Feejee Mermaid

Before exhibiting his infamous Feejee Mermaid in 1842, P.T. Barnum created quite a media frenzy by distributing flyers and writing letters to newspapers that claimed a certain "Dr. Griffin, agent of the Lyceum of Natural History in London" will be traveling through New York with a "veritable mermaid taken among the Feejee Islands." In reality "Dr. Griffin" was Barnum's friend Levi Lyman and the "veritable mermaid" was nothing more outlandish than the upper torso of a monkey sewn to the lower half of a fish.  The mermaid had been borrowed from Moses Kimball, the owner of the Boston Museum.

The Mermaid rapidly became one of Barnum's biggest attractions during his first year of business, helping him to treble his monthly profits. Merging the worlds of science and entertainment, Barnum challenged his audience to tell the fact from the fraud. His sideshow capitalised on the idea that there is as much pleasure in being deceived knowingly by a hoax as in spotting the fake and figuring out how it was made. The audience became the experts, testing their knowledge or trying their gullibility, but always enjoying the experience.