Charles Eisenmann cabinet card, 1887 (Mitchell). From left: Moung Phoset's wife, Moung Phoset, Mah Phoon, and Mah Phoon's attendant, who helped her get around after she lost her eyesight. The famous "Sacred Hairy Family of Birma" begins with Shwe-Maong, who was born in the highlands of Laos in 1796. At birth the child was covered in silky, greyish-brown , quite a different color and texture than that of an ordinary Southeast Asian. This hair grew thickest on his face, in particular his ears and nose. He was also toothless. The strange little boy was brought to the court of Burma's King Bagydaw as a curiosity at the age of five. He took to imitating local monkeys to entertain the nobles, and was such a delight that Bagydaw elected to keep him in the court as a jester. Shwe-Maong first became known to the West in 1836, through an English naturalist named John Crawford. Crawford believed Shwe-Maong to be a member of a new species, which he called Homo hirsutus.

When Shwe-Maong was about twenty years old, King Bagydaw presented him with a slave girl for a wife. The couple had four children together, and of these, one, a girl born in 1828, was hairy like Shwe-Maong and possessed of very few teeth. Called Mah Phoon, the little girl was raised in the royal court and took Shwe-Maong's place as the court mascot after he was killed by robbers. After Bagydaw died, his successor Theebaw kept Mah Phoon in his court and even offered a reward to any man who would marry her, as long as the king found him acceptable. When an Italian man tried to marry her so he could take her on a European tour, Theebaw forbade it.

Mah Phoon eventually did find a suitable Burmese husband, and had three children: a normal son, a hairy son named Moung Phoset, and a hairy daughter named Mah Me. One report states that King Theebaw actually paid Mah Phoon's husband a retainer of 500 rupees a month to perpetuate Mah Phoon's "species". What became of the second, non-hairy son is a mystery, as he did not join his mother and siblings on tour and is mentioned only sporadically before that point.

Dr. Jan Bondeson, in his excellent book The Two Headed Boy and Other Medical Marvels, theorizes that Mah Me was actually Moung Phoset's daughter rather than his sister, but an 1871 article from The Indian Daily News describes the hairy family as "a woman of forty-five, a man of twenty, and a girl of eleven", suggesting the two were less than ten years apart in age. Likewise, a syndicated piece from 1883 relates, "Only one of [Mah Phoon's] two boys took after his mother, but shortly afterward the lady was blessed with a daughter who developed the maternal characteristics in a marked degree." Moung Phoset worked primarily as a carpenter, and he, his mother, and his sister earned extra income by exhibiting themselves to European visitors. This arrangement was first described in 1855 by an English missionary, Captain Henry Yule, who said they would not allow themselves to be shown for less than forty rupees.

Tantalized by explorers' descriptions, Western showmen were determined to secure these hairy marvels for their own shows. P.T. Barnum sought to import the hairy family as early as 1871, but the king would not allow them to leave the country. It was in search of the legendary Burmese family in 1882 that the Norwegian explorer Karl Bock discovered the hairy girl Krao. Then, in 1885, King Theebaw was overthrown and his palace burned. Mah Phoon and her two hairy children escaped into the jungle. An Italian officer who worked for King Theebaw, Captain Paperno, found them hiding and offered to take them to Europe. Mah Me died in June of 1886, evidently while in transit from Burma to England.

By the time Mah Phoon and her children came to London in 1886, Mah Phoon was 68 years old and blind, and able to do little else, entertainment-wise, but sit motionless on the show platform. Nevertheless she was described as a bright, lively old woman who loved to chew betel nut despite her lack of teeth. Her son, too, was pleasing to British observers: "[Moung Phoset] is of medium hight [sic.], with pale brown skin, and is fairly friendly, having been partly educated, and married to a maid-of-honor," reported one contemporary publication. Mrs. Moung Phoset was "a Burmese woman of good-humored appearance, who appears, as the exhibitor states, to take pride in her extraordinary husband."

P.T. Barnum traveled to England at the end of 1886 to meet this extraordinary family, with the hope of bringing them to the United States for his Greatest Show On Earth. When he arrived he found a mob of other showmen, Americans and Europeans alike, bidding frantically for the honor of showing Mah Phoon and Moung Phoset. In the end Barnum made the winning offer of $100,000 (about $2.3 million!) to their English managers, Archer and Farrington, for a one-year contract beginning in March of 1887.

Mah Phoon died just short of fulfilling the contract, in February of 1888. She received a traditional Burmese burial in a Washington, D.C. cemetery.

When she was born, Dora Gutterman, a Jewish girl from Flatbush Avenue, New York, was covered in fine hair, which became thicker and coarser over a matter of weeks. Her parents were quite poor and had seven other children, so they consented to place little Dora on exhibition. As a sideshow star Dora earned $300 a week, enough to support her family comfortably.

