The Story of Myrtle Corbin, the Real Life Four Legged Woman

Josephine Myrtle Corbin was a normal girl by most standards. She was born on May 12th, 1868 in Lincoln County, Tennessee to parents William H. Corbin and Nancy Corbin. Her birth wasn’t marked by anything particularly out of the ordinary. In fact, her mother claimed to have had a typical labor and delivery.

Little myrtle was born a perfectly healthy, active, and thriving baby girl, at three-weeks-old she weighed 10lb and was nursing well, so there was little doubt that she would surely go far in life. Only, life might not be so kind to her in return, because she had four legs.

Myrtle’s mother had a normal pregnancy for all intents purposes, and when the big day came she had no reservations that her daughter would be anything but perfect. Shortly after the birth, she learned that the baby was momentarily in the breech position, something which may have proved fatal for both mother and child.

Thankfully, such a tragedy was avoided; but the surprises were far from over. When Myrtle was delivered, her parents could hardly believe their eyes. Although the little girl was perfectly formed from her head down to her navel, a tiny, second pair of legs lay flat against her belly.

The baffled physicians who examined the infant shortly after her birth turned their attention to her parents to try and explain the bizarre anomaly. First and foremost, there was quite an age gap between the couple. At the time of Myrtle’s birth, her father, William Corbin, was a 25-year-old wounded former confederate soldier, while her mother Nancy was almost a decade older, aged 34.

Rare Dipygus Condition

The field of medicine wasn’t quite so advanced back then, so the idea that a 9 year difference may have caused an extra pair of legs to develop randomly in the womb didn’t seem as farfetched as it does now. But that wasn’t all. The two also looked suspiciously alike, according to medical reports which stated that “they are so much alike in appearance, both having red hair, blue eyes, and fair complexion.” In fact, the parents looked so similar that the physicians felt the need to point out that they weren’t actually blood kin.

Myrtle was the Corbin’s third child, including a daughter from Nancy’s first marriage, and they went on to have four sons and four daughters in total. Each of Myrtle’s siblings had two legs and two arms to boot. So, if some illicit sibling romance wasn’t behind Myrtles unique birth, what was?

At first, it seemed that Myrtle was simply an unexplained oddity among the set of eight siblings. Her two inner legs, although capable of some movement, were underdeveloped, which has led some to speculate that they belonged to a parasitic twin, but this wasn’t exactly the case. Later, it would finally be determined that she had actually been born with an incredibly rare condition known as dipygus.

There was no twin: instead, Myrtle’s body axis had forked left and right partway along the lower spinal column during fetal development, meaning the posterior end, her legs and pelvis, had been duplicated. With two pelvises side-by-side, Myrtle naturally had two sets of legs, each consisting of one fully-formed leg and one small leg with just three toes, with the two small positioned side-by-side and flanked by the two normal-sized ones.

But that’s not all. Myrtle also had two distinct sets of fully functioning genital organs, both external and internal, as well as two sets of bowels, and two anuses. Each part worked totally independently from each other, so, hypothetically speaking, Myrtle could suffer a bought of diarrhea on one side, while simultaneously battling constipation on the other, which sounds far from ideal. A trip to Taco Bell would be like playing one dangerous game of Russian roulette!

Although it is said that Myrtle was able to move her smaller legs, they weren’t strong enough for her to walk on, which didn’t really matter considering they weren’t long enough to reach the ground anyway. Meanwhile, one of her larger legs also had a clubbed foot; so ironically the so-called “4-legged girl” only really had one fully functioning leg to speak of.

Myrtle’s condition may have made her a strange outlier in her small hometown community, but little did she know the very thing that might have held her back could also make her a star. From the moment Myrtle turned just five weeks old, her father decided to market her as a walking, talking money-maker for the family.

P.T. Barnum Circus

After showing off his four-legged daughter to curious neighbors and charging them a dime each, Mr. Corbin realized her untapped potential for further publicity. Wasting no time, he had promotional pamphlets made up and started placing ads in local newspapers to attract people from far and wide to come and catch a glimpse of his marvelous child. Over the next decade or so, William Corbin would take his little girl all over the country where she was exhibited at fairs, sideshows and so-called dime museums.

When Myrtle turned 13 in 1881, the newspaper ads Myrtle’s father had posted naturally attracted the world famous circus owner P.T. Barnum, the dude who inspired "The Greatest Showman", and she was promptly signed up for Barnum & Bailey tours sideshow circuit under the moniker “The Four-Legged Girl from Texas”.

Back in the 19th and early 20th century these so-called “sideshows” were a pretty big deal. As the name suggests, a sideshow was a smaller, secondary production that travelled alongside the big-draw circus or carnival. The most popular sideshows usually featured a nightly roster of human oddities or “freaks” that would "perform" for audiences under a single tent for one admission price.

One of Myrtle’s very first promotional pamphlets described her as being as “gentle of disposition as the summer sunshine and as happy as the day is long”. What a thinly-veiled way of saying: “this girl seems totally normal and nice but take a peek under her skirt and you’ll realize she’s actually a total freak of nature!”. In fact, that’s pretty much what her act consisted of.

When Myrtle first took to the stage, nothing gave away her unusual condition, apart from her particularly wide hips and clubbed foot, which wasn’t so uncommon at the time. By all means, she was an attractive girl with fair skin, blue eyes, and curly hair who seemed to have no place performing in front of such large crowds. But when Myrtle lifted her gown to reveal what lay beneath, the whole audience was left speechless.

Glowing reviews came in thick and fast; one particularly enthusiastic audience-member named Mr. Von Aukon stating that “every man, woman and child should see this lady. She is highly educated and very entertaining, as well as being the only living four-legged woman ever born…” Myrtle continued to work for P.T. Barnum for four years, and people were so keen to catch a glimpse of the famous Four-Legged Girl from Texas that Myrtle was able to secure herself an unusually high contract of up to $250 a week touring with the sideshow.

