12 CURIOS
A SPECIAL CATEGORY IS RESERVED for inanimate objects that might be displayed in a sideshow. Since there is no general carny or showmen's term for these, I simply refer to them as curios—that is, objects valued for their strangeness or rarity.
Pickled Exhibits
When neither the banner nor the outside talker promises that an exhibit is “alive,” it probably isn't. Many once-living rarities are preserved in some kind of solution, others are mummified, and a rare few are frozen.
Among the first type are what carnies call pickled punks—a term never used before the public but reserved for those who are with it (in the know). Originally, a pickled punk was a child or fetus kept in formaldehyde or some other preservative. It might be a normal fetal specimen, used in an educational exhibit, or a freak one, such as a two-headed baby or other anomaly (figures 12.1 and 12.2). By extension, the term also came to refer to such specimens of animals or even alleged “aliens” or other entities (Taylor and Kotcher 2002, 247; Keyser 2001).
Although preserved specimens have long been kept for biological and medical purposes (in 2002, I inspected a cabinet of them dating from the eighteenth century in a museum in Saxony), their sideshow value has been exploited in large part by showman Lou Dufour. About 1920, he was impressed by an exhibit of human embryos at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Seven years later, Dufour saw a similar collection of twenty specimens being exhibited by a Dr. Albert Jones at the local fair in Shreveport, Indiana. The lineup at the tent entrance caught Dufour's attention, and—after a few days of effort—he persuaded the doctor to sell the collection to him. Dufour added some other biological exhibits and named the show “Unborn.” In 1928 he opened it with a carnival, the Johnny J. Jones Shows, at Largo, Florida. Dufour (1977, 46-47) would later recall:
FIGURE 12.1. Bobby Reynolds and his two-headed pickled punk. (Photo by author)
FIGURE 12.2. Bobby Reynolds's two-headed pickled punk exhibit was sometimes presented as a blowoff or as a separate grind show. (Photo by author)
I received an excited call one morning from the fair manager. I had to get over to the grounds at once, to my exhibit. Without getting an explanation, I hurried down. The reason was the quartet of Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Harvey Firestone, and a Dr. Goodman, who had come to see the “Unborn” Show. I opened up and made my pitch for them. When they expressed approval and enthusiasm I knew I really had something with my assortment of human embryos and fetuses! Edison was deaf so I hollered into the old-fashioned horn he held to his ear. I asked what impelled him to come so early in the day, and Edison explained, “Last night I had these gentlemen to my home as dinner guests and all my wife could talk about was your exhibit. We decided to see for ourselves—and I’m glad we came.
Dufour adds that it took him a day to realize what he had. “If men of above-average intelligence would go to a dusty fairgrounds for the experience,” he realized, “it had to be worthwhile.” The exhibit proved “a gold mine” for the showman, who soon put together similar exhibits at numerous venues and became, as he said, “the biggest exhibitor of unborn humans in the entire world!”
In part, Dufour's success was due to low overhead. As he noted, all his actors “were bottled in formaldehyde and drew no salaries.” At the Century of Progress world's fair in Chicago (1933-1934), Dufour and his new partner Joe Rogers framed two shows. The “Life Museum” began with human fetuses and continued with exhibits on human anatomy, growth, and reproduction; animal life histories; and the evolutionary stages of mankind. The second show was billed as “A Live Two-Headed Baby,” but alas, the two-month-old infant died before the show opened. The savvy showmen quickly substituted “another one in a bottle” and dressed a female ticket seller and an inside lecturer in nurse costumes. The former would announce, “It was born alive—you must see the little one.” The marquee front pictured a two-headed infant being carried by a stork. By the time the sign's big two-dimensional word “LIVE” had been changed to “REAL,” recalled Dufour (1977, 62), “we were well on our way to success.” (See figure 12.3.)