By 1930, Dora had tired of being a freak and actively sought to have her and other permanently removed. "If I had a clear skin, and could use make-up, and wear the beautiful clothes I can afford, I'd be better looking than half the women that come to the circus," she explained to a reporter. She visited an electrolysis clinic and spent hours under the needle - but to no avail. Her beard grew back just as thick as it had been before treatment. At last, resigned to her fate, she began investing in real estate in Brooklyn. During the sideshow's off-season she collected rents and oversaw repairs herself; during the touring months she delegated responsibilities to another agent.

One of the saddest stories in the history of human prodigies is that of Julia Pastrana, the so- called "Female Nondescript". Born in western Mexico around 1834, Julia was a "Digger" Indian who, fully grown, stood just four and a half feet tall. (Since "Digger" is a blanket term applied by European settlers to any indigenous group that ate roots, regardless of tribal affiliation, it is impossible to know exactly what culture Julia came from.) She was covered in black hair and possessed a full beard and mustache and all the telltale facial features of , as well as the usual second row of teeth. As a young girl she became separated from her tribe and was sent to live with Pedro Sanchez, the governor of the state of Sinaloa to work as a servant. Dr. Jan Bondeson, in his book A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities probably the most complete biography of Julia Pastrana to date reports that she was "ill used" by Sanchez, and at the age of about twenty she left his employ, determined to return to her tribal homeland.

During her journey home she was intercepted by an American named Rates, who promised her great riches if she would let him take her on a tour of the United States. She spent about three years on the American dime museum circuit, submitting to examinations by prominent medical men who proclaimed her to be everything from a bear-human hybrid to an orangutan-human hybrid to a typical specimen of a Digger Indian. In fact, it was even claimed that, as Digger Indians go, this one was exceptionally tall, beautiful and human-like. A museum advertisement from 1857 proclaimed, "The Bear Woman is a curious and interesting little lady, whose entire face and person are covered with thick black hair. She has also a resemblance to the Orang- Outang, and in fact it would seem that she is half Monkey. Julia was found in Mexico, in a cave with animals of different kinds, and is pronounced by Dr. Mott, of New York, a Hybrid creature. During her exhibition, the Bear Woman entertains her visitors by singing pretty little romances, and by Dancing a Highland Fling, Polka, &c. Julia is very good natured, she behaves herself like a little lady and wherever she is exhibited she becomes the pet of all ladies and gentlemen, and by her strange appearance in a glistening Spanish costume, she highly amuses the children."

Julia's luxuriant costumes and sprightly dances did little to hide the sad truth, however. Her succession of showmen first Rates, then a J.W. Beach, and lastly a Mr. Theodore Lent - kept the little woman in seclusion, fearing that if the public saw her in the street they might not pay to see her on stage. Thus, her worldview was markedly stunted, despite her normal intelligence and great capacity for emotion. Though onstage she was costumed like a princess in her spectacular gowns and glittering jewels, spectators came not to admire her beauty or talent but to gawk in revulsion at what soon became known as "the ugliest woman in the world". Friends and she was permitted to have a few of these recalled that Julia spoke like a child and naïvely trusted almost anyone who behaved kindly towards her. Lonely and miserable, Julia wanted nothing more than to leave her glamorous life and return to Mexico. Theodore Lent, her manager, knew he must take a bold step to secure his livelihood. He asked her to marry him.

Knowing nothing of such real-world issues as love, other than what she had read in books, Julia accepted his offer. Soon she became pregnant; perhaps Lent was trying to have two freaks for the price of one. Julia went into labor in Moscow on March 20, 1860, accompanied by three doctors. The difficult delivery, complicated by Julia's tiny stature, caused irreparable injuries to both mother and child. Wounded by the doctors' forceps, Julia developed peritonitis. Theodore Lent, Jr., who was covered in black hair just like his mother, began to suffocate soon after birth and, despite the doctors' best efforts to revive him, clung to life for just three days. Julia died after five days, on March 25. Her last words, according to author Jan Bondeson: "I die happy, knowing I have been loved for my own sake." (Frederick Drimmer, in his 1973 book Very Special People, relates that she said the "he loves me for my own sake" line on the morning of her marriage, to dispel malicious rumors to the contrary.)

The loss of his wife and son was only a temporary setback for the scheming Lent, however. He began searching for a mortician to embalm the bodies of Julia and Theodore, Jr., for future display, and soon learned of a Professor Sokoloff, right there in Moscow, who was said to be the greatest embalmer in the world. So well-preserved were Sokoloff's corpses that they looked like wax dummies rather than real, dead humans. It was said that Sokoloff used a special secret formula that prevented withering of the flesh; however, the truth was that he simply stuffed the bodies, like hunting trophies, and was exceptionally good at hiding the seams.

