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This phrase brings to mind for most of us the bright lights, fried foods, and spectacle of the circus, carnival, or fair. This call promises us a view of something amazing, unusual, or fantastic. This could be stunt performances, magicians, the largest pig you've ever seen, or even animals doing incredible tricks. Back in the 19th and 20th century, this type of call brought curious onlookers to gaze upon humans with atypical attributes that both frightened and fascinated.
This type of exhibition was known as a freak show, and while they're rare today, they were intensely popular for much of history. Historically, the term freak was often used to describe individuals with physical and mental abnormalities or unusual characteristics that were considered abnormal. Today, the term freak is considered derogatory, so I'll be using phrases like people on display or freak show performers instead. This episode is going to focus on the freak shows of the Victorian era in England and in the USA, as this is a huge topic spanning centuries as well as academic disciplines.
Freak shows were a form of entertainment that exploited physical and mental differences for cash. In anthropology, this is called staging, presenting physical difference for profit, and it was often one of few ways the performers could earn a living. The way people with physical and mental differences were treated outside the freak show, with disdain, oppression, and marginalization, is called stigma. The people on display in freak shows experienced both.
The display of unusual humans goes back centuries. The Romans are documented as seeking out, quote, monstrous people, end quote, for show and profit. People with hypertrichosis, a genetic disorder that causes excessive hair growth all over the body, conjoined twins, and little people were brought to the 16th and 17th century royal courts of Europe as spectacles, sometimes becoming members of the court themselves, and sometimes being kidnapped and sold into slavery as a living oddity. Freak shows became exceedingly popular during the 19th century, specifically the Victorian era, which ran from 1820 to 1914.
Queen Victoria's coronation festivities included the display of giants, dwarves, and other, quote, oddities, end quote. In the early 1800s, single human oddities started joining traveling circuses, and by the 1870s, it was common to see freak shows at most circuses and carnivals. Aside from traveling exhibitions, freak shows were popular in the taverns and fairgrounds where freak show performers were combined with other talent displays. A more intimate experience was found in dime museums.
In a dime museum, freak show performers were exhibited as an educational display. Visitors were directed from stage to stage by a lecturer who described the performer's disabilities. So-called ugly laws in the United States in the 1860s banned those who were, quote, diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any other way deformed, end quote, from public view, making it hard for people with physical and mental differences to support themselves. Exhibitions, however, were exempt from these laws.
Freak shows, therefore, became places of employment for those who couldn't work elsewhere. They were also an opportunity for non-white performers, as non-white people were also excluded from many types of work and were also often exhibited in freak shows. As time went on, physical and mental differences became associated with deviance and sin. Many believed the conditions of the performers were punishments by God.
Therefore, late Victorian performers were billed as royalty or high class to prevent any moral groups from shutting down the shows. The growth of the British Empire and the expansion of scientific inquiry also resulted in a patriotic, ethnographic, and medical justification for bodily spectacle. In the early 1900s, the freak show faded and the medical exhibition rose in popularity under the auspices of the scientific revolution. Science and medical research legitimized bodily spectacle and savvy showmen exploited this.
Performers were marketed as, quote, Darwin's missing link, end quote, and the shows were called exhibitions or special lectures instead of a freak show. They were the same show, but marketed for newly enlightened audiences. The freak show is still alive today, although reinvented for modern audiences, the same as it's been reinvented for every new era of history. I'll go into this a little more near the end of the episode.
Freak shows generally exhibited three specific types of performers, freaks of nature or people with congenital or developmental disorders, freaks of culture, as in people from different cultures, and self-made freaks, those who modified their bodies in extreme ways. Some of the more commonly featured congenital and developmental conditions on display as freaks of nature were exceptionally tall people, historically termed giants, exceptionally short people, historically termed dwarves, conjoined twins, that is twins who are physically connected to each other, bearded ladies, who are women with facial hair due to conditions like hirsutism, people with microcephaly, a condition where the head and brain are abnormally small, historically termed pinheads, people with albinism, meaning they lack pigment in their skin, hair, and eyes, people with limb deformities such as missing limbs, extra fingers and toes, or deformed limbs, and people with weight extremes such as obesity or extreme thinness. Freaks of culture were people of other ethnicities displayed as curiosities. This was a common occurrence in England during the British Empire, when Britain had colonies all over the world and brought people from their colonies to be displayed.
For example, people with different skin colors, fashions, piercings, and beliefs. This occurred in parts of Europe and America as well. Self-made freaks are a more recent addition to modern freak shows, which are usually called carnivals of curiosity or similar. These are usually people who have had hundreds of body modifications such as tattoos or plastic surgeries to change their look or give them abilities that are beyond physical or social norms.
It's important to acknowledge that many times, especially in the Victorian era, the performer's participation wasn't always their choice. They were manipulated or enslaved in order to generate profit for the ringmaster or showman who ran the exhibition. Then and now, this is hugely unethical. In the worst case scenarios, freak show runners objectified the individuals involved, Treating them as objects of curiosity, keeping them captive, denying them dignity and humanity, and refusing to pay them.
