent and Julia do get married.

married, he transports her to America and then to Europe and eventually she does end up in London in, I think, the late 1850s at this point. How is she, we've mentioned some of her sort of show names there, but how is she being marketed? What kind of act spectacle are people coming to see when they see her? So she arrives in London, as you say, in 1857. And she has advertised, you can find one of these posters online, by the way, if you Google it, you'll see them. Miss Julia Pastrana, the nondescript. Isn't that interesting? Oh, yeah. So, okay, so there's something there about her ambiguity. Is that about her, in the narrative that surrounds her, there's a lot of ambiguity that is purposefully emphasized

in terms of her gender, i.e. that she appears as a woman, presents as a woman, but has this hair across her body and of course across her face as well, importantly. You know, she kind of fits into the broader, like, bearded women genre of the so-called freak show. But also there's something ambiguous about her, and this is horrendous, but, you know, this is how it's built at the time that she's sort of part human and maybe part animal as well. And she's some kind of hybrid thing. So I can see how the word nondescript there is sort of maybe playing into that idea of the ambiguity of her background. Yeah, it's not so much a monster.

interpretation of nondescriptors and like, oh, she's not even worth describing. It's, this is, and nothing. No, what it's hinting at there is mystery, the unknown, exploration, discovery. Like, you almost get to put the categorization on her when you've met her, you know? Right. And that she's such a novelty that she doesn't fit into the existing taxonomies of the cabinet of curiosity or the circus or whatever, that she defies all these genres and boundaries that so-called civilisation has put in place to understand the world that she is something new and other and fascinating. What they do, and this is interesting,

I think maybe feeds into this idea that we're talking about of Julia herself, maybe protecting her own backstory in order to propagate this now show story. There's this backstory created for her that she comes from a tribe of hairy women so that she is one of a kind. Again, it's this idea of the colony. the empire, we've gone, we've explored, we've found, and here is our proof that we have done this, that we have traversed parts of the earth that no other men have ever gone before.

Yeah, I agree with that. So what is her life like on the stage then? Because, and again, I'm thinking about the gaps in the archive. What do we know or not know about how she was treated, how much she was in control? what does her early career look like in terms of her survival, her business acumen, is she successful as an exhibit? So, yeah, as she's traveling around the UK and the US, Julia Pastrana, this idea of the nondescript remains with her,

but we also have ideas that she's a bear woman, that she's an ape woman, that she's a bearded woman. So again, this is what we were referencing before, Maddie, when you said this crossover between human and animal, Is she part human? Is she part animal? And of course, the audience, as we said before, get to decide some of that. So it depends where their biases lie, what they're going to interpret her as, but they actually have power coming into that and staring at her. And by the way, it's not always on stage. They can get quite close to her. You know what I mean? So it's quite

intrusive for her physically as well. Yeah, I mean, this is something we find, isn't it, in the history of circuses more broadly, this idea that you can. kind of pay to be more proximate to some of the exhibits and the people involved in this. And there's often a kind of, you know, maybe an underlying sex trade going on there, that there's certainly kind of sexualization, that there's, you know, you can pay to have your fortune read by people at the circus outside of sort of performance hours and things like that, that you can pay to get a little bit closer to them. And I wonder if that's what's happening with her here.

Do we see her sort of sexualized? You know, I'm thinking about she's described as sort of animalistic and stuff. Is she also sexualized? And was it known that Theodore Lent was married to her? I mean, is their kind of curiosity there as well? Yeah, people were aware that Lent and Julia were married. As a matter of fact, they used it as part of the publicity to advertise for the show because, again, it adds to this idea of oddity that this man has married this woman

and that they might be living at home in a normal domestic environment, but she is so different and so othered. So it becomes part of the thing that we use. to sell her. Lent, or someone like Lent, if it's not him specifically, right beside her on stage or in the arena, talking through her body, her otherness, her difference. And Julia is 90% of the time just passively standing there doing nothing, just literally standing there. And this Lent then, or another showman is using this kind of pseudo-scientific language that we've referred to before to describe or in an attempt to legitimize what they're doing and link it to this growing scientific

interest. But it's interesting because we have that side of it, the show side, but then we have the audience side of it. So we have some reactions that come in. And Alexander B. Mott, who was a prominent American surgeon, this is unbelievable, really, considering that he was supposedly a man of medicine, a man of science. He believed that Julia was proof of mating between a human and an orangutan. Wow. I'm just going to sit with that for a minute. Okay. Yeah, yeah. So that's, you know, that's what you're dealing with. And then we have another British surgeon who says that his name is Francis Buckland. And he says, this is interesting in a way, but he says she is only a deformed Mexican Indian woman.