Dressed in one of her finest Spanish dresses, Julia Pastrana was soon on tour again, with Theodore, Jr., at her side, wearing a miniature sailor suit and mounted on a pedestal. An English naturalist named Buckland, who examined the stuffed corpses, wrote, "There was no unpleasantness, or disagreeable concomitant, about the figure; it was almost difficult to imagine that the mummy was really that of a human being, and not an artificial model."

Throughout the 1870s the two hairy corpses continued to earn considerable income for Lent. Then, around 1880, he added an extra attraction to his show: a second, living bearded lady. This newcomer was Marie Bartels, a native of Karlsbad, Germany, but Lent rechristened her Zenora Pastrana, sister of the famous Julia Pastrana. Marie was approached by Lent when she was eighteen years old, and wooed with candies and promises of world travel in exchange for her hand in marriage. The bearded girl agreed. Lent taught his new wife to ride bareback for their show. And, far from being horrified by appearing onstage with her dead "sister" and "nephew", Zenora preferred it to appearing without them at least this way, people would know she and Julia were not the same person. Lent began suffering from spells of dementia not long after his marriage to Zenora. One eyewitness saw him tear up money and throw it into the River Neva in St. Petersburg surely an act of an irrational man. In 1884 he died of "brain disease" (likely syphilis). Zenora remarried and lived until at least 1900. Julia's and Theodore, Jr.'s bodies experienced a comeback in the 1970s, when the morbid artifacts, housed in a natural history museum in O They also were shown throughout Norway and Sweden. They were last seen intact in 1975; later, vandals broke into a museum where the bodies were on exhibition, broke off Julia order to steal her dress, and badly marred her face. Sawdust spilled from the gash, revealing the 100-year-old "secret" of Sokoloff's embalming technique. The tiny corpse of Theodore, Jr., was thrown into a ditch behind the museum, and was eaten by mice. pitiful condition, still has not been laid to rest; it resides in storage in the Oslo museum and is still available for viewing by medical professionals. A photograph of the body as it appears today can be seen in the 1999 documentary Freaks Uncensored!. What has become the most famous image of Julia Pastrana (above) is actually a photograph of her corpse, taken around 1890. Her crucifix necklace hides the large seam up the center of her chest.

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In his last letter to rival Herbert Spencer, the great Charles Darwin spoke of a "missing link" between man and ape, which would prove once and for all his theory of humans' evolutionary descent from apelike ancestors. The idea of the missing link was seized upon by countless opportunists seeking to earn a quick buck and perhaps make history at the same time. Dozens of humans with genetic anomalies, from the very hairy to the mentally handicapped, were presented by enterprising showmen as "Darwin's Missing Link".

Perhaps the most famous of these was Krao, a Thai girl born around 1872 in a small village in Laos. A thin layer of coarse black hair covered the child's body from head to toe, and she was also endowed with supernumerary teeth, a secondary feature of hypertrichosis, and hyperextensible joints, a common genetic variation in humans. Krao was first discovered in Laos by a Norwegian explorer, Karl Bock, and his assistant, Professor George Shelly, scouts for the showman G.A. Farini who had heard of Barnum's success with the Burmese hairy family (Mah Phoon, Moung Phoset and Mah Me) and sought a hairy freak of his own. Following leads from local people, Bock stumbled into Krao's native village, where a mother and father were exhibiting their remarkable hairy daughter as a curiosity. When the little girl wandered away from her down the cheeks. The rest of the face is covered with a fine, dark, downy hair, and the shoulders and arms have a covering of from an inch to an inch and a half long." She was even rumored to have a tail: "There is, it is said, a slight lengthening of the vertebrae, suggestive of a caudal protuberance." (All of these attributes, except for the supposed tail, are consistent with ordinary hypertrichosis not with any subhuman status.)

Her monkey-like features were excitedly reported second-hand by dozens of newspapers, yet anyone who had the opportunity to meet her face-to-face became immediately skeptical. In contrast with her apelike appearance were her quiet, refined personality and keen intelligence. After just a few weeks in London she had already learned a few words of English and a few words of German. And, despite her whiskered face, she was undoubtedly feminine, taking great interest in fancy dresses, ribbons, and jewelry. She called Farini "papa" and Professor Shelly "uncle", and allegedly preferred the new arrangement to her old life. "No houses, no shops, no toys, no fine dresses in Laos," the newly Westernized child told a reporter in her broken English. She displayed the proper modesty of a Victorian lady and showed appropriate affection for her adoptive family.

So successful was the Aquarium show that Farini and Shelly brought Krao to New York the following year. There, she was exhibited in Central Park and examined by a number of men of science. Previous doctors' doubts of her monkeydom notwithstanding, Shelly earnestly reported that "the hair on her back grew downward and inward, as it does on the apes; that the dimensions of her head corresponded with those of the orangs, and that, like them, she had 13 dorsal and 4 lumbar vertebrae, instead of 12 dorsal and 5 lumbar, as a properly built human being ought to have" and acted most impressed when she picked up a handkerchief with her toes. Even the fact that Krao didn't like candy was taken as evidence that she was not fully human. parents, they called her back with the word krao, which Bock assumed to be her name. Bock and Shelly paid the parents $350 to take the child with him back to England.