FIGURE 12.3. Showmen Lou Dufour and Joe Rogers operated a “Real Two-Headed Baby” show at Chicago's Century of Progress exhibition—the central sideshow in this official 1933 postcard of the midway. (Author's collection)
Showman Ward Hall calls the Dufour and Rogers exhibit “the original freak baby show” (interview in Taylor and Kotcher 2002). It did launch a thousand tips (so to speak), but it was not the first such exhibit, as shown by classified ads in Billboard magazine. In 1921 a California woman offered “two perfect heads on one body. Weighed 19 and three quarters pounds at birth, 10 inches across the shoulders. Preserved in five-gallon jar. For lease by reliable show.” Earlier, in 1919, a man had offered to sell showmen genuine two-headed and frog-child infants: “These cost more than paper stiffs [gaffs of paper and wax], but you will not be ashamed to exhibit them. Send 25 cents for descriptions and prices. This small charge is to keep information from moms and children” (Stencell 2002, 152-53).
In any event, the Dufour and Rogers exhibit was soon imitated by others. Fakes began to look more realistic, and because of their rubber (or sometimes soft vinyl) composition, they were called bouncers (figure 12.4). Bobby Reynolds—who showed me his genuine two-headed baby (see figure 12.1)—has seen all types: “I’ve always had something. I’ve had bouncers. I had one that was wax that looked like a gingerbread boy. Flat wooden thing with water around it. It was horrible. That was the first two-headed specimen I had. The one they had at Hubert's [Museum, in New York]—it was wax—was an exact reproduction of the one I have that's real. I always thought the one they had at Hubert's was real until one time I saw it in the corner and the leg was broke” (interview in Taylor 1997).
FIGURE 12.4. Pickled punks are sometimes bouncers (rubber fakes), as in this grind show. The fine print says, “These are facsimiles, created from real live babies” (Photo by Benjamin Radford)
The real specimens require some care. Whereas the gaffs can be placed in water (sometimes deliberately clouded with coffee or tea to help disguise the fakery), the genuine specimens are improved by a clear solution. Although this is often called formaldehyde, it is actually quite diluted, since too much formaldehyde can “burn” the specimens. (Aqueous solutions of the preservative are sold under trademark names such as Formalin.) Showmen change the liquid whenever it begins to look cloudy (Stencell 2002, 152-53; Wilson et al. 1996, 192-93).
Bouncers are cheaper and easier to acquire than genuine specimens. Another reason for using them is to circumvent legal restrictions. At an Illinois fair in 1977, a former coroner running for sheriff raided the Hall & Christ freak baby show, arresting Chris Christ and charging him with the illegal transporting of human remains. Although a judge eventually ruled that the fetuses were not corpses (there were neither birth nor death certificates) and that it was legal to own them, they had been confiscated and were never returned. Ward Hall never even asked for them back because, “Fortunately, we already had molds of them sitting at the rubber factory. We were only out of business…for a week, then we had the bouncers.” The candidate for sheriff engaged in his own form of show business: he lined up some fourteen little coffins at a cemetery and—with a priest, rabbi, and Protestant minister in attendance—proceeded to have a burial ceremony for the “carnival babies.” The publicity stunt was carried by the wire services, and he won the election (Taylor and Kotcher 2002, 9).
Hall and Christ encountered more trouble in Ohio. There, the operator of their freak baby show, Henry Valentine, attempted to appease a fairgrounds inspector by showing him that the genuine fetuses had been replaced with rubber ones. Unfortunately, as the inspector explained, Ohio law is “very specific. You cannot have any made-up freak. Now if you had the real ones there'd be no problem. You'd get the license, but I can't license these because they're fake” (Taylor and Kotcher 2002, 8).
Because many people find the baby shows (aka bottle shows) repulsive, and some carnival owners reject them on their midways, a few grinders have taken a new tack. For example, Jeff and Sue Murray framed a “Horrors of Drug Abuse!” show, attempting to give the exhibit a moral tone and some educational value. It utilized a traditional show tent, in contrast to most of the newer trailer-constructed grind shows. Depicting a cyclops-eyed baby, the marquee banner proclaimed, “Man-Made Monsters,” “Mother Nature's Mistakes,” and “Children Born of Addiction” (Ray 1993, 21-22). Jeff stored his bouncers dry, putting them in special jars on opening day and adding water and a splash of coffee. It created, states Ray (1993, 22), a “disturbing effect”: “At a date in Selmar, California, one Mexican woman staggered out of the tent on a particularly hot day, grabbed the ticket box for support and promptly leaned over and threw up. While not exactly an ideal situation it did serve as great publicity and helped sell a lot of tickets to marks whose curiosity had been set on fire.”
