Fiji Mermaid - Later Incarnations

Later Incarnations

In his Secrets of the Sideshows, Joe Nickell documents several modern-day claimants to the title of Barnum's "true" original mermaid, or as he describes them, "fakes of Barnum's fake". Exhibits at Ripley's Believe It Or Not, Coney Island's Sideshow by the Seashore, and Bobby Reynolds's traveling sideshow all lay claim to the title, but in Nickell's opinion, none is to be believed. He also describes an update of the tradition that uses an elaborate system to project the image of a live woman into a fishbowl, giving the appearance that she is only an inch or two long. He relates the story of a performer who was smoking a cigarette in her hidden chamber; the man outside was confronted by an angry patron who demanded to know how this was possible if the "mermaid" was underwater. In Rob Zombie's House of 1000 Corpses, Rainn Wilson's character is murdered and his corpse is transformed into a Fiji mermaid via taxidermy. In the '90s TV series The X-Files, the episode "Humbug" depicts the possibility of a series of sideshow murders having been committed by a Fiji Mermaid. Also, in the 2010 animated series Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated, the Fiji Mermaid makes an appearance as one of the objects in display at Darrow's Oddity Museum, in the episode The Secret Serum.

A guide to constructing a Fiji mermaid appeared in the November 2009 issue of Fortean Times magazine, in an article written by special effects expert and stop-motion animator Alan Friswell. Rather than building the figure with fish and monkey parts, Friswell used papier mache and modelling putty, sealed with wallpaper paste, and with doll's hair glued to the scalp.