In London she was presented to and ultimately adopted by Bock's employer, the eccentric showman Guillermo Antonio Farini. In actuality, Farini was William Leonard Hunt, a Canadian medical school dropout from Bomanville, Ontario, but he styled himself as an "Italian savant" and had a penchant for "adopting" underage performers, sometimes with questionable motives. The most famous of these was "Lulu", a child acrobat who was born a boy but lived as a girl for most of her life.

Farini first exhibited Krao, then eleven years old, at the Royal Aquarium at Westminster in London in late 1882. The description of Krao published at the Royal Aquarium exhibition is peppered with references to her simian attributes: "The eyes of the child are large, dark and lustrous; the nose is flattened, the nostrils scarcely showing; the cheeks are fat and pouch-like; the lower lip only rather thicker than is usual in Europeans; but the chief peculiarity is the strong and abundant hair. On the head it is black, thick and straight, and grows over the forehead down to the heavy , and is continued in whisker-like locks

From New York, Krao embarked on a dime museum tour, beginning with Philadelphia's Chestnut Street Dime Museum. By now the child was quite adept at manipulating crowds and eliciting wonder. She signed her pitch cards in fancy penmanship, picked up objects with her toes, and opened her mouth to reveal her extra teeth and the supposed pouches in her cheeks where she was said to store nuts. She found that Westerners especially loved her embellished tales of her wild life in Laos, living in the trees with her monkey-like parents and other members of her strange, simian race.

Soon, Krao and her handlers had concocted an entire storybook world of hairy ape-men. The Krao-Moneik were a tribe of "man-monkeys" from the deepest jungles of Laos, one of the last unexplored regions on Earth. Any European explorer who attempted to penetrate the region soon died of malaria. The Krao-Moneik took to the trees to avoid the swampy ground and the venomous snakes that patrolled it. They lived in huts woven from the branches of living trees and climbed with their hands and feet like monkeys. They had no knowledge of fire; their diet consisted of dried fish, wild rice and coconuts. Their primitive language consisted of only about 500 words, and they had no religion.

Bock and Shelly had discovered the Krao-Moneik on an expedition with ten native Laotian soldiers who led them deep into the bush on elephant-back. The hairy people remained elusive, as their keen sense of smell enabled them to evade the search party be climbing high into the trees. After passing numerous empty huts, the party stumbled upon a family: father, mother, and daughter, who were naked except for their heavy coats of black hair. The two adults were captured with little resistance, but the child Krao fought fiercely and bit and scratched her captors. For emphasis of this point, Shelly displayed an undeniably human bite mark on his arm.

Bock and Shelly took the hairy family back to the king of Laos, who had funded the expedition. He showed a great fondness for the mother and kept her in his court as a sort of mascot. The party then departed for Bangkok, where they would board a ship to England. On the way, an outbreak of cholera killed the hairy father and three of the Laotian soldiers, and made Bock very ill. When the diminished party reached Bangkok, Bock and Shelley successfully petitioned the king of Siam to take the little girl back to Europe for scientific study. The king found Western science silly but nonetheless desired to help the English people. He granted permission, and Bock, Shelly and Krao landed in England on October 24, 1882. With great effort Krao was taught to speak, wear clothes, and eat cooked food.

All this humbug made Krao one of the biggest draws in America, and its earnest scientific undertones elevated her above a simple museum freak. In 1885 she left the museum circuit and went on tour with John B. Doris' New Mammoth Shows, a minor Midwestern circus, as part of the menagerie, with a billing that became increasingly more ape and less human: "Her skull is entirely flat above the lower part of the brain. The upper jaw comes forward in an angle of 54 degrees. Her head is as broad as it is long. She has pouches inside her cheeks, where she stores food away like apes. She uses her toes equally as well as her hands. Her fingers bend back to the dorsal surface of her hands, so do her toes. She has ears and nose devoid of any cartilage, the nose and ears being only flesh. She has one extra backbone like the gorilla and chimpanzee's, the man monkeys. She has 13 pair of ribs, like those of an ape, and the same that Adam had before Eve's creation." The adolescent missing link earned $200 a week (about $4,500) less than contemporaries Jo-Jo, the Dog Faced Boy and Millie-Christine, the Two- Headed Nightingale, but still quite a handsome salary.