Today, there is widespread recognition that such shows were exploitative and degrading. However, not all freak shows were like this. There are uplifting, celebratory stories as well of people who found their power through the exhibition of their differences and found a family among their fellow performers. Many freak show performers have the attitude that people were going to gawk anyway, why not make them pay for the privilege?
I'm going to discuss several of the more famous freak show performers and the showmen who employed them. But first, an ad must play. If these ads annoy you, you can get ad-free episodes by becoming a patron for as little as $2 a month by going to bit.ly slash morbidpatron. That's bit.ly slash morbidpatron.
On March 23, 1844, Queen Victoria hosted a performance from General Tom Thumb, whose real name was Charles Stratton. Stratton marched into Buckingham Palace. He was 25 inches tall, dressed in a court suit, and he performed skits, tricks, and impersonations for over an hour. Unwittingly, Queen Victoria had given her royal seal of approval to freak shows.
At the time, the Victorians were obsessed with taxonomy and classification. Modernization, industrialization, and urbanization were the new normal. The middle class was rising, and the introduction of Saturday half holidays and commercial leisure spots gave them time to seek out new experiences. New methods of transportation, such as railways and steamships, gave them the ability to travel further and for the exhibitions to come to them.
Some of the most famous exhibitions were those run by P.T. Barnum, Tom Norman, the Ringling Brothers, and photographer Charles Eisenman. Barnum was the most popular showman in America, having both a museum and the Barnum & Bailey Circus. Norman was renowned for his London exhibitions, one of which featured Joseph Merrick, also known as the Elephant Man, who we've covered in a previous episode.
The Ringling Brothers ran a circus with a prominent freak show that was later absorbed by the Barnum & Bailey Circus. The photographs of circus and freak show performers taken by Eisenman popularized and perpetuated the allure of freak shows and exhibitions. These showmen were skilled promoters and businessmen who knew how to attract audiences and capitalize on public curiosity. They shaped the perception and legacy of freak shows, however, their methods and treatment of the performers was He began to earn more than $1,000 a week, that's around $42,000 today.
Upon his death in 1891, he donated about half his life earnings to other performers who hadn't had his good fortune. The rest was donated to the Greek Church. Another of P.T. Barnum's successful performers was William Henry Johnson, who was billed as Zip the Pinhead.
Johnson was born in New Jersey in 1842, an impoverished, newly freed slave. He was born with a subtle physical deformity, which gave him a cone-shaped head. He worked as a sideshow performer for a local New Jersey showman, as a missing link between humans and apes, until 1869, when P.T. Barnum discovered him.
Barnum changed Johnson's stage name to Zip and invented an eccentric backstory, where Zip was, quote, found during a gorilla trekking expedition near the Gambia River in Western Africa, end quote. At first, Barnum displayed Zip in a cage and paid him $1 a day, around $42 today, to stay in character and make only grunting noises. Zip would also play a violin so badly that guests would pay him to stop. Zip quickly became a superstar and started making around $100 a performance, which he did 10 times a week.
His act became less outlandish and more respectful as time went on. He was so successful that Barnum purchased Johnson a lavish house in Connecticut. Johnson had learned a lot about marketing from Barnum and kept performing well into his 80s. In 1925, he rescued a little girl who had fallen into the ocean near Coney Island, where he was performing.
He also performed in stage plays in his later years. When Johnson passed away, he was a multi-millionaire. Johnson worked with another highly successful set of performers known as Chang and Eng. Chang and Eng were conjoined twins from Siam, now known as Thailand, who were joined at the chest by a small piece of cartilage, but were otherwise freestanding.
Their livers were connected through the band, and they only shared sensation in the middle of the ligament. They were brought to the United States in 1829 by a British merchant to be a touring curiosity. Within three years, they left the control of their managers and toured on their own. Fun fact, the term, quote, Siamese twins, end quote, originated from a doctor who saw the two perform.
By 1838, the 29-year-old twins retired with $60,000, or $2.5 million today. They purchased a 100-acre plantation in South Carolina, became American citizens, married local sisters Adelaide and Sarah Yates, and together fathered 21 children. The brothers took on the last name Bunker and were respected members of Southern society. After the Civil War, Chang and Eng lost part of their wealth when their enslaved plantation workers were freed.
Chang and Eng began touring again to earn money. On a ship back home from Europe, Chang suffered a stroke, and the twins had to retire, with Eng becoming a carer for Chang. In 1870, the Bunker estate was worth $30,000, an equivalent to $1.3 million today. Chang died at the age of 62, with Eng following him only hours after.
An autopsy revealed that their livers were fused in a ligament connecting their sternum. This suggests that they could easily have been separated today, but would have likely died at the time due to primitive surgical methods. The announcement of their deaths caught the attention of Dr. William Pancoast, who successfully petitioned for the opportunity to study the twins.