Only doing a lot of heavy lifting that. So what you're kind of pointing to here, I guess, is the medical debate. So outside of the show itself, there is medical debate going. on and real interest in who she is and what is, what her condition is why she is different from other people, like what is the scientific cause of that difference? And that there is debate, you know, between certainly the two people that you've quoted from there. Is she, does she become a focal point of medical interest across her career?

Or is it just people, you know, doctors kind of, I sort of imagine these surgeons and doctors coming to the show and then maybe publishing their own opinion afterwards. There's a way to almost make their own names or build on her fame as well. It feels quite sort of vampiric in that way. If you think about the spectacle of doctors either by invite or by their own curiosity coming to see Julia and being allowed by Lent to get very close and examine her in front of the rest of the audience because that was happening, it's actually visually, it's quite striking because then those people in the rest of the audience who are not scientifically minded necessarily

but are just there out of curiosity, again, it's another way for them to legitimize their interest. And they're like, well, I'm literally here during a science experiment. You know, I'm watching this unfold. And then, you know, you're talking about, you know, is it a way for them to gain their own kind of fame because they go on and they publish? Yes, they do. And those quotes from that publication are often used on the posters. Lent uses them on the posters to advertise. Julia's show. So this is all hand in hand, but one thing to point out as we, we, it's blatantly obvious I think, but it's worth pointing out again and again. We are not hearing Julia's voice. She, she is not appearing here. We have this avatar, this, this creation, this character

that Lent has invented, that, that may, Lenton maybe Julia has helped invent. We don't know, but certainly the real woman behind Julia Pastrana is not coming through at all. No, and this is someone we know from the archive spoke multiple languages. We know she was a singer as well. You know, she literally, her voice is missing here in terms of what we're getting from her. I do have an image of her here from, I believe, around 1860, so I guess the sort of height of her fame, really. It's a Victorian lithograph, so it's a sort of coloured print. And, I mean, it's a really extraordinary image.

It's, we see her in a sort of Victorian lithograph. Korean showdress that's a little bit raunchy in terms of the length of it. It finishes just below her knees. She has these very dainty, beautiful, white, tight, bedecked calves that are coming down in these tiny little blue shoes. You know, the idea is this, I suppose, this binary again coming in of ugliness and femininity, that the lower half of her body seems like any other idealized woman in this period. And in the top half, we have a sense of her condition, of the hair that was growing on her. She's shown as having a very large head and quite large upper limbs compared to the lower half of her body. And again, this kind of binary is being exaggerated.

She has this stunning head of black hair that's pinned up in this very elegant, fashionable way with a crown of flowers. And again, very feminine, very idealised for the time. and her face itself is covered in hair. She has what looks like a monobrow and a quite distinct beard. And I'm kind of interested in that. I wonder how sort of defined the hair on her face was, whether it was just kind of across her whole visage or whether she did have this kind of, you know,

more pronounced facial hair as we would kind of understand it. I don't know. But there's certainly this emphasis here on ugliness, a kind of masculinity, I suppose, as well. It's a really, really interesting image and one that I think initially you just see the character, the spectacle, the woman who is on the stage, the woman you would see if you went to one of these freak shows. I don't really get a sense of who she was. She's not looking at us in this image. Her hands are folded on her hips and she's looking out almost to the audience. You know, it's very performative. She's in this stance as though she were standing upon

the stage. It's really hard to access Julia, the woman. Listen, if you're a gammon, turn off now and go and listen to your usual histories about tanks and warfare because I'm about to say racism and misogyny in one sentence and you might not be able to bear it. Nobody panic. This is a lie. This image is a lie. It is blatantly racist and it is very misogynistic. It is not what Julia looked like.