One of the visitors to the Doris circus in St. Joseph, Missouri, that year was E.S. Cole, a former missionary to Siam. Miss Cole knew Krao in her native Siam in 1878, before she was a missing link. The little hairy girl, Miss Cole said, was treated as an oddity for her hairiness, but her secondary attributes her tree-climbing skills, prehensile toes, cheek pouches, and extra bones were pure fabrication. Krao was a genuine freak, yes, but not a missing link. Miss Cole's protests were evidently ignored, however, as Krao was billed once again as a missing link when she appeared the following year at New York's Ninth and Arch Museum with legless acrobat Eli Bowen and glass-eater Bill Jones.

Krao established her permanent home in Brooklyn, where she worked at New York City's numerous dime museums and at Coney Island as a bearded lady. She lived with a German couple, Mr. and Mrs. Jacob Zeiler, with whom she was close friends and could converse in German. She had her own apartment in the Zeilers' building, where she cooked and kept house for herself. Her favorite hobby was the violin. "Music makes me happy here," Krao told a reporter in 1903, gesturing to her heart. Entirely self-taught, she played by ear in a style that was more folk than classical. She also loved to crochet and was quite fond of books. On the streets of the city she kept her beard covered with a veil. She also maintained a close friendship with the bearded lady Grace Gilbert until Grace's death in 1924.

Krao fell ill with influenza in 1926 and passed away on April 16. She wished to be cremated so no one could exhibit her body after her death, but New York law insisted that she must instead be buried. At her funeral, the rest of the Coney Island freaks paid their respects, and fat lady Carrie Holt said, "If anyone has gone to heaven, that woman has."

Photos: Top, Krao, about 14 years old, with G.A. Farini (Monestier). Center, Krao as a bearded lady. Bottom, Krao with carnival employees (Rusid).

Zola Williams, the wife of alligator-skinned man John H. Williams of Elwood, Indiana, billed herself as two attractions in one: a bearded lady and a fat lady. (Since both obesity and hairiness can be caused by thyroid conditions, it's not that uncommon for someone to be both.) The Williams' earliest appearance seems to be in 1937 at a Ripley's competitor called "Ducky- Wucky's Odditorium of the World's Strangest Freaks", alongside armless lady Rosa Lee. Zola went on to enjoy an independent career with the Clyde Beatty Circus sideshow in the 1950s.

"The Bearded Lady was there. Her name is Zola Williams and she has a Texas accent. She carried several shopping bags and wore a 'house dress' and a beaded sparkling crown on her head. Zola said this was her 24th season with show business. 'I'm the only true bearded lady,' she said. 'The only one.'" (Tucson Daily Citizen, September 25, 1952)

In private life "Mme. Adrienne" was Adele Kis, a Hungarian native born around 1884. Her husband was a lion tamer and the two were said to be quite a devoted couple who could be seen walking hand-in-hand on the grounds of the Budapest circus where they worked.

Adele's stay in the U.S. was apparently short. She was booked with Coney Island for the 1928 season as "The Hungarian Bearded Lady". A low point of her career was when another performer cut off her beard while she was sleeping. Adele successfully sued for $2,500 in damages. Adele returned to Budapest, where she died in January of 1934. Her heartbroken husband cut a lock from her beard to keep as a memento.

The eldest of four children born to a Swiss farming family, Joséphine Boisdechêne was born in Versoix, Switzerland, on March 25, 1831, just eleven months after her parents were married. At birth, she was covered in a sparse coat of dark hair. A doctor reassured the family that the hair would fall out soon; it was just lanugo, he said, the fine down that covers all babies in the womb nevermind that lanugo is pale and silky, while Joséphine's pelt was coarse and dark. The hair only grew darker, longer and thicker as little Joséphine grew older. Local doctors in the little town of Versoix were perplexed by the case, so they referred the Boisdechênes to the nearest big city, Geneva. Alas, the physicians of Geneva were of no help either. They recommended waiting until little Joséphine was eight years old before attempting any diagnosis or treatment.

The Boisdechênes reluctantly obeyed. They returned to Versoix and raised the little girl the best they could for the next eight years. At the end of the waiting period, they took her back to Geneva for a final diagnosis. The whiskers on Joséphine's face were thicker and coarser than the typical man's beard, the doctors concluded. Any attempt to shave or pluck the beard would only entice it to grow in thicker. Disappointed, the Boisdechênes returned once again to Versoix, where they followed doctors' advice once more and did not attempt to cut or shave little Joséphine's beard. Determined to make the best life for their daughter, beard or no beard, however, they sent her away to boarding school.

Then, Mme. Boisdechêne died, and M. Boisdechêne, unable to care for three young children by himself, brought Joséphine home. Joséphine was just fourteen years old, with a glossy black beard that reached five inches at its longest hair. By now, the extraordinary bearded girl was well-known around Versoix and neighboring villages. Soon, M. Boisdechêne began receiving letters from showmen who wanted to exhibit his daughter.

