Krao Farini (1876 – 16 April 1926) was an American sideshow performer, who was born with hypertrichosis and took part in 19th-century exhibition tours in North America and Europe. She was adopted by William Leonard Hunt, also known as Guillermo Antonio Farini, who exploited her appearance. Throughout her life she was falsely advertised as a primitive human and billed as the missing link between humans and apes. Origins Accounts from her early career have Krao Farini being born in Laos, then a province in northern Siam. As is the case with biographic accounts of most sideshow performers, it is unclear how much of her known life is fictitious. It is claimed that in January 1881, Krao and her parents were captured during an expedition conducted by the explorer Carl Bock to what is now northern Thailand and Laos. An anthropologist named Dr. George Shelly was part of the expedition and took charge of Krao. Krao was described as being part of a primitive tribe of humans called "Kraos-monink" all of whom were covered in hair and lived in trees. The Siamese had to be bribed by Bock and Shelley into capturing them because of the belief that it was bad luck to kill or capture Kraos-monink. Krao's mother was detained in Bangkok and her father died from cholera. They were said to lack the knowledge of fire and survived upon fruits, fish, and nuts. Her name was said to mean "ape" in Siamese. She was also described as having a number of anatomically unusual features in addition to her body hair including an extra thoracic vertebra, an extra pair of ribs, cheek pouches, hypermobility of her joints, and lacking cartilage in her ears and nose. Another early account of Krao's origins was given by Dr. George G. Shelly. He claimed that about 1874 Carl Bock had been travelling in Burma on behalf of Guillermo Antonio Farini in search of unusually tall people. At the court of the King of Burma, he encountered the grandchildren of a hairy couple (the couple had previously been encountered by European explorers at the court a generation before) . Bock discovered that they had been gifts to the court from the king of Laos. He offered the king of Burma $100,000 for them, but was denied. Then in 1882, Dr. Shelly and Bock went on several expeditions in search for hairy people. They met at