I am not making this up! There really is such a thing as werewolf syndrome, and the real name for it is hypertrichosis. This is not like in the movies, where a person turns into a werewolf every time there's a full moon. No, this is different. It's where a person has a whole bunch of hair growing on them, like for instance all over their entire face, where you would not expect a human to have hair.There are two ways you can get hypertrichosis, and one is that you are born with it, and the other is that you get it later in life, like because of some drugs you are taking or because you have cancer or maybe because of an eating disorder. If you have this second kind of werewolf syndrome, it can usually be treated, but if you are born with it, you are pretty much stuck with it.
Luckily, it's very rare for people to be born with this condition. The first case ever recorded was in 1648, and the man who had it was named Petrus Gonzales. He lived in the Canary Islands. In the Gonzales family, there were also two daughters, a son, and a grandchild who had hypertrichosis. Since 1648, there have only been about 50 cases of people born with hypertrichosis, so it really doesn't happen very much.
Mr. Barnum made up a story about how Jo-Jo and his father had been living as wild animals in a cave, and a hunter captured them, but the father could never be tamed. Mr. Barnum pointed out to everybody how much Jo-Jo looked like a dog, and he said that when Jo-Jo was upset, he would bark and growl. Then Mr. Fedor would bark and growl to please his boss and scare the audience. But really Mr. Fedor was a very civilized man who could speak three different languages.
Mr. Meyer started exhibiting Stephan all over Europe. By then, the boy's hair was 8 inches long on his face and 4 inches long on the rest of his body. The only places he didn't have hair were the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet.
In 1901, Lionel came to the U.S. and joined Barnum & Bailey's Circus. He did gymnastic tricks and spoke to people in a gentle way to show them he was a very nice man, in spite of looking like a ferocious lion. He wore stylish clothes, was well-educated, and could speak five languages. He settled in New York City in 1920 and worked at Coney Island for several years. Then in the late 1920s, he moved back to Germany. He died of a heart attack in 1932 at the age of 41.
Julia Pastrana was another person with hypertrichosis who made a living in sideshows. She was born in Mexico in 1834. Besides having lots of hair, she also had a double row of teeth that made her mouth stick out, sort of like a gorilla's. A man named Theodore Lent discovered Julia Pastrana and purchased her from a woman who might have been her mother. He taught her to dance and play music, and she also leaned to read and write in three languages. Mr. Lent took her on a tour all over the world. He called her the "Bearded and Hairy Lady."
Eventually, Mr. Lent married Ms. Pastrana. While they were on tour in Moscow, she had a baby that also had hypertrichosis, but sadly, the baby only lived for two days. And five days later, Ms. Pastrana died, too. But Mr. Lent did not want to stop touring, so he got a professor at a Moscow university to make mummies out of his wife and son. Then he mounted them in a glass cabinet so people could still come and see them. After a while, he found another hairy woman. He married her and changed her name to Zenora Pastrana. Finally, Mr. Lent was sent to a mental institution, which was probably a good place for him.
When Supatra was born, she not only had a lot of hair, but she also had very small nostrils that were only one millimeter wide. So she had to stay in an incubator and have surgery twice, just so she could breathe. Then she had to have another surgery when she was two, but now she can breathe perfectly well. The doctors did laser treatment on her hair, but it didn't make the hair go away. It just grew back even thicker. When it gets too long, her mother trims it for her so that it doesn't get in her eyes.
Posted in: Werewolf Syndrome