At first, M. Boisdechêne staunchly refused to let strangers make a show freak out of his daughter. After all, she may have been extraordinary, but she was still his child, and now she was a surrogate mother to her three small siblings. However, the offers became more and more enticing, and at last, in 1849, an unnamed showman from Lyons, France, offered M. Boisdechêne enough money to put his objections to rest. He leased out his farm, sent the other three children to boarding school, and went on tour with Joséphine.

Joséphine and her father toured Switzerland and France, at first with the showman's help and then on their own. In Paris she met with Napoleon III and received a gift of a massive diamond from the soon-to-be emperor (invoking the wrath of the Empress Eugénie, some say). It is said that Joséphine greatly admired him and styled her beard after his, and wore the diamond proudly nestled in her whiskers. While appearing at Troyes, Joséphine then 18 years old made the acquaintance of Fortune Clofullia, an aspiring landscape painter, who also had a beard. After just three months' courtship, Joséphine and Fortune were married. He joined his bride and father-in-law on tour, selling his paintings along the way.

From France, Joséphine, Fortune and M. Boisdechéne made their way to Londonfor the Great Universal Exposition. Joséphine was such a success there that they made it their home for over a year. Then, on December 26, 1851, Joséphine gave birth to her first child, a girl whom she named Jane Zelia Fortunne Clofullia. The baby girl, who was not hairy like her mother, proved to be an excellent promotion for Joséphine's show career. She obtained a medical certificate affirming that the baby was really hers, and began appearing with child in arms as "The Bearded Mother". Doubts of Joséphine's womanhood were extinguished by the sight of the new mother cradling her infant daughter. The baby lived just eleven months, but by the time she succumbed, Joséphine was already quite pregnant again. Her second child, a boy named Albert, was born just two months after the baby girl was buried. And, to the Clofullias' delight, Albert was covered in hair just like his mother.

The birth of a hairy baby to a bearded and hairy mother attracted P.T. Barnum's attention, and he paid to have the Clofullias brought to the United States. Soon Mme. Clofullia was a star attraction at the American Museum in New York City, with little Albert billed as "The Infant Esau". Museum-goers loved the hairy mother and baby, or at least most of them did one, William Charr, believed that Joséphine was really a man in women's clothing, and took Barnum to court for his twenty-five cents' admission plus damages. On the testimony of M. Boisdeschêne, M. Clofullia, and countless doctors, Barnum won the case. (As one might expect, however, it was later revealed that the entire "suit" had been orchestrated by Barnum himself a tactic he would recycle with almost all his bearded ladies for the remainder of his career.)

Joséphine's death date is usually given as 1875, though it's unknown at present where or how she died.

Frances Murphy claimed she was born in Madagascar around 1910 and abandoned at birth at a Franciscan monastery. Her name, she said, was given to her by Father Partick Murphy, who brought her to the United States where she attended the prestigious Schuster-Martin School of Drama in Cincinatti. She had had a beard "ever since she could remember". All humbug aside, Frances was an American-born transsexual who, at over six-feet tall and 240 pounds, had substantial difficulty "passing" as a woman. Nevertheless, she was able to register at the University of Southern California as a woman, and had special permission from a court in Santa Monica to wear women's clothing in public. Her career opportunities limited by her appearance, however, she turned to the sideshow circuit, where she easily parlayed her gender ambiguity into a half-and-half act, calling herself Francois-Francoise. During the 1939 New York World's Fair, she got a job at the Strange As It Seems exhibit (a Ripley's Believe It Or Not?! competitor) as "The Gorilla Girl" for which she grew a five-inch, red, curly beard. Once, when Orson Welles was in the audience, the talker paid homage to the actor's famous War of the Worlds broadcast by introducing Frances as "The Lady from Mars". Frances apparently had no trouble attracting suitors, despite her hulking size and substantial whiskers. During her World's Fair engagement, she attracted the attention of a certain Frank, who lived in Michigan and claimed he'd been following her career for the last six years. Frances had been married once before, she said, but her beard had caused such embarrassment for her husband that she did not want to put enough husband through the same hardship. So enamored was Frank with the bearded giantess that he even threatened to kill himself if she rejected him. (It's unknown whether Frank really existed, or whether this was a publicity stunt or even an oblique way of "outing" Frances.) The same season, Frances appeared in court after an encounter in a subway terminal with John Durkin, a New York City chauffeur. Frances was descending the stairs to the subway with her beard covered with a veil, when Durkin grabbed her from behind and attempted to kiss her. Frances swung around and knocked Durkin to the ground, and held him until the police arrived. "I have read of these occurrences, but never figured a thing like this would happen to me because of my appearance," Frances told police while Durkin simply groused, "If I had known she was bearded, I never would have touched her." The case went to court, and when asked by Durkin's attorney if she were really a woman, she replied indignantly, "Of course I am." The judge ordered a medical examination, which revealed that Frances had male genitals. She was arrested for perjury, while the assault charge against Durkin was dropped.