FIGURE 12.5. A mummified prospector was actually embalmed—or is this Canadian sideshow exhibit only a replica? (Photo by author)
As noted in the previous chapter, preserved animal fetuses are also exhibited. For instance, Jeff and Sue Murray operated a “Mystery Museum” grind show that included pickled freak animals among its varied exhibits.
Other Preserved Exhibits
Another major type of preserved exhibit is the mummy (figure 12.5). Most of the dried, emaciated figures that have found their way into sideshows and similar exhibits were not naturally preserved—as sometimes alleged—but are the result of embalming.
One such figure was the former Elmer McCurdy, an erstwhile soldier and miner who became a bank and train robber. He was killed by a sheriff's posse after an attempted train heist in Oklahoma. Locally embalmed with arsenic, the body was claimed in 1916 by some shrewd showmen from the Great Patterson Shows, who took it on tour. McCurdy's mummified body went from carnival to carnival, once being forfeited as security for a failed $500 loan. It was thus acquired in 1922 by policeman-turned-showman Louis Sonney, who exhibited the outlaw's mummy in his “Museum of Crime” sideshow and other venues off and on during the 1930s and 1940s. For example, McCurdy's mummified remains were exhibited in theater lobbies during showings of the film Narcotic (1933).
In 1968 McCurdy's body was acquired by the Hollywood wax museum, which later sold it to the “Laff-in-the-Dark” fun house at the Nu-Pike Amusement Park in Long Beach, California. When a scene was being filmed there for The Six Million Dollar Man (1976), what was thought to be a fun-house mannequin, painted fluorescent orange, fell off a hook, and the crew discovered a protruding arm bone. An autopsy turned up a bullet wound in the abdomen as well as a tag reading “Property of Louis Sonney.” The owners then “grudgingly” released the mummy, and Elmer McCurdy was finally laid to rest in an Oklahoma graveyard next to fellow outlaw Bill Doolin (Taylor and Kotcher 2002, 205; Stencell 2002, 215-16; Miller 2003).
One of the most famous mummies was that reputed to be Abraham Lincoln's assassin, John Wilkes Booth (1838-1865). Following his demise, some forty people, usually shortly before their own deaths, “confessed” that they were Booth (claiming that the assassin had somehow escaped and lived a secret life). One person, David E. George, who committed suicide in 1903 at Enid, Oklahoma, even confessed posthumously. His long unclaimed but remarkably embalmed body was obtained by Memphis lawyer Finis Bates, who identified the man as “John St. Helen” and claimed that St. Helen had confessed that he was really Booth. Bates published an account of this “true” story, The Escape and Suicide of John Wilkes Booth, and for many years the mummy was exhibited in carnival sideshows. Although it superficially resembled the actor-turned-assassin, even bearing fractures and wounds similar to Booth's, the mummy was investigated in 1910 by the Dearborn Independent and debunked (Nickell 1993). Initially, Bates had only rented the mummy to showmen on occasion, but after the lawyer's death, it was sold and returned to the entertainment circuit. Its whereabouts have been unknown since World War II, although current researchers still hope that it will turn up for DNA and other testing (Taylor and Kotcher 2002, 210).
Still another sideshow mummy was that of notorious Utah nightclub entertainer Marie O’Day. She was stabbed to death by her common-law husband in 1925 and, according to legend, her body was dumped in the Great Salt Lake. The salt preserved her corpse so that, when it turned up on shore a dozen years later, Marie still had her red hair and even the “corn upon her toe,” according to promotional literature. Marie's mummy was exhibited by a number of showmen in thirty-eight states. At one time she was shown in a special “Palace Car” (actually a semitrailer divided into a sleeping quarters for the operator and an exhibition room for Marie). Later she was exhibited by “Palace of Wonders” grinder Captain Harvey Lee Boswell, who died in 2002 (Taylor and Kotcher 2002, 211; Stencell 2002, 150).
Not all sideshow mummies are genuine. “Big Cleo, World's Tallest Girl”—who reportedly stood nearly eight feet tall and weighed 460 pounds—was a fabricated mummy. The single-O show was framed with large pictorials depicting Cleo as a bikini-clad beauty. One featured her towering over two tropical explorers saying, “Take Me to Your Leader” (Ray 1993, 17).
