There's a sucker born every minute, as P.T. Barnum is famed for proclaiming. (Although someone else actually uttered that quote...but that's another story.) Barnum, a circus operator and huckster, operated a popular 19th-century attraction called the American Museum, in lower Manhattan. The museum featured a sideshow of "human curiosities." Many of them were real people, like little person Tom Thumb, and the Bearded Lady.
Then, in 1842, he introduced the Feejee Mermaid (also spelled Fejee and Fiji).
The Feejee Mermaid, as Barnum said, was the mummified remains of a real mermaid. But unlike the popularized idea of what a mermaid was — a beautiful maiden whose lower half was a fish tail — Barnum's creature was a scary specimen (and most likely the upper half of a young monkey sewn onto the bottom half of a fish). This grotesque mermaid only fascinated people all the more, and attracted throngs to his museum.
The Feejee Mermaid is believed to have been created in Asia earlier in the century. Other similar "mermaids" existed during this time period.
Sources: HowStuffWorks.com, Szalay, Kageyama
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