Draft:Percilla Bejano

File:Percilla Bejano Baby Picture.jpg

After taking his baby daughter to many American doctors for answers about her condition and learning there was no cure, Percilla’s father decided to start exhibiting her to support their family of seven children. He eventually recruited showman Carl L. Lauther to help promote and manage his daughter’s career.

Percilla’s father was fatally shot in Gainesville while she was still a child, and his final wish was for Lauther and his wife to adopt Percilla. Although he exhibited and profited off of her, Lauther treated Percilla (now Percilla Lauther) like his own daughter and took it personally when customers called her a ‘freak’.

In the 1999 documentary film Sideshow: Alive On The Inside, Percilla said of Lauther:

“I was his daughter. He didn’t even allow any of the working men to cuss in front of me.”{{Cite AV media |url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6TMhxK30ro |title=ULTIMATE BETRAYAL: PERCILLA the MONKEY GIRL. RAW! |date=2025-03-06 |last=SIDESHOW Alive |access-date=2025-05-07 |via=YouTube}}

File:Promotional Photo of Percilla and Emmitt Bejano.jpg

In 1936, when she was 25, Lauther signed Percilla to perform with Johnny J. Jones Exposition’s “Oddities of the 20th Century” show. There, she met Emmitt Bejano, a man with lamellar ichthyosis billed as “Lobello, the Alligator Boy”.

Percilla and Emmitt married in 1938 and began performing together as “The World’s Strangest Married Couple”.

In 1938 they left Lauther’s show and signed with a traveling Ripley’s Believe It or Not! exhibit.

On February 2, 1939, Percilla gave birth to a baby girl, Francina, in Virginia. Like Percilla, Francina was born with hypertrichosis (covered head-to-toe in black hair). Sadly, at just fourteen weeks, Francina succumbed to bronchopneumonia.

File:Percilla and Emmitt Bejano.jpg

In the 1950s Percilla and Emmitt adopted a boy named Tony and they lived together on a ranch in Gibsonton, Florida. For the next two decades, they ran their own show as the Bejano Family, with Gooding Amusements, and later with James E. Strates Shows in the 1970s, even as ‘freak shows’ across the nation faced closures by well-intentioned activist groups.{{cite web |last1=Rivera |first1=Doc |title=The Monkey Girl: The Story of Percilla Bejano |url=https://www.docsmidwaycookhouse.com/historical-circus-carnival-videos/percilla-bejano-the-monkey-girl/ |access-date=7 May 2025 |website=Doc’s Midway Cookhouse}}

In 1978, she told a reporter:

“When they start making fun at me, I say, ‘I can see you for nothing right here, but you had to pay to see me.’”

In the ‘80s and ’90s, Percilla and Emmitt retired from traveling, but made many television and film appearances as two of the last surviving veterans of American freak show culture.

Percilla and Emmit (sometimes credited as Emmett) both starred in the American movie Carny (1980), the British television show The Secret Cabaret (1990), and the Canadian documentary film Being Different (1981).{{Cite news |date=1982-03-07 |title=Article clipped from The Indianapolis Star |url=https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-indianapolis-star/100362210/ |access-date=2025-05-07 |work=The Indianapolis Star |pages=103}}

They retired together in Tampa until Emmitt’s passing on April 17, 1995. After his death, Percilla shaved her beard as a sign of mourning and remained shaved until her own death in 2001.

In one of her pitchbooks sold at her shows, Percilla wrote:

“I’ll grant my exte­rior appear­ance is strange and unusual but that does not hin­der me from enjoy­ing life to the fullest extent and from par­tic­i­pat­ing in the good­ness life has to offer the same as your­self.”

Showman and author Daniel P. Mannix wrote about Percilla extensively in his 1976 book Freaks: We Who Are Not As Others.{{Cite book |last=Mannix |first=Daniel P. |title=Freaks: We Who Are Not As Others |date=Jan 1, 1976 |publisher=Pocket Books |year=1976 |isbn=9781618867575}}

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