Jane W. (or Mary A.) Devere was born in Brooksville, Kentucky, around 1859, of Jewish and French parentage. On October 8, 1883, she married Captain J.W. Devere, a showman. Her beard, which reached 14 inches at its longest hair, still holds with world record for the longest beard belonging to a woman. She was a devout Episcopalian and made time to go to church every Sunday, even while touring.

Jane, known as "The Kentucky Wonder", was a snake charmer and acrobat in addition to being a bearded lady. Her long and varied show career included Sells Bros., Circus, Campbell Bros. Circus, Yankee Robinson Shows, and Patterson Carnival Co. It was while playing an engagement in Oelwein, Iowa, with the latter company that she suffered a heart attack and died on June 18, 1912.

Considered quite a beauty in her youth, Christine married young to a farmer, Baker M. Twyman, of Peoria, Illinois. After the birth of her son, Baker Jr., she began sprouting hair on her cheeks. and only made the hair grow in thicker, until she possessed a full, healthy beard. The Twymans consulted specialists and spent thousands of dollars on treatment, but her beard remained.

When Mr. Twyman fell ill and was unable to work his farm, Christine blamed herself, fearing that he had worried himself sick over her and her beard. She felt the only way she could support her husband and son, without having to sell the farm, was to join a carnival sideshow. She left her son at home, vowing never to let him see her as a carnival freak.

While visiting Los Angeles on a carnival engagement, Christine met a woman who had also been bearded, but had undergone electrolysis. Christine had saved up enough of her carnival earnings that she could opt for the treatment herself. In the middle of the 1924 carnival season, she sneaked off and had her beard removed. The show found a last-minute replacement in "Kara", a gruff Syrian-American woman from Brooklyn. Kara, unlike Christine, had "an aggressive manner, and seemed to revel in her freakish whiskers" while Christine had seemed perpetually embarrassed. Despite her discomfort with sideshow life, however, Christine was welcomed with open arms by the carnival family, who viewed the calm, soft-spoken, intelligent woman as a sister. Even the roustabouts treated her with utmost respect.

Beardless, Christine returned to Peoria, no longer ashamed to show her face to her young son.

At the time of her birth in Williams County, Ohio, on February 2, 1876, Grace Hester Gilbert was covered in a layer of fine hair, and within a few years she had developed a full beard. When she was a young child, her family relocated to a farmstead five miles north of Kalkaska, Michigan. Although she enjoyed farm work, Grace knew there was money to be made in the life of a professional bearded lady. She signed her first contract with Ringling Bros. at Defiance, Ohio, in 1901. She alleged that her beard measured 18 inches four inches longer than that of Jane Devere, the confirmed record-holder. Although Grace was a redhead, she was coerced into bleaching her hair and beard with peroxide for the show, and her title was "The Girl with the Golden Whiskers". In public she covered her whiskers, which she called her "alfalfas", with an opaque veil.

A thickly-built farm girl, Grace was a standout among traditional bearded ladies for her rejection of stereotyped femininity. In her private life, she preferred to wear pants, and liked the social company of men rather than women. She enjoyed manual labor and often helped assemble tents and riggings for the circus. During the off- with chores. She did have a domestic side, however, and counted lacemaking among her favorite hobbies.

When she closed the 1910 Hagenback-Wallace circus season in South Bend, Indiana, Grace married 53-year-old farmer Giles Edwin Calvin, on October 27. The judge who married them mistook beardless Calvin for the bride and Grace for the groom. She and Giles had been sweethearts when she was a young girl, Grace explained, but she expressed no interest in a long-term romance at the time. Then, after his wife died, she took pity on him and rekindled their friendship. He began following her on tour, begging for her hand in marriage, and at last she accepted. Her plan was to leave showbusiness and help her husband on the farm. Grace died at home on January 11, 1924, of unknown causes.

Baroness Sidonia de Barcsy (pronounced "Barchy"), born in present-day Budapest on May 1, 1866, was a double rarity in the show world: a genetically-female bearded lady, and a true member of a royal family. Her husband was Baron Antonio de Barcsy. The lovely young Baroness was beardless until the age of 19, when she gave birth to her son, Nicu, who weighed just two and a half pounds at birth and would stand only three feet tall as an adult. Twelve days after Nicu's birth, Sidonia began growing hair on her cheeks. Her doctor ordered that all the mirrors be removed from her house, lest she be frightened to death by the sight of her hairy face. It was no use delaying the inevitable, however; Sidonia was mortified to find herself possessed of a full, eight-inch beard within just a few weeks. Her husband the Baron expressed a fondness for her new bewhiskered look and even threatened to divorce her if she shaved.

