In the 1800s and 1900s strange mummies were often part of carnival sideshows or sometimes back parlors of funeral homes. And sometimes they found their way into museums as "curiosities" for people to gawk at.

 

An Australian aborigine named Tambo Tambo was brought to America as a circus performer more than one hundred years ago.

On February 23, 1884, he died of pneumonia at the age of twenty-one while on tour with the circus. In 1993, 109 years later, his mummified body was discovered in a Cleveland, Ohio, funeral home. 

Why had his body been mummified? 

Why had it been secretly kept? 

How much money had been made exhibiting him?

And, perhaps more to the point, why is the mummified body of a person from a different  society or culture such a curiosity?

 

The body of an African Bushman, stolen from his grave in Botswana shortly after the man died in the late 1800s, was finally sent home and reburied in 2000.

Reportedly, a French taxidermist stole the body from the southern African nation, stuffed it (which essentially mummified it), and later sold it to a naturalist from Barcelona, Spain who was building an African collection. Eventually, his collection became part of a larger collection housed and displayed at the Darder Museum of Natural History in Banyoles, 70 miles northeast of Barcelona, where it west on display beginning in 1916. 

Critics, including some African countries, the United Nations, and the Organization of African Unity, believed that the display of the bushman's stuffed body was racist; in 1998, the body was removed from display, according to officials, "out of respect to the thousands of African immigrants who live in this town." 

It took two more years, however, for the Spanish government, the town of Banyoles, and the country of Botswana to come to terms on the return of the body. On June 30, 2000, Pedro Bosch, Banyoles's mayor, signed the agreement, stating, "It was not very appropriate to exhibit a human being of the black race in a Western and developed city." (Source:  New York Times, 7/1/2000)

 

For information on other stolen displayed mummies, see Elmer McCurdy and the Lemon Grove Mummies. 

Other mummies have been turned into regular sideshow attractions. For example, a carnival operator named Frank Hansen claimed to have the mummy of a Bigfoot-type creature frozen in a block of ice. Hansen had exhibited the creature in sideshows across the country, but in 1968 he seemed to want respect from the scientific community. He invited two zoologists to examine the block of ice at his farm in Minnesota.

Authors Russell Ciochon, John Olsen, and Jamie James describe what the zoologists saw:

Its body was hairy and vaguely human, about six feet in height, with long limbs and very large extremities, and it had a simian face with a sloping forehead.

Were they convinced that this was a mummy hoax? Not at all. In fact, they were so certain the creature had once been alive that they asked a curator at the Smithsonian Institution to examine it, but Hansen would not allow this. He later made a plastic model of the mummy for future exhibitions, and the mummy disappeared.

Many people doubt that it was real, but two respected zoologists have publicly stated that it certainly looked real. Were they mummy dummies, too?

 

One of the best books that rounds up a unique collection of strange mummies (including those in sideshows) is Modern Mummies by Christine Quigley.

A second book that features the complete tragic account of Julia Pastrana, a so-called Ape woman (and later mummy) exhibited primarily in Europe is Jan Bondeson's A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities.

Bondeson has also written a sequal entitled The Two-Headed Boy and Other Medical Marvels which features a number of unusual humans, a few of whom were mummified (though not in the ways you might think).