The Fiji Mermaid

In mid-July 1842, an English gentleman named Dr. J. Griffin, who was a member of the British Lyceum of Natural History, arrived in New York City bearing a real mermaid that was supposedly caught near the Fiji Islands in the South Pacific.

Soon after this, the showman P.T. Barnum tried to convince Dr. Griffin to display the mermaid at his museum. Dr. Griffin agreed to exhibit it for a week at Concert Hall on Broadway. Barnum distributed ten thousand copies of a pamphlet about seductive mermaids throughout the city. In August 1842, huge crowds showed up for the exhibit.

Throughout all of this, the deception of the public had been two-fold. First, Dr. Griffin was a fraud. He was no English gentleman. In fact, there was no such thing as the British Lyceum of Natural History. Griffin's real name was Levi Lyman. He was Barnum's accomplice and this had all been done to give the mermaid an appearance of scientific respectability. Second, the famous mermaid was constructed with half of the skeleton of a monkey (torso and head) sewn to the back half of a fish and then covered in papier-mâché, and Barnum knew it.

According to one theory, the Fiji mermaid was destroyed when Barnum's museum burned down in 1865. But this is unlikely, since she should have been at Kimball's Boston museum at that time. More likely, she perished when Kimball's museum burned down in the early 1880s.

There is no accurate information about how this fraud was finally discovered, but the Fiji mermaid will be present in the top 10 cryptozoology frauds.