In addition to pickled punks and mummies, other preserved exhibits include the products of taxidermy. For example, when P. T. Barnum acquired John Scudder's American Museum in late 1841, he inherited its resident taxidermist along with its collection of stuffed birds and small mammals. Barnum began adding larger mounted animals, such as lions, zebras, wolves, grizzly bears, and even huge stuffed elephants (Kunhardt et al. 1995, 110).
In the late 1860s the John O’Brien Circus had, as part of its menagerie, an “aquarium,” which was actually a wagon with a glass front. An assortment of stuffed fish was arranged on a wood panel just behind the glass. The aquarium thus took up only about a foot of the wagon's four-foot width, leaving a three-foot compartment to be used for other purposes, such as sleeping quarters for the driver or his relief man (Conklin 1921, 21-22).
Many freak animals are short-lived and thus become taxidermic exhibits. In 2002 in Waldenburg, Saxony, I visited a small natural history museum that had several such curios, including two-headed and double-bodied calves. A little twin-headed calf is displayed at the Farmers Museum in Cooperstown, New York (placed near the Cardiff giant, discussed later in this chapter).
Some freak animal shows include taxidermic exhibits. In his traveling International Circus Sideshow Museum & Gallery, Bobby Reynolds displayed a stuffed five-legged calf. Once, when we were talking about why he was no longer operating a live show, Bobby gestured across the tent to the calf and observed, “It doesn't eat, shit, or talk back.” Another time, he expounded on the practicality of such exhibits, saying, “See, this way you can put ‘em in a truck; you could lock the truck up.” In other words, they require no care or thought (Reynolds 2001). Bobby's worry-free menagerie includes a “real” two-headed goose (figure 12.6) and a humorous “hippy chicken” sporting a 1960s peace symbol dangling from its neck.
FIGURE 12.6. This two-headed goose in a sideshow exhibit looks suspiciously like an example of the taxidermist's art. (Photo by author)
Bobby's collection also includes shrunken heads (figure 12.7), which are akin to mummified and taxidermic exhibits. Bobby gave me some pointers on distinguishing between genuine and gaffed shrunken heads; for example, fine nose hair is one feature of the authentic ones. (Gaffed shrunken heads are widespread, with many being sold to showmen by Tate's Curiosity Shop of Phoenix, Arizona. See Taylor 2001, 66-69.) I learned more about the subject from one of the world's foremost authorities on shrunken heads, Bill Jamieson (2001). I also inspected his impressive collection at his Toronto home.
FIGURE 12.7. Showman Bobby Reynolds (left) poses with me—and another “shrunken” friend. (Photo by author)
Shrunken heads were prepared by the Jivaro tribes of the Ecuadorian and Peruvian Amazon, and the practice dates back to pre-Columbian times. The heads were taken from enemies as trophies, and the preparation was intended to keep the enemy's spirit from taking revenge in either the present life or the afterlife. The head-shrinking process began with a downward slit through the skin at the back of the head. The skull (which would not shrink) was removed and discarded. The eyes were sewn shut, and the lips were held closed with thin wooden pegs (these were later removed and replaced with string). The head was then boiled for up to two hours, resulting in its shrinking to about a third of its original size. Next, the skin was turned inside out and scraped to remove any adhering flesh. It was then returned to its original position, and the slit at the rear was sewn closed. Final shrinking was done by filling the skin sack with hot stones, which seared the interior skin, followed by hot sand, to reach the finer crevices and cavities. This treatment was later applied to the outside, and the head was finally suspended over a fire, which hardened and blackened it.
Still another type of preserved exhibit is the frozen animal. An example is “Little Irvy—The 20 Ton, 38 Ft. Whale” once exhibited by Jerry and Charlotte Malone. Harpooned on July 1, 1967, Little Irvy was promptly frozen with some forty tons of liquid nitrogen pumped around and inside the carcass. The frozen sperm whale was kept in a glass tank in a Thermo King refrigeration truck, accompanied by a sign reading, “This Exhibit Is Dedicated to the Preservation of Whales”—a punning, ironic claim, given that the whale was actually killed for exhibition. “See the Giant from the Pacific,” read a sign on the side of the truck. Some customers complained that they had been misled and urged Malone to add the words “DEAD WHALE” in large letters. Malone retorted that he would not do so “for the same reason that Banks don't put ‘12½% INTEREST’ [on loans] in big letters on their front windows” (Deford 2001).
