 On the 21st of January, 1924, 54-year-old Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin died. After his death, a group of scientists decided to embalm his body so that the people of the then Soviet Union could come and pay their respects to Lenin. His body was supposed to be on display in the Red Square in Moscow only for a few weeks, back in 1924. Well, it's 2020, almost to the 100-year mark of Lenin's death, and his body is still on display. In fact, you can go see his body on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. And of course, keeping Lenin's body up to snuff, or his corpse up to snuff, takes up a team, a team to work on his skin and replace things when they start to disintegrate. Talk about a glam squad. Anyway, by 2016 it is estimated that the whole procedure of keeping Lenin's embalmed body available for the public was costing the government around $200,000. But it seems there's a body down in Mexico, a possible embalmed body that's way more famous than Lenin's. But before we go any further, you know what to do. Hit that subscribe button and give us a like. Again, we also have a Patreon for anybody who wants to help support the channel. I also want to take the time to say that my little sister has decided to open up an Instagram account that is strictly for politics. So if you're somebody that is a truther or likes politics, it would be awesome if you could give her a follow at the deplorable mama. I will put a link to her new Instagram account down below. Welcome to Esoteric Atlanta. My name is Bryce, and today we're going to be talking about the mystery of the corpse bride of Chihuahua, Mexico, otherwise known as La Pasqualita. On Monday, I decided to do a fun video on the John Lawson house, which was a house that was inhabited by mannequins. It got me thinking that maybe going forward, we should do a mystery Monday. A lot of times on this channel, we talk about some really heavy stuff because there's heavy stuff happening in the world right now. I mean, it takes a lot to go through an historical event. So I think going forward, we will continue to do mystery Mondays. Just have a fun little story, something to break the seriousness of our world around us. Now, of course, for the rest of the week, we will continue to cover more serious topics in our storytelling style, but Mondays will be preserved for some fun. Good way to kick the week off, right? And it just so happens that this week, we're also going to be talking about a mannequin. So should it be Monday mannequin mysteries? No, I'm just kidding. Next week, we'll go into something different for fun, but we're also going to be talking about another mannequin. So the story takes place and continues to take place in the town of Chihuahua in the state of Chihuahua in Mexico. Now, Chihuahua, Chihuahua, Mexico is very close to the border of Texas. Chihuahua was founded in 1709 by Spanish explorers. And it actually, it's pretty competitive with European cities in the area of human development. And in fact, 99% of the population of Chihuahua are literate. That's really good. And if you go into the city center of Chihuahua, there is a bridal boutique called La Popular. Now, this bridal boutique has been around for a while and the original owner is not the current owner of the boutique. However, there is a mannequin that has a home in the front window of this boutique that carries a very suspicious story. In fact, the story or rather the mystery around this particular mannequin has been alive for 90 years. So what we know is that on March 25th, 1930, a very peculiar mannequin appeared in the storefront. Now, the owner of La Popular at that time was a woman named Pascuala Esparza. You see, this woman apparently had a daughter that was due to get married. Now the story goes that on her wedding day, her daughter was bitten by a black widow spider. And the venomous poison spread so quickly throughout her body that she died. She died on her wedding day. Very, very tragic. And then a couple of days later, this mannequin appeared that looked remarkably like her daughter. Now first of all, I know a lot of people have questioned the story about the black widow spider. And the only reference point I have for how quickly this venomous spread is a story of my own. Many years ago I was bitten by a brown recluse spider and I actually was bitten by the brown recluse spider right in my butt. I didn't realize what had happened at the time. I just all of a sudden got a really bad fever to the point where I was hallucinating. And my mother had to come get me where I was living and drive me up to the doctor. When I got to the doctor, the doctor asked me like, what had happened? Where have I been around? And I said that I had this weird lump on my butt. At that time I thought it was just like a bruise, like I knocked it or something. And so the doctor of course looked at it and immediately realized it was a spider bite, a brown recluse spider bite. So I had to go in and have it cut out and drained and stitched up. And I now have a nice little scar on my heini. After it was all over, the doctor proceeded to tell me that I need to just stay with my parents for a little while because my mother had to help me clean out the wound every day with epsom salts to make sure it healed. He also told me that I had been very lucky because the spider bit me on an area of my body that carried fatty tissue. And so it was harder for the venom to spread. Basically what I took from that was that he called me a fat ass. So moral of the story is I could see if she got bitten by a black widow spider on her arm or someone, somewhere last fatty, the venom was able to spread and kill her pretty quickly, especially seeing that this took place in 1930. But anyway, back to the mannequin. The thing about the mannequin that people