The Ugliest Woman in the World Buried After 153 Years

(Image source: Wikimedia Commons)

BY JONAS BRUUN ANCHOR JAMAL ANDRESS

An indigenous Mexican woman once known as “The Ugliest Woman in the World” can finally rest in peace. More than a century and a half after her death and a tragic life in a circus, Julia Pastrana was buried near her birthplace in the state of Sinaloa on Tuesday.

Thousands of people had flocked to the town of Sinaloa de Leyva to attend the infamous woman’s funeral that marked a decade-long campaign of getting Julia Pastrana’s body back to Mexico.

The mayor of Pastrana’s hometown acknowledged the woman’s unfortunate life saying: “Julia has been reborn among us. Let us never see another woman be turned into an object of commerce.”

The heavy attention that has surrounded Julia Pastrana since her birth in 1834 is due to two rare genetic disorders called hypertrichosis and gingival hyperplasia. The illnesses covered her face in hair and gave her a jutting jaw, quickly earning her nicknames like “bear woman” or “ape woman”.

Due to her peculiar appearance, a Mexican customs administrator bought Pastrana as a slave in 1854 and made her work as a circus performer. It was at this time Pastrana got her most persistent nickname: “The Ugliest Woman in the World”.

According to BBC News, the exploitation continued the rest of Pastrana’s life, even after she married American impresario Theodore Lent who became her manager.

Lent even continued touring with Pastrana after she died in Moscow in 1860, five days after giving birth to a son who had the same condition and also died shortly after. As a writer from the New York Times explains.

“Lent soon began exhibiting the embalmed bodies of his wife and son. He later found a bearded woman in Germany whom he married and billed as Pastrana’s sister, ‘Zenora Pastrana’. The couple traveled, and Zenora performed alongside the bodies.”

Not really the way you want your corpse to be handled. Well, the widely popular exhibition kept touring for almost a century even after her husband also passed away. Eventually, the body of Pastrana was placed in a storage room at the University of Oslo in Norway in 1976 after some thieves were caught with it.

According to Norwegian newspaper VG, not much has been done to Pastrana’s body ever since. First after the governor of Sinaloa petitioned for a repatriation last year, the authorities of Norway and Mexico agreed on a handover that was carried out last Wednesday.

Even though most agree that this week’s funeral of Julia Pastrana concludes a miserable story, the Mexican ambassador of Scandinavia thinks there are more aspects to Pastrana’s legacy.

“In one way, I think she had a very interesting life and maybe she enjoyed visiting and travelling and seeing other places, but at the same time I think it must have been very sad.”