Bogus Creatures
Sideshows are repositories of numerous allegedly paranormal entities—ranging from the Fejee Mermaid of Barnum's time to today's preserved extraterrestrial corpses. Approximately 100 percent of these are fakes.
Hoax mermaids, for example, date back to the sixteenth century. Known as “Jenny Hanivers,” such manufactured mermaids were typically produced by joining parts of two different species—the upper half of an ape (such as an orangutan or monkey) and the lower portion of a fish (such as a salmon). Such a fake was exhibited in 1822. Two decades later, P. T. Barnum acquired it from the original owner's descendants and exhibited it as the “Fejee Mermaid” (see chapter 1). When Barnum's fake was publicly challenged in South Carolina, he and his partner in the venture, Moses Kimball, discussed suing the accusing naturalist for libel (Harris 1973, 65-67). Instead, Barnum just had the mermaid shipped back to his American Museum, where it presumably perished when the museum burned in 1865. “It has been claimed,” however, “that Barnum's original mermaid found its way back to Moses Kimball in Boston and thence to the Peabody Museum” (Kunhardt et al. 1995, 43). The one at the Peabody is actually known as the Java Mermaid, “one of the many imitations that appeared in rival exhibits across the country.” According to the Harvard Gazette (Early 1996), many of its type were cheaply manufactured:
For years experts believed that the “mermaids” were made by sewing together the head of a monkey and the tail of a fish. But in 1990, Peabody conservator Scott Fulton conducted a full-scale examination. Fulton ran starch tests on the Java Mermaid's front section. “We discovered that it is made of papier-mâché molded to resemble the limbs of the creature,” he says. Then he showed the creature to Karel Liem, professor of ichthyology, and Karsten Hartel, curatorial associate in ichthyology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology. “It was the ingenuity of the thing, the way it was put together that I remember,” says Hartel, who confirmed that the creature's [composure included real fish parts. According to Fulton's] records, the mermaid's teeth, fingernails, and fins, are nothing more than the jaws and the teeth, spines, and fins of a carp and a porgy-like fish, “placed liberally.”
I have seen several of these “originals”—fakes of Barnum's fake! The old showman would have been delighted at the homage. One is displayed at the Ripley's Believe It or Not! Museum in Hollywood. Its display card, headed “World's Greatest Fake,” implies that it is Barnum's own: “Believe It or Not! This curious object was once exhibited as a genuine mermaid. Incredible as it may sound, thousands of people paid 25 cents in 1842 to see P. T. Barnum's ‘Fejee Mermaid.’”
Another is at Coney Island's Sideshows by the Seashore, which bills it as “P. T. Barnum's ‘Figi [sic] Mermaid’ circa 1842 / on loan from the Barnum Museum / Bridgeport, Connecticut.” Be that as it may, it does not match the illustration of the original that first appeared in the New York Sunday Herald and that Barnum termed “a correct likeness” (Kunhardt et al. 1995, 42).
Bobby Reynolds's traveling sideshow museum featured a version of the proliferating fake, with a banner proclaiming it “Real” (figure 12.8). Actually, inside the show tent Bobby had two of the fakes—one labeled a hoax “by P. T. Barnum and Bobby Reynolds,” the other billed as the real McCoy (figure 12.9). I once questioned Bobby about its authenticity, given the original's apparent demise in the 1865 fire. Without missing a beat, the showman informed me that the curio had apparently been rescued by a fireman and passed down in his family. “And you believe that story?” I asked, good-naturedly. Bobby—whose eyes will still be twinkling when he's dead—replied that since he had paid several thousand dollars for it, he had to believe it.
