Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: La Pascualita

Episode Date: March 1, 2023

In a bridal shop in Chihuahua, Mexico a mannequin has been standing in the window since the 1930s that’s so lifelike some say it’s actually a corpse.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. Hey, and welcome to The Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck. And this is Short Stuff, the urban legend from Chihuahua edition. Yeah, I'd never heard of this. This is kind of fun. You found this, I think, La Pascualita

colon bridal shop mannequin or embalmed course. And that's from Lauren David at How Stuff Works. Yeah, for sure. And so La Pascualita is a bridal shop mannequin and has been keeping up her side of the bargain since the 1930s. By being a mannequin? Yeah, that's a long lived mannequin. I mean, how many mannequins do you think are at Macy's that were put into work, put to work in the 1930s? Just the old Marge. Okay, one out of thousands, right? So that in and of itself is pretty impressive. But what makes La Pascualita even more impressive or more interesting even is that a lot of people, especially in the Chihuahua area, believe that she's not a mannequin at all, that she's actually an embalmed corpse, specifically the embalmed corpse of the original owner

of La Popular Bridal Dress Shop in Chihuahua, Mexico. That's right. I urge you to go when you can safely do so, look up pictures of La Pascualita. And specifically, just put in, as your search term, La Pascualita mannequin hands. Yeah. Because that is one of the creepiest parts of this mannequin are these, I mean, it looks like no mannequin hands that I've seen. They look like at worst like a Madame Tussaud's dummy hands. I would say even more detail than that. I've never seen more life like non-life hands in my life. You've been to Madame Tussaud's? I have. And I'm telling you this mannequin hasn't beaten. Well, the story of La Pascualita, you know, it's an urban legend. And usually when there's an urban legend, you can't pinpoint like any head cannon. It's

usually just a story kind of passed around that morphs and changes. And that's probably the case here. But as the story goes, in the 1930s, the, she's known as the corpse bride, was going to get married. And her mom, there's a couple of different versions. One was her mother was not in favor of the marriage. And the daughter, it like broke her heart. So she died. I saw other versions where she was bitten by a black widow. Or there are other sort of like bug stings and bites that killed her, depending on who's telling the story. And separately, not all at once, just depending on the story. Right. And that mama was so distraught that she had this, her daughter's body mummified or embalmed and said, you're going to live in my window as the corpse bride forevermore.

Right. Yeah, which is kind of sweet in a lot of ways. Kind of. The woman, by the way, that you're speaking of, who had her daughter embalmed is named Pasquala Esparza, the owner of the bridal shop in the 30s, when La Pascualita made her debut. And local people said, look at those hands. I don't know what Madame Tussaud is yet, but this beats them. Yeah. Never seen hands like that in my entire life. But also, doesn't that mannequin bear a very strong resemblance to Pasquala's daughter, who's now dead? I think that's really odd. Did you think she did? I didn't think she looked a whole lot like her.

No, but we'll get to that in a minute. Okay. There's a reason why she didn't look a whole lot like there's a picture that you're referring to, I think, on the internet where it shows a picture of Pasquala's daughter and then a picture of La Pascualita the mannequin, right? Yeah, that sounds like a great cliffhanger. Okay. All right, we'll be right back. What's up, y'all? This is Questlove and, you know, at QLS, I get to hang out with my friends, Sugar Steve, Laia, Vontigolo, Unpaid Bill. And we, you know, at Questlove Supreme, like the nerd out and do deep dives with musicians and actors and politicians and journalists.

We give you the stories behind all your favorite artists and creatives that you have never heard. I'm talking about stories behind their life journeys and their works of art. I love QLS because of the QLS team supreme. They're like a second family to me. You're a fan of deep diving into music, everything, all monacking your musical history, and learning things about hip hop artists and things you never thought. Then you're a lot like me, but you're also a fan of Questlove Supreme. One of the things I love the most about this show is that we get to learn from the masters. I look at being on this show as my graduate program in music. Listen to Questlove Supreme on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Boland. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler, and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring, and mind

blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. All right, I'm hanging. Let's hear it. Oh, okay. Well, the reason that the mannequin La Pasqualita doesn't look anything like the daughter of Pasquala that is shown in that picture is that the woman in the picture is not the daughter of Pasquala Esparza. There was no daughter of Pasquala Esparza. Okay. Has that been super confirmed? Because I saw How Stuff Works dug up a woman named Teresa Cordova who did a

