The first thing you’ll notice about Ingrid Havstrøm, better known as Crab Girl, is she lives up to her stage name. She’s surly, aloof and … well crabby. But she also has a lot of warmth and humour for people close to her, her “Sideshow family”.
Ingrid joined the Sideshow, possibly around age nine, as a young runaway. She had run away from an orphanage on the southern coast of Norway just outside Kristiansand. Her unusual physical appearance and her insistence and determination on staying meant that she was swiftly and legally adopted by the Sideshow.
The orphanage where Ingrid came from is situated on shoreline overlooking a beach where she was first found. “There she was, this tiny child, all of about three. She was completely naked and abandoned on the beach and looking very distressed” says Governess Aakvik. “I remember how my staff and I were initially quite alarmed by her unusual appearance.What kind of child has a crab claw as a hand?”
“She was a very shy little thing, though once she trusted you she was terribly affectionate. She’d curl up on your lap like a wee kitten, she was very cute – but like a stray kitten she was very timid and her moods would swing quite abruptly. She always had an unpredictable temper and she never really got along with the other children, which is why we suspect she ran away to be with the Sideshow.”
“We have no idea where she came from and who her birth family is, to my knowledge she has never confided that information, or maybe she does not remember. The other children would tease her and say that her father was a drunk sailor who had it off with a crab because he was so drunk that he could not tell the difference between a crab and a mermaid.”
“We called her Ingrid Havstrøm, because Havstrøm means ‘ocean current’ which we felt was very fitting to her nature”.
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