FIGURE 12.8. The Fiji Mermaida ‘real’ exhibitappears to gaze at Bobby Reynolds from her banner. (Photo by author)
FIGURE 12.9. The Fijii (sic) MermaidBarnum's lost original, or one of many spoofs? You decide! (Photo by author)
FIGURE 12.10. A “Jenny Haniver” is a manufactured mermaid—in this case, one made by altering a devilfish. (Photo by author)
One type of manufactured mermaid was created by making alterations to a devilfish (Stein 1993, 260-61). One of these was exhibited in the Hall & Christ sideshow (figure 12.10); another is in my personal collection.
Among other taxidermic fake creatures are the humorous American jack-elope and the German Wolpertinger. The jackelope is a jackrabbit with an antelope's antlers (figure 12.11). It supposedly inhabits the American Southwest. The Wolpertinger is the product of several animals combined by taxidermy, typically including a raccoon's tail, a bird's wings, and a duck's feet.
More serious offerings are the “devil baby” exhibits. These are gaffed freak creatures, usually made to look like mummified specimens and displayed in small coffins. They typically sport horns, hoofed feet, claws, and fangs (Taylor and Kotcher 2002, 243). I investigated one of these in a curio shop in Toronto in 1971. Supposedly purchased from an Irish museum a dozen years before, it appeared to be a papier-mâché fake, although it used real horns and hooves. The hair had been glued on (Nickell 1995, 114).
FIGURE 12.11. The jackelope is a taxidermist's fake, a jackrabbit fitted with antelope antlers. (Photo by author)
A photograph of a similar figure appears in a book titled Vampires, Zombies, and Monster Men (Farson 1976). Actually, it is a pair of figures, with arms folded as if in the repose of death. A sign mounted in the creatures’ coffin states that they are “Clahuchu and his Bride.” It goes on to explain that “these shrunken mummified figures were found in a crude tomblike cave on the island of Haiti in 1740 by a party of French marines. They are supposed to be the remains of a lost tribe of ‘Ju-Ju’ or Devil Men—who, after death followed a custom of shrinking & mummifying their dead.” The sign concludes: “Are they real? We don't know, but…X-Rays showed skin, horn & hooves human!” There was, astonishingly, no mention of a skeleton. Painted beneath the sign were these mumbo-jumbo words: “YENOH M’I DLOC.” Suspicious of the inscription, I soon discovered that reading each word backward in turn yields the prankish message, “Honey I’m Cold!”—an indication of how seriously we should take such “devil figures” (Nickell 1995, 114-15).
Showman William Nelson, who once managed the show wagon of the Pawnee Bill Wild West Show, began to sell “mummified curiosities” in 1909. These included a “Devil Child” that sold for “$15 cash” or, “with 8 x 10 banner, $35.00.” Other “mummified” (papier-mâché) entities sold by Nelson were a “Gigantic Moa,” a “Two-Headed Patagonian Giant,” and a “Big Sea Horse”—the latter advertised as “six feet long and made to ship in a box.” The ad explained: “It is a mummified subject with a big natural horse's skeleton head and two legs with slit hoofs” (Stencell 2002, 39-42).
Today, an elaborate figure of this genre is “Devil Man,” a touring figure owned by James Taylor. Its accompanying leaflet, “Certain Facts Concerning the Devil Man” (1998), states: “Some purport him to be really real. Others claim he is really fake. We just say he is really cool.” But, reading further, one learns that Devil Man is the creation of sideshow banner painter and “gaff artist” Mark Frierson, who fashioned it from papier-mâché, pieces of bone, and craft supplies.
Taken much more seriously was the “Sasquatch” that toured as a carnival single-O exhibit and was billed as “safely frozen in ice.” It debuted in 1968 as the Minnesota Iceman. Partially obscured by the foggy surface of the block of ice, the figure attracted two famous cryptozoologists (those who study legendary animals such as the Loch Ness Monster). One thought that the creature was “most probably” a Neanderthal man who had been dead for less than five years. Alas, the creature was a fake, crafted by top Disneyland model-maker Howard Ball. I saw the creature when it was exhibited on the midway at the 1973 Canadian National Exhibition. It was lying in a freezer-like tank, but some of the ice had melted away, exposing part of the body. I reached in and felt it; not surprisingly, it was rubbery (Nickell 1995, 230).