dissertation in 2012 from the University of New Mexico that had to do with this, went down to the shop to interview the... I don't know if it's still the same family. That's one thing I couldn't find. I don't believe it is, but the shop's been open the whole time, but I believe it's changed hands. All right. Changed creepy mummified hands. I had an interview lined up with a manager. The manager did not show up for the interview and they said that, you know, she got back in touch and they said, no, we think it's bad luck. So we're not going to do this interview. And she proposed, hey, this is all just a marketing thing because I have done some pretty extensive public record searching and I have not found that this daughter exists. So they're not going to do this

interview because it's negative publicity and this thing's a great marketing tool. Yeah. That's what I was basing in on Cordova's research. She searched for obituaries, church documents at the local church, historical records and found no record of Pasquala Esparza having a daughter or at all, let alone one that died. That's how I take it. Okay. As far as whether or not this could be a embalmed human being, not only did House of Orcs interview some embalmers and people in the funeral industry, but I got on Reddit, the source for all information. And there were quite a few embalmers who weighed in and all of them said, there's just no way, like the most super plus, plus 2.0 embalming that you could ever do on somebody. If you really

wanted someone to last a long time for some weird reason, there's just no way it would last these long, this long, especially in these conditions. Like La Pasqualita, if it were an embalm corpse, first of all, this is like, it's been standing in a sunny, bright window for 90 years. Yeah, in Chihuahua. That alone says, nope, not a corpse thing would have rotted by now, it would certainly not look like it does today, which is in pretty good shape, right? The second thing is, there are corpses out there that have been embalmed and kept preserved for very long time, like Lennon's corpse. I don't remember when he died, but I think it was the 30s as well. And if you look at him, he's still looking okay. He's clearly a corpse, but also

he's kept under extremely specific conditions. There's a team of people whose job it is, is to keep him up to snuff. Fresh, yeah. Yeah, essentially. And over the years, through all of these updates and fresh and ups, he's basically been turned into rubber. So you couldn't just embalm a corpse once, stand it up in a dress shop window for 90 years, and it would look like that. It just wouldn't. So yes, if you're a professional embalmer, you're like, this is not a corpse. It's just not a corpse. Yeah, much less change the clothes on this thing. Right. I mean, I didn't find any information on that, but unless she's wearing the bridal dress from the 1930s, is that true? I found that there's, so she supposedly has

varicose veins in her legs. I tried to find a picture of that, but I couldn't find one. Okay, here's why, because that piece of information that's bandied about is evidence that she's actually a corpse came from, I don't know if it's true or not, but it really fits into the idea of an urban legend where a woman unnamed, who supposedly worked in the dress shop, when, who knows, and was responsible for changing La Pasqualita, is the one who said that she had varicose veins. That woman might not exist either. Right. So again, we're just following the steps of a great urban legend where it just, over time, somebody said it, it became a really interesting thing. It's way more interesting than, that's a really

strange mannequin that they've had since the 1930s. And the dress shop itself is like, no, we're not going to rebuke this or dispute it. Like, it's great. It brings people to our bridal shop. Yeah. Did they ask the lady when she said, and she also has varicose veins. I've seen them, were they like, is that a blue pin in your front pocket? What pocket? Apparently also, there was another thing that's frequently said like, oh, well, this, this is great evidence too, that the owner requires that La Pasqualita be changed from dress to dress behind a drawn curtain. Oh, well, sure. So if she were a mannequin, why would you care? Right. But there is one question I have, Chuck, that I find fascinating. Nowhere on the internet is there even a suggestion

of the manufacturer of that mannequin. Oh, right. Or mention of any other mannequins that have hands like that. Nobody's stepped up and been like, look, she comes from the line of crazy hands from, you know, Nerfco that made mannequins back in the 30s. There's nothing like that out there. So I really do wonder who made that mannequin. It's really interesting. And I think that too is helping keep things going. Yeah, maybe it was Vincent Price. It could have been. Very creepy. Look at those hands, everybody. I'm telling you. I think to make it even more creepy, we should just sit here in silence for 30 seconds before we finish. Really? All right. I guess we're doing this. I'm going to say short stuff's out and then I'm just going to sit here.

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