The Baron brought his family to Western Europe in the 1890s to pursue a career in sideshow and museum exhibition. Though some stories blame political upheaval for the Baron's exodus, the latter decades of the 19th century were in fact a time of relative peace and prosperity in Austria-Hungary. A second, more believable account is that the Baron lost a fortune in poor investments and placed his family on exhibition to earn it back. And he was successful: Sidonia was, after all, the world's only bearded mother of a midget son, and the Baron himself, at nearly four hundred pounds, made a passable Fat Man. The "De Barcsy Troupe" was such a success that they soon had enough money to travel to America. They did so in 1903, and for the next nine years were a fixture with the Ringling Bros. and Campbell Bros. Circuses.

While the family was wintering in Drummond, Oklahoma, with Campbell Bros. Circus in 1912, the Baron took ill and died. Sidonia remarried, to the eccentric trick roper C.H. "Cherokee Buck" Tischu, who styled himself as "The Indian Wild Man", and who allegedly treated her and Nicu quite poorly. He eventually abandoned Sidonia and Nicu and fled to Texas, though Sidonia never legally divorced him. After her death, Buck married Dolletta Dodd, the famous midget mother.

Sidonia de Barcsy suffered from diabetes for many years, and she died on October 19, 1925 at her home in Drummond. She was cremated in Kansas City, Missouri, and her ashes interred alongside those of her first husband the Baron. Her son "Little Nick", who had taken the title of Baron after his father's death, would have inherited a $40 million estate in Hungary, but a fire in Illinois some years before had destroyed the papers proving his birthright. He went on to perform at Coney Island as a magician and escape artist until 1932, when he retired to Enid, Oklahoma, not far from Drummond. He spent his time training his trick dog, Snowball, practicing card tricks, and tending his chickens and a flock of inported French doves.

Nicu died in a nursing home in August of 1976, at the age of ninety-one. In life, he always insisted upon being treated as a man, not a child, so he was buried in a custom-built miniature adult's casket instead of a child's casket.

One of the most beautiful and tragic bearded ladies though perhaps more a hairy woman than a simple bearded lady was Annie Jones, born in Marion, Virginia, July 14, 1865. At birth she was covered head to toe in a thin layer of coarse, dark hair, which took the shape of a beard and mustache on her face. "We called her Esau, because of this peculiar growth on her face," said Annie's mother. At just nine months of age, she possessed a full beard and attracted the attention of P.T. Barnum. Annie's parents agreed to let the showman take her on tour, as they sorely needed the funds for their eleven other children, but only on the condition that Annie's mother could travel with her. Before she was a year old, "The Infant Esau", as Annie was called, was bringing in $150 a week (about $2,100 in contemporary dollars) enough to provide handsomely for her entire family. Her mother remained by her side until she was nine years old, but ultimately had to return to Pennsylvania to care for the other children.

She was, at the time, one of the highest-paid freaks in the nation, and her income only increased as she grew into a classic beauty. Attractively dressed in figure-hugging fashions of the day, Annie lounged provocatively across countless photographer's sets, displaying not only a luxuriant beard (which I suspect was retouched in more than a few prints) but also floor-length raven hair. Her arms were likewise adorned with a fine coat of black hair, though she often modestly hid them under long Victorian gloves. She was said to have a beautiful speaking voice (a common trait among hypertrichotic women, such as Percilla Bejano), and to be a fine mandolinist.

At one point young Annie was allegedly kidnapped by a phrenologist and her mother took the man to court to get Annie back although this may indeed have been an elaborate Barnum publicity ruse. When she was just fifteen, Annie married a Barnum circus talker named Richard Elliot. He was cold toward Annie, if not downright abusive, and she divorced him five years later. Almost immediately after, she was married again, to circus wardrobe man William Donovan, who whisked her away to Europe. She appeared at the Imperial Palace in St. Petersburg and delighted the Czar and Czarina. In Germany, France and Italy, she met with royals and was showered with tributes. After Donovan took ill and died in Europe, Annie returned to the United States she signed on with the Barnum Circus again and earned an alleged $500 a week more than the President of the United States at the time.

Unlike many freaks of her day, Annie was said to be a smart investor who put her money into real estate and kept a substantial rainy-day fund, fearing that any day she could lose her beard and her meal ticket. Alas, she was never able to enjoy these savings, as she came down with tuberculosis while appearing at Nimes, France, with the Barnum & Bailey Circus. She returned to the U.S. and moved in to her mother's apartment on Cornelia Street in Brooklyn. Annie's father had died some years before and her mother remarried to a man named Pogue. Mrs. Pogue's attempts to nurse Annie back to health over the coming months were in vain. Annie passed away on October 22, 1902, at the age of just thirty-seven. Her dying request was to be buried with her whiskers uncut.

Photo: Annie Jones Elliot, age 19. Cabinet card by Charles Eisenmann, ca. 1874.