Short Stuff: La Pascualita

In a bridal shop in Chihuahua, Mexico a mannequin has been standing in the window since the 1930s that’s so lifelike some say it’s actually a corpse.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and
there's Chuck and this is Short Stuff the Urban Legend
from Chihuahua Edition. Yeah, I've never heard of this. This
is kind of fun. You found this. I think La
Pascualita colon bridal shop mannequin or embalmed course, And that's
from Lauren David at How Stuff Works. Yeah, for sure.

(00:27):
And so La Pasqualita is a bridal shop mannequin and
has been keeping up her side of the bargain since
the nineteen thirties by being a mannequin. Yeah, that's a
long lived mannequin. I mean, how many mannequins do you
think are at Macy's that were put into into work
put to work in the nineteen thirties? Just the old

(00:47):
Marge Okay, one out of thousands, right, So that in
and of itself is pretty impressive. But what makes La
Pascualita even more impressive, or more interesting even is that
a lot of people, especially in the Chihuahua area, believe
that she's not a mannequin at all, that she's actually
an embalmed corpse, specifically the embalmed corpse of the original

(01:11):
owner of La Popular bridal dress shop in Chihuahua, Mexico.
That's right. I urge you to go when you can
safely do so. Look up pictures of La Pascualita and
specifically just put in as your search term La Pascualita
mannequin hands, Yeah, because that is one of the creepiest

(01:35):
parts of this mannequin. Are these? I mean, it looks
like no mannequin hands that I've seen. They look like,
at worst, like a Madame Tussau's dummy hands. I would
say even more detail than that. I've never seen more
life like non life hands in my life. You ever

(01:56):
been to Madame Tussau's I have, and I'm telling you
this mannequin hasn't beaten well. The story of Lo Pascualita, Um,
you know, it's an urban legend, and usually when there's
an urban legend, you can't pinpoint like any head cannon. Uh.
It's usually just a story kind of passed around that
morrison changes. And that's probably the case here. But as

(02:16):
the story goes in the nineteen thirties, the she's known
as the corpse Bride, was going to get married and
her mom. Uh. There's a couple of different versions. One
was her mother was not in favor of the marriage
and the daughter it like broke her heart, so she died.
I saw other versions where she was bitten by a

(02:38):
black widow or there are other sort of like bug
stings and bites that killed her, depending on who's telling
the story separately, not all at once, right, depending on
the story. Right. And that mama was so distraught that
she had this her daughter's body mummified or and or embalmed,

(02:59):
and said you're gonna live in my window as the
corpse bride forevermore right, Yeah, which is kind of sweet
in a lot of ways. Kind of The woman, by
the way, that you're speaking of who had her daughter
embalmed is named Pasquala Esparza, the owner of the Bridle

(03:19):
shop in the thirties when La Pasqualita made her debut
and local people said, look at those hands. I don't
know what Madame Tousseau is it yet, but this beats them. Yeah,
never seen hands like that in my entire life. But
also doesn't that mannequin bear a very strong resemblance to
Pasquala's daughter who's now dead. I think that's really odd.

(03:41):
Did you think she did? I didn't think she looked
a whole lot like her. No, but we'll get to
that in a minute. There's a reason why she didn't
look a whole lot like There's a picture that you're
referring to, I think on the internet where it shows
a picture of Pasquala's daughter and then a picture of
La Pascualita the mannequin. Right, yeah, that sounds like a
great cliffhanger. Okay, all right, we'll be going back stout.

(04:36):
Stop you shouldn't, I should know, all right, I'm hanging
let's hear it. Oh, okay, Well, the reason that the
mannequin La Pasqualita doesn't look anything like the daughter of
Pasquala that has shown in that picture is that the
woman of pictures not the daughter of pasqual There was

(04:57):
no daughter of Pasquala as far as okay, has that
been super confirmed? Because this all how stuff works, dug up.
A woman named Teresa Cordova, who did a dissertation in
twenty twelve from the University of New Mexico that had
to do with this, went down to the shop to
interview them. I don't know if it is still the

(05:20):
same family. That's one thing I couldn't find. I don't
believe it is, but it's it's the shop's been open
the whole time, but I believe it's changed hands, all right,
changed creepy mummified hands that had an interview lined up
with the manager. The manager did not show up for
the interview, and they said that, you know, she got
back in touch and they said, no, we think it's
bad luck, so we're not going to do this interview.