noticed first were the glassy eyes. The gaze of the eyes seemed very human. She also had very thick eyelashes and it appeared that she would follow you with her eyes around the room. People also say that her hands really freaked them out because they were pretty human looking. And I will say for myself, I felt like her hands definitely looked very human. You could even see the wrinkles in her thumb that would have been her thumb print. Some of the employees also say that on her legs, you can see varicose veins. Of course, as I said earlier, she also very much looked like the shop owner's daughter who had died on her wedding day. Immediately rumors started to spread around Chihuahua, Mexico that the shop owner had embalmed her daughter and was using her daughter as a mannequin in her store. It seems that the grief of losing her daughter on her wedding day was too much to bear. And so she actually hired someone to come in and keep her body preserved. And of course, people go on to say that not only does her corpse look like it is preserved as a mannequin, but it seems that her corpse might also still hold the spirit of the daughter. Why do people say this? Well, they say this because apparently, allegedly, according to people who have been in the shop, the mannequin will change positions on its own. In fact, one anonymous employee of the store said and I quote, every time I go near Pascualita, my hands break out in a sweat. Her hands are very realistic and she even has varicose veins on her legs. I believe she's a real person. Now, as we know from Vladimir Lenin's body, as we spoke about in the intro, it does take a lot of money to keep up an embalmed body. The body is going to start to decay. You're constantly having to have maintenance and a team of people, scientists around to keep the body looking lifelike. And as Vladimir Lenin's body has been around now for almost 100 years post his death, we can safely say that the Pascualita has also been around too close to 100 years to her death as well. Now we see how much effort goes into Vladimir Lenin. And I can't say that many people have talked about that much effort going into La Pascualita. I couldn't find any stories of people seeing maintenance people come in to touch up her body or make sure everything was working properly. I can't find any stories of people noticing her body start to decay or change colors with the death of the cells of the body. And as much as I want to believe that La Pascualita is a corpse bride and that this legend is true, things were not adding up. So I had to do my due diligence and go further into research. So what I then researched were mannequins from the 1930s. And that's when I stumbled upon Grace, otherwise known as Grace the mannequin. Grace the mannequin made her debut in storefronts in New York City around 1937. So about seven years after La Pascualita was put in the window down in Mexico. Now Grace, they would have to do her hair and do her makeup every single day. You see back in those days and closer to modern times, people wanted their mannequins to appear lifelike, to really wear the clothes the way a woman of that time would look and wear the clothes. It wasn't until recently in our modern time that companies started taking the faces off of mannequins because they didn't want the beauty of the mannequin to distract from the art of the clothes. They wanted the clothes to be the cell, not the beautiful mannequin. And by studying Grace more and looking at her story in New York, I realized there were lots of similarities between her and La Pascualita. I realized that La Pascualita is probably a mannequin from the 1930s. It's just very freaky to us because that's not the way mannequins look for us today. But then again, I could be wrong because you see I do believe that there is magic in the world. And I know that in Mexico, although they are a very Catholic country, there's also brujas. So in a time of intense mourning, could it possibly be that the mother of this young bride called upon some witchcraft to keep her daughter, her image alive and with her in the shop? I don't know. I don't know. So while I'm 99% sure that La Pascualita is sadly just a mannequin, I still have that 1% of me that thinks maybe there's something else to this story that we just don't know. And when someone asks the current owner if La Pascualita was actually an embalmed body, he winked and said, is it true? I really couldn't say. Now, no doubt this legend has definitely brought business to this store. And if you are in Chihuahua, Mexico, and you want to stop by, the mannequin usually does stay in the window of the shop. Now, if you go down to Chihuahua, Mexico and visit it, please be respectful to the current owners and be respectful to the mannequin itself. And then let me know what you think. Did you see the mannequin move? All right, guys, let me know your opinions down below. Have you heard of the story? What do you think is going on with La Pascualita? On our next video, we are going to cover another embalmed body over in Italy. That has quite a mystery around it as well, a little bit similar to La Pascualita. Except for this body we actually know is embalmed. And don't forget, tomorrow night, I will be back on with David on the Dark Outpost, David Zublik. Again, his channel link will be down in the description below. I hope you all will join us. We're going to be talking about Eastern philosophy and Ayurvedic health. That's another side of my life that I actually do for a living. So this is just fun. I do that for a living. So I hope that you'll be joining us tomorrow night on the Dark Outpost. All right, once again, thank you to Josh McKay for doing our music and to Todd Roderick for helping me edit and produce this story. I hope you guys have a wonderful day and I'll talk to you soon. Bye.