Step right up folks…prepare to be amazed at what you see…right this way to the greatest show on earth.  Before radio and television, human beings had to depend on live shows for their entertainment and while most people would attend a play or a concert, the more adventurous sought out sideshows at carnivals, where odd, unusual and downright weird people performed behind closed curtains.

The practice exists today, while certainly not as prevalent as in the early 1800’s to the mid-1900’s. Still, we wonder, are those shows real or are they fake. The answer may be a little bit of both. Much of what is touted as real is actually a trick to make it seem so, or it’s worded in such a way that yes, what they say is real is real, but once you get inside, you’ll see that most of the time, you’ve been had. Still, as long as there are curiosity seekers, there will be those who deliver the curiosities.

Bearded Ladies, Wild Man of Borneo, Siamese Twins, and Tom Thumb, the Smallest Man Alive

Although many of the sideshow acts at circuses in the 19 and 20^th Centuries were fakes, some actually were genuine and caused by genetic anomalies. Take the bearded ladies, for instance. Some were just cleverly made up to appear to have beards while others quite likely suffered from a medical condition known as hypertrichosis wherein excess hair grew on certain parts of the body, most notably on the face. There were lion-faced boys and camel girls, but they were just names attached to unfortunate human beings who happened to have been born with atrociously deformed bodies and whose deformities were seen by men like P.T. Barnum  and Samuel Grumpertz as an opportunity to make money.

While P.T. Barnum was known for pulling the wool over his customers’ eyes by doing such things as passing off a regular black man as the Wild Man of Borneo, a lesser-known sideshow manager by the name of Samuel Grumpertz was globetrotting around the world looking for bona fide “freaks” to bring back to America to show at Coney Island.  While Siamese twins were a popular sideshow attraction, they did raise objections from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children who filed several lawsuits to try and prohibit such exhibits from taking place.

And yes, there were lots and lots of little people, the smallest of which was a man named Charles Sherwood Stratton, better known as Tom Thumb, whose height only reached 33 inches. Discovered by P.T. Barnum, Tom Thumb wasn’t just a sideshow exhibit, but rather became a high-paid performer who eventually travelled all over the world and met some of the most famous people of his time.   

Sword Swallowers, Human Blockheads and Fire Eaters

Using the body in scary ways has always been a staple of the carnival and circus sideshows. Most everyone believes when they seen a man swallowing a sword or pounding a long nail up his nostril or even putting a fiery torch in his mouth that it is just a magic trick. In reality, it’s a little of both. Believe it or not, the sword is real, not fake and not collapsible, the nails are real and they really are being pounded into the man’s nasal passageway, and the fire, yes, it is real and it is hot.

So how do they do it? The trick is the performers know a lot about human physiology and they have found ways to put dangerous items in their bodies without causing permanent damage to themselves. In the case of a sword swallower, it takes years of practice and the ability to ignore their body’s automatic reflexes to allow themselves to stick long, unbendable objects down their throats. The same goes for the human blockhead. He really can hammer a nail into his head through the nostril, but it will have taken him years of practice to get to the point of doing it in front of an audience.