It's rumored that Pancoast had offered money to Chang and Eng's widows to inspect the twins, but more likely the doctors pressured the sisters to donate the bodies by calling it their duty to science and humanity. The twins' bodies were delivered by train to the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, where an autopsy was performed. The preliminary findings of the autopsy were presented on February 18th, while the autopsy was in progress. It was suggested that Eng had died of blood loss as his circulatory system pumped blood through the connecting band into his dead brother's body and received no blood in return.
But most physicians believe Eng died of fright at the sight of his brother's body. This is not the only instance of a freak show performer continuing to function as a spectacle and curiosity after their death. Julia Pastrana, who suffered from hypertrichosis terminalis, which caused her whole body to be covered in thick hair, was exhibited as Bearwoman. She died in childbirth in 1860, after which her husband, who was also her manager and a showman, sent her body and that of their child to Russian scientists to be preserved.
He then exhibited them in his traveling show between 1862 and 1864, right alongside his new wife, who had a similar condition. After his death, the bodies continued to tour around Europe until 1895. They are now in storage at the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Oslo. After their deaths, Chang, Eng, and Julia and her child went from being a person exploited for profit to an object exploited for profit.
Many freak show performers suffered similar fates during life, but were buried in quiet ceremonies with nondescript graves to keep them from being exploited in death. In 1932, as the popularity of freak shows was dwindling, a film came out called Freaks, directed by Todd Browning. The plot revolves around a beautiful trapeze artist who manipulates one of the sideshow performers for financial gain, leading to a shocking revenge disfigurement orchestrated by the performers. Its portrayal of individuals with real deformities and disabilities, the freak show performers who starred in the film, was seen as controversial at the time due to its perceived exploitation of the performers and the shocking nature of the film's content.
However, over time, the film gained a following and is now considered a cult classic and a significant work of early horror cinema. The film sparked debate about representation, exploitation, and the portrayal of disability in film. It challenges audiences to confront their perceptions of physical differences and raises ethical questions about the treatment of marginalized individuals in entertainment. In 1967, retired circus and sideshow performers began settling in Gibsonton, aka Gibsonton, a small town in Florida.
At its height in the 1960s and 70s, the self-defined 14,900 population town was a fabled place where everyone had once been a performer. The post office catered to little people with extra low counters, and the beer halls had custom-built chairs for the fat ladies and the tallest men. Special zoning regulations allowed residents to keep and train exotic animals in their gardens. It became the home of around 100 self-defined human oddities, in addition to several thousand carnival workers known as carneys.
It was a safe haven, away from prying eyes. Nowadays, Gibstown looks like any other American small town. If you didn't know it was there, you might drive straight through it. This is because the display of differently-abled people has become increasingly taboo.
It's illegal in several states to exhibit any, quote, deformed human being or human monstrosity, end quote, except for closed scientific exhibits, even if the performers are high-paid, consenting adults. Freak shows haven't completely disappeared, however. One of the more famous modern shows is the Jim Rose Circus, which was founded in Seattle in 1991. It toured with Lollapalooza in 1992, an annual American four-day music festival held in Grant Park in Chicago, and also with Nine Inch Nails, Godsmack, and Marilyn Manson.
Jim Rose himself performed several acts in the show, which included stunts and comedy. Other acts I've featured in the show were the amazing Lifto, who lifted heavy weights from his piercings and genitals, Nat the tube Crowley, who swallowed seven feet of plastic tubing, filled himself with various liquids, and then pumped them back out again, The Enigma, who was billed as able to eat anything, similar to Tarare, a character from a previous episode, and whose body was completely tattooed with blue puzzle pieces, the Lizardman, who was tattooed all over to appear like a lizard, and had surgically split his tongue, several ex-pro wrestlers, Brianna Belladonna, a sword swallower, and Fat Matt Allitoe, who was billed as the world's fattest contortionist. As you can see, most of the individuals in Jim Rose Circus are not so-called freaks of nature, but self-made freaks. There have been several attempts to ban the show, but none have succeeded.
It's been called revolting and amusing, brutally comic and shocking. The popularity of freak shows was criticized even during their heyday, and as societal attitudes toward disability, diversity, and human rights evolved, so did perceptions of freak shows. They declined in popularity and eventually disappeared in most parts of the world. Why did freak shows become so popular in the Victorian era?
Beyond the innovations in science, industry, transportation, and urbanization, what was it that drew so much fascination? Why do they still draw fascination today? Humans have a conflicting and complex relationship with the imagery of physical difference. We reject, exploit, or celebrate, or do all of these at once.
From an anthropological perspective, the body often represents our identities. Therefore, we are constantly comparing ourselves to what society deems as normal or average. Freak shows and physical and mental difference itself, especially when exhibited so starkly, seems to represent to us an in-between being, a being that pushes the physical and conceptual limits of our definitions of normal and abnormal. In the Victorian era, freak show performers, especially cultural freak show performers, became a powerful ideological tool to confirm the normality of the dominant culture and its beliefs.
Dr. Barbara Putova of Charles and relate to other humans. It sparks fear, pity, but also empathy, which is why freak shows also spark our morbid curiosity. The Morbid Curiosity podcast is produced by H.
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