We are lucky in that we have a photograph. And this is, I mean, yes, you can see that she has tracosis in the photograph. It's only one. She's on a side profile in the in the photograph. But she's rather beautiful. She is, they have darkened her skin in this as well. Yes. Yeah.

And it's in talking about that contrast as well with the upper body and the lower body that her lower legs have tites or stockings on. And they are white. They are specifically white where it has her bare arms, her bare chest and her, well, her sort of decontage. and her face are very, very dark. The depiction is very dark. But I want you to bear in mind the depiction of the face there, Maddie,

because that comes back later after she has died. Just trying to get back to her again and the factual realities of her life that we can uncover. What do we know about her agency within the freak show? I'm thinking particularly, you know, she's married to Lent. She's obviously making him a lot of money. Is she seeing any of that money? and what else do we know about their relationship other than the fact that it is used

as part of the publicity around her performance? Yeah, again, it's this grey area thing we talked about earlier, isn't it? So we know she's earning a wage from this in her own right, and obviously she's living with the man who is earning the most money from this. So is she, and this is a question we don't know,

is she benefiting in kind from that as well? what we do know is there is some form of sexual relationship between them because in 1860 Julia becomes pregnant with Lentz child and you know we just don't have the information as to

what the nuances of their private domestic situation was but we do know that she became pregnant so I suppose we'll leave that there but this is the beginning of the end of Julia because during childbirth she dies and she's only age 26. Like she's really young and she is touring in Moscow and interesting. I don't even think we give her own words when she when she dies because her final words are

supposed to be, I hope to be loved for what I am and not for what I look like. Look, she could have said that but there's absolutely no proof that she did. It appears in newspapers. I don't know. to me it feels too poet. Like look, if you are struggling through childbirth and it's going horrendously wrong as it is in this case, are you really going to be thinking about... Are you going to be quotable? I doubt it.

But it's likely she died of some kind of postpartum infection, which of course, you know, is relatively common in the 19th century. She did give birth to a son and that son inherited the hypertracosis. So, you know, and he himself dies about 35 hours later. So this is, this is tragedy, you know, writ large. Yeah, and I mean, it speaks as well. You know, I'm very, obviously at the moment, I'm very interested in the history of childbirth and midwifery

and the sort of medical care that women receive throughout history. And, you know, famously the 19th century is a time of kind of horrendous new interventions in the birth space, particularly by men. The sort of all-female midwife team is being pushed out at this point in favour of the sort of lone doctor or surgeon. And I wonder how much this is compounded in Julia's case

because people medically don't understand her body because she's been a spectacle and object and not a patient to be treated or understood and because she has this complicated medical situation, how, you know, we'll never know, I suppose, how difficult pregnancy and childbirth were for her and how I'd be interested in knowing how she was treated in, you know, during labour and obviously her son then being born with the same condition as her,

how much care was given of him, how doctors reacted to that. And, you know, you mentioned she's on tour in Moscow at this point, and she's not at home resting up. She's busy working in a, you know, a place that is foreign to her and she's on the road and she's far from home and far from, well, I was going to say

far from friends. I mean, she may always have been far from friends. She may not have had any at all. You know, I get the sense it's a very lonely life.

It's a real, real, real tragedy. It's incredibly disturbing to me to hear that. But we think we've hit the bottom, the rock bottom of this story, Anthony, and...

We ain't. It just keeps going down, doesn't it? So here's the thing. We are coming towards the end this story. Don't worry, you don't have another 45 minutes to sit through, but if you thought it was going to be relatively plain sailing from here, just buckle up for the last few minutes of this story because Lentz her husband and her manager, I guess, now... And the father of her child,

presumably as well. Now sells her body and her son's body to a professor Suckelov in Moscow University. The aim being to have her embalmed to go through some form of taxidermy, to go through some form of, not my word, but just to give you the description of stuffing. And she is then after this process, and by the way, the same thing happens to the child's body. They are then formally, they are then informally referred to as mummies. And then, Maddie, Lent buys them back from Sukhalov. He purchases his son and wife back. He purchases his son and wife.

