The Woman with Odd Hair

Ms. Mau’s hair lies like a python on her shoulders. When she dropped it down, the hair swept the ground. Looking from behind, the hair looks like a small papoose, swinging after each move of the woman.

For the past 17 years, Phung Thi Mau in Chua village, Van Thang commune, Ba Vi district, northern province of Ha Tay, has carried hair of 5kg in weight and more than 1.5m in length.

She has planned to cut it several times but each time she planned to do that, her head began to hurt painfully, like someone tightened a rope around her head.

The odd story about this hair commenced on the night of December 15, 1990 (lunar calendar). That night, she couldn’t sleep well.

In the morning on the next day, she combed her hair normally but it was strange because it was no longer smooth as before. It was very tangled. The more combing, the more tangled the hair was. The comb’s teeth were broken after her try to comb the hair. Ms. Mau used another comb but the situation was the same. She found that her hair was stuck together for a section of around 22cm long. In the morning on the next day, all of her hair was stuck together and she couldn’t disentangle it anymore.

When the hair began to clot, Ms. Mau always heard a crackling sound from her hair, which was sometimes low and sometimes high, depending on her health.

She still washes her hair on her own. However, each time of washing the special hair, Mau needs several hours to struggle with it, with one hour to make it clean and one-two hours to make it dry, using a large electric fan.