Sideshow gaff artist Doug Higley also touted alleged Sasquatches with his grind show “Bigfoot Museum.” A sign promised “15 Authentic Exhibits Explore Myths, Monsters, Wonders, and Humbugs.” Among other items of evidence were casts of Bigfoot tracks, accompanied by photos of the late anthropologist and cryptozoologist Grover Krantz, an arch-Bigfoot promoter. Doug told me that he exhibits such material in a “spirit of fun and tradition,” and he disparaged “the gullibility of some eggheads like Grover Krantz” (Higley 1999).
In contrast to Bigfoot, a supposed man-beast from our evolutionary past, are the sideshow extraterrestrials that typically appear as futuristic versions of ourselves. Their morphology has become quite standardized, and they are typically represented as small, big-eyed, big-headed humanoids (Nickell 2001, 160-63). The notion that alien beings were recovered from a flying saucer that crashed near Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947 has become part of American folklore and fakelore. It has been revealed that the crash debris was from a “weather balloon” (actually, a secret spy balloon intended to monitor sonic emissions from anticipated Soviet nuclear tests). However, popular books continue to spread rumors and hoax tales about the retrieval of crashed saucers and their alien occupants. The Roswell myth has been fueled by forged “MJ-12 documents,” bogus accounts by con men and dishonest UFOlogists, faked diary entries, and even a hoaxed “alien autopsy” film in 1995, followed the next year by a Roswell “UFO fragment”—all spread by media hype and hoopla. It is no wonder that showmen have hijacked the Roswell bandwagon and sidetracked it to the back end of the midway.
In 2000, Bobby Reynolds debuted his “Alien Bodies” exhibit, advertised as “Direct from Roswell” (figure 12.12). “See a Real Space Creature,” promised a sign, “inside this show now!!!” Of course, the creature was “real”—real rubber. I had bought an identical alien from Bobby the year before and exhibited it at my workplace, the Center for Inquiry in Amherst, New York, where I told visitors it was “from the distant planet Latex.”
I visited the trailer-framed grind show at the 2000 Erie County Fair, accompanied by two friends. With a straight face, Bobby accepted the three wooden nickels I tendered for his big sideshow, then escorted us to the nearby single-O feature. Inside was a duplicate of my rubber humanoid, together with a fake alien fetus in a jar and a curiously deformed little extraterrestrial displayed atop some metal “wreckage.” I lowered my voice and commented about the latter, “That looks like Doug Higley's work.” Bobby replied, “Yes, I got that from Doug.” Later, further around the midway, we came upon another alien single-O (figure 12.13). By dropping Higley's name and offering my wooden-nickel business cards, we were given a free guided tour by the friendly woman running the show. Inside the small tent was one of Higley's “real” aliens, exhibited in a wooden crate stenciled “Top Secret.” It was accompanied by some documents sporting charred edges and a “Confidential” rubber-stamp impression (just like the one on Doug's letters to me).
FIGURE 12.12. The “Alien Bodies” grind show at the 2000 Erie County Fair in New York spoofed the Roswell conspiracy theories. (Photo by author)
Higley does not say much about his technique for producing Fejee Mermaids, chupacabras, Amazonian pygmy mummies, an “iguana boy,” aliens, and other “real entities.” In a booklet he declares: “Not rubber. My secret process is best!” One clue comes from a sign in Bobby Reynolds's alien show: “This exhibit is made possible by the use of space age polymers to preserve the specimen…preventing further deterioration and odor.” Doug himself admits that his “secret” is “polymer clay” (Higley 1999), and Fred Olen Ray (1993, 36) describes the final step in the process, noting that one of Doug's creatures was “baked in his kitchen oven.”
A fellow showman dubbed Doug Higley the “Phantom of the Midway” because, since the creatures are exhibited as “real,” the existence of the artist is unknown; his is a phantom presence. In an article titled “Truth or Fiction” in Circus Report, Higley (1998) asks, “When Warner Bros. does a movie featuring a Lost Jungle City, do they put on the poster, ‘Not real! Untrue! This is Fiction!’? Do the Universal [Studios’] monsters get promoted with ‘Showgoer beware! The monster is rubber!’?” Of course not, says the Phantom: “I look at every show I do or every gaff I create for others as my own little movie. The fiction is the fun, the mystery is the value, the fantasy is the goal. Each is designed to work the brain—crinkle the brow and crack a smile, and, yes, in some cases even educate and inform.”