And then, Maddie, He sends them on a tour of Europe. Their body is on a tour of Europe. And this is when people start to go, oh, hold on now. Hold on. This is getting a little, this is getting a little bit strange. But. Oh, really?

People respond like that? Some people do. Yeah, yeah. But, okay. You might say, oh, great, there's some hope here. There's decency in the world. But people flocked at the same time. You know what I mean?

People were still coming. and doctors and scientists continued with this idea of trying to legitimize the display, oh, this, we need this, we need to see this, people need to be aware of this. But the press were not comfortable. The press were not overly happy with this. And they particularly were not happy with the display of the child's body. And it was referred to as startling, as in like, oh gosh, this is, you know, there's entertainment, and then there's whatever this is.

And we seem to have crossed a line here. But can I just tell you this, despite that. I don't want to know it, but go on. The body of Julia and her son toured as late as 1972. No. Yes. What? And then by 1976, again, we're not at the lowest point yet.

1976, vandals damage the child's body and its remains are eaten by mice when they're in Oslo. in Norway. It's so grim. We don't need to tell people how grim it is. It's there for everyone to see. I feel so angry about this. It's, it's, I want to say that's the interesting thing. It's the grim thing as well. Just, just thinking about the moment when she is embalmed or as you say, taxidermy, you know, there's kind of a mixture of things used on the body, a mixture of different methods. And, you know, thinking about how she's described as animalistic and taxidermying, you know, seems like the appropriate thing therefore. And she's treat her remains and those of her tiny child are treated with such disrespect. But it's interesting that they're called mummies. And we've spoken on this show a lot, you know, about sort of ancient Egypt in the 19th and the early 20th century and sort of the colonial narrative that's tied up there and this idea of ancient Egypt being kind of mysterious. and othered the bodies of the dead from that world being brought back to Europe and particularly to Britain and displayed as curiosities. And I think there's something going on there as well.

You know, in death, she's sort of no longer a Mexican woman or an indigenous woman that her identity is shifted again. It's reinvented as almost an ancient Egyptian, right? this kind of, that she can, the idea of her being nondescript again is coming back in, that she sort of plays with all these boundaries and she can be moved across different lines and taxonomies and different definitions. I mean, the display of the body until 1972, that is truly remarkable to me. Who was putting it on display at this point? Is this still touring as a freak show?

I mean, what's going on here? Yes, yes, it is. is still touring as a freak show, but in, it gets worse. In 1979, her body is stolen and then refound in an Institute of Forensic Medicine at Oslo in the 1990s. But then, good news, good news, good news, good news. And we'll finish with good news. We need some of that, please. In 2012 to 2013, her remains were repatriated.

She was taken back to Mexico and hundreds of tend to. hundreds of people attended her Catholic burial in a cemetery in Sinaloa de Lava, and I apologize if I've butchered that pronunciation. And the mayor of her hometown at the time said at her funeral that Julia Pastrana, even though it wasn't her name, but at least we're honoring here, has come home and has been reborn among us. So I think there is a little bit of reclaiming of Julia at the end. One thing I want to point out is the final kind of thing, well, the two final things.

If you can see, if you'd like to, you can see those images of the touring mummies online. They are there. They're part of research that has gone on for the Julia Pastrana online project, which is, I'll read you a statement from them in a minute because it's really interesting. Those are not, although they are, the imagery there is not the image of human remains. it has been her, her, that remember I said to you, remember that face from that image that you described, Maddie, that we were like, you know, it looks quite animalistic. That is not the face of Julia Pastrana that I saw in the, in the photographic image. So there has, it seems to me,

at least, that the remains have been distorted when they went on display, that it was, they made it so much worse in order to attract so much more attention. The fact that the child that was born is 35 hours old when he dies, it's impossible that he was the size that he is displayed as. It's just impossible. So there's something else about manipulation going on there. I think that's potentially something for another day. But can I just give you this quote from Julia Pastrana online about the intentions of what they're trying to do? And I think it's great. This website focuses on Pastrana's life, presenting documents related to her performances, her marriage, and her travels in the US and Europe. Rather than accepting the account for a life given in promotional brochures,

