Scary Mermaids – Real or Fake?

Take a look at this bunch of scary mermaids. Are they real or fake? Well, mermaids are supposedly half-fish, half-human creatures who live in the sea and lure love-sick sailors to their death. They are creatures of myth and legend going back thousands of years. But do they really exist?

There was a tradition a long time ago of manufacturing fake mermaid carcasses for public display out of the body parts of dead monkeys and fish. The photographs you have just seen exemplify such hoaxes. The most famous hoax was the Feejee Mermaid displayed by P.T. Barnum above.

Barnum’s mermaid was really an artifact purchased secondhand by the great showman in the mid-1800s and exhibited throughout the United States as a carnival attraction. Yet another specimen still in existence was fabricated in Japan and said to be 1,400 years old.

Maylasian Mermaid

Scary Mermaid Found Dead on a Beach After a tsunami.

In myth and legend, mermaids are beautiful and alluring creatures, but the funny thing is, the “real” specimens displayed here are, without exception, hideous in appearance – “the incarnation of ugliness,” as one American critic described P.T. Barnum’s FeeJee Mermaid. It’s a discrepancy no one ever bothers to explain.