Regency Londoners were obsessed with pig-faced ladies

[Still Waters]

Gathered around Piccadilly Street in the summer of 1815, Londoners were celebrating the recent British victory over Napoleon. The area was packed with people, forcing traffic to a crawl. As memoirist Rees Howell Gronow wrote in 1864, one carriage in particular drew the crowd’s attention. Some proclaimed that inside, they had seen an animal snout protruding from a trendy bonnet. It was none other than the infamous pig-faced lady, or so they claimed. Some shouted for the carriage to stop, crowding around the vehicle. Faced with the growing press of people, the driver hurried away.

As the person in that carriage surely learned, even the wildest rumors can bloom into a real-world frenzy. By the early 19th century, London’s growing news industry helped to transform the urban legend of a pig-faced lady into delirium.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/pig-faced-lady-london