Julia Pastrana online works to provide documentation that researchers and artists can use as the basis for further literary, artistic and critical production. So it's trying to reclaim the scraps of evidence we do have from Julia's real life, but also trying to alert us to the misdirection that's going on in all the things that were available publicly during her life of how we were trying to be, people were deliberately being duped during that time. Yeah, it's gathered together a comprehensive archive with a critical eye and it's asking us to be critical of it. Yeah, I mean, I think that's a really exciting and worthwhile thing. And how, you know, what a great circumstance that is that Julia, whoever she was, whatever her real name was, has people who are willing to do that work in the

present day. And so often, you know, we kind of hear people say, well, the past's in the past. You shouldn't judge it by those standards or whatever. But, you know, we're still living with the effects of the freak show and the way that it marginalised people and the way that it othered, you know, all kinds of conditions, body types, abilities, disabilities, genders, all of that. And because we're still living with that, we need to address them in meaningful ways. And I that's exactly what the Julia Bistrana online project is doing. So yeah, kudos to them for doing that work. It is very important, I think. I think you're absolutely right. I hate this argument of, oh, it's history. You're looking at it with modern lens. What other lens do people look at the past

through? You look at the past through the lens of your own time. People in the 1950s were looking at it through a particular lens. People in the 1820s were looking at history through a particular lens. That is how we look at history. It's the whole discipline of history. that we bring new ways of looking at things to the past. People have this terrible idea, and it shows how little engaged they are in really trying to discover histories. But they have this terrible idea that history is a finite thing

that's stopped on a particular date. And from thence, nothing new can be said about it. Thence, in brackets, question mark. When is then? Well, you know, I mean, this is a thing. Look, the past happened. We cannot change the past. It will always remain the past.

History is now. History is a process. It's a practice. It's a set of tools. It's a conversation. And it's happening now. And it will always happen now, whatever now is.

And it's new every time we turn to it. Yeah. I mean, I just, I think this has been a really fascinating history. It's been obviously an incredibly dark one. And I think it's one that's going to stay with me for a long time. And I do feel quite emotional hearing about the treatment of Julia's body in particular. You know,

and there's a broader conversation there to be. had as well about human remains in different institutions across the world. And I think that's certainly an episode or a series of episodes we could be open to, we would be open to doing. What's your takeaway from Julia's story, Anthony? My takeaway is, maybe. It's grim, but maybe let's not fall into the trap. Let's not do Julia the disservice of saying she was totally agent. agentless in this. There is a world in which we're dealing with somebody who might have been quite savvy, who might have been quite business-minded, who might have played a part in her own display. I don't know. It's hard to know because we don't know that for sure, Maddie. I wish I

could say that for certain. I don't know. But I just don't want to write her off if actually she had some agency. I'd love to think she may be there. But that's wishful thinking on my behalf. I can't prove that archivably. I think what we can say maybe is that she was a survivor. She was dealt a very difficult hand in the era in which she was born and lived. And she survived it for as long as she was able. Obviously, you know, meeting a tragic and difficult end. But how much agency she had, as you say, we can't tell.

But let's imagine that she had some. That's even that. We tried to be hopeful. And even that seems totally depressing. Let's imagine she had some. Yeah, let's imagine it. I can't see it, but let's imagine it. Right, Julia, we're thinking of you today.

And we're giving you an old nod to your, as Maddy says, to your survival, to your survival instincts, and to someday maybe finding out a little bit more about who you were, even what your real name was. But until then, you know, we'll keep talking about your life your existence and we'll see what we can discover in the future. Historians are never, you know, put off by difficult histories. We press into these things and maybe someday we'll find something new. Here, here. And I think it's given me an appetite for doing more. Histories of the

circus, of the freak show, I think there's so much more to say there and so much more to delve into. So if that's something that you're interested in, listener, then get in touch with us at afterdark at history hit.com. This has been a really difficult but interesting conversation, Anthony. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you for turning up and doing the job. Thank you. They pay me to do this, so yes.

Goodbye.