(05:42):
And she proposed, Hey, this is all just a marketing
thing because I have done some pretty extensive public record
searching and I have not found that this daughter exists,
So they're not gonna do this interview because this negative
publicity and missing is a great marketing tool. Yeah, that's
what I was basing it on. Cordova's research. Okay, she

(06:03):
searched for obituaries church documents at the local church historical
records and found no record of Pasquala A. Sparza having
a daughter or at all, let alone one that died.
That's that's how I take it. Okay, As far as
whether or not this could be a embalmed human being,

(06:27):
not only did how stuff works interview some embalmers and
people in the funeral industry, but I got on Reddit
the source for all information, and there were quite a
few embalmers who weighed in, and all of them said,
there's just no way, like the most super plus plus

(06:48):
two point zero embalming that you could ever do on somebody,
if you really wanted someone to last a long time
for some weird reason, there's just no way it would
last seas long this long, especially in these conditions like
La Pascualita, if it were an embalmed corps. First of all,
this is like has been standing in a sunny, bright

(07:08):
window for ninety years. That all that alone says nope,
not a corpse. Thing would have rotted by now. It
would certainly not look like it does today, which is
in pretty good shape. Right. The second thing is there
are corpses out there that have been embalmed and kept
preserved for very long time, like Lennon's corpse. I don't

(07:29):
remember when he died, but I think it was the
thirties as well. And if you look at him, he's
still looking okay, that's clearly a corpse. But also he's
kept under extremely specific conditions. There's a team of people
who whose job it is is to keep him, you know,
up to snuff. Yeah. Yeah, essentially, and over the years,

(07:50):
through all of these updates and like freshen ups, he's
basically been turned into rubber. Yeah. So you couldn't just
embalm the corpse wants standed up in a dress shop
window for ninety years and it would look like that.
It just wouldn't. So, Yes, if you're a professional or balmer,
you're like, this is not a corpse. It's just not

(08:11):
a corpse. Yeah, much less change the clothes on this thing, right,
I mean I didn't. I didn't find any information on that.
But unless she's wearing the bridal dress from the nineteen thirties,
is that true? I found um that there's so she
supposedly has vericoast veins in her legs. I'd try to
find a picture of that, but I couldn't find one. Okay,

(08:32):
here's why, because that piece of information that's bandied about
is evidence that she's actually not TRPs came from I
don't know if it's true or not, but it's It
really fits into the idea of an urban legend where
a woman unnamed who supposedly worked in the dress shop
when who knows and was responsible for changing law. Pascuelita

(08:53):
is the one who said that she had vericoast veins.
That woman might not exist either, right, So again, and
we're just following the steps of a great urban legend
where it just over time, somebody said it, it it became
a really interesting thing. It's way more interesting than that's
a really strange mannequin that they've had since the nineteen thirties.

(09:13):
And the dress shop itself is like, no, we're not
going to We're not going to rebuke this or dispute it,
like it's great. It brings people to our bridal shop. Yeah,
did they ask a lady when she said and she
also has vericos veins. I've seen them where they like,
is that a bluepin in your front pocket? What pocket? Apparently, also,

(09:34):
there was another thing that's frequently said, like, oh well,
this is great evidence too, that the owner requires that
La Pascualita be changed from dress to dress behind a
drawn curtain. Well, sure, so if she were a mannequin,
why would you care? Right? But there is one question
I have, Chuck, that I find fascinating. Nowhere on the internet,

(09:54):
is there even a suggestion of the manufacturer of that mannequin?
Oh right, or mention of any other mannequins that have
hands like that. Nobody's stepped up and been like, look,
she comes from the line of crazy hands from you know,
Nerveco that made mannequins back in the thirties. There's nothing
like that. Yea, So I really do wonder who made

(10:17):
that mannequin. It's it's really interesting, and I think that too,
is helping keep things going. Maybe it was Vincent Price.
It could have been very creepy. Look at those hands, everybody.
I'm telling you, I think to make it even more creepy,
we should just sit here in silence for thirty seconds
before we finish. Really all right, I guess we're doing this.

(10:43):
I'm gonna say short Stuff's out, and then I'm just
gonna sit here. Short Stuff's out. Stuff you Should Know
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