History's most convincing mermaid hoaxes
Do mermaids exist? Probably not, but there have been plenty of hoaxes. From the Fiji mermaid to a TV mockumentary, here are four of the best fakes.
Image: stock.adobe.com
The folklore of the mermaid – half-human, half-fish – has captured the public imagination for centuries. Ancient Greek mythology gave birth to the idea of ‘sirens’, seductive mermaids (originally depicted instead as half-birdlike) singing songs to lure sailors to their deaths. However, not all mermaids have been depicted as threatening.
We’re all familiar with Disney’s big-screen versions of The Little Mermaid, both the 1989 animated original and the 2023 live-action remake. These, in turn, were inspired by the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale of the same name. Also, who could forget Daryl Hannah as the mermaid Madison in the 1980s romantic fantasy film Splash?
So, it seems we’d love to believe that mermaids might just exist, despite scientists finding no credible evidence that they do. It’s made us easy prey to a litany of mermaid hoaxes. The new Sky HISTORY series Britain’s X-Files shows just how easily we can be duped, so which of these scams have been especially – ahem – fishy?
Fiji mermaid: P.T. Barnum’s sideshow star
The famed explorer Christopher Columbus allegedly saw mermaids while sailing in the Caribbean in 1493. As he described them as ‘not half as beautiful as they are painted’, there’s a good chance he was simply looking at manatees. Indeed, mermaids can seem much more ‘real’ when they don’t live up to their stereotypically glamorous pop-culture image.
This likely helps to explain why the ‘Fiji mermaid’ caused such a sensation when exhibited in London in 1822 and then by P. T. Barnum in New York in 1842. On both sides of the Atlantic, crowds came out in their droves, only to lose interest after learning that the supposed mermaid was a fake. This curio, comprising parts of a monkey and fish sewn together, is thought to have since perished in a museum fire.
Animal Planet hoax
In 2012, millions of viewers were stunned to tune into the TV channel Animal Planet and see compelling evidence that mermaids may exist after all. A seemingly strait-laced documentary, Mermaids: The Body Found, featured interviews with scientists claiming to have recovered an actual mermaid body.
Except that, well, they hadn’t…and they weren’t even scientists. They were just actors, and the entire documentary was merely a ‘mockumentary’
deliberately crafted to come across as genuine. Animal Planet made little effort to point out the make-believe aspect, resulting in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) later issuing a statement that there was no evidence that mermaids existed.
Despite the outcry, Mermaids: The Body Found spawned a similarly duplicitous sequel, Mermaids: The New Evidence, which aired on Animal Planet the following year.
Enjuin mermaid
For decades, the Enjuin temple in the Japanese city of Asakuchi has held what looks like a grotesque mummified mermaid. It’s only 30cm long, consisting of a human-like head with visible hair and a sharp-toothed wailing mouth.
The ‘mermaid’ was found accompanied by a peculiar note dated 1903. The letter reads: ‘A mermaid was caught in a fish-catching net in the sea off Kochi Prefecture. The fishermen who caught it did not know it was a mermaid, but took it to Osaka and sold it as an unusual fish. My ancestors bought it and kept it as a family treasure.’
According to legend, the mermaid was caught off Japan’s Shikoku Island around the late 1730s. Using modern means of analysis, researchers from Okayama’s Kurashiki University of Science and the Arts were able to more definitively establish the mermaid’s origins. Turns out it’s actually a mannequin fashioned together from both man-made and organic matter in the 19th century.
Buxton mermaid
So-called as it is held at Buxton Museum and Art Gallery in Derbyshire, the Buxton mermaid is nonetheless of unknown provenance. At one point, this figurine was kept with a merman counterpart in the London collection of the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine. In the early 2010s, the University of Lincoln studied the mermaid closely and found that it was largely made of wood, wire and human hair.
‘We think that it came from the mid-19th century,’ conservation specialist Anita Hollinshead told the BBC in 2012. ‘We are still doing tests to find that out. The teeth are carved bone and we think the eyes are actually some sort of mollusc shell,’ she added.
Hollinshead explained that fishermen used to earn supplementary income from selling fake mermaids. ‘Sometimes people bought them thinking they were the real thing. They were very popular side-show attractions, particularly in London in the mid-19th century.’
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