These are not the actual photos of Josephine Myrtle Corbin, a woman born with four legs - FACTLY
Sai Krishna Muthyanolla
August 17, 2023
A collage of three pictures is being shared on social media which allegedly shows a four-legged woman named Josephine Myrtle, born in 1897. Let’s check the veracity of this information through this article.
Claim: The woman with four legs in this picture is Josephine Myrtle.
Fact: Although there lived a real person named Josephine Myrtle in the U.S., who was born with four legs, these photos do not show her. These are photos published in the Weekly World News (WWN) tabloid, which was infamous for publishing mostly fictional news. Hence, the claim made in the post is Misleading.
To learn more about the claim, we performed a reverse image search on Yandex, which led us to a website that contained the same photos. These photos look like a newspaper print. The cutline under one of those photos describes her as Ashley.
Taking this as a hint, we searched further to learn more about these pictures leading us to an article published in the Weekly World News(WWN) tabloid, which was infamous for publishing mostly fictional news.
According to this article, these are the wedding pictures of a woman named Ashley Braistle. Popular fact-checking website Snopes described these pictures as a hoax. They also mentioned that WWN used to publish ‘far-fetched fictional tales’ (example).
With this information, it is evident that these photos are not real. However, it is true that Josephine Myrtle Corbin was a real person born with a rare fetal anomaly known as dipygus. According to the University of Texas, Austin, she was born in 1868. According to a write-up published in their ‘Ransom Center Magazine’, ‘Myrtle Corbin Myrtle Corbin (1868–1927) was born with a dipygus twin, having a second set of legs growing out between her own legs that also led to a full functioning female reproductive system. She later went on to marry a doctor and gave birth to five children, three from one body and two from another. She is considered to be the only dypgus twin case that has done this.’ You can find her photo here.
According to a flyer available on the University of Texas, Arlington website, she was shown publicly at an exhibition. This flyer mentions that she was born in Lincoln County, Tennessee. Click here and here to learn more about Josephine.
To sum up, photos published along with a hoax website are falsely shared as photos of Josephine Myrtle Corbin, a woman born with four legs.