FIGURE 12.13. This “real” alien is made of real polymer clay. (Photo by author)
Other Curios
An interesting variety of other curiosities have appeared as exhibits in dime museums, sideshows, and similar venues. Among “Over 10,000 Curiosities!” advertised by Barnum's museum were “Geological Conchological and Numismatic Collections, Specimens of Natural History, Wax Statuary, Paintings, Historical Relics, Etc.” There were “3,000 Specimens of Native Birds,” as well as other stuffed wildlife, including lions, zebras, bears, and elephants. Barnum exhibited Indian costumes, automatons, and Civil War artifacts, including Fort Sumter “relics,” a secession flag, and slave shackles (Kunhardt et al. 1995).
Following World War I, midway war shows proliferated, featuring photographs of battle scenes, along with actual gas masks, grenades, trench mines, uniforms, helmets, guns, and similar battlefield items. However, incidents of exploding gas canisters and ammunition led to government restrictions on the display of potentially dangerous artifacts. World War II spawned another round of such war shows, featuring military paraphernalia, wax figures of Nazi leaders, and various Hitler cars (Stencell 2002, 83-89).
Crime shows began to flourish in the 1930s following the deaths of such notorious gangsters as John Dillinger (1903-1934). Dillinger's father appeared in one such show wearing his son's clothing and holding a wooden gun that the outlaw had used for a sensational jail escape. Showmen Lou Dufour and Joe Rogers set up a hugely fronted “Crime Never Pays” show at the California Pacific Exposition of 1935 in San Diego. It featured “Dillinger's Bullet Proof Limousine,” along with the gangster's personal effects. Another feature was a gruesome wax-figure scene from Chicago's famous St. Valentine's Day massacre (Stencell 2002, 212-13; Dufour 1977, 182).
There were numerous crime cars, including several billed as the “original” bullet-riddled auto in which outlaw couple Bonnie and Clyde were gunned down (figure 12.14). I saw one of these on the midway of the Canadian National Exhibition in the 1970s. It may have been the genuine one; reportedly the sedan was acquired in the 1960s by showman Ted Toddy. He won an injunction against other claimants and offered a “$10,000 Reward if This Is Not the Real Death Car.” It was sold in 1973 to a Nevada casino owner for $175,000 (Stencell 2002, 219-21). (A photo of the Toddy car appears consistent, in terms of model and arrangement of bullet holes, with a 1934 Associated Press/Wide World photo of the car [Newton 2002, 25].)
In 1972 I saw a curio that directly evoked P. T. Barnum. At a ten-in-one at the Canadian National Exhibition was a banner for the “Cardiff Giant—10 ft. 4 ins.” The portrait depicted a very tall man, and the talker promised, “He's a big son of a gun!” However, fine print on the banner stated, “The original, Farmers Museum, Cooperstown, N.Y.” Still finer print admitted, “This is a facsimile.” Inside the tent—at the end of a long platform, following a rubber man, a fire-eater who doubled as a sword swallower, and some illusions and other acts—was the giant: a concrete statue. Like the copy once made by Barnum, it was a fake of the original 1869 fake. It resembled (or was it the same as?) one I had photographed in 2001 at Bobby Reynolds's sideshow museum at the Erie County Fair in Hamburg, New York (figure 12.15).
FIGURE 12.14. Gangster cars now on exhibit at a Las Vegas casino include Bonnie and Clyde's bullet-riddled Ford (once a sideshow attraction) and the Lincoln owned by Al Capone and Dutch Schultz. (Advertising postcard)
FIGURE 12.15. The Cardiff giant is a replica of the notorious giant hoax. (Photo by author)
As these examples demonstrate, almost anything can be exhibited in a sideshow—whether genuine or merely “real”—as long as it has some claim to the strange or exotic. Not surprisingly, therefore, as Ray (1993, 36) points out, “The museum format show has always been an old standby in the Grind Show business,” from Barnum's American Museum to such modern examples as Jeff Murray's “Mystery Museum Show,” Doug Higley's “World's Smallest Side Show” (an interesting twist), and Bobby Reynolds's “The World Famous International Circus Sideshow Museum.”