By the time she turned eighteen, Myrtle had raked in enough dough to be able to retire from the spotlight for the time being. Unlike other freakshow acts, who became so embedded in the carnival circuit that it became their only real home, Myrtle never dreamed of a life spent performing.

Myrtle’s younger sister Willie Ann Corbin had married a man named Hiram Locke Bicknell in November 1884, and Hiram’s younger brother, a soon-to-be doctor named Clinton Bickwell, became interested in Myrtle. The unlikely pair fell in love and were married at age 19 on 12th June the following year.

Four-Legged Woman Illusion

Myrtle’s marriage bought an early end to her sideshow career, much to the chagrin of circus owners up and down the country who were eager to book the one-and-only Four-Legged Girl from Texas in their own shows. Now that they were unable to get the genuine article, shafted showmen were driven to dream up a crafty solution: they’d just make their own fake four-legged girl instead!

It might seem totally ridiculous, but several sideshows decided to dupe their audiences by fabricating their own “freaks” because real-life charming ladies with supernumerary legs were few and far between. In some cases, an attractive lady would appear to have three legs when seated in front of an audience, but, in reality, the third appendage would simply be produced by a second woman seated behind the curtain. This hidden woman would stick her leg through the back of the chair and rest it in a shallow central portion, so that it appeared to hang between the legs of the frontwoman.

To create the illusion of a four-legged woman, a special apparatus would sometimes be strapped around the waist of the performer which consisted of two fake outer legs. These false legs, each dressed in matching stockings, would be articulated at the knee, allowing her to go one step further than the fake three-legged woman by standing and performing little dances for the audience.

Pregnancies

In the spring of 1887, about a year after Myrtle and Clinton’s marriage, Corbin discovered that she was pregnant. She’d visited Physician Lewis Whaley in Blountsville, Alabama complaining of pain in her left side, fever, headache, and a decreased appetite.

Despite her unique anatomy, with two sets of internal and external reproductive organs, doctors saw no real reason why she shouldn’t be able to carry the baby to full term. The physician soon determined that it was in her left uterus that Myrtle was pregnant. According to Whaley, upon learning that she was pregnant, Myrtle remarked “if it had been in my right side I would come nearer believing you were correct”. This led doctors to believe that she preferred intercourse on the right side.

Unfortunately, Myrtle became gravely ill and Whaley was forced to perform an abortion eight weeks after her initial examination. She was reportedly between three and four months pregnant at the time. Although it seemed that her dreams of a normal family life were now dashed, Myrtle went on to give birth to five healthy children during the rest of her adult life, four daughters, and one son.

Thanks to her rare deformity, she was apparently able to carry three pregnancies on the right side and two on the left; now that’s what I call multitasking! In the early 1890s, James and Myrtle then moved their family from Blount County, Alabama to Cleburne City, where they settled into a quiet farming life.

After Lewis Whaley’s coverage of her first pregnancy in the Atlanta Medical and Surgical Journal Myrtle’s bizarre case continued to pop up throughout the 1880s. She was referred to in case studies simply as “Mrs B”, and study authors repeatedly commented on how intelligent, well-mannered, and refined she was, as if having an extra pair of legs would somehow compromise such pleasant qualities.

The Four-Legged Girl From Cleburne

Besides her continuing presence in medical literature in the United States and around the world, Myrtle maintained a quiet existence in their Cleburne home with her husband and brood of children. But when her children reached adulthood and funds started running low, Myrtle’s showbiz career experienced a fleeting revival around 1909. She dusted off her best dresses and began exhibiting herself at Huber’s Museum in New York at the age of 41 under the new moniker The Four-Legged Girl from Cleburne.

Though it’d been more than 20 years since she’d set foot on stage, Corbin was an instant hit. She’d learned a lot about showmanship during her childhood and would often dress her extra limbs with socks and shoes matching her normal legs. She continued to perform with the Ringling Brother’s circus and even appeared at Coney Island. Within no time, she was making $450 a week, which was a killing back in the day!

Death

As the years drew by Myrtle began to retire from showbusiness from around 1915, until, in 1928, she developed a skin infection on her right leg. When it failed to heal she finally visited a doctor in Cleburne who diagnosed her as having erysipelas, a streptococcal infection. Nowadays, a simple course of antibiotics would eliminate the problem and Myrtle would be sent on her way, but these were different times.

On May 6th, a week after being diagnosed, Myrtle Corbin was dead, just one week shy of turning 60. But, just as Myrtle Corbin’s life had been far from ordinary, so too would her burial. Once her coffin was lowered into the ground, her husband James stood watching as the grave was filled with a thick layer of cement. James and Myrtles other surviving relatives waited for an hour, maybe two, until the cement had dried completely before they could breathe a sigh of relief and head back home.

It’s strange to think that a lifeless body could be so tempting for so many people, but this seemingly extreme measure was taken to prevent grave-robbers from stealing the extraordinary body that lay beneath. Several physicians and showmen had already offered money for Myrtle’s remains, and her family knew that there were people out there who would stop at nothing to get one last peace of Myrtle Corbin, the “Four-Legged Girl from Texas”.

Myrtle Corbin’s story just goes to show how many hoops someone who had been born “different” had to jump through just to live a normal life in the 19th century. Although she was considered a “freak” throughout her life, Myrtle was able to turn it into a successful career and proved that she could be a loving wife and mother at the same time.

If you were amazed at the story of Myrtle Corbin, the four-legged woman, you might want to read about Adam Rainer, the man who was both a dwarf and a giant! Thanks for reading.